However:
> Speaking of parts of history that don’t get talked about, let’s mention some other borders that got moved. Poland was ultimately “compensated” for the loss of its eastern territory to the USSR with the annexation of most of the easternmost parts of Germany, complete with the forced relocation of Germans into the now smaller territory of occupied Germany, a massive exercise in what most Americans would call “ethnic cleansing” if the US wasn’t utterly complicit in it.
I am not sure how the US was complicit in this exactly. You skipped the part where ethnic cleansing was also done to the Poles in Eastern Poland, and they were moved at gun-point to where I currently am writing from.. Lower Silesia. The understanding here was that the USSR moved Poland to the East, so that Russia moved further to the East. It sucked for the Germans and the Poles. The Soviet Army did this. BTW, it's oddly not nationalist around here, as there is no multi-century family land history.
Everyone around here does not believe that these new borders were at the request of the USA. If the USA/UK is to blame at all, it is that they abandoned us all to the monsters in Moscow. People are still a little pissed off about that to be honest.
Here is my family story: One of my grandmothers lived in Kalisz, Poland. Her family was considered "reis deutsch," so was not taken for extermination. Her farmhouse was used by German officers as a BnB, as it laid exactly half-way between Berlin and Warsaw.
My other grandmother pretended she was Polish for all of her adult life. However, it turns out she was 100% German. Her parents were shot, in a big public show, by the Red Army in Riga, Latvia - as they owned the brick factory, and were German. After her parents were shot, she walked to Poland at the age of 18 and never spoke another word in German for the rest of her life.
As my Polish grandmother began suffering from dementia, she started to drop her guard and finally started to answer all my dumb WWII questions (we were living comfortably in Seattle at the time.) I was not ready for the answers. In addition to regular wartime, she was SA'ed by both German and Soviet Army members. Meanwhile, my secretly German grandmother didn't have as good a time, having seen her parents shot and then who know what happened during her lost years while she walked to Warsaw over the course of 11 months. Later in adult life, she was committed multiple times.
All in all, my family history turns out to be the definition of: it's more complicated than what I was taught in school, and I can imagine.
When people start to talk about left/right, commie/fascist, as if one is better than the other, I don't know how to respond except that I believe in the horseshoe theory of politics. It's us normies in the middle, and murderous assholes on the edges. Those assholes sign things like the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, call each other "the other," and we all have to suffer.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I truly appreciate communication on this website.