Did "The West" invade Russia in 1941?

[Joij21]

All what I did was replying to a poster who claimed that Russia attacked Western country during WW2 (meaning Finland), while Western countries never attacked Russia.

And yet Russia attacked Finland before Germany attacked Russia. Operation Barbarossa is completely different than the Winter war, only the Continuation war happened simultaneously.

It seems like your trying to use Germany as an excuse for why Russia attacked Finland.

 

[GinandTonic]

My original point had nothing to do with NATO and whatever the concept of West constitutes. And it wasn't worth creating separate thread to discuss.

All what I did was replying to a poster who claimed that Russia attacked Western country during WW2 (meaning Finland), while Western countries never attacked Russia.
I answered that if you consider WW2 Finland as Western country, Nazi Germany also falls under this definition. And claiming that the West never attacked Russia in this case is ridiculous.

TBH, setting the word first aside, I've some sympathy for this point. I think it is an issue of semantics overlapping with identity/ identification.

For many in "the west", the west = NATO = fighting nazi's. Countries reconstructing their identities post USSR, post the trauma of reconstructing themselves as SSR's in the first place. Being "not nazi" is a focal point of their self-identification. When the Germans became "us" rather than nazi they ceased being "other". As Bob Dylan put it -

The Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now, too
Have God on their side

The Russians didn't have the same process. Didn't identify themselves around the same cultural signifiers. The Russians also identify as the "not-nazis".

Both sides look at the other and see disturbing echo's of nazism growing. For my part the Putinist fascism scares the socks off of me, but my opinion would doubtless be different if I lived in St Petersburg. Now I completely disagree with the nonsense coming from Russian propaganda, but I can understand that both sides have a core identification with being the not-nazis.

For what it's worth the rest of Dylan's song ends -

I've learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

But now we got weapons
Of chemical dust
If fire them, we're forced to
Then fire, them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side

Through many a dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ was
Betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
That if God's on our side
He'll stop the next war

 

[Grendeldef]

With God on my side

The scariest sentiment an aggressive Special Military Operation leader can express.

 

[Joij21]

The Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now, too
Have God on their side

This is probably why the Russians think we're sus. The Germans tried to annihilate their race off the face of the Earth. Yet when Germany lost we allowed every surviving German man, women, and child to live and largely forgave them for what they had done. Not only that but we had allowed them to keep a sovereign nation state after it all.

It's the same thing with China. They largely believe we should have exterminated all the Japanese in revenge for the disgusting things the did to the Chinese people.

Old blood vendettas run deep. Demons from the far flung past are dug back up by the gravedigger to haunt the land of the living.

 

[Verbose]

This is probably why the Russians think we're sus. The Germans tried to annihilate their race off the face of the Earth. Yet when Germany lost we allowed every surviving German man, women, and child to live and largely forgave them for what they had done. Not only that but we had allowed them to keep a sovereign nation state after it all.

It's the same thing with China. They largely believe we should have exterminated all the Japanese in revenge for the disgusting things the did to the Chinese people.

Old blood vendettas run deep. Demons from the far flung past are dug back up by the gravedigger to haunt the land of the living.

During WWII even Hollywood managed to maintain the distinction between Germans and Nazis...

 

[GinandTonic]

This is probably why the Russians think we're sus. The Germans tried to annihilate their race off the face of the Earth. Yet when Germany lost we allowed every surviving German man, women, and child to live and largely forgave them for what they had done. Not only that but we had allowed them to keep a sovereign nation state after it all.

It's the same thing with China. They largely believe we should have exterminated all the Japanese in revenge for the disgusting things the did to the Chinese people.

Old blood vendettas run deep. Demons from the far flung past are dug back up by the gravedigger to haunt the land of the living.

The USSR rehabilitated East Germany. And the East Germans took their SSRhood seriously. By all accounts they unnerved the Russians by buying into what were at that point obviously ignored corrupt "conventions".

