The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was move back to Western betrayal, without redirect, and revert to this version. There is a strong consensus here that the current content and title of this article is untenable, but no consensus that the old version of the article is similarly problematic to the point warranting deletion. Due to the nature of this AfD, I have no objections to a speedy renomination to consider the viability of the old version, if someone desires to do so. Tim Song (talk) 04:38, 3 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Controversial command decisions, World War II

[edit]
Controversial command decisions, World War II (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log • AfD statistics)
(Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL)

This article flagrantly breaches WP:SYNTH and WP:NPOV and is an unviable topic. No clear references are given for the 'decisions' in the article being particularly 'controversial' and most of its content has been referenced to a variety of secondary sources which are flat histories of the war. These don't claim things are particularly 'controversial' and are being used to support only one interpretation of events. Moreover, the term 'Controversial' is being used as a fig leaf for POV pushing: this article is a fork of the controversial Western Betrayal article (which now redirects to it) and the author of most this article, Communicat (talk · contribs), has stated that this article advances the "Soviet view" of the war to counter the "dominant Western narrative": [1]. As such, this article is nothing more than one editor's personal interpretation of selected World War II events, and should be deleted. Nick-D (talk) 22:22, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The rationale behind changing the title (which is still not etched in stone) can be traced from the robust and informative discussion that has accompanied the article over the past month or so. You might care to familiarise yourself with that discussion. In doing so, please note that I have certainly not "stated that this article advances the Soviet View ..". Please don't misrepresent me or take my words out of context. Read the discussion properly.
Your allegation is false that "most of (the article's) content has been referenced to a variety of secondary sources which are flat histories of the war". The vast majority of sources cited are in fact primary sources such as memoirs, biographies and official archive material.
I'm surprised at all the fuss over this start-class rated article before it has even managed to properly get off the ground. Communicat (talk) 23:35, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: smacks of a blatent POV fork. If the author believes that current WWII articles are POV, then he needs to discuss the matter on the relevant talk pages, rather than creating a COATRACK. The name itself epitomizes just how POV this article is, and how unlikely it is that it could ever be sufficiently neutral. bahamut0013wordsdeeds 22:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per nom and WP:COATRACK. The only viable path for this article in its current form would be as User:W. B. Wilson suggested on the talk page - changing it to 'Soviet views of World War II.' The article presents the Soviet view as to their perceived neglect by the Western allies at critical points. This may be valid encyclopaedic material, but must be presented as the Soviet view; right now that critical distinction is being muddied. I checked the references; 13 and 17 are to entire books (one a two-volume book) which is unacceptable. Ref 24 is an alleged newspaper article which needs to be better sourced. All appear secondary, except perhaps that original World War II documents are reproduced within the collections. Communicat should be reminded that memoirs and biographies are secondary sources, and if official archive material is actually being used, it breaches WP:Original Research.
If the majority believe that retitling the article 'Soviet views of World War II command decisions' is a sensible possibility, I would support that; otherwise, I would support deletion. Buckshot06 (talk) 04:54, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment As a note, if the article was to be changed to 'Soviet views of World War II' it would need to be referenced to sources which describe these views. At present almost all of the references are to western histories of the war which don't present Soviet interpretations of events (which is part of the WP:SYNTH problem). Nick-D (talk) 05:23, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete: - in its current form and per WP:NPOV. Concur with Buckshot06 (talk · contribs) that the Soviet view of World War II is very much a valid topic for Wikipedia and that transformation of the current article to such form would be a way for the article to be retained. Retitling the article, however, would only be a start. While Communicat (talk · contribs) is using citations in the current article, at least one citation seems to be taken out of context (referring to Gordon Harrison's "Cross Channel Attack") -- this suggests that citations should be chosen with more care if they are to avoid the appearance of being cherry-picked to support questionable statements. Again, if the article is changed to represent Soviet views of the war, the identification of solid reference material that can provide valid citations (for example, the Soviet official history of the war) will probably be considerably easier than attempting to find good citations in the current context of the article's title and intent. The article, in the interests of NPOV, will also have to make clear that the issues being presented are the Soviet POV and due care will have to be taken to note that national interests of the USSR will have introduced distortions