Did you know that the United States almost single handedly, with the help of the atomic bomb, won World War II? Yep, Uncle Sam kicked Hitler’s ass. That is the conclusion you will draw if you watch three of the most popular, widely watched documentaries on World War II. This underscores a critical point that my friend Andrei Martyanov has made repeatedly about the misinformation in the west on the role that the Russians played in winning the war in Europe.
Why is this important? If you have had a chance to watch “man on the street” interviews done by entertainers like Jay Leno, Jessie Waters and Mark Dice, the average American knows nothing of American history, much less the history of World War II. Just watch what happens when Dice asks people why we celebrate the 4th of July:
I would be willing to lay down a heavy bet in Las Vegas that 95% of Americans have no idea what role Russia played in defeating the Germans. The truth is this–without Russia crushing the Germans on the Eastern front, Europe and the UK would be speaking German, or required to learn it in school. One of the reasons, not the only one, is how the most popular documentary series’ tell the story of the Great War. The narratives focus primarily on what the United States did with some credit given to the Brits for having a stiff upper lip and Churchill. The Russians generally are presented as bit players who somehow survived the slaughter at Stalingrad.
The vast majority of Americans have no idea that Russia lost more soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad than the United States lost in the entire war in both the European, North African and Pacific theaters. Ponder that for a minute.
If you examine the list of the top documentaries on World War II that history buffs in America and the UK watch it is no wonder Americans are so clueless.
The World at War–A groundbreaking 26-part documentary series narrated by the actor Laurence Olivier about the deadliest conflict in history, World War II. The specific role of the Soviet Union in World War II is discussed in three episodes–Barbarossa: June-December 1941, Stalingrad: June 1942-February 1943, and Red Star: The Soviet Union – 1941-1943. Russia is mentioned secondarily in three other episodes–Pincers: August 1944-March 1945, Nemesis: Germany – February-May 1945 and Reckoning: 1945… and After. The “Reckoning” episode focuses on the rising Soviet menace.
The Color of War–A 16 episode series featuring actual color footage of World War II. None of the episodes focus on the Soviet front.
WW II in HD–A 10 episode series that focuses exclusively on the United States effort in North Africa, Europe and the Pacific.
If Americans understood what Russia did in stopping the first Nazi invasion outside the city gates of Moscow in December 1941. If they understood the remarkable counter attack the Stavka put together that led to the defeat and capture of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. If they understood the massive tank battle at Kursk, the capture of Ukraine and Operation Bagration, then I suspect the people of the United States would understand why Putin is doing what he is doing now in Ukraine. The aphorism, “ignorance is bliss”, is wrong. Ignorance is dangerous and can kill you.
This forces me to repeat Sun Tzu’s brilliant insight:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
America’s fundamental failure is that we no longer know who we are. Until the people of the United States solve that problem, we are on the road to defeat.
It is surprising. One of my global explanations for the United States circling the drain is not just ignorance of history but D&I. NASA no longer hires the brightest wiz kids they hire females and minorities. Every nook and cranny of our society is being knee capped with this. Our intelligence services cashiers in grocery stores UAW line workers soldiers pilots universities — no longer the fastest brightest but D&I. Are women as smart as men? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/dr-paul-irwing-there-are-twice-as-many-men-as-women-with-an-iq-of-120plus-426321.html
The West has become too feminized. We cry tears over microaggressions while raining terror on the Middle East to help our good buddy Israel.
Yes. Limbaugh called it the chicafication of America. They are too nice they want to save all the kiddies at the border. Men are focused on the protection of their country family. If only men could vote : Trump would have won easily in 2020. Obama would not have won in 2008 or 2012. More surprising Kennedy Johnson Carter and Clinton would not have been president.
Not “feminist” (whatever that means) but childish, like a brat throwing a tantrum over its melted ice cream. “Real” men (whatever that means) can cry and not be ashamed.
Kinzinger is a good example.
Are you seriously blaming women? You thick as 2 plank cowardly morons.
