Riverside

Partially funded by Americans and to a lesser degree Russians, primarily funded by Europeans

Edit: to clarify, I don't believe Russia has less of an intent on controlling European politics than the USA does, it's just that the USA has a lot more power, money and relations with Europe, so it naturally has a lot more ways to influence our policy. As an example, Europe will (righfully) be very angry at Russia when it starts a war with Ukraine, but will join the USA in a war in Iraq.

As a Spaniard (country which joined the European Community rather late), I can definitely confirm that it was pretty much explicit that joining NATO was a prerequisite to be accepted in the EU. The EU was born out of the Marshall Plan and of NATO.

You may be answering to the wrong comment

Totally went over my head, sorry

in Spain you had communists, and they LITERALLY decided to fight the anarchists

This is one of those widely repeated things that coincidentally is never backed up by any numerical evidence whatsoever. Bolsheviks, per modern historical analysis, killed a total of less than 20 anarchists in the entire Spanish Civil War, and at least some of those because a spy in Nazi Germany called Harro Schulze-Boysen confirmed a Nazi plot to generate an anarchist insurrection in Barcelona to weaken the Republic's defenses. You tell me to read a book: well, point me towards a historiographical analysis of the Spanish Civil War pointing out NUMERICALLY HOW MANY anarchists were actually repressed by the communists.

Not gonna read

Then simply tell me: which book can I read that details a numerical analysis of this repression, because I've asked several anarchists and never got a response.

Military intervention in Libya. Belligerent NATO states: Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States. Most of those are EU countries.

NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Aviation: French, Italian, UK, Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, German

I'm not arguing that Europe doesn't have the potential for being a force of good, I'm arguing that as of now, it's simply not. The EU was formed not with peace and stability in mind, but with neoliberalism and anticommunism, otherwise it would have never adhered to NATO and participated in all its military campaigns, both informally (Afghanistan) and formally (Libya and Yugoslavia). If we want to praise a country/region for its peace in the past century, we should praise post-Vietnam-war China.

I'm gonna paste a comment that I wrote some time ago responding to the whole "Soviets sided with the Nazis" lie that is often propagated on Lemmy. Feel free to respond to it, I'd love to engage with you in its contents:

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: "The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused." Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn't want to. By the logic of "invading Poland" being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.

As a Spaniard leftist it's so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren't dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn't agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won't find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.

The invasion of "Poland" is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn't invade what we think of nowadays when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

"Polish" territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you'd consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn't invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn't allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that's a given), and offered to send a million troops to France's border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren't allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this

See? This is why they defed you. You're carrying water for Zionists by saying that legitimate defense against an occupying nation is terrorism.

Excellent analysis, thanks too for sharing your numbers, quite interesting seeing how much you can save with proper usage of the vehicle!!