into their official interpretation of the events of the 1930's, the Great Patriotic War, and the larger context of the Second World War. No one would expect an article on the Nazi German view of the war to be presented without similar amplifying and clarifying commentary, lest such article(s) degenerate into springboards for nationalist propaganda. W. B. Wilson (talk) 05:38, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Allow me to start at the beginning. My motivation at the outset of editing the article when it was still titled Western Betrayal (as it had been for a number of years) with the emphasis mainly on Poland, was to show that Poland does not have a monopoly on any sense of betrayal by the West. The sense / belief / notion / perception of betrayal was and still is widespread. Okay, so I think I accomplished that mission. Then the article became much too long, requiring splitting. The first content to be split was the post-war content, because the article was linked essentially to WW2, not the Cold War. Also, the original Western Betrayal article commenced from an unverified, unsubstantiated premise and then proceeded as though it was a settled and unquestioned premise. Some of the content that was moved/split to Cold War, incidentally, should have been retained in the newly titled Controversial etc, in particular the Katyn massacre, (which I think qualifies as a controversial command decision, to put it diplomatically). I'm guilty of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in that particular regard, but it can be remedied. Other parts of the original article concerned the section Diplomacy between the Wars, which as the section head makes clear is not about WW2 but about the inter-war period. It was interesting and well researched, so rather than simply deleting it, I moved it to Central and East Europe article. Don't know what happened to it subsequently.
As for renaming the article Soviet Views of WW2, I don't support that. The article incorporates a substantial chunk of impartial Western views by highly respected Western academic sources who've been subjected to peer review, (and who would probably baulk at being referred to as communists). Besides, the article is not just about the Soviet view. It incorporates for example an Australian view (on Singapore). There might be room on wikipedia for an article about the Soviet view of WW2, but it is not this particular article.
As regards what is and what is not a primary source, which someone has disputed above, wiki's own policy guidelines state that memoirs, autobiographies etc of people directly involved in the relevant events are regarded as primary sources. Many if not most of my sources are exactly that. Let's not muddy the waters even more by making false assertions.
In case there is any confusion about what I've meant by using on talk page the phrase "dominant Western narrative", that narrative holds that WW2 was "a good war, which we won." Hogwash. It was a very nasty war with war crimes on all sides, and from which only the largest armaments manufacturers emerged any the richer. Sorry for the digression.
And by the way, I've recently added a sub-section sub-titled Air Offensive to the "betrayal" section, providing a reasoned counter proposal to the Soviet view of "betrayal" by the West. In the interests of NPOV, the sub-section details the reason why the West was tardy in opening and advancing a second front in Europe, namely scarcity of resources and logistical issues, which were not the result of any perceived intentional betrayal by the West. Communicat (talk) 13:19, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Incidentally, and for what it's worth, I thought W. B. Wilson was making a sarcastic joke when he originally suggested the article title be changed to Soviet View of WW2. I see now that some folk have taken the joke literally and seriously. Or maybe he wasn't joking at all. Whatever. Just count me out if you want an article on the Soviet View of WW2. That would require Russian language skills (which I don't have) and an encylopedia all of its own. Communicat (talk) 14:02, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I regret that our communication seems to be so problematic. I was not being sarcastic. In fact, it was you who asserted that the Soviet view of the war is ignored in existing articles. I believe the Soviet view of the war is a valid topic for Wikipedia, which prompted my suggestion to rename the article and refocus its thrust, which as I stated before, would be easier to reliably document with citations than a controversies article. As to the difficulty of writing such an article, it could be written as a stub and progressively expanded. W. B. Wilson (talk) 17:12, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As to the "betrayal" theme, there is a fundamental problem with the notion. Nations do not conduct relations with other nations in the manner of childhood friendships, and that is especially true in times of crisis. The leadership of all nations understand this and are prepared to exercise a whole spectrum of options, "friendships" with other nations notwithstanding, depending on how the situation develops. That this is true renders the charge of "betrayal" by any nation against another nothing more than a convenient exercise of propaganda. An encyclopedic approach to history should be nuanced enough to recognize such verities and not be influenced by the attempts of governments to pretend otherwise. W. B. Wilson (talk) 17:12, 27 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree. Actually, charges of betrayal, while they may appeal to overt and covert propagandists, are rarely if ever used openly by political diplomats themselves. To do so would mean closing diplomatic channels and an end to any possibility of negotiated compromise and reconciliation with the adversary.
