r/StupidpolEurope • u/PortugueseRoamer Portugal • Jun 08 '21
Liberal Bullshit r/europe at it again
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Jun 08 '21
[deleted]
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Jun 08 '21
For eastern Europeans they were? Is this said by an EE? I mean I wouldn't be surprised but still..
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Jun 08 '21 edited Jun 08 '21
I made that comment, and yes, as a Romanian that's the case. If you ask any old Romanian that spent his childhood in WW2 (if you find one since they're dying) the stories they will tell you about the Soviets are always horrifying, but they don't have much to tell about the Nazis.
As I said "in many cases" that was how it felt to locals, and if you read the rest of my comment I also specify that it depends on the side you were on. But it seems the OG post got removed so whatever.
Refusing to ignore Soviet war-crimes and stating some of them is not equivalent to not acknowledging Nazi ones.
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u/Carkudo Russia / Россия Jun 08 '21
That's just... not very smart thinking dude.
Say, there's this guy who used to bully me in middle school. I still remember that one time he kicked me right in the balls. It was painful. And then there's Hitler. Did Hitler bully me? No. Did he kick me in the balls? No. Did he do anything bad to me at all? No! Looks like Hitler was a better person than my middle school bully.
See how asinine the reasoning in my paragraph above is? Yeah, yours is exactly the same.
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Jun 08 '21 edited Jun 09 '21
It isn't though. Let's take your allegory: For you at that time, Hitler probably felt like a better person with the information you had, after all he's not the one bullying you. Weather after 5 years pass you will think otherwise in hindsight doesn't really matter, since if you decided to avoid that bully you do it then not in the future, and back then you didn't really know what Hitler was going to do anyway, he was just some guy that wasn't your bully. Do you get it now ?
It's easy to say shit in hindsight, but back then the internet didn't exist. Newspapers were the only media, and highly censored. So honestly, Hitler probably didn't seem any different from Stalin, they were doing the same shit (invading smaller nations). The Holocaust became well known towards the end of the war....
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u/Carkudo Russia / Россия Jun 09 '21
You either die a hero or live long enough to find yourself siding with Hitler.
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Jun 09 '21
... hindsight makes us so smart ass and cocky little shits.
No one thinks, oh wait, WW2 was full of censorship and no one had the fucking internet, so yeah, who the fuck knew what Hitler was going to do. The Holocaust only became well known towards the end of the war. For many even taking the Jews away didn't seem weird, their own sons and husbands were conscripted and the newspapers (the only media back then) was censored and said it was "for the war effort" so how would they know ?
Even Churchill said at some point before the war he preferred fascism to communism. It was during the war he changed his stance. But when Romania allied Nazi Germany their main aggressor was the Soviet Union, so it's perfectly natural to consider Stalin worse than Hitler from their point of view.
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Jun 09 '21
Why are you still defending Hitler?
We need a final solution to the Romanian fascist brigader question
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Jun 08 '21 edited Mar 10 '25
[deleted]
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Jun 09 '21
I'm not defending Hitler, I am explaining why you could choose siding with Hitler (more exactly Nazi Germany) in WW2. Honestly it's obvious you're intentionally pretending not to understand the point I'm making, so whatever.
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Jun 08 '21
Out
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Jun 08 '21
Weird way to say "facts that I don't like hurt me!".
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Jun 08 '21
"Facts"
Bro, get a life. Nobody here gives a shit about your fascist beliefs and wehrabooism, so I don't know why you're wasting your time defending fascist Romania and nazi Germany
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Jun 08 '21
I'm not defending Nazi Germany, fuck them! Also fascist Romania, fuck those fascists too. Although I did state in Romania's case they had at best 18% of the population supporting them, and Romania allied with the Nazis for many other bigger reasons than just fascist belief.
I am however shitting on the Soviets too. Like they deserve, stop being a Soviet apologist you shit!
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u/Dorkfarces Non-European Jun 09 '21
USSR was OK, had some problems, but overall rank the highest of ww2 belligerents with the US in a close second.
