What's this? "The past belongs to Keith." Stick that on a T-Shirt. But he's wrong.Archived Message
Posted by Thomas Newfield on October 23, 2019, 9:46 pm, in reply to "Arseholes"
The Soviets spent most of the 30s trying to get a coalition together to prevent German expansion, invasions, war. The western powers with the Brits and (here) the Poles at the forefront were having none of it. Throughout the 30s the Poles (from '34 I believe) had a non-aggression agreement with the Nazis, and took part of Silesia from Czechoslovakia after the Munich thing.... For which btw the label "appeasement" is misleading: it was continuation of a policy of support for a Western European bulwark against Soviet Russia, who all the western powers wished to overthrow. With a veneer of virtuous "reluctance". The Nazis were the champions of the west, in government and a decisive chunk of the establlshment.
The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was Stalin's last gambit to buy time and forestall a German invasion. The Poles suffered severely yes. But the Nazi-Soviet pact was a pragmatic and rational scheme and last resort, not a policy of aquiescence in Nazism, which western support was.