True Left

One thing that is always taught about WWII is the German "territorial aggression", "Lebensraum", etc. But not too long ago I learned Poland had its own version of "Lebensraum".

Immediately after receiving independence, Poland went to war with the USSR in order to gain more territory!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War

March 1919, a month after the beginning of the war (and only a few months after receiving independence!):


June 1920, Poland's approximate furthest advance eastward:



Hmm..

At the height of the Polish–Soviet conflict, Jews were subjected to antisemitic violence by Polish forces, who considered them a potential threat and often accused of supporting the Bolsheviks.[84][85] During the Battle of Warsaw, the Polish authorities interned Jewish soldiers and volunteers and sent them to an internment camp.[86][87]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War

In 1919, Russian Jews were caught in the middle of a civil war, and became the victims of warring Red and White Russian, Ukrainian and Polish forces, among others, resulting in the loss of an estimated 100,000 Jewish lives.[16] White Russian troops led by Denikin staged pogroms against Jews in practically every town he captured.[17] In Ukraine at this time, murders of Jews took place on an unprecedented scale, second only to the Holocaust years of World War II.[18]
[...]
However, reports of these incidents caused the United States to send a commission led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and Sir Stuart M. Samuel to investigate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_the_Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War

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Józef Piłsudski, de facto leader of Poland from 1918 until his death in 1935 (serving as commander of the military, Prime Minister, and later military dictator), and Józef Beck (foreign policy minister of Poland in the 1930s) both wanted to recreate the Polish-Lithuanian empire, break Russia/the USSR up along ethnic lines, and even go so far as to create a large federation of central European powers (with Poland in the lead) in order to make Poland the dominant power in Europe.

The project of Polish territorial domination was called Intermarium, while the geopolitical plan to destabilize Russia/USSR and other powers via promoting ethno-tribalism within their borders was called Prometheism.

The initial plan:


Which quickly expanded:


And expanded even further!!


That's more territory than those wacky Nazis took during their "plan for global domination". How would this period in Polish history have been taught in schools if Poland lost the war???

Prospectively a federation[1][2][3][4][5] of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Polish leader and former political prisoner of the Russian Empire, Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland,[6] Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.[7][8]
[...]
Intermarium was, however, perceived by some Lithuanians as a threat to their newly established independence, and by some Ukrainians as a threat to their aspirations for independence,
[...]
Józef Piłsudski's strategic goal was to resurrect an updated, democratic form of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while working for the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and later the Soviet Union, into its ethnic constituents.[29] (The latter was his Prometheist project.)[29] Piłsudski saw an Intermarium federation as a counterweight to Russian and German imperialism.[30][31]
[...]
The Lithuanians,[35][37] who had re-established their independence in 1918, were unwilling to join; the Ukrainians, similarly seeking independence,[19] likewise feared that Poland might again subjugate them;[35] and the Belarusians, who had little national consciousness and were mostly Russophiles, were similarly not interested either in independence or in Piłsudski's proposals of union.[35] The chances for Piłsudski's scheme were not enhanced by a series of post-World War I wars and border conflicts between Poland and its neighbors in disputed territories—the Polish-Soviet War, the Polish–Lithuanian War, the Polish–Ukrainian War, and border conflicts between Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Piłsudski's concept was opposed within Poland itself, where National Democracy leader Roman Dmowski[38][39] argued for an ethnically homogeneous Poland in which minorities would be Polonized.[40][41] Many Polish politicians, including Dmowski, opposed the idea of a multiethnic federation, preferring instead to work for a unitary Polish nation-state.[39] Sanford has described Piłsudski's policies after his resumption of power in 1926 as similarly focusing on the Polonization of the country's Eastern Slavic minorities and on the centralization of power.[33]

While some scholars accept at face value the democratic principles claimed by Piłsudski for his federative plan,[42] others view such claims with skepticism, pointing out a coup d'état in 1926 when Piłsudski assumed nearly dictatorial powers.[13][43] In particular, his project is viewed unfavorably by most Ukrainian historians, with Oleksandr Derhachov arguing that the federation would have created a greater Poland in which the interests of non-Poles, especially Ukrainians, would have received short shrift.[15]
[...]
He did not hesitate to use military force to expand Poland's borders to Galicia and Volhynia, crushing a Ukrainian attempt at self-determination in disputed territories east of the Bug River which contained a substantial Polish presence[46] (a Polish majority mainly in cities such as Lwów, surrounded by a rural Ukrainian majority).