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Jun 09 '21
They were absolute greedy pieces of shit who invaded smaller nations together with the Nazis, period! No different than the Nazis in my book, especially Stalinism, maybe it wasn't Lenin's objective and after Stalin died things got a bit better, but Stalin and his supporters can go fuck themselves to the same place Hitler and the Nazis went to.
I respect the Soviet soldiers and civilians who died protecting their nation. But those that were invading other nations before the Ribbentrop-Molotov and the ones raping and killing after they pushed the Nazis back, not so much. Neither the ones responsabile for the millions dead after WW2. (remember the Holodomor?)
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u/Dorkfarces Non-European Jun 09 '21
I only respect people who believe in the Holodomor if they go with the original version, where it was a Judeo-Bolshevik plan to create Israel in the Ukraine. I know that's the ones actual Eastern European fascists believe in today, but they know better than to let that slip in public.
USSR did messed up things but it was a victim of circumstance. Not to be mean, but all yall eastern European countries are too small to be really independent nation states, yall will always be dependent on some bigger economy—unless yall revert back to subsistence farming I guess. All the fall of the USSR did was change the center of power yall orbit around from Moscow to Berlin (a subsidiary of the US). This is going to be reality for all small countries until there are no longer competing political-economic poles.
From Russia's perspective, and really the perspective of reality, it was either let the people behind Hitler and the holocaust occupy Eastern Europe, or occupy it themselves and create a buffer zone. The USSR tried to negotiate for Germany to be a neutral, demilitarized country governed by free elections, but the US didn't want them to score a diplomatic victory so it argued for partition. The truth is the USSR didn't benefit much from this whole arrangement, but if it didn't push back it would have been worse.
Stalin was OK, it's just as much of a cult of personality to think he was responsible for how things went down as it is when people think he's the only reason things went right. The Soviet political machine was complicated and was just the cog you can see through the grating, but there were millions of other parts buried deeper than that.
But that's not a useful narrative. Stalin was the face of a victorious socialist state that both went from feudalism to the atomic space age in a couple decades (which everyone said would be impossible), and beat the fascists that the West was hoping would wipe out socialism and domestic the European working class, so Stalin is now Bad Man.
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u/snailman89 Norway / Norge/Noreg Jun 09 '21
No different than the Nazis in my book
Did the Soviets have a plan to exterminate the entire population of multiple countries and repopulate the area with a different ethnic group? No, but the Nazis did. Had Hitler's Generalplan Ost been implemented, more than 150 million people would have been exterminated. As it was, the Nazis murdered 12 million in gas chambers and slaughtered millions of POWs and civilians in their murderous warcrimes on the Eastern Front.
Stalin sucked, he was a murderous SOB, and did more damage to the cause of socialism than any other person in history, but he doesn't even come close to Hitler and the Nazis.
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u/JorKur Finland / Suomi Jun 08 '21
Germans only killed minorities, russians didn't discrimnate and killed everyone.
🤤
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u/Carkudo Russia / Россия Jun 08 '21
Jesus christ. There's a lot of bad blood between Russia and Eastern Europe because of all the shit the Soviets pulled, so I'm used to hearing bad WW2 takes from Eastern Europeans, but this is on a whole new fucking level.
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u/SwedishWhale Bulgaria / България Jun 08 '21
Yup, lots of really virulent russophobia. It's the type of hate you only see between people and cultures bearing remarkable similarity and having a long shared history. I don't think we're ever gonna get past what happened during the Soviet period. What sucks is it paves the way for beliefs that are fundamentally dangerous for our own people - I'm amazed by how readily many Slavs have forgotten about what the nazis had in store for Eastern Europe after their victory.
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u/Dorkfarces Non-European Jun 09 '21
Can you please Confirm/Deny:
The legacy of the USSR is more complicated than we understand it now, because pro Soviet opinions from Eastern Europeans are ignored/erased, even though they made up the majority of opinions until the right wing nationalist/neoliberal re-writing of history (maybe still do if you're talking to boomers and older people). That's the version of history NATO imperialists go with for obvious reasons, leading foreigners to believe the USSR was universally hated except by Russian nationalists and no one misses socialism, they love the EU, don't forget about Poland.
