> Behalf Of Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten
> They already had been seriously invaded by the French and
> the Germans (Gautam
> didn't the Germans have a peace treaty or something with
> the Russians when they
> decided that invasion was the better way to go). I can
> imagine that might justify
> their paranoya at the time? Just wondering here. But I'll
> let Gautam correct me on
> that. Never really been that big a fan of history.
>
> Sonja
Not sure exactly what you're referring to here, Sonja. Russia was
invaded by Germany in 1914 during the First World War. There was no
peace treaty there. Allied (i.e. American and British) forces
intervened in Russia during 1919, but it's hard to call that an
invasion (despite a lot of propaganda by the Communists on that topic)
since they were acting at the request of, and on behalf of, the White
Russians, who were at least marginally the legitimate government of
Russia, to the extent that Russia had a legitimate government at the
time. The USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940 in violation of
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a "non-aggression" treaty between Germany
and the USSR. While that was certainly in violation of a treaty,
given that the USSR had used the shield of the Pact to invade, IIRC,
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland, complaining about the
_treaty_ violation per se seems, well, a touch odd. This, of course,
does not take into account the almost unimaginable barbarity of German
soldiers in the USSR - although Soviet soldiers were not exactly
humane in the places they conquered either. Umm, going really far
back in history, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. I don't even want
to trace the multi-layered treaty violations that _everyone_ engaged
in during the Napoleonic Wars (except the British, generally, but they
didn't sign the treaties either), but I guess that's probably the
French incident you're thinking of.
John's point, I think, was that Soviet domination of the world was an
explicit goal of the Bolshevik's from even before they assumed power
in Russia. They established the Comintern, for example, almost
immediately after securing their hold on Russia, for the explicit
reason of overthrowing capitalist governments. I know we've trod this
ground before, but it seems worthwhile to point out that there is, in
my mind, and I think in most people's, a significant difference
between a democracy attempting to overthrow a totalitarian
dictatorship in the hope of establishing a democracy and a
totalitarian dictatorship attempting to overthrow a democracy in the
hope of establishing another totalitarian dictatorship. The Soviet
government also showed almost continual aggressive tendencies whenever
it had the opportunity - engaging in entirely unprovoked aggression
against, as I mentioned earlier, Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania,
and Estonia. In fact, Soviet policy was so egregious that it supplies
the answer to a trivia question - what was the only nation ever
expelled from the League of Nations? The answer is the Soviet Union,
as a punishment for its invasion of Finland, a war of conquest whose
naked aggression is matched only by the hideous incompetence of the
Red Army in carrying it out. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, further,
was explicitly meant to aid both Germany _and_ the USSR in conquering
Poland, which (we often forget) was invaded by Soviet forces almost
simultaneously with the German attack. The three Baltic republics did
not regain their freedom until the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
********************Gautam "Ulysses" Mukunda**********************
* Harvard College Class of '01 *He either fears his fate too much*
* www.fas.harvard.edu/~mukunda * Or his deserts are small, *
* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Who dares not put it to the touch*
* "Freedom is not Free" * To win or lose it all. *
******************************************************************