The only thick and failed women are the ones who had you retarded cavemen.
Firstly, let’s get some facts into you dumbheads.
1. Intelligence is inherited ONLY from your mother. Temperament influenced by father. Genetic facts for Dumbo’s.
2. Some of the greatest armies on histories had female warriors and leaders. Sikh Army that bought down Mogul rule and defeated China. Queen of Sheba. You are dumber than Cleopatra who would have cut your balls off and turned you into the eunuch you clearly are while bathing in donkeys milk.
3. The decline of America has NOTHING to do with women and minorities.The majority of all of your million dollar plus new business over last decade are started by women, immigrants and minorities.
4. Provide one study where women or minorities have affectee America adversely in combat?
5. As for education women outperform men. Oh yeah the nuclear bomb not possible without women called Marie Curie. Gunpowder invented in China. Fibre optics giving rise to high speed communication, an Indian
Stop crying like a silly baby. If America is declining it’s because of policies of white men who in education go to elite univerties and buy their kids places there in the same universities when on level playing field Asian Americans make or female outperform them.
6. Your media opportunities generally go to kids of rich parents who get jobs,political seats (Kennedy, mcains, Schiff, Kardashians, Soros, Gates, etc) because they are made by daddy’s. The white male daddys who rig the system so no one else gets in, including working class white males who they treat like backward creatures.
And you think the American army is not tough and violent enough? They are absolute terror monitors. Go visit the wrecks left of Libya and Afghanistan and every other place and tell people Americans are too gentle. They are the most violent and destructive army in the world.
No, I’m talking about our domestic culture and the people we put in leadership positions. There is no wisdom and no restraint. The US foriegn policy is mostly in the hands of the neocons who never saw a war they didn’t like. And I’m well aware of the slaughter these clowns have perpetrated.
Definitely hell on wheels against wedding parties, hospitals, elementary schools, van loads of journalists, and assorted goat herders but against real fighters, ask the IS.
No, of course not! I’m blaming feminized men.
Your points are all very well taken.
The analysis isn’t quite as simple as that but yes, white castrated males are truly should shoulder the lions share of the blame, but there is plenty of blame to go around and it cannot be easily parsed into males vs females.
Your point about Mdme Cutie however is irrelevant to nuclear bombs. She did yeoman work in radiation but it had virtually nothing to do with the development of nuclear weapons. Take it for a good thing.
I have my masters in Clinical Psychology and while I agree with you about the stupidity of blaming females, I also have to point out that we didn’t inherit our intelligence from our mother’s and temperament from our fathers. That’s flat out untrue. In fact, the greatest indicator of one’s intelligence is what they are exposed to and taught as children. Intelligence isn’t inherited. Intelligence is created by either the right environment created by parents who provide their children the proper stimulus which encourages thought.
Give me the proper resources and I can take a baby and make it into a genius or a homeless criminal because it will always be nurture over nature.
Also, to claim everyone gets their intellect from their mother’s is as sexist as the statements your arguing against which is highly ironic.
Women were never typically great fighters. Women don’t have the body structure to be excellent fighters. It’s why you don’t see women fighting men in MMA. Women were forced to use their minds more than men as a result and use their sexuality as a means of power and influence. Women are not great fighters but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t better than men in other departments and there is nothing wrong with that.
Minorities are messing things up because many refuse to integrate into America and they immigrate here, stay within their area, hang out with only people that look and speak like them, and it’s like they want to bring their country here while taking from our country and sending out dollars back home. In California you’ll see many Asians but few will be seen with non-Asians. They stick together like white rice. The fact they come here to reap the benefits but refuse to make American friends and integrate he to our culture is creating the destruction of our nation because we have many cultures residing in America. Russia has one single culture, China, and Europe all have their single culture while we have many and it’s why we no longer have an identity. We need to stop all immigration until the people here begin to accept our way of life otherwise they need to go!!! I wouldn’t move to another country and not learn the language and respect the culture. I would try to make friends with the civilians of the country and wouldn’t just hang around Americans or English speakers. Unchecked immigration is ruining our nation.
