Britain joined the war initially for the goal of re-establishing Belgium and preventing the channel ports from falling into German hands, though by signing an alliance with France it also somewhat supported its war goals. Later Britain's goals got larger: destruction of prussian militarism, obtaining German colonies, democratisation of Germany. Then there were a number of other proclaimed war goals, either directly stated like the Balfour Declaration or Sykes-Picot Agreement or not. Throw in Britain's signing of the Treaty of Bucharest (1916) and the recognition of the Czech and Polish National Comitee (thoughnot the Yugoslav one) and if you don't consider them merly tactical moves Britain wasn't serious about, they ment that it accepted these nations war goals as its own.
Nowhere in any of this is a single-minded drive to expand the area of territorial concession in Europe; obviously Britain couldn't have any, but we were also opposed to the extreme claims from France. Everybody had their own policy and their own reason for following it. We're not mathematicians, so our formulae cannot be rules, only useful generalisations. This is, perhaps, the root of the disagreement.
As you noted, Sazonov was one of the few high ranking officials who realised that Russia was already to big for its own good and incorporating more minorities would be counter-productive in the long term. Emphasis on "few" however - and that he still considered incorporating some more minorities. You know Russian history pretty darn well, you sure know that it is full of situations were it spent a lot of resources, time, wealth and manpower on gaining control over useless territories simply for the heck of it. Or for prestige. Or for a buffer zone. Or for some mythical belief that "more land" immiedietly means "more wealth and power". Central Asia would be a good example,
Central Asia was a pursuit of security and the ability to grow cotton. It probably wasn't worth it, at least from the point of view of money spent, but neither was the British Empire outside India and Malysia. You're description is one of imperialism generally, at least since Rome.
as would Manchuria, Mongolia, the Caucasus and the western provinces like Poland, Finland and Pribaltika - although those propably payed for themselves thanks to their industry and resources. A lot of Russian officials honestly believed in that "expansion for the sake of expansion" was the "Russian way".
So in pursuit of some sort of mythical Russian
sonderweg we are constructing a theory and then immediately admitting that most of the examples don't actually work?
Poland was almost certainly a burden, but 'expansion for the sake of expansion' was certainly not going through the head of Alexander I in 1814-15. But apparently you don't like complicating things. Again this maddening desire for simplicity.
And I'm not sure about him caring about future Russo-German relations so much. If that was to be the case he wouldn't support any territorial gains at Germany's expanse, but he did. Even Memelland could become a "Russian Alsace".
Actually he was according to what I read against taking over any part of East Prussia - including presumably the Memel area - because of its special significance. Whether it in fact had a special significance is an open question, but people are wrong all the time.
And while we are on the subject - what about Persia?
Nae flag, daesna count.
That is to say that the European and non-European spheres were treated quite differently by everyone. Russia not only had continuing interests in a Persian sphere-of-influence, but intended extensive annexations in the Ottoman Empire from the moment it got itself involved. That's not what's being discussed.
Was there a point in annexing northern Persia? I can't see one, but the Tzar did.
I don't see the point of anyone annexing anywhere, masel, but I suppose that's what comes of living on an island.
By todays standards XVII - XVIII century England
Britain!
would propably be a "terror state" and part of some "Axis of Evil". But lets not compare the Age of Sail with the Industrial Era, especially the one after the trauma of WWI - which did certainly change the perception of what 'war' is for the civilized world.
Why not? Comparison eludicates and much of history is an exercise in comparison. Having compared, we needn't decide they're the same - we never actually do, because history is super-complicated. But comparison is a tool in the box.
Having made the theoretical point: the Bengal famine happened in the 1940s and those are the ancestors I'm talking about, of my great-X generation, hence my references to the war and Nazism. We're not, in this instance, talking about the 18th and 19th centuries.
I'm not talking collective guilt, I'm talking being a accomplice. Imagine a hypothetical situation where 5 people break into a room where Joe is.
My father warned me, with the wisdom of the great British civil service, never to trust a hypothetical. They never actually happen.
'I'm not talking about millions of people, I'm talking about five people. Who I just made up'.
