Churchill turning his back on Poland

PGiX was made irrelevant, because of Polish obstinacy. At the negotiating table, if you keep ignoring the signals you get from your partners, that's what happens.

Russian's "don't surrender"; So the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was an invitation to party. The war of 1921 was actually a Russian victory, which is why they acceded territory. The Russo-Japanese war of 1905, was just a trick to lure Japanese. This same Russian culture of never surrendering, must be why so many Russian soldiers were captured at Kiev...

The Soviet regime would just keep on profiting just fine. Whether a ceasefire, a return to '41 borders, or whichever else Stalin decided. And again, it doesn't really matter what the agreement looked like, just that there was a risk, that the West needed to mitigate.

Post your complaints about accusations of Polish profiteering in that thread.

Modern Poland was never on par economically with Western Europe prior to WW2 and wouldn't be regardless. Nothing Britain did or said, was going to prevent either USSR or Nazi Germany taking over of Poland. The Alliance could not afford to lose Soviet participation. After the conquest of France, reality was looking grim for Poland. Without the Soviets, the war could easily have dragged on many more years, and Poland would ultimately still face Soviet occupation. It's somehow incredible how Poles imagine some kind of free liberation with retained borders and unhindered economy, with anything less than that, a betrayal by Churchill.

And if we are going to bring post-WW2 arguments; If Poland still had unresolved border disputes with Belorus and Ukraine, it wouldn't even be in the EU. That would've been Churchill's fault too.

 

what many people don't know, is that Stalin gave up his share of Austria and forced the Greek communist party to give up its war and allowed the west to keep control of Greece due to the agreement

 

And what many people don't know is that:

- in 1945 the USSR annexed by force a part of Czechoslovakia,
- in February 1948 there was a Soviet sponsored coup d'état,
- in March 1948 the last independent minister in the Czechoslovak government, the courageous Jan Masaryk was thrown out a window to his death by Communist thugs,
- by 1970 over 300,000 people were forced to flee the tiny Czechoslovakia.

This was the fate of those who believed in promises of the Allies, weren't obstinate, didn't ignore the signals.

As to the pre-war Poland, it was a country as poor as for example Spain.
But not the wealth is important, but the lost year of arrested economic development endured by all the communist countries.
The post-war GDP per capita of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Bloc were almost the same - and then...


View attachment 24972 View attachment 24971

 

This is the fate of those fighting Soviet occupation. Similar things happened to Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Mongolians, Estonians... The thing they all had in common; Communist oppression.

By now we know the tune of your harp. It was all Churchill.

 

One could blame Stalin but then one could also blame GB and France for Sudetenland, Rhineland and Czechoslovakia... Appeasement didn't start with Uncle Joe

 

What many people seem to forget or neglect to mention is that there were MANY who believed in and supported the Soviet System. The Soviet Union would have never been as large as it was had it not had so many who shared this a view. Many countries and people also benefited greatly from the Soviet Union.

Central European countries not as much as Central Asian countries ofcourse.

I for one don't think Churchill turned his back on Poland. He did the best he could with the cards he was dealt.

 

Entirely true. It was Churchil who handed over vast German territories to Poles, as a pay-of:

"Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.
There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed
by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions …"

Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in 1944

 

You know who else offered the Poles new attractive territories for colonization, so they could live long and prosper, in exchange for some small insignificant territorial concessions?
Who called them his best friends?
And then got mad when they refused, and used force to make them submit to its authority?

Hint: he wore a toothbrush mustache.

Because, it can be argued that from the point of view of international law the only difference between those two proposals was that one of the "offerors" didn't wear a toothbrush mustache.

 

AUGUST 14, 1941

The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.

First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; [...]

Franklin D. Roosevelt
Winston S. Churchill


Beautiful words, no?

 

I don't think this is an appropriate theme for attempts to be "funny".

The Allied map shown below was used to determine the number of Germans that would have to be expelled from the eastern German territories using different border scenarios. (Source of the map: US State Department)
Now tell me: Has Churchill really turned his back on Poland or he payed of Poles with other peoples lands. Poles have ruthlessly swept Germans from these territories. At the right you may observe the Curzon Line - a fair eastern border of Poland. This is almost everything I can say about this subject.

 

Is there a single example that a "soviet system" was chosen in a free election? But there are numerous examples of attempts to establish a soviet systems only supported by a small minority against the will of the vast majority.

Why was that? Any guess?

 

The Soviet system came to be because the majority of the population in Russia wanted it. That is the reason why the Bolsheviks were victorious. Same thing in Ukraine.
What other options were available for the people of Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan for example? People in these countries lived far better under the Soviet system than the one they had prior to. They simply didn't even know of any other system (aside from what they had prior).

Was the president of Afghanistan (Karzai) elected in a "free election"? Palestinians had a free election and elected Hamas... People want what people want. Soviet Union collapsed because people got tired of the system.

 

More than 60% for the social democrats, last free election in 1917.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly

 

Keep banging on the same old harp.
Everyone else sees it is broken.
Except the Poles.

Because there are desires, and then there are practical realities.