Here you go. Just one example but widespread on peer reviewed scientific journals.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/children-intelligence-iq-mother-inherit-inheritance-genetics-genes-a7345596.html?amp
Europe has no single culture.
Yes first generation immigrants often don’t integrate well. Second and third generation do integrate. And the immigration level at Southern border makes integration impossible currently.
However what culture are they integrating into? I don’t identify with the far left culture that is ruling the US currently. There is no one culture.
Trump was right to do outreach for republicans as once people are in US which side they integrate into becomes important.
Not arguing women are better fighters than men. They are not as strong and there are physical thresholds very few if any women can meet. Hence separate sports.
What I find absurd is blaming relatively powerless women, physically and politically, for the pathetic behaviour of some men. It’s a false correlation and a cowards excuse.
All men are responsible for their own behaviour.
Men who are scared to stand up because they are weak are themselves to blame. Not their mummies.
Yes most Americans know nothing of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact where Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland. Or Stalin’s war on Finland where he got his ass kicked by a small country, or his annexing of the Baltic States.
Nor are they aware that Stalin wanted Germany to fight France and Britain to exhaustion so he could swoop in and conquer most of Europe.
That war made strange bedfellows. Stalin certainly did not leave a legacy that folks celebrate today. general rokossovsky apparently found a way to forgive that tyrant.
Personally, Stalin only chose to side with England and America because he’d rather have his enemies a continent away and on a small island in the Atlantic. Stalin was extremely afraid of Hitler as a leader because Hitler was a million times more charismatic than Stalin and far smarter. Stalin was afraid if he continued to side with Germany that Germany would win and Russians would embrace Hitler over Stalin which would only make sense because Stalin was an absolute moron. I think Stalin only sided against the Germans because he feared they would take over and he thought Americans are so far away that they wouldn’t bother him for quite sometime and same with the British.
I think a lot of what we’ve been told about Germany and Hitler isn’t the truth. For example, no one talks about the Havaraa agreement, or the Transfer agreement, which essentially created Israel. It was discovered by the Jewish historian, Edwin Black, who wrote the New York Times best seller the Transfer Agreement, which proved Hitler began the creation of Israel. During World War II Hitler had signed a deal with Jewish Zionist to send over Jewish Europeans to Palestine while also allowing them to transfer all their money and belongings with them to Palestine which is where they wanted to go because it was their holy land.
In fact, the Rothschilds made a deal with the English during World War I where they said they would get America to fight with the British, and essentially save them, if afterwards, England would create a Jewish state in Palestine. This agreement was called the Balfour Agreement, which can easily be found on Google. The Rothschilds literally showed just how powerful they were by stating they would get America to fight a war for them if the English would then create a Jewish state in Israel. I believe this fact alone shows just how powerful the Rothschilds must be because they were able to literally get our nation to do their bidding and send over our soldiers to die horrible deaths just so they could begin the creation of Israel, but England never followed through with their promise.
I found it incredibly shocking watching a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu when he said that Hitler did not want to kill all the Jews and that he never intended to commit a holocaust during World War II and that the only reason there was a Holocaust was because of Muslims who had convinced Hitler to go through with it Because Hitler needed their resources like oil etc. The speech is easily accessible online and all you have to do is go on YouTube and look up “Benjamin Netanyahu said Hitler did not want to kill all Jews speech”, and you should see several clips with the part of the speech he gave when he said this, which I found to be really remarkable coming from him!
All of this is similar to what you brought up about the Russians not getting the credit for sacrificing over 20 million soldiers on the Eastern Front which depleted the Germans significantly! But our history books pay no mind to the way what the Russians did. The winners always write the history books as they say.
The thing about history is that it’s not a science, the winners always write the history books, and it’s up to those who are willing to put all there personal beliefs and desires aside, like Edwin Black, who is Jewish, but discovered Hitler began the creation of Israel, because it’s only when we are able to question everything, strive fir pure unfettered objectivity,and eliminate preconceived beliefs, that we open up our ability to discover the truth.
