I will not defend Stalin and I will not defend the CCP. Just because capitalism isn’t good doesn’t mean that we have to glaze imperialist states. Ask Ukraine and the Baltic states how good they had it during the USSR; my point being that pro-USSR sentiments are largely just pro-Russian propaganda.
China is doing some good nowadays, but it still definitely has corruption. There are still billionaires, polluted air, capitalistic factories—which have terrible working conditions and sell cheaply made carcinogenic products, they’re building AI data centres—some of which will boil the water temperature, bans citizens from accessing a lot of websites, etc.
I even decided to join a solidarity website and it mentioned f**cking Kim Jong-Un as a leftist figure ffs 💀. Literally, ANY North Korean defector will tell you how bad the North Korean regime is. The site had no mention of actual decent examples like Peter Kropotkin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Martin Luther King Jr, or even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
Edit: did not know that Proudhon was a bigot. My bad; thanks immensely for telling me.
Oh cool an actual serious response. Instead of putting it all in one ginormous comment I’d like to try spreading this out over a couple replies if that’s ok with you in order to keep track of everything and as I get around to responding to more stuff. I also know that getting into the details of things is time-consuming which is why I might not respond to everything.
I don’t understand this as a counter-point to starting a collective offensive. The whole point of seeking allies and making a collective offensive is to join strength against a superior foe. They sent aid to Spain in their fight against the Francoist, I don’t see a reason to disbelieve this.
Romania was ruled by fascists. They openly sympathized and collaborated with Hitler. This was the flag of the national christian party which was in power at the time:
Their coming to power was remarked by Hitler as the “first happy event of the New Year”[1]. Of course they didn’t let the Red Army through, I don’t care what reason they gave.
I mean compared to all of Poland and compared to what the Red Army took I think this can be noted as a small chunk. Białystok is also colored in the map directly above that statement as “Territories of modern Poland under Soviet occupation”. I thought that part of the response most transparent of all.
I mean it’s part an ad absurdum argument using the liberals framework of todays european borders as “correct and natural”. I don’t remember exactly the context that reply got made in (I could look it up if you want) so the audience might have been a bit different. There’s this thing that a lot of people hear that Germany and the USSR partitioned poland and they do think of modern poland and don’t know that it mainly involved territories that most people living there wouldn’t consider part of poland. Which is why the Curzon Line had been suggested multiple times as the Soviet-Polish border 10 years prior to Molotow-Ribbentrop.
Are you suggesting ethnic cleansing or what do you think happened? I’m gonna admit I’m not terribly knowledgeable about the soviet-polish war but I believe that the area east of the Curzon Line was established as an anti-communist buffer and had a lot of anti-communist troops stationed there. That this was untenable for the Soviets who were preparing to fight the Nazis seems plausible to me, but this is indeed a huge blind spot of mine so please do elaborate on the soviet’s reasoning here if you want.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-230-59818-8 43–5 according to wikipedia ↩︎
Well… That’s a relief that you are taking this seriously. I’m always unsure if people want to engage in a serious discussion of the facts. I’ll order my response with the easiest to address to the hardest.
Białystok, Not Focusing on the People, and Historiography
Yes, the map called it out. I didn’t need to drive it home. But I thought it was important to name it and not let it dangle as “one small chunk”.
My larger issue with the original post is how it systematically shifts focus away from human beings to just lines on a map. Doing so allows for the construction of a clean narrative that begins to crumble when you look at the actual people of the land and their treatment under occupation.
I’m not making a claim of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Rather, I’m pointing out that we are always caught between two ways of ordering history. We can look at the facts and build a narrative that honestly accounts for them, or we can start with a rigid narrative and deliberately dim the facts that don’t serve it. History requires a constant, dialogical relationship between the two: testing our overarching narrative against the raw, uncomfortable facts at hand. If you only start with a rigid, pre-determined narrative, vital human realities get left completely out of focus. If you only start with events, it’s hard to pick out what’s important.
Romanian Rulership
That flag is indeed of the National Christian Party. But they were not in power in September 1939. The quote you cited is from 1938.
1935: The National Christian Party (PNC) is formed and that flag is created
December 1937 – February 1938: December 1937 elections, the ruling liberals lose their majority. The Iron Guard, a paramilitary fascist group, is growing in power. To keep them at bay, King Carol II appoints the PNC’s Octavian Goga as Prime Minister. The PNC were fierce opponents to the Iron Guard whom they regularly battled in the streets. However, Carol also suspected they were administratively inept. He anticipated that their radical, chaotic governance would provoke a severe domestic backlash, creating the perfect pretext for the crown to dissolve parliament and tighten absolute control.
Hitler sends a New Year’s telegram describing their appointment as the “first happy event of the New Year”.
This government is a total disaster. The economy panics, violence erupts in the streets between the PNC’s paramilitary forces and the Iron Guard.
February 10, 1938: King Carol II fires the government, bans all political parties, suspends the constitution, and establishes a royal dictatorship. The PNC is dissolved, and the swastika flag is banned from public life.
The paramilitary wing of the PNC joined the Iron Guard. The administrative apparatus join the royal dictatorship serving in the Front of National Rebirth.
1938 – 1939: King Carol II’s regime spends the next 18 months ruthlessly suppressing fascism inside Romania. The state focus turns heavily against the Iron Guard, who are seen as a genuine threat to the crown. They capture and execute the leader of the Iron Guard, Codreanu. The SS and SD begin to funnel money to the Iron Guard.
March 1939: Hitler tears up the Munich Agreement and occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia without Britain or France doing anything.
April 1939: Britain and France guarantee Romania’s independence and territorial integrity. Hitler thinks this guarantee is weak.
September 1939: This is the time of the invasion and Polish government that goes into exile in Romania. The prime minister, Armand Călinescu, is an explicitly pro-Western Prime Minister. They accept Polish refugees and smuggle the Polish gold out of Poland.
September 21, 1939: The Iron Guard assassinate Călinescu.
June 1940: France falls to Germany.
September 1940: Carol appoints General Ion Antonescu backed by the Iron Guard as his prime minister. The Carol royal dictatorship loses popular support. He abdicates the throne. This clears the way for Antonescu to take power and the National Legionary State is formed. Horia Sima, the leader of the Iron Guard, was appointed Vice-Premier. The Iron Guard was declared the sole legal political movement in the country. Nazi Germany officially supported the Iron Guard as a legitimate partner in government.
I want to emphasize again that I’m not trying to build a narrative, just show that there are events on the ground that complicate any narrative. Because they were complicated times being led by individuals who didn’t know how to address the novel events. I gloss over September 1939 to September 1940, not out of concern that it undermines any narrative, but because it doesn’t address the role of fascism in the government at the time. There are several complicating events during this time. What you won’t see is a heroic display of resistance against the Nazi war machine. Instead, you’ll see small compromises and political maneuvering hoping desperately that the tides will change to keep Romania independent.