A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago

Townhall.com ^ | August 15, 2019 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Kaslin]

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the "Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler's Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with the signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

[NorseViking]

Russians died at Polish hands too at the time but all of this combined over centuries fades comparing to that Hitler planned for both.

[dfwgator]

So you think Russia controlling ALL of Europe would not have resulted in the deaths of millions across the entire continent?

[NorseViking]

That’s too a hypothetical scenario. I think the overall outcome could have been the same it was. There is little possibility for the US intervention not to take place.

[nathanbedford]

I will of course take a look at Peter's Zeihan because you recommended him.

Meanwhile I ask you to contemplate the Ponzi scheme nature of Social Security and explain to me the wisdom of trying to cure that Ponzi scheme by adding more future claimants to a system that is mathematically bankrupt in a few years. I reject trying to cure a Ponzi scheme by enlarging a Ponzi scheme.

Let's consider these points:

Robots do not invent or innovate (I think it's a little bit premature to utterly dismiss artificial intelligence).

Robots do not manage (the digital age has utterly transformed how we manage everything. Huge corporations no longer have central offices with everyone working at home on his PC or on the road on his cell phone. We manage inconceivable quantities of data every day. Our management has become so sophisticated in the digital age that are efficiency has helped keep inflation in check and spread wealth to millions)

They have zero artistic creativity (the last movie blockbuster last week recorded $2.7 billion in ticket sales or was it 3.7 billion? The point, all of the creativity in that movie was enhanced if it did not actually originate with computers and software.)

There goes the whole marketing, engineering, sports, music and other industries (Google has turned the world of marketing upside down; engineering has been revolutionized by computer assisted design and by theoretical testing; sports are made available to millions by virtue of Digital Communications; if there is anything that makes me despair it is the distortion of the world of music done by computer; whole new industries have been created)

The world is turning over very fast, the Japanese are making a bet that the digitalized world will more than compensate for an aging population and they rightly fear the downside of flooding their country with an economically, linguistically and culturally indigestible mass of illiterate welfare claimants.

The United States and Europe are making the opposite choice, we shall see.

[NorseViking]

I don’t know where the idea that Japan does not accept immigrants comes from.
Their own estimates are about two and a half millions immigrants living in Japan. One in ten people aged between 20-30 is foreigner in Tokyo area alone.
They already had Pakistani ghettos in 1990s.

[dfwgator]

All of the good Sumo wrestlers are from Mongolia.

[NorseViking]

That’s the least they should care. Pakistani car thieves is another side of it.

[PapaBear3625]

As to the question why did we (meaning at that time Great Britain and the Empire) not declare war on Russia for invading Poland, one has to be observant of realities on the ground. The idea that England could take on both of these superpowers ( between them Germany and Russia would kill approximately 35 million of each other's people in a war in which Britain and America each lost less than 500,000 dead), is simply not credible. That is why Churchill uttered his famous quip in support of his making an alliance with Russia against Nazi Germany, "If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a friendly reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

Larger reality on the ground: in the US, including right in Roosevelt's cabinet, we had lots of Communists.

This is why cultivated public opinion was against entering the war until after Hitler invaded the USSR (22 June 1941), at which point it immediately turned around. Meanwhile, Roosevelt froze Japan's assets (July 26, 1941) and imposed an oil embargo on August 1, making Japan's declaring war on the US inevitable.

[nathanbedford]

It appears that the Japanese are at about 2% looking to go to 2 1/2% of the total population which would make the ratio more like one in 50 for the overall population.

[sparklite2]

Add this all up, and in some sense, World War II really started on Aug. 23, 1939, 80 years ago this summer.

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WWII was guaranteed with the signing of the Draconian Treaty of Versailles in 1918.

[sparklite2]

Stalin and naive FDR @ Yalta.

[NorseViking]

By any measure it is not a small percentage.
It is a sort of normalcy bias to think otherwise.
Only US, Russia and Germany has 10+ million immigrants . You might get used to it but it doesn’t mean it is normal or forth that mich is a small number.

[dfwgator]

WWII started in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria.

[sparklite2]

Wrongly so. They had much more in common than differences. Different modes of totalitarianism. So why did Hitler attack and invade the USSR? Because he was insane.

---

The insanity defense is another way of saying,
“The dog ate my homework.” The need to equate
Nazism with communism, especially in light of
Hitler’s hatred of communists, flounders on the
shoals of logic.

[PapaBear3625]

Japan is collapsing. It also will become much more dangerous as it runs out of people.

At some point, they will do SOMETHING to get Japanese women to marry early and produce children. Even if they have to go "Handmaid's Tale".

[Vaquero]

FDR was a Socialist scumbag. Funny how the democrats lionized Russia until they kicked out communism.

[dfwgator]

Hitler got fooled into thinking that the Soviets were weak based upon their performance in Finland.

[sparklite2]

That Hitler didn’t supply his troops with winter gear points to his thinking the invasion would be short and sweet. Yes, at some point in his thinking, he vastly underrated the Soviets. But so did Stalin. He moved critical manufacturing to east of Moscow and was bracing for defeat.

[nathanbedford]

I have a few quibbles with your analysis.

The isolationism in America prior to Pearl Harbor was also related to the high level of German and Italians then living here not to mention many Irish with a grievance against Great Britain rather than a effect of communist influence among the general population of America.

American isolationism was a product of the ghastly carnage of the trenches in World War I and the evident failure of the Treaty of Versailles and the pathetic league of Nations to curb what Americans regarded to be a penchant for war among European nations.

The general mood for noninvolvement was largely unaffected by Hitler's invasion of Russia, but you are quite correct the previous neutral posture of the Communists flipped entirely with the invasion of Russia. The general population quite naturally sprang almost unanimously to favor war simply because of the Pearl Harbor attack. Hitler obligingly relieved Roosevelt of the problem of waging war against Nazi Germany by declaring war on America and even made it possible for the allies to prioritize the war in Europe over the war in the Pacific with that act of folly.

I would agree that the imposition of the oil embargo made Japan's decision to wage undeclared war more likely but not necessarily inevitable. The oil embargo was entirely justified in view of Japan's brutality in China and aggression in Manchuria. Japan's decision to wage war was the product of a military class which simply would not consider any other option but might have acted otherwise if the Emperor had weighed in against the attack on Pearl Harbor.

[dfwgator]

Supplies from the US and Britain saved Stalin’s bacon, and he even admitted it privately.