@Riverbot
Whatever!
Putin invaded Ukraine without a declaration of war and has brutalised the civilian population there with millions displaced.
You moan about so-called atrocities in Donbas.
Putin's barbarity is on another LEVEL.
Printable View
@Riverbot
Whatever!
Putin invaded Ukraine without a declaration of war and has brutalised the civilian population there with millions displaced.
You moan about so-called atrocities in Donbas.
Putin's barbarity is on another LEVEL.
The Ukrainians started to brutalise the civilians in Donbas first, that's the starting point!Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallicanus
There is no justification for torture and mutilation. The only possible, imaginable, justification someone might come up, potentially, is that a person did that too to one of his own. Kind of mirror penalty. The other case might be information, crucial, life saving information in an interrogation. Even these two "justifications" are questionable and being denied by any "Liberal law", human rights, martial law etc.
There is, from my point of view, no other justification at all, for causing, deliberately, pain and suffering on a person, mutilating and hurting it, other than in combat.
This is the other level. Because fighting, even killing, for a concrete, understandable goal, with the force being limited to reach the goal, is a completely different level than deliberateley torturing and mutilating people!
War is war and the Russians didn't do, up to this point, anything which isn't in the limits of military necessity. In a war caused by the actions of the Selenski regime minimum as much as by what Putin did.
If a bomb hits a civilian building, because military targets are close by, its a completely different thing than torturing and mutiliting, deliberately, helpless people!
The barbarism is in torturing and mutilating helpless people for no good reason. There is no justification for that, never.
@Riverman I guess we will see what happens this week(see below). I'm taking precautions and getting rid of unnecessary credit cards, paying off credit card debt, and any bills(getting food for storage). Who knows what will happen.
Putin has pointed out that Russia is not running a charity. Among the hostile and unfriendlies?(see Trudeau's reception at the EU -- Croatia minister pointing out facts), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL1kMKgq1b0
wants energy and other agreements to be honored in Russian rubles, since the declaration of economic embargo and seizure of Russian assets. I think he has a good point.
https://www.usnews.com/news/business...-gas-in-rubles
Germany’s energy minister says the Group of Seven major economies have agreed to reject Moscow’s demand to pay for Russian natural gas exports in rubles.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/putin-says-russia-will-start-selling-gas-unfriendly-countries-roubles-2022-03-23/
Quote:
Russian gas accounts for some 40% of Europe's total consumption. EU gas imports from Russia this year have fluctuated between 200 million to 800 million euros ($880 million) a day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
That's a completely different, complex and unpleasant debate, but just one thing to add: You know very well that one of the major issues was Danzig, and Danzig was without a doubt a German city, wanted to be part of Germany, would have voted for Germany, but wasn't allowed to join Germany. And the other being the "Polish corridor", which was mostly given to Poland so the new state had its own access to the sea, just like Danzig should have remained a "free city", even though the inhabitants had other preferences, like mentioned.
With that I'm not saying that Germany would have become peaceful and wouldn't have started any war, because we all know about Hitlers wider plans, but these were the issues with Poland, the primary reasons for the conflict with the Poles. The conflict over Danzig was not even an exclusively "Nazi issue", because there were troubles before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danzig_crisis_(1932)Quote:
The American president Woodrow Wilson had issued a set of war aims known as the 14 Points on 8 January 1918.[1] Point 13 called for Polish independence to be restored after the war and for Poland to have "free and secure access to the sea", a statement that implied the German deep-water port of Danzig located at a strategical location where a branch of the river Vistula flowed into the Baltic Sea should become part of Poland.[1] At the Paris peace conference in 1919, of the "Big Three" leaders, Wilson and the French premier Georges Cl�menceau supported the Polish claim to Danzig, but the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was opposed under the grounds the population of Danzig was about 90% German. In a compromise, it was agreed that Danzig would become a Free City that would belong to neither Germany nor Poland, but the latter was to have special rights in the city. The Polish delegation to the Paris peace conference led by Roman Dmowski had asked for the cessation of Danzig to Poland, and within Poland the creation of the Free City was widely seen as a betrayal of Point 13.[2] Agreements such as the Paris convention of 1920 gave Poland certain rights with regards to the foreign relations of the Free City.[3] Throughout the interwar period, it was widely believed that Poland was looking for any excuse to annex Danzig, and the movement of Polish military forces into the Free City was always the cause of much tension.[2] The population of Danzig, which was 90% German at the time, never reconciled themselves to their separation from Germany and throughout the interwar period, the municipal authorities of the Free City took every opportunity to press the case for a return to the Reich.[4]
It was a German-Polish issue, and one of the main reasons Germany and Poland didn't come to terms. Because both hated Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, but that conflict was in between these two. This was just a thorn in Germany's side and at the same time Poland wanted to annex the city with its 90 percent German population. The main reason for the German-Polish war was that, because otherwise they might have come to terms. Therefore the regions you mentioned, were not the main cause for the conflict.
