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Wow, Germany was provoked into invading Poland; because, they were not just handed Polish land on a silver platter. What an argument. Just like Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine; because, they were not just handed eastern Ukraine on a silver platter.
Poland had been debatable land for centuries. When it wasn't being carved up by the Russians and whatever German and other states were on the borders, it was expanding into an empire of its own carving up other territories.
Trying to figure out if Danzig should be German or Polish or Danish or what the hell is one of those "who would win, Superman or Batman?" kind of questions to chew over. Like another famous tangle:
Depending on the degree of precision you want to achieve, you can of course argue about every single tree line in Pomerania or Silesia, but the arrangement post-WWI followed ethno-linguistic lines pretty well at the eastern border of Germany. This wasn't some completely intractable question, it was solved fairly well at Versailles. The remaining minorities on both sides of the border were geographically distributed in a way that precluded easy solutions but also not that significant in terms of numbers. On top of that several mixed areas got their own referendums to clear remaining doubts.
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That's pretty far away from the argument, and quite irrelevant to the passage you are quoting.
Poland, by refusing to hand over Danzig and working through Germany to get what they wanted, were aligning themselves with Britain and the US to get what they wanted. What's being highlighted is that Poland made the decision to stand against Germany on the basis that they had the backing of the US and Britain. A basis that, according to Flynn, was being heavily pushed on the Poles by the US.
Considering the US and Britain didn't have any ability to stand by their word, going against Germany was maybe the worst decision ever made by Polish statesmen. Getting some of the worst of the war and post-war occupation.
Given that Germans planned to murder or enslave Poles, what was the alternative? (RP II leaders made numerous stupid decisions, not surrendering to country that wants to exterminate you was hardly one of them - it was at least worth trying to defend and winning was plausible even if very unlikely)
You've replied to multiple comments of mine saying the same thing. I don't care for your hysterics, but it would be much more manageable to steer the conversation somewhere productive if you could keep them to a single comment, thanks.
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It is far away from the argument, but it's also far more correct. Note that your framing is selectively allocating agency to the Poles and the Brits/Germans to choose in response to the German demands, just as Flynn's framing attributes agency to the American influence driving others decisions, but neither address that the Germans themselves had the agency in not only making unreasonable demands, but also the agency to not make those demands. The dictator is not an immovable fact of nature, for which there is no reasoning and agency only exists with the responder. The dictator is an agent, and has used their agency to posit the demand in the first place.
Avoiding this point- that people are resisting unreasonable German demands- is required to credibly claim that the Poles were unreasonable in not compromising to them, because there is no failure in reason or competence to resist the unreasonable. But the German Nazis were being unreasonable, and the other actors were being reasonable in resisting the unreasonable, and so re-establing the actual originating context- that the Germans were the originating actors and making unreasonable demands- is the more correct point for conveying not the argument, but the actual context the argument is trying to ignore.
Your contention relies on the Germans requests being unreasonable when you could just as easily say that they weren't. Not the least considering Poland could have been much better for it, along with all of Europe, if they had aligned themselves with Germany against communism and what National Socialists recognized as capitalism in the hands of the international jew.
My argument isn't selective about anything. I think you should step back and recognize just what narrative is being revised. Hitler could have done things differently, but the obvious case here is that so could everyone else. In the context of general WW2 narratives that shovel all blame on Hitler in particular, and to a lesser extent the Treaty of Versailles, there exists an obvious angle of blame that is never talked about lest it draw attention away from the great myths we have created out of Hitler and the holocaust.
No, it would not go better for Poland given that Germans genuinely consider Poles as subhumans.
that particular stupidity solved nothing, was mistaken and resulted in several millions of innocent people being murdered
You pro-slavery, pro-mass-murder and pro-Hitler (ok, that is redundant a bit) apologia is spectacularly stupid and evil.
Less antagonism, please.
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Please stop telling lies. The Germans considered West-Poles to be aryans. Hitler said of slavs that they were docile so long they had food and drink.
Please engage with statements in context. This is a waste of time.
This isn't an argument and makes no sense since I have made no pro-slavery or pro-mass-murder statements.
Are you now in full scale denial? Germans proceeded to murder people who were not docile.
Only some of them, and that was only subgroup anyway. And you were eligible if you cooperated with mass-murdering nazis.
They killed British and American soldiers too. You know, because there was a war.
West-Poles, according to Nazi racial law, were aryans.
Seems like we have gone very far away from Germans considering all Poles subhumans very fast.
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It would be very easy to say many false things, but they would remain false, hence why not even you claim that the German grivance narrative driving the demands was justified.
Their reward would have been to be colonized, treated as subhuman, and progressively enslaved and exterminated, as per the policy statements and intentions of the German rieche.