As for the proposed stub article Soviet View of WW2, I would much prefer a straight forward Soviet Union in WW2 without the "View" part. I think the Soviet role in WW2 is a bit under-stated or not stated at all in the main WW2 article. (There are some other under-stated things in that article as well, probably due to length restrictions, which could be remedied by separate links to specific things omitted in the main article, such as Strategic Air Offensive,etc.) Communicat (talk) 13:05, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Response: Yes, Western Betrayal had existed for around six years or so in a clear and neglected state of disarray, key verifications and sources missing, riddled with POV bias including bias of omission, inappropriate content that should have been on other page articles, etc etc. All of which appears to have been editorially tolerated because, despite its simplistic title of Western Betrayal, the article was clearly anti-Soviet. All it needed, after years and years in that state, was for someone to come along and remedy some of those problems in consultation with other users on the talk page, and the proverbial $h1t hit the fan. Especially after a couple of citations were provided quoting Stalin and Zhukov (the latter promptly deleted by someone).

There is a policy called be bold, but the entire basis for the rename into this exact title was this single proposal that nobody responded to: Talk:Western betrayal#Controversial command decisions. Don't be surprised when people complain about your unilateral actions. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 11:18, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest all the sudden fuss has far less to do with accurate history than with anti-communist hysteria reminiscent of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Is that what wikipedia is really supposed to be about? I doubt it. But why then did nobody bother to post an AFD notice on the original and obviously biased Western Betrayal article? I rest my case. For those users who've now decided to enter the fray some six weeks after it commenced, and who are not too intellectually challenged, I would helpfully suggest they take a look at the article discussion page comment of user JamesMLane t c posted at 19:52, 9 March 2010 (UTC) As it is, the current and disruptive controversy surrounding my article has become dispersed across various separate locations -- i.e. article discussion page, RFC page, AFD page, and some users' individual talk pages. I suspect that only some of the individual users who've concerned themselves with the article have actually been invited by user Nick-d to participate in the present AFD "debate" which he himself/herself instigated inappropriately without first engaging in the discussion on the article talk page, which is the appropriate venue. Such curious behaviour by Nick-d and some of his/her unfounded claims strike me as blatantly mischievous, to say the least. Communicat (talk) 12:40, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. There are a whole pile of reasons for this. The title is unsupportable: who is to decide what a 'controversial' decision is. The article itself is a blatant POV form of the existing articles, all of which (if I remember) are reasonably neutral. I see no possibility of this article becoming neutral; if it were to cover each 'decision' neutrally it would inevitably be eligible to be a simple set of links to the (already neutral) articles covering them. Any salvageable parts can be copied to existing articles. If User:Communicat feels that there is a Western bias to Wikipedia WWII articles, the correct approach is to fix that, not start a POV fork. DJ Clayworth (talk) 21:31, 28 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Did you mean "Delete but restore..."? Having both of these articles would just be duplication. DJ Clayworth (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The intent was keep both. Looked at side by side, there's no overlap. Both are referenced and offer detailed treatments of notable historic angles that are not AFAIK completely covered by other articles. Maybe rename this one Controversial Allied command decisions during WWII. To that end, might I suggest to Comm. that they include, in the current article, brief sections summarizing the controversies surrounding Strategic bombing during World War II and Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 'Main article=x'. Makes it more comprehensive. Plenty of refs to harvest. WRT to the earlier Western betrayal article, rename it to Western betrayal of Central and Eastern Europe, take out the completely unreferenced sections, unreferenced paragraphs unless they point to Main article = x and Main article is referenced, unreferenced quotes, external links section. That should make it a more manageable size. It was POV, but had lots of inline refs and many more are out there. Getting to NPOV is always a work in progress at WP. Novickas (talk) 17:40, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, how about narrowing the scope of the current controversial command decisions article. Call it Allied disputes over Second Front in WWII or something like that. That part looks to contain some new stuff - right now Second Front redirects to a section of Western Front, is quite short, and