But just like usual, if a territory being conquered by losses of blood, states and people don't give up on it that easily any more. Same here in Ukraine: The conflict started in a rather limited area of confrontation (Donbas & Crimea) and might have stopped there, if there would have been peace talks just in time. Now it escalated to a new level, and its questionable whether the Russians will peacefully retreat from any territories they conquered in the East and South.
There is always a window of opportunity for peaceful, diplomatic solutions. Once its closed, things usually escalate to the next level. It was like that in World War I, in World War II, let's just hope we're not approaching World War III because of this nonsense again.
Because whatever my sympathies might be for the Russians or the Ukrainians, my main concern is always and has always been to limit this conflict. I completely agree on Macron insofar, as I think that's the No. 1 priority. Any other concerns of the Russians or the Ukrainians and the least the American warmonger and "regime changer" come after:
- peace
- saving lifes and people
- saving our economic well-being and prosperity
One has to understand, however, how this is being done: Not by constantly escalating and pushing Ukraine even deeper into a bloody mess.
The incidences I mentioned just show that this war is already extremely nasty, but the Russians are still fairly disciplined and don't overly brutal. If the Ukrainians want to escalate to the bitter end, this can just get way more horrible for the Ukrainian people and the Russians, probably the world.
Peace talks now!
You are delusional, the Polish Corridor was given to Poland first of all on ethnic grounds - it had a clear Polish majority over entire history, politically was equally Anti-German, it voted for the Polish Party (Polnische Fraktion, later Polenpartei) in all elections to Reichstag between 1867 and 1912.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
Here is ethnic data from the Polish Corridor from all available censuses taken between 1831 and 1931 (100 years long period):
https://i.imgur.com/p3Fw5Bu.png
West Prussia as a whole was also >50% Polish before the deliberate, systematic, planned Germanization of the region started:
https://i.imgur.com/iuCwmcl.png
The issue is not complex at all.
In Versailles 1919, borders in the Corridor were drawn based on Jakob Spett's map - which was in turn based on 1910 census.
^^^
Germans did not want to give back to Poland even one inch of land which they had stolen from us in 1772-1795 & 1815 Partitions.
Even Greater Poland - the core region of Poland (historically) - would have remained under German occupation, if not our uprising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0UpWU-SzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCfMy5fT_Q
Most Germans who lived in my region - Posen Province - were descended from religious refugees who came here in the 1500s-1600s.
Believe it or not, but Poland - despite being mainly Catholic - was accepting Protestant refugees who fled persecution by the Habsburgs.
Descendants of these Germans, who found refuge in my region, later turned against my people. And they were "Nazi 5th Column" in 1939.
It is only historical justice, that those traitors were expelled from my land in 1945.
I only hope that the refugees Germany has been taking during the last decades, will one day also turn against Native Germans.
They will then feel their own medicine - what we felt when Polish Germans betrayed and turned against the native ethnic Poles.
At least historically Poland learned a lesson, what can happen if you allow immigration, or take refugees, from cultures which are too different than your own. This is why now we are more selective. We allow Ukrainians in, because we know that they are compatible.
I am pro-multiculturalism, but as long as all co-existing cultures are compatible, and all citizens are loyal to the state.
Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians - are all compatible with each other.
Czechs and Slovaks are their own thing - let them reunite as Czechoslovakia, or perhaps add Hungary too.
The problem is indeed not ethnicity, I agree with you. The problem was that it cut East Prussia off, while giving the Poles no solid access to the sea anyway, for which they needed Danzig. So nothing was really solved: Germany had a problem with its Eastern province of East Prussia, Poland had no port city it wanted, and to take Danzig from Germany was just an injust action.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
Therefore the only good solution to this conflict would have been an alliance of Germany and Poland, which would have allowed the Germans free land traffic, and to turn Danzig back to Germany, but give the Poles favourable conditions for using it. At that time, Britain said to Poland that any deal with Germany would have left it to the mercy of Germany - no support afterwards. And that's something the proud Poles could never accept, to be at the full mercy of Germany and cut off from their Western allies. They rather wanted to succeed on the battlefield, to gain even more.
That way no compromise was reached and what came next was the start of World War II with fights in Danzig.
From an ethnic perspective, I agree with you, the Polish corridor was rightly given to Poland. But the problem caused by this, the cutting off of East Prussia, could only be solved peacefully with an alliance - with the consequences mentioned = the English would have given no guarantees. Essentially Poland would have been completely on its own, probably even considered hostile by the English, would have become completely dependent from Germany. Therefore both sides chose confrontation, first diplomatically, then Germany attacked, causing WWII.
It was, generally speaking, a very unpleasant and hard to resolve situation and now we know what came out of it. Nowadays people tend to talk about the "2nd World War" as if it was always a fixed thing. No it wasn't. There were various red lines crossed by different sides at different times, and every transgression caused a new level of escalation.
This is, just like it was in World War I, what makes conflicts which affect various nations, big players and alliances, so difficult and dangerous. It can get out of hand very quickly.
Which is why I always say: Don't make the same mistakes a 2nd time. The only mistake the Western allies made with Germany after World War I, is, that they have waited so long for giving the Germans what they wanted all along. Why needed there to be a Hitler to get it? There were democratically elected Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, Liberals and others around, which just wanted the same and radical elements only profited from the fact that Germans were not getting what was rightfully theirs.
Now some conclude from World War I or II, that you have to be even harsher with a so called aggressor, but there is no proof that this prevents a war, even on the contrary, it causes wars. And it makes, if anything, if assuming an evil dictator, if inventing an evil dictator, the escalation all the easier to justify for himself, for his administration, his people and allies.
If people, like this senior citizen Biden, talk like they do, act like they do, they do nothing to prevent conflict and escalation, but cause it. He did so all along, since the start of his presidency, by doing nothing diplomatically, but only arming up Ukraine and backing up its aggressive claims and policy against Russia.
Poking a strong opponent all the time and saying, "he will beat me, he will beat me, you will see, he is a brutal aggressor..." What is this? A bad joke? Why not stopping poking to begin with? Probably because another big guy in the background says: "You have the right to poke him, he is a bad guy, just poke him. If he gets aggressive, we will help, we want to beat him up anyway and you will come out even stronger than before..."
That's the situation in Ukraine, that's the "American policy" there. They caused the conflict.
If someone wants to de-escalate and prevent war, like the Europeans wanted, start working on a diplomatic compromise with which both sides can live with. That would have been reasonable, but not for the American "regime changers".
Humiliating big powers and nations, for no good reason but hate and arrogance, the greed for even more total power, is no good choice. That's something the USA should have learned from history. Russia was willing to compromise, willing to become a Western ally, but the USA, people like Biden in particular did block them. That was a grave mistake, there was absolutely no justice or reason in what the USA did.
If Austria wants to reunite with Germany, I would not oppose it either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
Poland solved that problem by building the city of Gdynia from scratch.
Alaska is also cut off from the rest of the United States, but Americans are not invading Canada because of it...Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
Also let's remember that East Prussia was cut off from all other German lands during most of its history.
Riverman,
Timothy Snyder nailed it - he described exactly what were the actual causes of WW2 in his book:
Some excerpts from one of reviews of Snyder's book "Black Earth":
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/b...imothy-snyder/
"(...) One of the most unusual features of Timothy Snyder�s Black Earth, writes Christopher R. Browning in his New York Review of Books review, is the many pages Snyder devotes to Poland, Zionism, and Palestine. At the center of this story is the short-lived alliance between the Polish government and the Zionist Revisionist Movement during the late 1930s, explored in the book�s first four chapters (the third titled �The Promise of Palestine�) and revisited in the conclusion. After Marshal J�zef Piłsudski�s death, the ruling circles in Poland advocated solving the country�s so-called Jewish problem through the emigration of a large part of the Jewish population (estimated at about 3 million on the eve of the war). For that purpose, Snyder recounts, the Polish government lent public support to Revisionist Zionist leaders and paramilitary groups and even financed and trained them. Their hope was that these Jews would wage a campaign of resistance and terror against the British mandatory authorities in Palestine and establish a Jewish state open to large-scale Jewish emigration.
Why is the history of Revisionist Zionism and their Polish supporters so central to a book that claims we have misunderstood the Holocaust and purports to offer a new explanation for it? The Polish-Zionist Revisionist alliance is in fact so central to Snyder�s account that the four main Zionist Revisionist protagonists in his story�Vladimir Jabotinsky, Avraham Stern, Yitzhak Shamir, and Menachem Begin�are mentioned in the book more often than Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill combined.
One place to start is by situating Snyder�s discussion of Revisionist Zionism within its context in the book, namely an alliance that never materialized between Germany and Poland. As Snyder tells us, Adolf Hitler had initially hoped to draw Poland into a joint war of aggression against the Soviet Union. After some negotiations, Polish leaders rejected Hitler�s overtures. They determined that maintaining the status quo in Europe would benefit Poland more than war and feared that they would become a German satellite state following the Soviet Union�s defeat. Snyder, however, proposes that Hitler�s dream of a Polish-German alliance failed not merely because of Poland�s political calculations but ultimately because of ideological divisions. The failure to reach an agreement and the ensuing German invasion of Poland, he writes, �resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy.� Snyder sums up these differences two pages later: 'The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by the League of Nations mandate to the British Empire.' (...)"
^^^ It was not about Danzig. It was about Jews and about German Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Just like Snyder wrote.
Note, that Israel indeed emerged in Palestine, so pre-war Polish rulers achieved their goal, athough it was a Pyrrhic victory.
^^^ Link to full review - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...ion-holocaust/
And by the way - I think that the real covert essence of this war is the fight for Ukraine's natural resources in the Black Sea.
I posted a video about it before.
Several years ago huge deposits of oil and gas were discovered in Ukraine's territorial waters to the west & south of Crimea.
But as Snyder wrote:Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
"(...) One place to start is by situating Snyder�s discussion of Revisionist Zionism within its context in the book, namely an alliance that never materialized between Germany and Poland. As Snyder tells us, Adolf Hitler had initially hoped to draw Poland into a joint war of aggression against the Soviet Union. After some negotiations, Polish leaders rejected Hitler�s overtures. They determined that maintaining the status quo in Europe would benefit Poland more than war and feared that they would become a German satellite state following the Soviet Union�s defeat. Snyder, however, proposes that Hitler�s dream of a Polish-German alliance failed not merely because of Poland�s political calculations but ultimately because of ideological divisions. The failure to reach an agreement and the ensuing German invasion of Poland, he writes, �resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy.� (...)"
Snyder's thesis about "deep differences on the Jewish question" is unpopular in Germany because Germans want to dilute their guilt for the Holocaust. German revisionist nationalists would like to say that Poland had the same views about Jews, and that Poland would have carried out its own holocaust even if Germany did not occupy Poland. They like to claim that supposedly an average Pole was more antisemitic than an average German.
In reality, however, pre-war Polish government was friends with Jewish Zionists (as Snyder explained).
First: Canada is a friendly state. You know how often they intervened in Latin America, when a state, democratic or not, was no vassal and opposed US American dominance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
Besides, the USA did invade Canada, they just failed on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812
The USA tried, they failed, and came to terms with a friendly, English speaking and cultured neighbour.
