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Apparently I'm now a shitlib for not buying into this disgusting tankie propaganda that it was all the Wests fault and Stalin had to ally with Hitler.

For a mod who loves to ban others for bad jacketing, they sure have no problem doing it to other anarchists.

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[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 33 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

That summary is terrible, though. It claims shit like the soviets "hated" germany / the nazis, ignoring shit like the Treaty of Rapallo wherein the violent suppression of communists by the German government (not yet the nazis, yes) was freely forgiven by the soviet union, and which played a huge role in the interaction between the Soviet government and the Weimar / Nazi governments. It also relies heavily on the writings of Grover Furr, a flag even redder than the Soviet's in any political discussion about the time period.

Grover Furr's credibility is best explained by this blurb from his wikipedia page:

Furr has written books, papers, and articles about Soviet history, especially the Stalin era, in which he has stated that the Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, was not deliberate, describing it as a fiction created by pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, that the Katyn massacre was committed by the Nazi Schutzstaffel and not the Soviet NKVD, that all defendants in the Moscow Trials were guilty as charged, that claims in Nikita Khrushchev's speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences are almost entirely false, that the purpose of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was to preserve the Second Polish Republic rather than partition it, and that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland in September 1939, on the grounds that the Polish state no longer existed.

Seriously, just go read Furr's site (it's incredibly difficult to parse due to how it's presented. He loves having multiple interlinked web pages with little context provided as to how the specifics relate, so fair warning that it's a slog.) The most blatant thing to point out is how he provides baseless in-text explanations of things like the meanings of specific language used in the M-R Pact which are completely unaddressed elsewhere in his explanation. It's maddening to see him treated as a scholar in this field, as though statements provided in inline parenthetical / editorial asides are somehow exempt from the need for citations ~~or that anything he does is acceptable academic behavior~~.

Back to Cowbee though: they completely misrepresent the "4/5 of dead Nazis" statistic, ignoring things like:

  • Troop allocations between the western and eastern fronts were wildly disproportionate
  • The seven other countries that contributed troops to the war on the eastern front (and then assign credit for all those nazi deaths to the USSR, of course)
  • That, thanks to the willingness of Nazis to surrender to the western forces, the western front captured more than 10x the number of Nazi soldiers they killed (~3,500,000 captured to 375,000 killed) which is a million more than the soviets killed (this does not include the additional 3.5million 'disarmed forces' since those are only somewhat admissible here and is a hugely complex topic on it's own)

There is a very real discussion to be had on how related, truly, were the two countries prior to the war, for example: They were close enough that the USSR even allowed the Nazis to run a tank training school, fighter pilot school and chemical weapons proving ground in their territory, which was closed soon after the reichstag fire as the political differences between the two countries became more solidifed as hitler rose to power). How much of that earlier cooperation survived? Important to discuss, and misrepresented by all sides in nearly all directions for an endless procession of political reasons. That solidification of differences is a truly fascinating topic and one fraught with complexity and intrigue and is a great subject to debate (in good faith), but the debate Cowbee is presenting is full of misinformation and absolute rampant bullshit from a king of misrepresenting history.

^edit:^ ^misformatted^ ^link^

^edit^ ^2:^ ^words^ ^are^ ^hard^

[-] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

About the tank school (not reading all this RN): It was for the Reichswehr, which was the army of the Weimar republic.
Also please read your own links, the 2nd paragraph of the wiki page reads:

Following the Nazi party's rise to power, the school was closed and Germany's Tank Force and Air Force were trained in Germany.

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 30 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

So you didn't even bother to read the 2nd half of that sentence, where I explicitly state exactly what you're calling me out for having excluded? Come on.

[-] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 weeks ago

I even read the whole article and thus thought it regarded the school as a whole

Closure

In the early 1930s, the political situation for the tank school began to change. The Soviet Union opened itself to the West while Germany attempted a closer approach to France.[1]

In December 1932, Germany achieved being viewed as an equal at the Geneva Conference, making the secret schools somewhat unnecessary. With the rise of the Nazis to power in January 1933, the ideological gap between fascist Germany and the communist Soviet Union became too large and the tank school at Kazan was closed in late 1933

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I'm honestly not sure what you mean. How does the article regarding the school as a whole factor into anything being discussed, or at all address how you were trying to present my arguments as lacking credibility because of an oversight in my citations based on a point I addressed in the same sentence?

[-] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The main reason for my original comment was the following:

They were close enough that the USSR even allowed the Nazis to run a tank training school [...]

Which again (intentionally or not) misrepresents historical fact. Weimar Germany was not at all the Third Reich...

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This is a tedious and at-best-arguable semantic error on my part, since not only was it clearly in service of the future Nazi war machine (ex: Josef Harpe was a Nazi, and was one of the members of the school) and filled with then and future members of the Nazi party, the Nazis did run the school (and their rise to power lead to it's dissolution, the complexities of which were my entire point).

[-] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 weeks ago

That semantic error does obscure how the Nazis gaining power directly caused the USSR to terminate the program. Which unfortunately allows for the misinterpretation that the USSR started a tank school for the Nazi regime. They started it with Germany because both entities at the time saw a benefit to defying Versailles. The German Communist Party wasn't yet outlawed and held like a quarter of the Reichstag at the time.

The failed strategy of the USSR was to undermine the victors of WW1, and hoped the communist wings of Europe would prevail.

They did not.

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago

My point was that the situation surrounding the closure of the school was many-faceted. I appreciate you expanding upon that, though I fear you may have fallen into the same misunderstanding as they by fixating on your own interpretation of one phrase as critical, rather than the actual content of the message (that the complexity of the political motivations behind the creation and closure of the school was the reason I brought it up at all)

[-] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah I wasn't really disagreeing as pointing out how even such a semantic thing can lead to big misinterpretations given the complexity of the whole period.

this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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