If you can see some other alternative action that benefits both Poland and the Western Allies more, you're welcome to explain. But you've failed miserably so far.

 

Everyone? Maybe not.

From A Question of Honor by Lynne Olson, Stanley Cloud:
When Churchill asked the House to show its support not only for the agreement but for the justice of the agreemeent, the irony almost became more than the forty-one-year-old Dunglass could bear.
He rose slowly to his feet, still frail and stooped from the lingering effects of his illness.
"As far as Poland is concerned," he said, "there is no country which by reason of its opposition to tyranny has earned a greater right to independence. There is no country to which independence has been more specifically pledged in treaty and declaration...." He glanced around the hushed chamber. "When the Prime Minister says that he accepts this as an act of justice, I must take a fundamentally opposite view. We have, dozens of times in our history, accepted this kind of arrangement as a fact of power." His voice grew in intensity."I accept it as a fact of power, but I cannot be asked to underwrite it as an act of justice."
The following day, twenty-five opponents of the Yalta agreement's handling of the Polish question decided to do more than merely register their dissent. They introduced an amendment to the confidence vote, regretting the government's "decision to transfer to another power the territory of an ally" and to fail to give liberated nations "the full right to choose their own Government free from the influence of any other power."
In other words, the amendment politely indicted Churchill and his government for violating the Atlantic Charter. This was highly unusual and highly explosive. The dissidents, mostly members of the Conservative Party, were formally challenging the conduct of a Conservative prime minister and his coalition government during wartime.
In the debate that followed, those who supported the amendment made clear they realized the gravity of their action. There was a deep sense of sadness, even anguish, in many of the speeches, along with an uncommon passion.
"It was magnificent," Tory MP Henry Channon wrote. It was "the supreme debate,' "the conscience of the gentlemen of England' on display.
Commander Sir Archibald Southby, one of the amendment's two main sponsors, told his colleagues that this was the most difficult speech of his career.
As much as he wanted to support the prime minister, he said, "if our foreign policy is to be based upon expediency and not upon principles then it is bound to fail, and I cannot in honour express my confidence in it, no matter what the consequences of my decision may be to me personally. I hold that there is a greater loyalty than that which we owe to any one man, government, or party—the loyalty to those fundamental ideals of justice, liberty and honour . . . which we have twice in our lifetime seen the British sword drawn to uphold."
Southby's speech—and several that followed —sounded remarkably like those made by Churchill in the days of Munich, a point that Lord James Willoughby d'Eresby made when he rose to address the House.
Having just returned to Parliament after five years at the front, Willoughby d'Eresby, an army major and regimental commander, observed that members' roles seemed to have changed dramatically in the years he had been away. For example, in the late 1930, he said, it had been Churchill and Eden who "spoke up in this House' on "questions of British honour." [...]
When he talked to the men in his command about why Britain was fighting the war, he said, he gave the reasons put forth by the prime minister, among them, to safeguard the freedom and independence of all nations, but above all, to restore the independence of Poland.
Now, he said, the Yalta agreement had made a "sham" of such talk Willoughby d'Eresby's comments must have deeply wounded Churchill.
So must have the speech of Victor Raikes, a high-principled Tory from southeast Essex who, as his Times obituary pointed out years later, "put causes before career." Raikes noted that the last time he had defied a sitting government in a vote of confidence, it had been 1935, and he had followed the government's chief critic, Winston Churchill, into the lobby in opposition. He voted against the government then bemuse he believed Churchill was right, he said.
"Because I differ from him today, I do it," Raikes added, "not because I am 'anti' the Prime Minister—I have stood by him in days when he was far less popular than he is today - but because I believe that, for all his greatness today and insignificant as I am, I speak with the voice of my country."

Deficiencies corrected.

 

I do wish you wouldn't try to bias readers by altering the colour of the text; further, it makes reading it harder, not easier.

Source is of course missing,... so no further comment is needed.

 

Remarkable job of cherry picking...Considering this is what Dunglass said.

For those interested, the discussion, over 3 days, can be found...
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1945/feb/27/crimea-conference
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1945/feb/28/crimea-conference
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1945/mar/01/crimea-conference

 

A Question of Honor by Lynne Olson, Stanley Cloud

' "A Question of Honor" fails when it moves away from the Kosciuszko Squadron and the Polish fliers.'

'Superficial and lacking some elementary historical knowledge.'

-Amazon reviewers


Obviously written to mass market audience, rather than providing real historic insight.

 

There were no free elections in 1917 :in 1917 Russia was a country at war, in chaos . Besides, the 1917 elections results are irrelevant for the point that the communist regime lasted because it had the support of the population : dictatorships need the support of the population , otherwise they are doomed .

 

A small minority can not rule against the will of the majority : the nazis were a small minority in Germany but ruled with the support, agreement of the majority .All those millions who had voted SPD/KPD before 1933 did not became nazis, but they did not oppose the nazis and later they supported the nazis, mainly because HItler succeeded into improve living conditions : live was better in 1938 than in 1932. And it was the same in the SU : live was better under Stalin than under the Tsar . Erst kommt das Fressen und dan die Moral .