makes no mention of the dispute - which is notable - from the NYT in 2004: 'In fact, the problem of the second front in Europe was one of the most complicated in the relations between the Allies. Stalin had raised the issue as early as July 1941 in a letter to Churchill.' [5]. To me that says, warrants a stand-alone article. I don't see it at Eastern Front (World War II) either. (Merge whatever's new, sourced and doesn't fall in this scope into other articles, of course. Most WP articles could use more refing). Would that make it more acceptable to those who want to delete it? I really hate to see referenced, well-written stuff go away. Novickas (talk) 03:06, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comunicat responds: The Western Allies were certainly under "some unique Western obligation" (W. B. Wilson's words) in terms of the Atlantic Charter, as glossed over in the original Western Betrayal article. The Charter lured indigenous people and resistance movements around the world to side with the West during WW2, with the promise of post-war freedom from colonialism, and the freedom of nations to live under governments of their own choosing. My edit attempted to merge the betrayal of Poland with violantions of the Atlantic Charter elsewhere around the world. Central Europe did not have a monopoly on suffering the consequences of false promises made in the Atlantic Charter. That was the intended meaning of the article. It's morphed a bit since then, to accommodated critics. Communicat (talk) 14:03, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Then these points should be made in an article about the Atlantic Charter, not forked to a different article. I still don't buy the notion of unique Western obligation, however. Movements may have felt lured, but in the end, they made their own decisions about what path they were going to embark upon. There is nothing uniquely different in all of this that had not already occurred many times over in history. W. B. Wilson (talk) 16:45, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Communicat responds again: Yes, of course there have been betrayals of trust and betrayals of one kind of another ever since Biblical times and throughout history. (Britain and France's First World War adoption of the secret Sykes-Picot argreement to betray their Arab allies is a notable case in point). But that isn't an acceptable excuse for not wanting to use the dreaded Betrayal word in the disputed article because of alleged POV concerns. The Western betrayal of anti-Axis resistance groups and national liberation movements around the world was, in terms of the Atlantic Charter, an enormous betrayal pure and simple. There is no comparable betrayal in military history to match the enormity of the West's betrayal of the Atlantic Charter principles. It had huge wartime and post-war consequences including the Malayan Emergency, fullscale wars in Indo-China, and insurgencies that exists to this day in places like the Phillipines. The West's betrayal of the Atlantic Charter principles should properly and obviously be included under the article heading of Western Betrayal. So why don't you people want to call a spade a spade?

Because the only "spade" to be noted here is that there is a popular belief and likely a school of history in certain universities that use a loaded word like "betrayal" (which we have already noted is more of a propaganda technique than a genuine charge made by one country against another at the national government echelon). As I have already noted twice, I think the phenomenon of this belief is notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia article. But let us document the belief and briefly identify the primary themes it encompasses, letting links to full articles on each theme deal with those themes in detail. W. B. Wilson (talk) 17:28, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Carnildo in his/her above posting of 01:42, 31 March 2010 (UTC) makes the useful observation: "The strategic plan for dealing with a German invasion of Poland was for the Polish forces to retreat to defensible positions and hold those positions while French and British forces invaded Germany from the west; the failure of the British and French to follow through on the plan is commonly known as the "Western betrayal". Now, that was not stated in the original Western Betrayal article. But, if that particular observation were to be properly sourced and edited into the lead of a restored and modified Western Betrayal article, it would go a long way towards sorting out the mess. It would overcome the POV and semantic arguments that have for many years accompanied that highly lopsided and unstable article, and which eventually led to bold reworking by me, and then subsequent deletion by user Buckshot, for which decision I was not responsible. Communicat (talk) 09:59, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adding one sourced observation will NOT "go a long way towards sorting out the mess". There are significant problems throughout your version which have been detailed above. Pull the plug, revert back to a semi-decent versionm, then improve that version. Currently it's just a mess. Ravensfire (talk) 16:43, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Move back to the old title and roll back to the version [7] prior to the hijacking of the article by Communicat. That was an entirely different subject. Colchicum (talk) 11:36, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No, it was the same subject: Western betrayal of Atlantic Charter principles. Communicat (talk) 14:41, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You may create a new and different article on the subject of Atlantic Charter principles betrayal.Biophys (talk) 16:41, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