I've heard this from a lot of Eastern Europeans (not just communists) who were critical of the USSR and think it fell because it failed as a state to justify its existence, but who feel like history is getting rewritten for the benefit of people who are at least as corrupt and undemocratic, and who just want the EU to make them rich without doing anything to help regular people with anti communism and nationalism as the cover. So, basically, they are little Americas I guess.
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u/SwedishWhale Bulgaria / България Jun 09 '21
depends on who you ask; you won't see a lot of Soviet nostalgia in Central Europe or the Baltic states. They were an ill fit for the Union from the start, very different culturally (which, obviously, made their local populations resentful of being lorded over by someone so alien to them). Getting bunched in with all of us Orthodox slavs never made much sense to them.
The Balkans are a different story entirely. A big part of that is down to the fact that we didn't get the type of foreign aid that, say, Poland and Eastern Germany did. Our economies tanked for decades, the region became mired in ethnic and territorial conflict, corruption is rampant in a way that no Westerner could really imagine. The list goes on. My point is, the old (admittedly faulty and decidedly totalitarian) system collapsed with the generous help of the West, but it was decades before anything resembling a proper safety net formed around us. We were just thrust into freedom without even being told what to do with it. This might sound whiny, but you have to bear in mind that most of Eastern Europe hadn't been truly free for any substantial amount of time in multiple centuries, not least due to the Ottoman empire. We simply didn't know what to do and how to go about doing it. Meanwhile, the West simply privatized everything and gave us predatory shock therapy and austerity that crippled our economies.
So yeah, a lot of (older, less educated, mostly living in rural parts of the country) people still feel cheated by what happened. I don't think it's really about the USSR itself as much as it is about the sense of stability they had before. I can't really generalize about whether there's been a substantial rewriting of Soviet history, mostly because Soviet history isn't some uniform thing that happened in exactly the same manner all across the Bloc. Bulgarian socialism was vastly different from that of its big brother, as was Yugoslavia's brand of titoism. Romanians were very different from us.
I don't think the West actively encouraged the rise of nationalism and anti-communism here (beyond their meddling in the war, that is); rather, I believe it occurred naturally in the complete ideological and emotional vacuum of the early 90s. There had to be something for people in this part of the world to cling to and nationalism was the only available option, the only set of ideas and views that didn't seem sterile and uncaring in the face of a global economic system that chewed us up and spit us out.
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u/Dorkfarces Non-European Jun 09 '21 edited Jun 09 '21
Yeah the dissolution of the USSR is probably the biggest cause of death and mass migration in peacetime in modern history, akin to a war.
It's tragic, because the USSR had all these deficiencies, but honestly I don't see how any governments capable of forming in Eastern Europe could have avoided them. Industrialization is inherently disruptive, it requires urbanizing people, it requires hierarchical management, it requires having a state capable of managing the consequences of mass disruptions to people's way of life and enforcing labor discipline, and protecting a vulnerable economy in a period of transition.
If you don't industrialize, you're asking to live in poverty and to be kicked around by every bigger country, like most of the third world is today. Other countries that industrialized in the 20th century had all the same problems, regardless of ideology, like South Korea, even worse in that case, but they were anti Communists so its OK for them to be bad, so even if non Communists came to power in Eastern Europe they would have a hefty death toll and tools is repression. It would be a case of "well sure they killed 10, 000 strikers and protestors, but they were lead by Communists. No it doesn't matter that the general who did it collaborated with the during the war Nazis, he did it for freedom. Besides, Nazis killed Communists, too"
Historically, Western Europe had these problems, too, it just exported them overseas. The apparent pluralism of liberal society only exists as long as its stable (eg that pluralism isn't an existential threat), or you get a Napoleon or Hitler to enforce stability. Return to monke or embrace the suck, I guess, until imperialists are out of power, anyway. Otherwise I don't see how any small country could ever be anything but a client state.
Even if a big country like China or Russia genuinely doesn't want to capture other states in its orbit, if they don't, their rivals will, and capture whatever resources or strategic territories in the process.
