Mini-history wars

[David]

Lola alerted me to this incident in which an academic at University of Melbourne managed to piss a lot of people off:

http://theconversation.com/academics-and-barbarians-why-one-article-aroused-russian-ire-25480#comment_359623

The petition to make him apologise has received 10,000 signatures and apparently made the news over in Europe. Here's the article that started it all:

http://m.theage.com.au/comment/russia-reveals-both-its-strength-and-weakness-in-the-invasion-of-ukraine-20140303-3409n.html

So, what's all this about? The outrage centres on the bolded bit below:

[Wokko]

He's right, but when you play the 'hurt feelings' game then expect it to expand. Also he missed one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Soviet Russia was a brutal, evil, disgusting regime and I don't think allying with them and protecting them from Nazi Germany was a terribly wise decision (likely necessary to defeat Germany, but I don't think there was a lesser of those two evils). There's a reason that many from Churchill to Patton to MacArthur were wanting to keep the tanks rolling and take them out too.

[Tannin]

David, your grasp of modern European history as evidenced by this post is, frankly, entirely lacking. It was stupid and ludicrous for a supposed historian to use that term in that context. The reality was - and this is very well-known and abundantly evidenced - that the Soviet Union became involved, through no fault of its own in a war of unimaginable ferocity. Such things rapidly acquire a momentum of their own. The barbarity of the Nazi invasion is unquestioned, and no-one with any understanding of the history of that era would seriously question the fact that strong measures were desperately needed to save the people of the Soviet Union from it.

And save you and me from it, let us not forget. You, David From Canberra, live and breathe a free man today because of the heroism and appalling sacrifice of the people of the Soviet
Union. In that desperate war against two of the most evil and barbaric regimes ever to have existed, regimes which had every intention of enslaving the entire world and the means to do so, the Soviet Union did most of the heavy lifting. The Soviet Union suffered far worse civilian and military losses, put many, many more troops into the field, and took on, suffered dredfully from, and eventually defeated roughly two-thirds of Hitler's entire war effort - as compared to the British Empire, the United States, and various others who, between all of them, took only the remaining one-third. In what is today Russia, that conflict's name is The Great Patriotic War. In their eyes, it was a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis, with the other Allies playing only bit parts. That's not an unfair point of view. The Soviet Union saved the world. Others played a part - the United States and the British Empire very significant and vital parts - but the people of the Soviet Union died like flies and in doing so made your life today possible. Never forget that.

Did the Soviet Union commit atrocities in response to those committed by the Nazis? Of course it did. So did Great Britan. So did the United States. Were those atrocities worse than or on a greater scale than those committed by the other Allies? No doubt. But then there were far more Soviets in the conflict (they did most of the fighting) and the suffering inflicted on the Soviets by the Nazis was far, far worse than that which Hitler was able to inflict on the Empire or the USA. Above all, they occurred in a climate already poisoned by the incredibly brutal Nazis.

To describe the Soviet response to Nazi barbarity as if it was an isolated, independent act, free of historical context and without so much as mentioning that it was no more than a like-for-like response rooted in self-defence and deep, heartfelt anger, hurt, and disgust at the Nazi atrocities is the sort of gross academic misjudgment which would get a first year history paper marked down heavily and a third year paper failed.

To describe the successful Soviet defence of its own people and territory - and of yours and mine too, let us not forget - as an "invasion" with the clear implication that this was an unnecessary and unexpected action rather than an inevitable response to gross Nazi aggression and a crucially needed conclusion to a long and desperate battle to survive is simply unforgivable.

The outrage against Lynch's stupidity is fully justified. No-one with views so blinkered, ahistorical, and out of touch with historical reality should be employed in an academic capacity by any reputable university. If the willful, bigoted ignorance shown in this newspaper article is a fair sample of Lynch's work, you have to ask how he managed to find academic employment in the first place.

[David]

All that you say in the first three paragraphs is on the historical record and I am well aware of it. It all seems beside the point, however—his reference to Russian barbarity in Eastern Germany is in isolation correct and in the context of the broader paragraph questionable (though, I think, defensible).

