If Germany gained the alliance with Poland it wanted in the mid-1930s

It's an indisputable fact that Great Britain had no obligation toward Czechoslovakia.

They aren't ascribed by the author - he wasn't even there, they are in diaries of people who were.

 

Alright, I'm done here.........I'm going to take my, down with communism, and F*ck Stalin posters with me.........

 

The Soviet westward offensive of 1918–1919 was part of the campaign by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic into areas abandoned by the Ober Ost garrisons that were being withdrawn to Germany following that country's defeat in World War I.
The initially successful offensive against the Republic of Estonia ignited the Estonian War of Independence which ended with the Soviet recognition of Estonia.
The war against Republics of Latvia and Lithuania was more successful for the Soviets and resulted in the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics being established.
In Belarus, the Belarusian People's Republic was conquered and the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia proclaimed.

The campaign eventually bogged down and led to:
- the Estonian Pskov Offensive,
- the White Russian Petrograd Offensives,
- the Lithuanian-Soviet War,
- the Latvian War of Independence,
- continuation of the Ukrainian-Soviet War,
- and the start of the Polish-Soviet War.

 

Not really. Indeed the League of Nations charter suggest otherwise.

 

Of course, you are right. So let's try again:

It's an indisputable fact that Great Britain had no meaningful obligation toward Czechoslovakia.

The Covenant of the League of Nations mandated sanctions against the aggressor and nothing more.
Anything else was goodwill of "concerned" countries.
Un-concerned countries didn't have to concern with that.

 

Sanctions are an obligation.

 

Lenin and the Soviet system wasn't communism. When the Bolsheviks lost the first free election in 1918, Lenin did exactly what Hitler did after the Reichstag fire decree in regards to suspending civil liberties, strikes, unions, free press, free speech, instituted a secret police, then called CHEKA. The power, the "dictatorship of the proletariot" was actually Lenin and his small circle of bureaucrats holding all the power and suppressing the actual proletariat. When Stalin took over it was even worse. Totalitarianism not Communism. The power was consolidated and the decisions were consolidated to Stalin with maybe some input from the Politburo. The workers didn't own a damn thing or have a say in a damn thing and there still was classes and the Stalin-bureaucratic clique lived like the Tzars while everyone else suffered. Collectivization may have had some Communist feel to it but it all went into the hands of the bureaucratic leaders.

 

You are fighting a loosing battle. It certainly wasn't "communism" as defined by Marx but it became the visible definition of "communism" under Lenin and his successors and the various incarnations of it in countries other than Russia. Furthermore the evidence tends to suggest that Marx's "communism" will devlolve into the version we see and saw in the various "communist" countries.

 

Just because they called it "communism" as a visible definition under Lenin and saying its communism is like saying North Korea is "democratic" because it is in their title of state. Maybe Soviet "Communism" should always be put in quotes and then defined by what it actually was because it was totalitarianism with the fraud of a classless society when Stalin and the politburo were the new tzars with all the power, decision-making, the owners and the decision-makers of the means of production and property, etc.

 

No it's not. There are a significant number of democratic states to offset the Korean claim not so with communism. Indeed though it has become pretty clear that if the term "democratic" is part of the name of the state then the state isn't.

 

Ok, but still Communism under the Soviets was not Communism, and Fascism was an answer to Communism, instead of classes being the enemies, even though in Soviet society that was a fraud and Stalin and the Politburo became the new aristocracy and lived like tzars, it was races, social Darwinism, etc. that became the enemy, installing the same tactics that Lenin used and Stalin only increased.

 

Check out "Behemoth" written in 1942 by a German who left Nazi Germany, and essentially made a rational comparison of the New Deal, Sovietism, and Nazism as all leaning towards bureaucratic, globally organized, "administered" society. There were many Mussolini supporters in FDR's first cabinet and I forget their names by I have the essay saved and I can post it. Two of the programs in the first New Deal were spitting images of what the Nazis and Soviets were doing in regards to "hands-on" instead of "hands-off" economics.

 

Two programs out of literally hundreds of government programs were the same...And this somehow proves the point?

What is the asking price of that bridge in Brooklyn that you are trying to sell?

 

I'm not trying to prove a point. The two main programs in the First New Deal, including the NRA and General Hugh Johnson were cancelled due to their unconstitutionality. Read "Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal." General Johnson was forced to resign. He was a supporter of Mussolini. The only point I'm making that in the rough times after the First World War and the financial crisis that followed all these systems were similar regardless of titles and theories. Especially Sovietism and Nazism.

 

Excerpt from a scholar: Well, seeing as Stalin set up a system of state capitalism, I would argue that he was not a communist at all. We could power the world with the energy generated by Karl Marx spinning in his grave every time someone calls Stalin or the USSR “communist”. It is state capitalist for the following reasons:

1. The proletariat was still being oppressed by a pseudo-bourgeoisie.
2. That pseudo-bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, not the people.

Those two facts alone make it very suspect that this is in any way communist.

 

There were many Constitutional challeges to New Deal programs...Somewhere around 11 if memory serves. Hardly surprising giving the many businesses that were effected by them. Many were successful, some were not. In some cases, the wording was changed to make the laws Constitutional, in others, the Acts were changed to better suit specific businesses.

General Johnson was "cancelled", because he was an alcoholic ass who made enemies with almost every one, and was caught having an affair with his very overpaid secretary.

I have...It is a rather superficial article that mostly focuses mainly on Johnson, and does not delve deeper, or outright ignores many factors surrounding the matter. For instance, Bernard Baruch is largely ignored.

As I said before...He was fired for personal matters, not any of his beliefs. When a married man pays his secretary over five times the going wage, sticking his pen in her ink well, and is very blatant about doing so. It will end badly.

What do you expect? Most would call it "common sense." The "Hands off" approach had been tried, and it failed...Hence, the "Hands on" approach was taken.

Also, Sovietism/Stalinism did not experience the financial crisis that "market" economies did, as there was no "market" to crash. They were looking to rapidly industrialize their nation and needed capital & technology to do so.

 

During the Great Depression millions of Americans were unemployed, but at the same time the Soviet citizens were dying from hunger by millions so I suppose the hands-off approach won that contest.

 

Communism can't exist without violence, You can't abolish religion, private property, and peasant landownership and expect people to cooperate meekly. The resulting resistance has to be crushed mercilessly and the sooner the better.
In this regard, Stalin was a perfect communist who carried communism to its logical conclusion, actually, he created a communism that worked and delivered results like the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Still, he didn't create a communist state but a socialist one, the USSR was going to morph into a communist state in a distant future.

 

This sort of debate always ends up getting tangled in semantics. Mark's knew that there would be some opposition to forming a Communist government but he wrote in the tradition of many Utopian writers who ignored the serious issues with their Utopias. As Communism evolved (and depending on how you define Socialism it was or wasn't one in the USSR) violence became endemic in part because it failed it's own basic vision of a classless society. The ruling class, in order to remain so, had to repress that truth. In any case the Communism that Stalin created didn't "work" in the long term and self destructed a few decades after it was created. The results that Communism clearly created were the dead in numbers that no other system has come close to.

 

Stalinism required Stalin to work, his successors didn't have the balls to continue what he began.