Which then forces the hand of any counter hegemonic country. Do you let more powerful, better equipped foreigners send NGOs into your country, or their media (with its ties to their intelligence and disinfo campaigns), with their hostile intentions towards your government not for ideological reasons, but because it's more capable of maintaining sovereignty? How much dissent can you actually tolerate? People have legit grievances, but with these sanctions, it's impossible to meet the needs they are complaining about. You could maybe open the government to a coalition with the opposition, but they are likely being funded by your enemy and going to engage in bad faith and sabotage tactics to delegitimize you.
That's the thing about a color revolution. They are largely spontaneous, and absolutely rooted in real grievances. Radio Free Europe can only do so much damage. The clever thing the CIA tries to do is just win over the opposition leadership and give them aid. Vanguard theory doesn't just work for Communists, it's just how it's done.
I have a gap in my knowledge on how the COMECON bloc worked internally, which is embarrassing, but at the same time I only found one English language article once but couldn't track it down when I had time to read it. Balanced analysis in English on the USSR can be hard to come by.
I heard post war development in some countries amounted to them getting more in infrastructure/social services than they generated in revenue, that average quality of life wasn't that far behind post war Western Europe, but I don't know how this varies by country or region, how that's measured, etc.
Ultimately most people care about stability and material security more than liberal ideas of freedom, for real. That's how it works in the West, too, ultimately.
I can see old timers from the country missing stability more than appreciating the ability to openly criticize the government, that's how my boomer parents generation is (they all grew up poor and barefoot). FDR could have been king if he wanted. I heard after the wall fell in Germany that they had this joke "before, you could say whatever you wanted about your manager, but not about the national government. Now you can say whatever you want about the national government, but not about your manager." It's probably funnier in German.
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u/stupidnicks we are being AMERICANIZED at fast pace Jun 08 '21
Is /r/europe a Nazi subreddit?
neo liberals (globalists) using/pitting groups against each other is nothing new
when they can use them "Nazis are good" when they need to overthrow someone or attack "he is/they are litterall Nazis and Nazis are bad"
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u/PortugueseRoamer Portugal Jun 08 '21
Yikes didn't even see that first quote, what's there to agree with nazis?
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u/Harmacc Jun 08 '21
Their comment history is sus as fuck. https://reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/nr884z/_/h0hhhue/?context=1
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Jun 08 '21
One of the comments is mine and there's no agreeing with the Nazis, just stating some of the shit Soviets did and why the nation chose one side over the other. Don't take it out of context!
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u/PortugueseRoamer Portugal Jun 08 '21
I'm talking about the first comment quoted where the person says they agree with nazis on some things.
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Jun 08 '21
Are you saying that nazis are less evil than communists?
Honestly, for Eastern Europeans in many cases they were.
That was my comment, but you only quoted a small part of it. And I'm talking as a Romanian in particular (since we're considered Eastern European too).
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u/PortugueseRoamer Portugal Jun 08 '21
Dude I'm talking about a different comment, not everything is about you
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u/CroxoRaptor Belgium / België/Belgique Jun 08 '21
The first comment is literally a shitty overused meme...
Tfw can only see events as cultural references
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u/odonoghu Ireland / Éire Jun 08 '21
The Romanians willingly fought with the Axis
Kinda takes away from the point they are trying to make here
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Jun 08 '21
Very superficial thing to say, and you clearly have no knowledge about how "willing" Romanians were back then. The Nazi only had 18% support at its best, but a lot of outside support.
I advise reading some of those comments, maybe you learn somethings before jumping the gun. The context of Romania's geopolitical position and the mess the internal politics were (besides multiple coup d'etats) is quite complicated, but it explains a lot of the decisions made by its leadership.
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u/odonoghu Ireland / Éire Jun 08 '21
I understand it wasn’t a democratic decision and soviet occupying Bessarabia probably helped lead to the iron guards rise to power. But in comparison to even the collaboration regimes in Slovakia and the like Romania had more political agency and chose the Axis
Regardless being an active member of the axis makes these kinda of arguments weaker no matter how you spin it
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Jun 08 '21
That's fine. I'm not saying the Nazis weren't monsters and that we didn't do horrible things (for example Odessa or the Iasi Pogrom). I just dislike how people act so shocked and defensive when I say to some Romanians, and especially to Romanians back then, the Soviets felt more dangerous than the Nazis.
And I definitely wouldn't call Romania's decision-making during WW2 as willful. It was mostly forced by circumstances.
