re: Polish embassy condemns Tucker’s claim that 1939 invasion was justified

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That response mostly sidesteps the actual argument. Saying that popular memory of WWII contains propaganda, mythmaking, and oversimplification does not establish that the conventional account of the war’s origins is false.

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No idea what you are talking about. The origins of WWII are extremely numerous and have been mentioned here and in Tucker’s discussion. There is legitimate disagreement about whether decisions made were wise or resulted in what those who made them wanted them to result in. And yes, it is relevant that most people have been indoctrinated into a quasi religious assessment of WWII that draws black and white distinctions and dissuades critical analysis of allied actions. I’m sorry if you don’t think it’s relevant to mention that but it is obviously relevant regarding popular perception and acknowledging why popular perception is what it is, which pertains to the ostracizing of Tucker and any others who challenge the popular narrative regarding outcomes and historical context.

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A more complete historical context can explain German grievances, Allied mistakes, Soviet opportunism, and the failures of Versailles without erasing German agency. Complexity is not the same thing as moral equivalence. You can reject a simplistic “good guys versus bad guys” story while still concluding, from the documentary record, that Nazi Germany bore the primary responsibility for starting the European war in 1939.

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Who is “erasing German agency?” It sounds like you are spitting this out of an AI. The Germans obviously contributed to the war’s outbreak. I haven’t ever suggested otherwise, so another of your odd strawmen. The orthodox and sacrosanct view is that the war is entirely Germany’s fault. That is what is being critiqued. I didn’t hear Tucker or anyone else say the Germans did not have equal culpability or “agency” in their decisions making.

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You’re conflating two separate issues: whether Britain and France cared about the balance of power, and whether Hitler’s aims were merely reactive or limited to Versailles revision. The first is obviously true; the second is not. Historians can dispute how rigid Hitler’s timetable was or how opportunistically he acted, but his broader aims are not mysterious. He wrote them down years before the war. Overturning Versailles was part of the program, but so were uniting Germans, acquiring Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, and making Germany the dominant continental power. That matters because Britain and France did not go to war simply because Germany became stronger. They tolerated rearmament, the Rhineland, Anschluss, and Munich. War came only after Hitler moved beyond negotiated revision and invaded Poland. So yes, balance-of-power politics mattered. But that does not reduce 1939 to a morally neutral hegemonic contest, nor does it erase German agency in repeatedly escalating the crisis

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It sounds like you are the one conflating things. I’m really starting to think you are using AI because this was all addressed already and it doesn’t make sense. You are arguing that Britain and France unquestionably were motivated by balance of power considerations, and Germany unquestionably was flipping the European balance of power dynamic, but their declaration of war against Germany stemmed from some other vague moral motivations as well? But they had no moral concerns regarding the Soviet Union who was a well known criminal regime who allied with Germany and likewise conquered and massacred independent European states? Certainly not enough to intervene at least…

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And the fact that Britain and France did not declare war in 1939 on the slogan “stop racial extermination” is beside the point. Their immediate casus belli was Germany’s invasion of Poland and their guarantee to Poland. The full machinery of mass extermination had not yet unfolded. A state’s war aims and ideology are not defined solely by the language its enemies use in their declarations of war.

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It’s not beside the point, it clearly could not have been a factor because it is anachronistic. You are the one who interjected it into this discussion, not me, remember?! There wasn’t any mass extermination in 1939 either happening or being discussed so it was obviously irrelevant to the decision making for Britain and France to go to war. Hence my argument that the war was of primary motivation, power politics. The explanation for why they did not care about Soviet evil doings is because they did not view the Soviets as any imminent threat to their regional hegemony. Another example of power politics trumping any moral considerations.

Your responses are exceeding verbose and imprecise.

The sacrosanct treatment this topic gets is dangerous because it dissuades critical discussion and uses “lessons learned” from the predetermined assessment of the conflict to determine how we conduct policy moving forward. There are lots of lessons to be learned from both world wars and unexpected outcomes and Pyrrhic victories are certainly some of those, along with war guarantees and major power alliances pulling states in the direction of major wars that neither side wants and they otherwise would rationally look for a way out of.