Regards, Ivan
Posted on 08/07/2004 4:17:09 PM PDT by MadIvan
The war which erupted just 90 years ago is correctly seen as one of the greatest tragedies in world history. Not merely did many millions of people perish in battle and in famine, but, even more horribly, it enabled the mad and the bad to capture and command entire civilisations.
The war certainly transformed the fortunes of the Austrian Adolf Hitler. Not long before, he had been a coatless down-and-out in Vienna, infested with lice and surviving by wheedling passengers at the Westbahnhof station into letting him carrying their bags. Finally, he was given refuge in a men's home founded by Jews, where other Jews lent him money and helped to sell his watercolours. His income was still wretched, and for a while he contemplated going into the hair-restorer business. And the only people that he volubly hated then were Jesuits.
Early in 1914, he was called up for service in the peacetime Austrian army, but failed the medical. He was living in Munich when war broke out, and should have returned to Austria to serve in Franz-Joseph's army. Instead, in the confusion of war, he was - illegally - accepted into the Bavarian Army, in which he had no right to serve. Thus war led him on the vital steps towards being first a German and then, ultimately, that nation's Fuhrer.
However, Hitler's Reich was only made possible through the endeavours of the brilliant pioneer of state totalitarianism, Lenin, who, in August 1914, was close to despair. His Bolshevik movement was broken and riddled with agents, and he was in exile in the Austrian Carpathians, an object of much suspicion among local peasants. Indeed, that summer there was even talk about lynching the ugly little Russian. When war was declared, he was arrested, but instead of being interned, as he might well have been, he was allowed to seek refuge in neutral Switzerland.
Trotsky was also in Austrian exile, in Vienna. He was told by the police chief, Geyer, that all Russians would soon be interned. Trotsky said he would leave the next morning. No, said Geyer, you'll leave now. It was 3 pm; at 6.15 pm, the Zurich-bound train carrying the future founder of the Red Army left the Westbahnhof, where not long before the wretched, antic figure of Hitler had been cadging a few hellers, the farthings of the Austrian empire.
That August, Stalin was in indefinite police exile in Turukhansk, in the Arctic Circle. Nguyen Tat Thanh was a pastry chef under Escoffier in the Carlton in London. Mao Tse-tung was about to become a student of Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary and a believer in Western democracy. None could possibly have foreseen the astounding drama that would transform their lives, and the globe, in so short a time.
For in a mere three years, war would bring ruin to the Romanov dynasty. Then, in one of the most ill-judged interventions in history, German intelligence smuggled Lenin back into Russia. Together with his old rival Trotsky, also back from his Swiss holiday, and Stalin, now released from Siberian exile, they forged the world's first totalitarian state. Terror now became permanent policy, and the central instrument of government.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Hitler - for all his anti-Communist rhetoric - proved to be an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union, creating mirror images of Stalin's secret police and death camps wherever his jackboot fell. And very properly: for without the Soviet revolution, there would have been no Third Reich: no NKVD, the Soviet secret police, then no Gestapo.
The Soviet Union had rather franker devotees than Hitler of course - the pastry chef, Nguyen That Thanh, for example, being one of them. Now known as Ho Chi Minh, in 1918, he helped found the French Communist Party, and rapidly became an obedient, brilliant client of Lenin's and Stalin's. He visited Moscow regularly after 1921, before finally returning to Vietnam. In due and terrible course, he ruthlessly transformed his native land into a true model of abject poverty and Stalinist oppression.
But in terms of mass murder, Mao Tse-tong stands head and shoulders above them all. Deeply angered by the (admittedly disgraceful) post-war settlement which transferred sovereignty of the province of Shandong from Germany to Japan rather than China, he rejected the fledgling democratic movements in Peking, and formed instead the Chinese Communist Party. Totalitarianism suited his deviant, murderous personality admirably, and over the next half century, he was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 50 million people.
The Great War reached and stirred the bottom of the human pond. In the anarchy which followed, terrible, freakish creatures that would never have never risen through the rigours and laws of normal civil society, were able to impose their lunatic visions and monstrous poisons over much of the planet. Only now is the world finally beginning to recover from those truly diabolical men. Yet 90 years ago this month they were still the mediocre and friendless nonentities they thoroughly deserved to be: though not for very much longer.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Interesting.
I thought this was a Clinton-McAuliffe thread.
OK, maybe it didn't quite happen, but the notion of a destitute Hitler schlepping Trotsky's bags in a railway station is mind-boggling. Trotsky was, of course, both a communist and of Jewish extraction, either of which would have earned him a vacation in Auschwitz. I wonder if he would have tipped well...
*bump* to historical perspective (don't get mired in minutia)
Trotsky found out too late that letting someone pick your brains is not always the best thing to do....
John Fony Kerry was down and out until Teresa took him in. Now, he has become the fuhrer of the democrat party.
And the Muslims were busy commiting Jihad genocide on any and all Christians in Turkey.
http://www.greece.org/genocide/quotes/quotes12.html
The fact that he didn't get "fragged" shows strict adherence to discipline on the part of the Brownwater Navy Personnel.
Agreed!
"they forged the world's first totalitarian state."Hardly.
"Hitler - for all his anti-Communist rhetoric - proved to be an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union"Which is hardly surprising in the founder of National Socialism.
"The Soviet Union had rather franker devotees than Hitler of course - the pastry chef, Nguyen That Thanh, for example, being one of them. Now known as Ho Chi Minh, in 1918, he helped found the French Communist Party, and rapidly became an obedient, brilliant client of Lenin's and Stalin's."And today, John Kerry's protrait hangs in the communist museum in Ho Chi Minh City.
"Only now is the world finally beginning to recover from those truly diabolical men."You're far too optimistic, Kevin. The world has always produced a continuous supply. There are many in power and rising to power at this very moment.
As we think of new laws that would further diminish our freedoms in this country, let us consider that everything Hitler did, to everyone, was perfectly legal under German law.
Well, you gotta admit, Trotsky axed for it.
Ramon in the library with the pick axe.
Wicked!
Just a thought, but if they got rid of the graft, there would be no need to raise taxes.
Good Post. I gotta read it later.
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