They exit the room with some of Joe's stuff, split it among themselves near his house and get caught by the police. Joe is found dead in his room, killed by a single strike in his head. We know he was alive when the 5 men entered and dead when they exited, we also know only one of them killed him - but we don't know which one, since they all claim they didn't do it, and that they didn't steal anything, just got the stuff from the other four without knowledge where it came from. What do you think would be more just - let them allgo, becausethe "individual perpetrator" can'tbe idnetified, or accuse and sentence them all for murder and theft - because they did it together and none of them stoped the one doing it?
Which one of them was violently conscripted into the gang?
This is a classic example of hypothetical as a device for escaping the thing actually being discussed. Many of my ancestors took part in an imperial system and war-effort with starving Indians at the other end. But they never murdered anyone. What would you have done to them? Is sailing on a British merchant ship now equivelant to coshing granny?
Did you by any chance read Houseman, because you reminded me of 'the Shopshire lad'.
Everybody should read Housman, but I'm not from Shropshire but from Mid-Lothian and as such I know very well that *manic shivering after the manner of a Covenanting minister*
we're ALL going to die. That dying tends to put a crimp in one's life plans is a fact worth bearing in mind at all times.
And you know well thatyes, 14% of them died, but the remaining 86% ended up with polish potatos on their plates, drinking slovak wine from Czech crystal (figuratively speaking).
'Untruthfully speaking'. Actually they were eating American spam. (Since when do Russian stereotypes even drink wine, anyway?)
The facts are there. Why do you wish to replace them with a framework of awkward metaphors and grudges when you could understand them as facts? We all know life is complicated and it's hard to disentangle right and wrong. If we're going to be literary, do you read or see a tragedy with the intent of finding out who was responsible for everything and arresting them, or do you just appreciate a human story? Can you not try to appreciate history as a great many human stories?
They did reap those lands they invaded for their fruits. And hiding behind 'state policy' doesn't change the objective fact. The boy from the slums may nothave got to enjoy Indian spices, but Boris from Smolensk certainly did enjoy those nice electric lights powered by coal stolen from Romania, etc.
'Some of the time what I say isn't true - actually most of the time - but it is still
objective fact.' Several Warpac countries ended up subsidised by the USSR as part of its, hem-hem, state policy. Were Bulgarians nicking Soviet fossil fuel? Or is the world too big and complicated for this kind of deranged 'logic' (as if Romania were a person rather than an imaginary entity)?
I don't like over-complicating things.
Don't study history, jim.
I think I've found the problem. I like complicating things, because I like the truth and the truth is complicated.
If you kill or steal from a person you are a thief or a murder
-Er. Murder
er. Sorry, obnoxious pedantry, I know, but that really gets up my nose.
and if you get caught you get to be called a criminal. But suddenly if you do the exact same things in a uniform, you are 'following suit' and if you get caught you are a 'victim'. Stalin was a thief before becoming a murderer. Not some 'Great politician'. And those who followed him were simple thugs.
But what if you
don't steal and you
don't murder and only participate - partly against your will - in frameworks that do? You'd prosecute the man who drove the bus that the criminal used to leave the scene.
People who murder and rape and steal are bad people. Nobody is disputing this. But apparently every adult Russian was responsible for the Holocaust or something.
Thats a legitimate point of view, that there can not be a analogy between Criminal or Civil Law and International Law, because the state is a sovereign entity and a person is not. Quite common even. But don't you think that even though analogies can't be applied, international law ought to be based on civil and criminal law? That its fair to treat states like legal entities, and conflicts between them being resolved, or punished the same way they punish their own subjects? I think that would be very just indeed, even if the relations between states are magnitudes more complex than those between any legal persons.
But you're fiddling your own principle. If states are treated like people, it' states that are so treated. You're talking about people. You're in fact treating people like states.
So yeah, if I buy stuff from China I do support their tyranny (hence why I avoid buying Chinese, seriously).
Practically impossible to avoid altogether; and then one merely starts playing six degrees of seperation, since we participate in an economy intimately bound to the Chinese one. We live in a nasty world.
