> And how do you know that the right moment will ever arrive? And when it arrives how would you know that it is the right time?
It's called political realism, so you look at the reality, do an analysis and try to draw conclusions based on a calculation of chances of success/failure and potential benefits and losses compared with the status quo. You look at how strong you are, and how strong is your opponent. You look at how much you have now and how much you could possibly gain. You look at who else could benefit from your action, and whether those foreign parties are not provoking you to take a certain course of action in their interest, not yours (the classical question cui bono?). Sadly, the ones who were bothered to do any of this, were being marginalized, and in today's pop historical discourse (fortunately, not the scientific one) are often referred to as predators or collaborators. And Fins were smarter than that.
When it comes to Poland regaining independence in 1918, the role of "us" is often blatantly overestimated in the Polish historical mythology. First of all, there wasn't really an us. There was a land-owning class and there were peasants, with often conflicting interests. The land-owning class would do just fine without an independent state (well, it became a concern for them after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, for obvious reasons), and the peasants were bothered not so much about independence but who would give them right to land, and who would not. Their varying role in the 1920 war gives us a good idea about this. Second, while the role of the very blurred us is overestimated, what gets neglected is the role of foreign powers, who were drawing the maps of the post-war Europe. And here, I'm afraid, they couldn't care less about how many hazardous insurrections the Poles pulled off in the 19th century. All that mattered was that the Western Europe needed a cordon sanitaire between them and the Soviet Russia that'd protect the interests of the capitalistic model from a foreign intervention (this was way before the Bolsheviks settled on building socialism in their own country). Plus, the Anglo-Saxons needed a political arm in Central Europe, which would serve as an instrument in their policy of keeping Germany and Russia conflicted or at a distance, in the spirit of their perennial divide and conquer strategy towards continental Europe. And even the Polish representatives, whose signatures can be found under the Treaty of Versailles, were indeed the realists (national democrats), not the romantic insurrectionists.
I don't know too much about Kurds and their political situation, so I won't be making opinionated statements.