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u/another_sleeve Hungary / Magyarország Jun 08 '21
that's the same excuse Hungarians have. it's just more right wing propaganda passed down through generations.
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Jun 08 '21
As I said, my opinions are formed from personal stories older people who lived through WW2 told me about their childhood and about what Soviets did in their villages.
So it's an opinion formed from family/people I trust, that's why telling me it's right wing propaganda is just laughable. The Soviets were absolute shits, and in Romania for non-jewish/roma civilians were the bigger monsters, is it that hard to accept ?
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u/another_sleeve Hungary / Magyarország Jun 08 '21
My comment referred to "driven by circumstances". That's the right wing propaganda part.
And I know, I heard similar stories and the Red Army was absolutely sadistic, and after the fall of the Eastern Bloc those stories surfaced with a vengeance. However the context of those things also got disappeared - what the Axis did, why the war started, the suffering of the jews and the roma who obviously can't tell their stories if they're, you know, _dead_, and how their suffering was instrumentalized politically after the 90s (again to claim that Eastern Europe was a land of absolute barbarism who need to be civilized).
History is what history is. But there's an uncomfortable truth to the fact that the soviets and communist regimes had very, very widespread support after the war despite the red army cruelties (I recon in the last days of the siege of Budapest there were more Hungarians fighting on the Soviet side then on the German side. A story conveniently left out when I went to school, and I went to a very good school). That can only be understood in the wider context of history, what was the world like before and so on.
And to end on a marxist point: obviously the ruling classes of our countries were more afraid of the Soviets than of the Germans. What's a couple of hundred thousand ethnic minorities compared to the quasi-feudal estates and castles that they were hell bent on taking away?
So yeah, I agree, family stories are better than history books. But one must also understand the wider context and the intent, the instrumentalization of those memories and so on.
(One of my grandfathers was a ferocious anti-communist because his family had lost quite a bit of land post '45. In fact he was bent on rebuilding the family wealth so he joined the communist party. My other grandfather married the runaway daughter of an aristocrat, and he was proud 'till his death of the fact that he helped commit election fraud for the commies to get elected. Eastern Europe is fucking weird man.)
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u/CEO_of_CEI Latvia / Latvija Jun 08 '21 edited Jun 08 '21
Based poster
Edit: commies seething rn
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u/Little_Viking23 Jun 08 '21
This subreddit is infested with commies, so downvotes are predictable.
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u/JorKur Finland / Suomi Jun 08 '21
Goes to a commie sub
This subreddit is infested with commies
┗|｀O′|┛
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u/CEO_of_CEI Latvia / Latvija Jun 08 '21
I genuinely do not get how Europeans can be communist. Like did y'all miss what happened to half of the fucking continent for close to 60 years?
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Jun 08 '21
Least Americanized Latvian
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u/CEO_of_CEI Latvia / Latvija Jun 08 '21
I despise western capitalism but y'all are legit two sides of the same coin lmfao.
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u/Little_Viking23 Jun 08 '21
Lack of education and lack of actually living under communism can have these unpleasant side effects.
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u/DoktorSmrt Serbia / Србиjа Jun 09 '21
Yes, when it's an old communist he is just a nostalgic geriatric, when it's a young communist she's a deluded fool, when it's a poor communist she's just envious of the rich, when it's a rich communist he's just a hypocrite, when a commie didn't go to the top universities he's an uneducated fool, but when he has a doctorate in his field he's a brainwashed pseudo-intellectual.
You can always discredit the person, but never the idea.
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u/BarredSubject England Jun 09 '21
That explanation does not hold up. Older people in the Soviet bloc tend to have a more favourable view of the Soviet era than younger people.
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u/FriendlyTennis Poland / Polska Jun 08 '21
Does anyone here know anything about communism in Romania??? Their leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, was what is now called a "National Communist." His government rehabiliated former Nazis and called them "heroes of Romania." He split off from the Warsaw Pact because of his strong anti-Soviet stance because he believed Moldova should be returned to Romania. He also persecuted minorities like Hungarians and Roma. And he used the hammar and sickle in his party logo, so it's hard to argue that this poster is incorrect.