But I didn't crash into Mr. Lee's home, and neither did any of my countrymen. So I would deserve a trial,
There's principle and there's silliness. Now everybody deserves a trial, apparently.
but propably not a death sentence. If I landed on Hainan with a rifle, then I wouldn't expect to be treated nicely though.
What do you do with the rifle? Why did you land there?
The Soviet Union was founded in 1922. Two decades, thats 20 years. So in the years 1922-1942 the Soviet Union managed to wage a war in Kamchatka, Yakutia,
Excuse me, I believe those areas were part of the ex-Russian Empire and therefore shooting at 'em was okay, like how Britain was allowed to shoot Indians.
Uiguria, Mongolia, find itself in a conflict with China over a railway,
Do you want me to start listing all the uses of military and armed force by various other countries?
invaded Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania. Truly wonderful is the peaceful land of the Soviets!
I obviously meant up until the point we were discussing. You can be excessively literal with numbers, well done.
On a serious note - don't you find it telling that you could only say two decades? That following that the Soviet Union engaged in hostile, agressive military actions every few years? And that prior to that, the Russian Empire did the same every two decades as well, approximately? You would be hard pressed to find 25 years of Russian history when it did not invade, annex, blackmail with force or otherwise be hostile to its neighbours.
I could say the same about my own country. Hang on, I do say the same about my own country. All the time. I just don't use this to reflect morally on its inhabitants through a weird fixation with collective guilt.
Not much of a 'land of victims' it is.
Sure neither it is while we're talking in Hibeno-English and so, but that 'land' is a rake of soil or it's been imagined up and sure.
'Lands' were nostly invented in the last 200 years, so why base moral judgments about the past on them? And can a regime capable of victimising foreigners not victimise its own citizens?
The world is complicated. A bourgeois Victorian lassie belongs to a class of arch-victimisers: for her Rangit is being knouted on a plantation. But she is also, as a woman, a victim of an absurd and damaging order of patriarchalism. Is she Noble Sufferer or Vile Villain (or an actual person existing in the real world)?
But apparently we don't like complication.
Don't mistake "predictable outcome" with "the butterfly effect". You are sounding like that lawyer from AllyMcBeal who gives speeches like "Your Honor, my client did pullthe trigger of his gun while pointing it at the deceased womens temple at point blank range, but he did not know itwould kill her. Besides, he would not have done if the gun wouldn't have been manufactured. Blame the Colt Company!". This might work in the USA, but it does go against my common reason.
Do you mean to imply that I'm American?





People who think that everybody who buys Chinese only
probably ought not to be executed lose the right to talk about common sense.
Sure,go ahead. Start a war. Just don't complain and call yourself a victim when you and 16% of your countrymen die.
But I didn't start it. I couldn't, I was in the GULAG for distributing subversive pamphlets.
Every country is held together by violence to some degree - they differ on how much they rely on it. Some use soly force, some use trade relations a keep things together by calling others allies and partners.
So violence inflicted inside one's own empire is okay (except when done in Yakutia)?
And Uganda? Got independence in 1960s I recall, and didn't get a few percent killed of between 1920 - 1960.
Now who's picking dates? Uganda saw massive dying surrounding, for example, the destruction of Bunyoro. There's plenty of examples to name.
Estonians would like that too, I'm sure and propably would put Idi Amin in charge of their country, but that would be up to them.
What?
Czechoslovakia signed an alliance with the SU earlier in 1935. Point is, Stalin goals towards it hasn't changed between 1935 and 1945.
You think a scenario where the Red Army occupies all of Poland and Czechoslovakia and doesn't turn them into puppet states wouldn't belong to the ASB section?
Not if Stalin thought he'd be bombed if he did. But since when did signing an alliance become a sign of one's desire for annexations?
Yeah, I'd propably try to flee too.
I referred to the slogan 'On consideration I'd rather be on my bike' [than doing some apparently pointless task or making some difficult decision] and meaning to imply that your dichotomies are false. One person can be victim and victimiser.