It is very selective about many things.
This is irrelevant to the reasonableness of other people, as Hitler did NOT do things differently, and people were making decisions based on what he DID do, which was unreasonable by standards both contemporary to now and contemporary to then.
These narratives are false, not least because Stalin had his fair share in allying with Hitler, and the Treaty of Versailles was a red herring that was not a justified grievance for German actions.
There are no great myths of Hitler or the holocaust. There is banality of incompetence and evil, and those who wish to dismiss it away in their mediocrity.
I don't pretend to know either way which geopolitical claims are more justified since I assume all actors are demanding what bests suits them at the time. And the world that would have been if things had gone differently is not known to anyone. Considering how easy you find it to say and believe false things I can only question your confidence.
As per war propaganda driven by those who were at war with Germany. The Germans said the same thing about the allies.
?
"Reasonableness" in this context is nonsense. There was nothing 'reasonable' about Germany playing second fiddle to Britain and France whilst the Soviet Union amassed power. Though it's much easier to simply retroactively assign reason to the victors.
You rely on these myths to maintain your viewpoints. The Germans weren't evil and relying on verbal constructs to sneak such words into the conversation is all you have. Since your viewpoint relies on condemnation of the evil vs good rather than objectivity and analysis.
And I know that German claims of being superior to Slavs and Jews and being entitled to murder and enslave them were wrong and not justified. In the end even Hitler renounced claim of German superiority.
Germans deliberately murdered and enslaved millions of innocent people, planned to do more on that on gigantic scale with large scale genocide.
Feel free to call it differently, for me "were evil" is a fitting description for people doing it, but I would be happy with more descriptive version.
What are you even saying? How does this relate to any of what I wrote? 'I know this and that!'
Then why did the person I was replying to use the concept 'banality of evil'? There's no need for you in this conversation, given your differing views to the person I was replying to, especially since you are making no sense in relation to what was being discussed by us.
I am doing so and I don't care one bit for what you prefer given your comically simplistic view on history.
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I am also quite reminded of the perennial tankie claim that Soviet Union just had to invade Finland in 1939 when we didn't give them the small bits of territory they requested.
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Poland ended up handed over to Stalin wholesale. Great work there.
Terrible, but not as terrible as what Hitler had planned for Poland.
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No worse for them, not at all, than the treatment the Germans gave them.
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Yeah, I think this is the weakest link of the revisionist claims. I actually do think Hitler wasn't hellbent on "conquering Europe from the getgo" as many Western historians will claim. Plus Poland had its own antisemitic government. Putin got into hot water for pointing out that Josef Beck, Poland's foreign minister, was closely co-operating with Nazi Germany in order to jointly deport a great number of Jews. Hitler attended a special funeral in honor of Poland's strongman leader Pilsudski's when he died.
There's an interesting article focusing on Poland from the point of view of an Palestinian-American, which details a lot of these things that many are unaware of.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-polands-anti-semites-helped-colonise-palestine
Obviously the author has his grievances, but he does stick to the facts. Poland was very enthusiastic in supporting Zionism as a way of getting rid of its Jewish population. It played a key role in training Zionist militias, in particular later Prime Minister Menachem Begin himself. So clearly the Poles weren't the angels we were taught and Nazi Germany was far more pragmatic than we are told in the lead-up to the war. This probably has some parallells to the current UA-RU war, as past UA extremism and intolerance is whitewashed by the Western press.
That said, Hitler's invasion is justified by revisionists on the same flimsy grounds that Russia's is now by its apologists. I am willing to believe that the Poles were mistreating Germans in the "Danzig corridoor", but this was the 1930s. Kristallnacht had just happened. Was Nazi Germany really the "dindu nuffin" that Unz and other revisionists would have us believe? The entire period in question is a stark reminder of how toxic nationalism taken to its fullest extent often is.
Those facts you list are pretty well known (to historians). Along with Poland being an asshat towards Lithuania:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Polish_ultimatum_to_Lithuania
or that they used Germans annexing parts of Czechia to expand their own territory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Olza#Part_of_Poland_(1938%E2%80%931939)
or that Poland repressed their other minorities, not just Jews:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonization#Ukrainians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Ukrainians_in_Eastern_Galicia
So there is no some grand conspiracy to whitewash Interwar Poland, just as there is no conspiracy to hide the existence of Ukrainian radical nationalists. It's about emphasis and rhetoric: when all you talk about is how the 2nd Republic was oppressive, or how some Ukrainian soldiers openly sport Nazi insignias — most likely you are a biased hack, like Unz. Unfortunately, a lot of nuance is lost along the way, because Ukraine should drop radical nationalists as their values are antithetical to EU which Ukraine wants to join.
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