“Oh, so the Polish and other partisans in Nazi-occupied Mitteleuropa were just “Soviet backed communists”?”
Er no, and nowhere did I suggest that all partisans were Soviet backed Communists, but a heck of a lot of them were and the victims of such people might not share your peculiarly starry eyed view of those men’s activities.
Try not to view everything in black and white, don’t be so naive, not everything breaks down into simple ‘good guy/bad guy’ narratives.
Almost any partisan who survived the war to live anywhere behind the Iron Curtain was by definition Soviet-backed: the Soviets killed all the partisans they could find who didn’t subordinate themselves to Communist control.
“Try not to view everything in black and white, don’t be so naive, not everything breaks down into simple ‘good guy/bad guy’ narratives.”
Pfft! Pot calling the kettle black. You can’t even follow you own advice!
>>> Er no, and nowhere did I suggest that all partisans were Soviet backed Communists, but a heck of a lot of them were and the victims of such people might not share your peculiarly starry eyed view of those men’s activities. <<<
The problem here is vagueness. Even if one could quantify who was “Soviet backed,” to be supported by the Soviets then doesn’t entail that the anti-Nazi guerillas or partisans were doctrinaire Communists. The US was giving a heck of a lot of material and tech support to the Soviets and the Red Army for much of the war. Did this make the Reds “US backed capitalists”?
The fellow-countrymen of those Polish and other victims might wonder in amazement at someone who strains at the gnat of de-contextualized and unquantified “partisan banditry” and yet seems to brush off the murderous and brutal Nazi enslavement of their countries as the mere presence of “German lines.”
You remember the Nazis, don’t you? The genocidal nutjobs the Allies and the partisans were fighting against?
Let’s look at the relevant part of your original post:
>>> Something similar occurs when we read about the “partisans” behind German lines in Poland and Soviet territory, despite them being painted today as heroic figures for many people they were nothing more than bandits killing and stealing according to their own ideologies. <<<
Once again, to paint with a broad brush (without any quantification or qualification) these partisan and guerilla activities as those of “bandits” who killed and stole according to an ideology (which one?) is slander pure and simple. That you place it in the mouths of an anonymous “many people” doesn’t make it any less offensive.