It was Danzig, a solution for the corridor traffic and a potential treaty with Poland. The Anti-Semitism and Lebensraum ideology was a different thing. That was no reason for going to war with Poland at all. The main reason was that Germany and Poland couldn't come to terms over the issues and Poland considered Germany the first, the more dangerous enemy. That's what Dmowski wrote, if you ever have ever read him:Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Dmowski
The Polish position, ideologically, always was that Germany is more dangerous, because its more advanced. So having to choice to first fight Germany, then Russia, they went for the first and this was even more likely with the back up by Britain and France. A support they would have lost, if coming to terms with Germany.
Like I said before: You have to distinguish between greater ideological frameworks and longer term goals on the one hand, and concrete conflicts and actions in the short-term on the other. Like Germany had wider plans, Russia has wider plans. But would they just have started a war out of nothing, if coming to terms peacefully? No! Rarely a country, even a militaristic one, prefers war over a peaceful solution. They might consider war being the continuation of policy by violent means, but its usually, all the time, the 2nd best option to any even half-way reasonable, civilised nation. Tribals might be different, at times, some ethnic groups too, but in the occidental context, I know barely a single case.
So having a situation, in which a peaceful diplomatic solution can reach acceptable outcomes, usually prevents a war. There are insane demands made by people, political leaders or states. But that's fairly obvious, easy to recognise. Its overall, fairly rare. Because even if someone wants a war, he usually wants an excuse to start it. Because being attacked is the best motivation to fight. Sometimes both sides can say that, like in this one, because the Ukrainians attacked Donbas, the Russians the rest of Ukraine...
Quote:
Snyder, however, proposes that Hitler�s dream of a Polish-German alliance failed not merely because of Poland�s political calculations but ultimately because of ideological divisions. The failure to reach an agreement and the ensuing German invasion of Poland, he writes, �resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy.�
The conflict predates National Socialism and Anti-Semitism was definitely not the main reason why the alliance failed. Poland just wanted additional German territories, not being dependent from Germany, but rather ally up with far away Western powers, which would never claim neighbouring or own territories. They really thought they could win this war on their own, with the help of the Western powers. And like I wrote above, Dmowski and other Polish ideologists considered Germany more dangerous than the Soviet Union anyway.Quote:
(...)"
Polish-German relations were also friendly since 1933 until late 1938 perhaps.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
That was long before Alaska became American territory - which was in 1867.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
And they were correct.Quote:
Originally Posted by Riverman
Poland in 1939 was capable of defending itself against a Soviet invasion, if the Soviets invaded alone.
The poor performance of the Red Army in Finland showed that it was a "Potemkin village" at that time.
They were better with Pilsudski than before or after. The main problem was that in both countries a political change happened: Hitler in Germany, Pilsudski dying in Poland. If either wouldn't have happened, they might have come to terms. But with both, it was impossible, because of the clearly anti-German course of the post-Pilsudski Polish governments and the obvious more aggressive stance of Hitlers Germany at the same time. Probably Germany could have achieved more, but "Hitler was in a hurry", to put it that way, which was one of the main problems of his character and actions. He lacked the reason and patience to work on safer and more humane solutions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
But that's the unfortunate past, which killed many of my relatives all around, from different sides and groups, under different circumstances.
We don't need something like that a 3rd time, even more it would be worse than the first two. That's why I'm absolutely in favour of a peace deal, a diplomatic solution as soon as possible. It can get out of hand.
^^^Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
There was more of religious tolerance in the Rzeczpospolita than elsewhere in Europe during that time period:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkr-U2yvYO4
meanwhile somewhere in Orenburg Oblast....
На границе с Оренбуржьем задержали вагоны с большой партией пшеницы и сахара // On the Orenburg - Kazakhstan border detained wagons with a large batch of wheat and sugar
third World problems just begun
https://youtu.be/9kdDrDz18IM
Likewise, the Donetsk region is a major industrial center - steel and coal, including military industries. Azovstal in Mariupol is/was (before bombed by Russia) one of the largest steel mills in Europe. Harkiv has loads of strategic science, physics to radars.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomenable
I can imagine Russian stategists brainstorming pretexts for “special military operations” and leaking them to the crazies in the state media to gauge if that would cause a popular uprising or not. Are they as shrewd and ruthless as this? Yes.
Meanwhile, Novaya Gazeta (their editor-in-chief won the latest Nobel Peace Prize) stopped publishing because journalism is no more possible in Russia.