Posted on 09/04/2024 6:24:54 PM PDT by marcusmaximus
Tucker Carlson recently had Darryl Cooper on his podcast to discuss history. The most prominent talking point of Cooper, a historian of sorts, was the ostensibly avoidable nature of the Second World War. It’s not a new thesis; there has always been an American polemic that the United States’ involvement in WWII was unnecessary and unwinnable. Charles Lindbergh and the 1930s America First movement did not think the United States’ involvement was inevitable. A long and often-times inconsistent tradition of Anglophobia convinced many Americans—Lindbergh being the most notable—that Great Britain was tricking the United States into a war it had no stake in. What makes Cooper interesting, and worrisome, is the way he sees Winston Churchill as a primary aggressor in the Second World War instead of the nakedly genocidal, tyrannical, and racist Führer of Germany, Adolf Hitler. Churchill’s warmongering—if one insists on calling it that—was in the defense of the conservative and even nationalist European system against Nazi imperialism.
(Excerpt) Read more at providencemag.com ...
Hitler started WWII.
And Stalin helped.
Tucker! Read better books!
Starting with Mein Kampf, where Hitler laid out exactly what he would do.
If it had been ‘anybody but Hitler’, and the Anglos had acted more reasonably to the Danzig Crisis
They tried that in Munich. six months later the Nazis rolled into the rest of Czechoslovakia. They weren’t just trying to bring Germans back into the Reich anymore.
As Chamberlain said, from that point on, Hitler simply could not be trusted to keep his word.
Churchill had some boneheaded ideas such as viewing Italy as the “soft underbelly” of Europe
And Gallipoli. But to his credit, after he lost his job with the Admiralty, he went to go fight on the front line during WWI.
Churchill’s speech from 1934....
Many people think that the best way to escape war is to dwell upon its horrors and to imprint them vividly upon the minds of the younger generation. They flaunt the grisly photograph before their eyes. They fill their ears with tales of carnage. They dilate upon the ineptitude of generals and admirals. They denounce the crime as insensate folly of human strife. Now, all this teaching ought to be very useful in preventing us from attacking or invading any other country, if anyone outside a madhouse wished to do so, but how would it help us if we were attacked or invaded ourselves that is the question we have to ask.
Would the invaders consent to hear Lord Beaverbrook’s exposition, or listen to the impassioned appeals of Mr. Lloyd George? Would they agree to meet that famous South African, General Smuts, and have their inferiority complex removed in friendly, reasonable debate? I doubt it. I have borne responsibility for the safety of this country in grievous times. I gravely doubt it.
But even if they did, I am not so sure we should convince them, and persuade them to go back quietly home. They might say, it seems to me, “you are rich; we are poor. You seem well fed; we are hungry. You have been victorious; we have been defeated. You have valuable colonies; we have none. You have your navy; where is ours? You have had the past; let us have the future.” Above all, I fear they would say, “you are weak and we are strong.”
Churchill was blinded by his hatred of Germans. Much of the spiral of WWII can be laid at his feet. Germany was going to war up Europe and Russia wanted to sweep in during the chaos to spread communism while FDR was more than willing to see old empires dissolve away. Nobody has the high ground morally in that mess.
It was a consequence of the foul-up that was WWI.
Everyone on this thread should read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. There are way too many erroneous understandings to refute.
Everyone on this thread should read William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
I watched the TV series, but I did read “Berlin Diary”.
This was actually a pretty good TV docu-drama on what went on behind the scenes in the months leading up to the start of WWII.
Countdown To War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVsRkRGZySA
I recall a cartoon by Bill Mauldin featuring two soldiers, Willie & Joe, from around 1943 in which they are in Italy looking northward to the Apennine Mountains in the foreground and the Alps behind them. One says to the other, “whoever called Italy a soft underbelly should have his head examined.”
Well those ships were sinking a lot of U-Boats.
It turned into a “tough old gut”.
The seeds of WWII were partially sown by the Treaty of Versailles. So I suppose this historian would claim the allies started the war by winning WWI.
I certainly blame Clemenceau. To his credit, Wilson, who I have few good things to say, did try to get Clemenceau to moderate the terms, but he wouldn’t listen.
Wilson showed good sense in that case.
There were also social and economic problems in Germany which made the NAZI party seem like a sane solution. Dictatorships do not arise during times of moral and economic stability. It is also not possible to convince a nation to blame an entire race or religious sect for those problems.
Hitler certainly did not invent anti-Semitism it was already underneath the surface of most European nations. He just gave Germany justification (false as it was) for bringing it to the surface.
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