"Invasion" means exactly what it says on the tin. The connotations you give the word—that it means "pre-emptive" and "unnecessary"—are simply not meanings that it carries or has ever carried. As for whether it should have been footnoted, why? No historical event is isolated. All have their reasons, justified or otherwise (and I hope you're not going to argue that the rape of around a million German women was justified).

I think it's perfectly acceptable to speak of the Russian invasion of East Germany in 1944-45 without context, because anyone who doesn't understand the basic context there probably doesn't even know where Russia is on the map or what day of the week it is. Insisting on mandatory footnotes (e.g. something like "which was, admittedly, a retaliation against Germany's own brutal invasion" or "but it wasn't quite as bad as what happened in Belorussia or Dresden or Hiroshima") just seems like euphemistic whitewashing. A bit like this, really:

[Wokko]

Russia invaded Poland at the same time as Nazi Germany did, it invaded Finland years before that. To try and place them as an unwitting victim of Nazi aggression is stupid and naive. Germany was as worried about a Soviet invasion of Europe as Russia was worried about an invasion coming from the west.

These were two belligerent, aggressive, expansive empires and superpowers of their era. History is indeed written by the victors, and some people just lap that shit up. The Soviet regime had been committing genocide and massacring it's own people for decades before Hitler even came to power.

[Tannin]

David, you are still writing about the "Russian invasion of Germany" as if it was something the Soviets "decided to do", rather than dealing with the fact that it was a necessary and utterly vital part of their defence against gross aggression, and of our safety from that Nazi aggression. You really need to gain some understanding of history.

Wokko, you are so busy finding things to hate about the Soviets that you have distorted the facts so far as to make your post almost meaningless. Learn some bloody history FFS instead of making idealogically-driven assumptions. In reality, the Soviet Union was hopelessly unready for the Nazi invasion; had no idea it was coming, and was so confident that it would not come that they dismantled much of their western defence system. In that invasion, the Soviets lost the entirety of their commonwealth west of Asia, including most of their economic assets and vast numbers of their people. A rough equivalent would be for us to loose Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales.

Was Stalin a nice bloke? Hell no. He was a brutal oaf. But Stalin and his people did more good for the world than anyone else in that era. You are alive and free today more because of the sacrifice and heroism of Stalin's people than for any other reason.

[3.14159]

[David]

[pietillidie]

In the end these debates are always lost in the anthropomorphising of empty constructs like "nation", "country" and "people". These entities have no morality in and of themselves, yet such debates keep ascribing moral properties to them. You simply can't move seamlessly between individual morality and "mass morality" and pretend you're talking sense. (Note, "mass morality" is quite different from meaningful statistical constructs such as "standard of living", "safety", "stability", and so on).

When we talk about "wrongdoing", we have to decide what sort of "wrongdoing" we're dealing with: Classical individual wrongdoing, forced wrongdoing, wrongdoing necessitated or incited by context, a strategic eye-for-an-eye wrongdoing, some mix of these, and so on. But the minute we ascribe personal wrongdoing to some dumb mass entity like a country is the minute we're accusing all kinds of innocent or plain ignorant/unaware/unresourced/unstable/un~ people of "wrongdoing".

If we're serious these are really useless conversations to start with, hence they never result in anything but louder claims of "wrongdoing". The best we can say IMO is that certain actions, policies, responses and situations are better or worse, more or less desireable. Leave both the individual focus and mass anthropomorphising out of it.

[ronrat]

David, are you suggesting the allies should have stopped at the bordersand hoped the good Nazis would have released all the POWS and the Gypsies and Jews in concentration camps after a good hearty meal and a train ticket home. And not destroyed evidence of war crimes or tried to escape with falsified papers.

[HAL]

That David is a cool dude.

[1061]

In one night 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed during fire bombing on Tokyo, where is the outrage about what we helped the Americans to do?

Or the Nazi concentration camps?

Or what the Japanese did to Aussies during the building of the Burma Railway?

Gee this kind of shit shits me.

[Tannin]

[Tannin]

[Tannin]