Speaking of Poland's future frontiers, Piłsudski said: "All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente—on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany," while in the east "there are doors that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far."[47] In the eastern chaos, the Polish forces set out to expand as far as feasible. On the other hand, Poland had no interest in joining the western intervention in the Russian Civil War[46] or in conquering Russia itself.[48]
[...]
Piłsudski died in 1935. A later, much reduced version of his concept was attempted by interwar Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, a Piłsudski protégé. His proposal, during the late 1930s, of a "Third Europe"—an alliance of Poland, Romania and Hungary—gained little ground before World War II supervened.[49]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermarium

"Third Europe"? Wow, what does that remind you of? You really can't make this up.

The Polish government-in-exile continued this plan during WWII, and the V4 in many ways is a present-day attempt revive it, which is noted on the Wiki page:

The concept of a "Central [and Eastern] European Union"— a triangular geopolitical entity anchored in the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic or Aegean Seas—was revived during World War II in Władysław Sikorski's Polish Government in Exile.
[...]
On 12 May 2011, the Visegrád Group countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) announced the formation of a Visegrád Battlegroup under Poland's command. The battlegroup was in place by 2016 as an independent force, not part of the NATO command. In addition, starting in 2013, the four countries were to begin joint military exercises under the auspices of the NATO Response Force. Some scholars saw this as a first step toward close Central European regional cooperation.[56]

On 6 August 2015, Polish President Andrzej Duda, in his inaugural address, announced plans to build a regional alliance of Central European states, modeled on the Intermarium concept.[57][58][59] In 2016 the Three Seas Initiative held an initial summit meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia.[60] The Three Seas Initiative has 12 member states along a north–south axis from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermarium#World_War_II_and_since

This is the future V4:

The current initiative is influenced by the Polish interwar Intermarium concept. The modern Three Seas Initiative was launched in 2015 by Polish President Andrzej Duda and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović.[3] It held its first summit in Dubrovnik (Croatia) on 25–26 August 2016. The two-day event ended with a declaration of co-operation in economic matters, particularly in the field of energy as well as transport and communications infrastructure.[2]
[...]
Perception

Czech Republic
The Three Seas Initiative was at the beginning perceived by local experts and diplomats in the Czech Republic rather negatively. It was seen as a Polish attempt to create its sphere of influence (similar to the historical perception of Intermarium). Further fears were related to a possibility of deepening the East-West division in the EU and exclusion of Germany. A long term Czech objection is that there should be no competing geopolitical project in the region that would weaken the EU. Some of those objections have been partially addressed lately also due to a good experience with cooperation on infrastructure projects in the Visegrad group.[34]

Finland
The populist Finns Party has advocated for Finland to join the initiative.[35]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Seas_Initiative

Prometheism or Prometheanism (Polish: Prometeizm) was a political project initiated by Józef Piłsudski, statesman of the Second Polish Republic from 1918 to 1935. Its aim was to weaken the Russian Empire and its successor states, including the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements among the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia and the Soviet Union.[1]

Between the World Wars, Prometheism and Piłsudski's other concept, of an "Intermarium federation", constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and for some of his political heirs.[2]
[...]
A brief history of Poland's Promethean endeavor was set down on February 12, 1940, by Edmund Charaszkiewicz, a Polish military intelligence officer whose responsibilities from 1927 until the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939 had included the coordination of Poland's Promethean program. Charaszkiewicz wrote his paper in Paris after escaping from a Poland overrun by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[4]

    The creator and soul of the Promethean concept [wrote Charaszkiewicz] was Marshal Piłsudski, who as early as 1904, in a memorandum to the Japanese government, pointed out the need to employ, in the struggle against Russia, the numerous non-Russian nations that inhabited the basins of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas, and emphasized that the Polish nation, by virtue of its history, love of freedom, and uncompromising stance toward [the three empires that had partitioned Poland out of political existence at the end of the 18th century] would, in that struggle, doubtless take a leading place and help work the emancipation of other nations oppressed by Russia.[5]

A key excerpt from Piłsudski's 1904 memorandum declared:

    Poland's strength and importance among the constituent parts of the Russian state embolden us to set ourselves the political goal of breaking up the Russian state into its main constituents and emancipating the countries that have been forcibly incorporated into that empire. We regard this not only as the fulfilment of our country's cultural strivings for independent existence, but also as a guarantee of that existence, since a Russia divested of her conquests will be sufficiently weakened that she will cease to be a formidable and dangerous neighbor.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheism