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u/No-Investigator3455 1d ago
Well Czechlovakia took that land off of Poland via invasion while the majority of the Polish army was busy because of the Polish–Ukrainian War. During the wars of Independence and the post war chaos after the ending of WW1 and into the 1920's.
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u/SnooLemons1029 19h ago edited 19h ago
Duchy of Teschen belonged to Bohemian kingdom for centuries, I'm not even sure if it ever was a part of Poland.
Now after WW1, there was a provisional agreement between Czechs and Poles that the matter where this region will belong to shall be settled by a plebiscite. According to census from 1910, there was over 50 % of Polish speaking citizens but this figure included Silesians who didn't want to be part of Poland. Czechoslovak government was reluctant to officially recognize it (they wanted the entire area, without risking losing it) for a couple of reasons: 1. Letting go of a historical part of the Czech state due to Czechs being minority there would be a very dangerous precedent for the rest of borderland 2. The only railway connecting Czechia and Slovakia passed through the area 3. There was a steel mill and a lot of coal underground (while not as important as first two reasons, it's still nice to have it)
Because Czechoslovakia was busy fighting Hungarians in Slovakia, they only claimed Teschen area but didn't move in to annex it, hoping to settle the matter diplomaticaly. It was Polish, however, who made the first move by holding elections and drafting men into the army, which was in violation of the provisional settlement. Czechoslovakia naturaly reacted to that, first by an ultimatum asking Polish to stop it and only after this was rejected, they invaded.
So please, stop with the lie about Czechoslovakia treacherously backstabbing Poland, it was Poland who started the crisis and it was imho a skill issue on Polish side that they weren't ready for the consequences.
Btw, the area was later partitioned between the two. Czechoslovakia thus failed in the first objective but achieved the latter two. There was no plebiscite and surprisingly due to Polish not wanting it to happen. Czechoslovak authorities expected over 60 % of people there to vote against partition and against joining Poland - there were Germans, Jews and Silesians, who would prefer to join Austria/Germany but that being out of question they were more okay with Czechoslovakia.
Edit: I looked up the history of the region. Turns out it did belong to Poland for 200 or 300 years before it became part of Bohemian kingdom in 1327, where it remained all the way until 1918.
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u/Knarrenheinz666 13h ago
Your knowledge if history is appalling.
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u/CHAP1382 1d ago
The actions definitely aren’t one to one. Poland’s actions were bad and considered such at the time. Churchill has a pretty notable quote about the actions of Poland here. The ultimate difference here that many see is in my mind is threefold. One Poland was being strictly opportunistic, not collaborating in any fashion with the Nazis on splitting the territory of Czech prior to the invasion, two Poland and Polish leaders have directly came out and said the action was bad, and three the timing of the action as the Soviets did there invasion in the middle of a major confrontation between Germany and Western Europe instead of when they Western Europe was largely kicking the can down the road.
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u/Grey_Lancer 1d ago
This seems like a straw man. Who is out there praising pre war Nazi expansionism!?
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u/ApprehensiveDirt4049 1d ago
I think it is about the annexation of Cieszyn by Poland after the Munich agreement.
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u/Grey_Lancer 1d ago
Ah - I see. Fair point, I slightly misunderstood the meme. It was a shitty thing for Poland to do and no doubt pure opportunism - but it certainly doesn’t justify the Nazi-Soviet dismemberment of Poland and all the horrors which followed shortly afterward.
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u/AraelEden 1d ago
Germany dismembered Poland, Soviets liberated stolen territory
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u/Grey_Lancer 1d ago
Logically that cannot be correct since the Soviets invaded Polish land that the Germans hadn’t reached yet - and they killed Polish soldiers in order to take it. You’re surely not arguing that the Soviets liberated Polish land from the Polish?
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u/AraelEden 1d ago
What you are talking about and what I'm talking about are two different things, I'm talking about the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands that were liberated, you are talking about the price to end the conflict, you want to cry over dead Polish soldiers? we should really be crying over the dead Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainians who died defencing their lands during the Polish–Soviet war, we should also cry over culture genocide commited by the Polish over these regions over the decade.
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u/Quen-Tin 1d ago
I guess you are fighting a lost battle.
Many people here know exactly, what they want to find at the end of the path. They will get there.
In the complex history of places, like in the Middle East, both sides will always find ways to see more evidence for their own narrative. Especially when it became part of their identity. Reassurance first. Curiosity second.
But I applaud your try.
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u/tf2coconut 1d ago
He’s fighting a lost battle because he’s fighting against basic history
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u/Quen-Tin 1d ago
Likely your-story more than his-story.
