Don't forget that in the 1800s the English thought that the Irish were a different race
Posted on 04/30/2021 5:20:10 AM PDT by C19fan
Moscow on a midsummer’s night in 1941 was a balmy place to be. For the discerning, there was Chekhov’s Three Sisters playing to full houses, while opera lovers had a choice between Rigoletto and La Traviata.
Others fished for their suppers on the banks of the river, tended their allotments, or simply strolled through Gorky Park.
All felt safe in the knowledge that, for the past two years (give or take a few weeks), Stalin’s Soviet Union had been in a pact of friendship and non-aggression with Hitler’s Germany.
Though their fundamental political beliefs were polar opposites — one communist, the other fascist — the two biggest nations in Europe had agreed not to go to war with each other.
Until, suddenly, this cosy world turned on its head. The next morning those same Moscow streets were filled with silent, anxious crowds surrounding public loudspeakers, from which came the trembling, echoing voice of Molotov, the minister of foreign affairs.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If you want Victor Davis Hanson’s brilliant analysis on why Hitler lost the war, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQq-ORA4fHw
The Ukrainians eagerly joined the Germans. The Ukrainian Nazi police were sometimes called “Nightingales” because of their spectacular singing skills.
I agree. Hitler successfully played off Europe’s aversion to war (resulting from WWI) to take much of what he wanted. But once it became a fight to the death with Britain, the USSR and the USA, he wasn’t going to win. If a mobster comes into your business and says “pay me $100 a week protection,” you might do it. But if he says I’m coming back tonight to kill you and your whole family, you are likely to have a different response, especially if you are armed.
Hitler made a number of mistakes during Barbarossa (delaying the invasion until June 22, delaying the push to Moscow while jerking around in the Ukraine, becoming obsessed by Stalingrad, making clear that ordinary Russians had no choice to fight to the death when many of them would have welcomed liberation from Stalin, “no retreat” orders, etc.), but would any of it have mattered? Given the scope of the Soviet counteroffensive that began Dec. 6, which truly shocked the Germans, I don’t think even taking Moscow would have made much of a difference.
The fact is that Hitler grossly underestimated the Red Army based on Stalin’s purge of the officer corps and its unimpressive performance against Finland. And he likely felt invincible after the collapse of France. Historians like to rattle off the numbers of planes, tanks and heavy guns involved in Barbarossa as though the Germans were the most unstoppable juggernaut ever seen, but for a country the size of the USSR, Barbarossa was underpowered. Compared to the numbers that the Soviets brought to Germany’s border in 1944-45, it was night and day.
Up to 1939, Hitler succeeded beyond any normal person’s wildest dreams - Germany united, with a rebuilt economy and military, large chunks of territory secured without a shot fired, the Versailles treaty dead, the democracies cowering. But once Hitler started to try to enact HIS wildest dreams — world domination and extermination of entire peoples based on his insane ideology, making the war a matter of national survival for all the other major powers — he bit off more than Germany could chew.
The fundamental difference between the two systems is the Nazis gave the pretense of private ownership. Yes you could own your own factory but the state would control the production process.
Yes you could own your home but the state would determine how you would live in it.
What both systems had in common was there was no ownership of speech or thought.
Don't forget that in the 1800s the English thought that the Irish were a different race
yes, both were socialist, but communism was not inherently or intrinsically anti-Jew
Many Jews joined it - and were disproportionately represented in the initial leadership (though not the majority) - as witnessed by Trotsky.
Communism was one of 4 options for Jews in the Russian Empire in the 1800s -- remember that the 1800s was the rise of nationalism and each nation said "this is my land" - the problem being that most demands overlapped
Communism was not anti-Jew during Lenin, not at all
Stalin had some anti-Jewish tendencies but this was exacerbated by the number of Jewish origin communists who opposed Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish arch-rival Leon Trotsky, - well he didn't care about who he killed: Jews, Christians, Muslims - anyone was fair game for him.
The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. Lenin continued to speak out against antisemitism. Information campaigns against antisemitism were conducted in the Red Army and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.
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The Soviet murder machine differed from the Nazi one in that the Nazis killed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, priests, communists while the Soviet murder machine killed everyone indiscriminately (equal opportunity murderers the old Bolsheviks were)
Correct. I recommend the book "Hitler's religion" - it seems that Hitler was a pantheist more than anything while his motley crew were a mix of atheists, pantheists and Nordic religionists who considered Jews and Christians as "weakening the German nation"
though technically Mussolini’s fascists were also socialists
I totally agree: If he had captured the oil supply first the game would have been over for the Russians.
Mussolini’s big mistake was that he allied with the Germans and made the English and the Americans his enemies.
Among the Italians in the 1930s, America was the land of friends and family and the Italian elite were Anglophiles.
They also disliked and distrusted Germans.
The Italians had no heart in the war
To be fair, Republican leadership only got us directly involved in a war AFTER al Qaeda blew up the twin towers and part of the pentagon.
But I do agree, turning the Soviets into republicans wouldn’t have been a good idea, especially when the Soviets technically were already republicans anyways, of the French and Spanish stripe. Heck, of the Jeffersonian Republican stripe anyways (yes, there was a Republican party before the one Lincoln helmed. It was helmed by Thomas Jefferson, and had more in common with the Jacobins in France and the Democrat party of today).
I still think Patton should have been allowed to stop the Soviets, though.
“yes, both were socialist, but communism was not inherently or intrinsically anti-Jew”
Yes and no. Yes in that it’s not intrinsically anti-Jew in the sense of not wanting any Jewish ethnicity in there, no in that it actually is intrinsically anti-Jew in terms of religion and culture, as Karl Marx himself was at the very least a self-loathing Jew if not a full-blown anti-Semite DESPITE having even more Jewish blood than Hitler himself was rumored to have, advocated separating Jews from their culture and beliefs, and outright compared Jews to con men in his infamous “What is Judaism’s god? Money! What is Judaism’s religions? Huckstering!” line, and even advocated for a full-on extermination campaign against lesser beings in the revolution.
Funny thing is, even the Fascists were no different from the Bolsheviks ultimately, even being directly inspired by the same literature that Trotsky and Lenin were if Mussolini is to be believed.
In fact, the reason why it broke off from bolshevikism by supporting country was purely due to pragmatism since, Russia aside, none of the working class members in various European countries took advantage of the war to overthrow their landlords and if anything were more determined to defend their landlords, so Marx’s claim there evidently didn’t come to pass.
But yes, that definitely could have been a reason why the left goes by “Fascist” for Germany.
> Personally, I think Hitlers first and biggest mistake was not going south to seize the oil fields.
It was a big country and factories had been moved east to the Urals. Taking Moscow wouldn't have meant the end of the war for Hitler any more than it had for Napoleon. But a lot of North/South communication ran through Moscow. If the Germans went south, their supply lines to the oil fields would have been vulnerable to attacks from the North. Some scholars think it would have served the Germans better to just take Moscow, driving a wedge through the middle of the country, and worry about the South later.
There were moments when the Soviets would have lost without American aid, but their war industries weren’t terrible and Stalin was prepared to lose tens of millions to win the war. If they had been able to get through their weakest moments, they very well could have won without our material aid. But our opening up a second front in Europe insured that Hitler would be denied victory.
The Germans were initially welcomed into Ukraine as liberators. Stalin had killed millions of them by deliberate famine. If the Germans had just ACTED as liberators for a while, and recruited local Ukrainians as allies in hunting down Communist partisans, they might have won.
Logical
Even the best logic does not always win wars.
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