So why then was original article titled Western Betrayal, and not Betrayal at Yalta? Go figure. Communicat (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. You did the trick here. You replaced an established term by the Soviet propaganda cliche which only sounds identical. This article should be moved to Yalta betrayal and reverted to an older version. Biophys (talk) 18:56, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Was this AfD raised on the EEML? Should the closer assume that it was? Angus McLellan (Talk) 19:41, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
And why would it matter? Colchicum (talk) 21:12, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Communicat says: Don't know what's an EEML, but I do know the original Western Betrayal article was in Start Class category and had been that way for about eight years. This was possibly because the words "Western Betrayal or Yalta betrayal" in the very first sentence of the article were unverified and unsourced. You can't use an unverified and unsourced premise and then proceed as though it's a settled and unquestioned premise. Nor are people like Biophys convincing when they refer vaguely to the "well known and notable concept of Yalta betrayal". Well known to whom, and why notable? Or else consider the unsourced and unverified words of Carnildo : "The strategic plan for dealing with a German invasion of Poland was for the Polish forces to retreat to defensible positions and hold those positions while French and British forces invaded Germany from the west; the failure of the British and French to follow through on the plan is commonly known as the "Western betrayal". Commonly known to whom? Not me, for a start.

Why doesn't someone just source the "Western Betrayal" words in first sentence of the original article, which will keep purists like me happy, and then restore it? (Either with or without the current, wider post-modern interpretation of "Western Betrayal").

The "Western Betrayal" title was changed to the more diplomatic "Controversial decisions" title because I allowed some users to persuade me to drop the original title. I bowed to peer pressure. (See article discussion page around six weeks ago). My mistake. (talk) 21:53, 1 April 2010 (UTC) Communicat (talk) 22:10, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Tony Judt: "'Yalta' has entered the lexicon of central European politics as a synonym for Western betrayal, the moment when the Allies sold out Poland and the other small states between Russia and Germany." [8]. Marc Trachtenberg: "In the early 1990s, this interpretation of Yalta as a betrayal of Eastern Europe was used, particularly by the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, but by other eastern European leaders as well, to shame the West into extending NATO security guarantees eastward." [9] Don't want to put those refs in now - they don't fit in the current article, Yalta not being a command decision, and not knowing the outcome of this discussion will be - if it's restored, I'll do it, would only take a couple minutes. Then Trachtenberg, on that page and the following few, summarizes the issue in a rather impartial way and he could be used as a quick start towards NPOVing it.
Since there are, as Communicat writes, several other 'Western betrayals', Yalta betrayal is probably a better title. And a disambiguation page: 'Western betrayal' may refer to: Yalta betrayal, the decisions made by the Allied Powers at the end of World War II; the 1938 Munich Agreement permitting Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland; the Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I [10], etc. Again, I support the concept of a separate article about the Second Front timing dispute that would save C.'s valuable work.
EEML refers to this WP arbitration case Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern European mailing list/Proposed decision. Improper off-wiki coordination of editing disputes in this area. Novickas (talk) 12:35, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Would you support a new list article - List of controversial Allied World War II command decisions - linking to all current WP articles that contain detailed, ref'd discussions of the controversies? It could be headed by a short statement - "This is a list of command decisions by the WWII Allies that have generated..." That would be easier in the short run. An umbrella article is, IMO, a longer range goal. Novickas (talk) 16:10, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Renamed: Controversial decisions, WW2 -- i.e. without the "command" part. Communicat (talk) 19:30, 2 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
Delete - Why keep a platform that fosters unobjectivity. With respect, Ko Soi IX (talk) 21:54, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
More