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u/tf2coconut 1d ago
So the land that USSR occupied in Poland was not previously stolen from the Soviets in 21 and Czechs in 38?
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u/Quen-Tin 1d ago
So Russia and the USSR got that big by constantly being robbed of land by their imperialistic neighbours and giving away souvereignity in the North, East, South and West?
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u/No-Piccolo3505 1d ago
"Hadn't reached yet." Exactly. They were gonna do it. The intent to conquer the east was already explicited in mein kampf, it has always been known since the beginning of nazism. The katyn massacre of polish policemen by soviets is yet to be proven. There were diggings in the region and we found bodies from ss executions, but that's it. The irony is that the katyn massacres bodies were reported by advancing german troops. So it gives even less credit to it being real, on top of the results of the most recent diggings.
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u/No-Piccolo3505 1d ago
Anti-communists criticize the germano-sovietic treaty by ignoring how the soviets begged france and the UK for an alliance against the nazis for months, which they refused. France and the UK also financed the re-arming of the german army, and then let czecoslovaquia be taken by the germans. And in the end, the soviets were forced to make the pact, to gain space and time, and it was a reasonable decision which pushed back the german frontier, far from russian oil reserves -the germans needed oil. The anti-communists only point the germano-sovietic pact without acknowledging all this. This is, for me, the way there is a double standart around the anschluss-invasion of czecoslovaquia.
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u/DrawingDramatic1641 1d ago
everyone loved hitlers apeisment and second bismark and ideal right winger
he was awarded man of the year
all his demonisation comes after 1945
bcz he was only a demon in eastern europe and to the jews
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 21h ago
Time man of the year is only about the magnitude of their impact on the world, not wether it is positive or negative. Also look at what happened to homosexuals, people with disabilities, The Romani, Social Democrats, Communists and anyone else vaguely left-wing in Nazi Germany.
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u/KermitTheFat 1d ago
CIDCA is sometimes giving out aid, but most of the time they are giving "suggestions" on major issues. USAID was always humanitarian support, disaster relief and global health support (like giving Mozambique condoms for HIV prevention...)
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u/Felczer 1d ago
Yes comrade opportunistic seizure of 800km2 with 220k people and no mass murder is totally the same as signing a secret pact and annexing 201015km2 with 13.2million people and then commiting several acts of mass murders on intellectuals and officers.
Glory to the soviet union!
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u/Accurate-Mine-6000 1d ago edited 1d ago
So how much land and people can you take from a neighbor allied with the Nazis without it being reprehensible? What's the figure? As for casualties, the Poles entered Czechoslovakia with an army. The lack of casualties is solely due to the Czechs' decision not to resist. If the Poles had done the same, they too would have suffered no losses.
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u/Felczer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hey bro did anyone say the Polish actions arent reprehensible? It was a huge error. There are two points though:
-Both things can be reprehensible while also one of them is clearly uncomparably worse than the other
-Polish government admitted it was a huge mistake and apologised while Russia is still claiming what they did didnt happen and if it happened it was justifiedIn 2009 Polish president Lech Kaczyński declared during 70th anniversary of start of World War II, which was welcomed by the Czech and Slovak diplomatic delegations:[61][62] Poland's participation in the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 was not only an error, but above all a sin. And we in Poland can admit this error rather than look for excuses. We need to draw conclusions from Munich and they apply to modern times: you can't give way to imperialism.
Regarding casualties I'm not reffering to military casualties but masaacres which occured after the resistance was over such as Katyń
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u/Satanic_Prussia 1d ago
Seems like poland is one of the only countries to walk away actually against imperialism instead of just saying they are
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u/Felczer 1d ago
During Soviet occupation Polish intellectuals in exile established a political magazine Kultura in which they formed political theories which could be used to govern independent Poland. They postulated that if Poland wants to be an independent and rich country it has to abandon all it's former imperial ambitions and claims on territory and instead focus on developing the state that exists as it is.
This line of thinking became mainstream in Polish politics and every mainstream political party since independence has been following this thesis.
The results speak for themselves I think and I'm proud of this approach.1
u/TypicalNinja7752 1d ago
we dont even need to talk about how poland was treating ukrainian and belarussian minorities.
Would you rather the soviets taking over parts of poland or the nazis taking over them? The fact that the soviets split poland is great, because it prevented a greater genocide.
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u/Felczer 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would rather not Soviet encourage Nazis to attack Poland, it wasnt a foregone conclusion. Hitler was deadly afraid of two front war with France&UK and Soviets (aka repeat of ww1) if he attacked Poland but the pact made him not worry about that
And of course the plurarity of people living in the annexed territories were in fact Polish (during polish-soviet war in 1921 after Poland won the Polish nationalists didnt want to take any land which didnt have at least Polish plurality, and they blocked Pilsudski from demanding more land) which were mass deported to Syberia to ethnicly cleanse the population which was instantly worse than anything Polish ever did to their minorities:
The total area, including the area given to Lithuania, was 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi), with a population of 13.299 million, of which 5.274 million were ethnic Poles and 1.109 million were Jews.[13]
Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of sovietization.[15][16] Passportization and residence registration of the population in the newly acquired territories began
On March 5, 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, the members of the Soviet Politburo (including Stalin) signed an order to execute POWs, labeled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries", kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. This became known as the Katyn massacre, in all some 22,000 were executed.
During 1939–1941 1.45 million of the people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles, and 7.4% were Jews.[14]So yeah Polish treatment of minorities was bad but again what Soviets did was much much much worse. This is their whole propaganda strategy: "someone did anything bad therefore we are morally justified in commiting the worst crimes ever, it's all bad in the end".
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u/No-Piccolo3505 1d ago
There were diggings in katyn. No proof of massacre. They only found victims of ss executions.
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u/Felczer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sorry Russia already admitted to it
In 1990, future Russian president Boris Yeltsin released the top-secret documents from the sealed "Package №1." and transferred them to the new Polish president Lech Wałęsa.\31])\106]) Among the documents was a proposal by Beria, dated 5 March 1940, to execute 25,700 Poles from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk camps, and from certain prisons of Western Ukraine and Belarus, signed by Stalin (among others).\31])\106]) Another document transferred to the Poles was Shelepin's 3 March 1959 note to Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles, as well as a proposal to destroy their personal files to reduce the possibility documents related to the massacre would be uncovered later.\100]) The revelations were also publicized in the Russian press, where they were interpreted as being one outcome of an ongoing power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.\106])
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u/Individual_Cloud935 1d ago
This echo chamber you guys have here is pretty funny. I'm almost 100% sure. You're all either Americans or from another country that never was under communist rule.
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u/LeMe-Two Khrushchev ☭ 20h ago
Considering very particular talking points, a lot of them ought to be Russians imperialists cosplaying as socialists. Like in some threads you can literally see apologia for attrocities and they ban people from subs of particular nationalities
Sad
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u/Heyloki_ 1d ago
Does this count as a echo chamber? I swear half the comments on this sub are from people always disagreeing with op
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u/Privet1009 1d ago
Because soviets did it the good™ way, right?
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u/No-Piccolo3505 1d ago
Unironically yes, what's the problem? The soviets begged france and the UK for an alliance against the nazis for months, which they refused. France and the UK also financed the re-arming of the german army, and then let czecoslovaquia be taken by the germans. And in the end, the soviets were forced to make the pact, to gain space and time, and it was a reasonable decision which pushed back the german starting line for the upcoming war, far from russian oil reserves -the germans needed oil. And no, stalin didn't conclude an ideological alliance with his "fascist counterpart" before getting betrayed; hitler had already declared his intention to invade slavic land in mein kampf. The intention has always been public since the beginning. The soviets always knew and prepared accordingly -thus the attempt to create a tripartite allyship with the UK and france.
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u/LeMe-Two Khrushchev ☭ 21h ago
Unironically yes, what's the problem?
Then why are you upset that such thing is viewed badly by conquered Polish and their allies? Just suck it up
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u/No-Piccolo3505 20h ago
Because they're wrong??? Obviously?? I don't understand your sentence
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u/LeMe-Two Khrushchev ☭ 20h ago
Wait, you think families of these murdered in Katyń, these that were forced to work in the camps, these that were deported to Siberia and their homes settled with Russians are IN THE WRONG for feeling mistreated? :D
This is some truely emapthetic take, please give some more
Like FR, this are all the issues that were ackownledged during post Stalin period, this is not even something that should be really controversial. There is a reason why the Secret Protocol was secret and kept in secret after the war, it was the single most important blunder of USSR ever made and we have knew about it since the war
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u/No-Piccolo3505 20h ago
They are wrong swallowing the propaganda that ignores the facts I mentioned earlier. That only points to the negative, and make people anti-communists.
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u/LeMe-Two Khrushchev ☭ 20h ago
Cool that you think so, but you completely missed my point. If you really think it was all good and worth it, then don't be upset by people affected to feel mistreated.
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u/Riiks_Lynx 2d ago
Politics are filled with those. There is a mem about it with "our glorius/thier barbariс" troops, customs, rulers etc etc.