 

[red_elk]

This is probably why the Russians think we're sus. The Germans tried to annihilate their race off the face of the Earth. Yet when Germany lost we allowed every surviving German man, women, and child to live and largely forgave them for what they had done. Not only that but we had allowed them to keep a sovereign nation state after it all.

Germans have been cured from it. At least they don't seem to believe anymore that our DNA is defective.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Germans have been cured from it. At least they don't seem to believe anymore that our DNA is defective.

There was a theory that Russia had been constantly executing and gulaging all its best people over many centuaries of dictatorship resulting in a geneticly defective genre pool
But given the young generation of Russians this dosnt seem to be the case, plenty of smart, educated and talented generation of Russians, they just have been fleeing to the West instead for a better life.

 

[BenitoChavez]

No. Russia didn't exist in 1941.

Is that pedantic enough for this thread?

 

[BenitoChavez]

This is probably why the Russians think we're sus. The Germans tried to annihilate their race off the face of the Earth. Yet when Germany lost we allowed every surviving German man, women, and child to live and largely forgave them for what they had done. Not only that but we had allowed them to keep a sovereign nation state after it all.

It's the same thing with China. They largely believe we should have exterminated all the Japanese in revenge for the disgusting things the did to the Chinese people.

Old blood vendettas run deep. Demons from the far flung past are dug back up by the gravedigger to haunt the land of the living.

The thing is all those old blood vendettas from WWI are what led to WWII in the first place. Forgiveness really is the only way forward otherwise we'll just end up in a global circular firing squad and the first person to pull the trigger ensures we are all dead.

 

[Traitorfish]

There was a theory that Russia had been constantly executing and gulaging all its best people over many centuaries of dictatorship resulting in a geneticly defective genre pool

That would seem to depend on the prior assumption that Tsarist autocracy was an efficient system for promoting the genetically advantage to the positions of prominence where they could attract the negative attentions of the state, which is... bold, to say the least.

 

[Remorseless1]

The West never attacked Russia, because the West is a nonsense denominator.

Claiming the West attacked Russia is ridiculous. It means the West was fighting the West in WW2 and the West won and lost.

So everyone got a participation ribbon?

 

[Farm Boy]

Lots of gold stars. Your kids get em in school as stickers. When they give them to you, they come with lapel pins.

 

[Kyriakos]

The scariest sentiment an aggressive Special Military Operation leader can express.

 

[Arwon]

I'm not reading this thread but in 1941 part of "The West" invaded another part of "The West" heavily due to a dispute between two totalising "Western" ideologies, cheers

 

[Quintillus]

G&T has a good point that the definition of "West" has evolved. Germany was certainly part of "the West" in 1941. But there's a good argument that so was the USSR, and Tsarist Russia before it. West at that point more or less meaning "Europe" (or most of it, at any rate), and the U.S./Canada. "East" referring to most of the non-Soviet parts of Asia. Nowadays the "West" is primarily an ideological distinction; in the mindset of the 1930s and 1940s it was about which countries west industrialized and/or "civilized".

East and West dividing Europe, and becoming an ideological distinction, is an artifact of the Iron Curtain and how the war ended.

So I would say that a Western country invaded the USSR in 1941, with help from a couple others in the Axis, and the USSR was allied with other Western countries (France, UK, US) which helped it eventually defeat that invasion. Those latter Western countries supplied substantial amounts of supplies to help the Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Tuvans, Georgians, and other Soviets defeat the Germans.

I think the two main reasons this thread is contentious are that the thread title implies a unified "Western" action (although the OP says that was not meant to be implied on page 2, beyond where the average passerby will look), and using today's definition of "the West" when talking about a historical matter (and from different geographic areas where what's "west" could differ both philosophically and geographically). We'd have similar problems if discussing the policies of the UK Liberal Party in the late 1800s if we used today's definition of "liberal".

I'll give Ajidica the "winner" of the thread award for discussing the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance, which was something I had not been aware of before.

 

[Kaitzilla]

View attachment 625458

Crush those Nazis!

Spoiler :

 

[Grendeldef]

Damn Westies confusing things unnecessarily.