World War 2 I find so fascinating because so much happened during that time and so much of it we still know nothing about because they don’t want us knowing about it.
True. The Brits colonised Palestine. They were indebt to Jewish banks since about 1923 I think and they agreed to give them the land of the Palestinians in return for money.
The rest I will read more about. That is shocking if Netanyahu said that.
The Straussian neo con Jewish Israel America is not transparent. It’s not considered ok to raise dual loyalty issues but when 10 senior officers of state in the US are Jewish with neo con or Straussian backgrounds you have to ask.
(First of all I apologize for my poor ability to write in English)
And secondly, you know that I estimate your worth and courage with respect to certain matters, friend Larry. However, I see that in the US they have no fucking idea of what happened in the USSR or who Stalin really was. I am a communist comrade. And believe me that my commitment to freedom and social justice is above any personality, whatever it may be. But in the case of Stalin, the black legend has taken hold of Western intellectuals, to such an extent that they usually navigate in a kind of The Truman Show.
I recommend an article by a young Spanish intellectual who squashes all that anti-communist black legend detail by detail.
https://fgbueno.es/act/efo173.htm
https://posmodernia.com/las-purgas-en-la-union-sovietica/
https://nodulo.org/ec/2018/n184p02.htm
Maybe one day we’ll have coffee and talk about it respectfully.
You are invited to the south of Spain for whenever you like.
A warm hug.
He mass murdered all the Polish officers after invading. Other territory grabs included Western Ukraine and Maldova. Poland still has half of Germany. Heard of Konigsberg? Even Soltzhenitzen said Stalin’s murders were irrational the Germans had logic to theirs. Except for Hitler’s stupid obsession with Jews they were treated bad even in Vichy N Africa. They would have helped him win.
And the United States killed hundreds of thousands of women and children in Dreden, Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we found ways to excuse that. We acted like Stalin in that regard, albeit at a much smaller scale. And then total of the civilians the US killed in Iraq and Vietnam. Just pointing out that if you are going to use that argument the US does not come to the table with sparkling clean hands. We comfort ourselves by insisting we meant well.
There’s no possible perfect utopia world nor sinless, flawless person. Truly meaning well counts for something, IMO, even if some destruction follows in the wake of the good intentions. Worse destruction usually follows in the wake of bad intentions. “Smaller scale” has material meaning.
Falsely claiming to mean well is entirely different story. That’s a schizophrenic state. You’re actually a wannabe barbarian war lord, but you have to put on the appearance of a sensitive well meaning member of the “global community”. This wolf in sheep’s clothing approach seems to me to drive a meaningful proportion of the propaganda that is concocted and aimed us. I would prefer that they just come out and proclaim themselves to be Genghis Khan reincarnated and get on with it. I appreciate honesty. They’d still have to thoroughly study and understand their adversaries. I think that would be more possible in an openly belligerent imperialistic warrior culture. History generally confirms it.
You hit it on the head Eric.
You read something in that wasn’t there. I am pro Russian. A common problem with communicating with out tone of voice and facial cues. I do it too. If you really want to analyze that it was the UK that initially pushed for bombing civilians in Germany not us. Hiroshima and Tokyo was I suppose just allowed because once it got going thanks to the UK it became accepted. At that point in the war both sides hated each other.
Yes, the UK became an enthusiastic bomber of Germany after the Germans his civilian areas in London. But it was the US Army Air Corp Generals who strongly supported the British view that the war could be won from the air. US losses in that air campaign were horrendous as you know.
The British were behind bombing city centers in Germany. Odd that they are hysterical actors in Ukraine too. Notice the UK’s Marshall name: Douglas Evill.
On 31 January, Bottomley sent Portal a message saying a heavy attack on Dresden and other cities “will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from other fronts”.[33] British historian Frederick Taylor mentions a further memo sent to the Chiefs of Staff Committee by Air Marshal Sir Douglas Evill on 1 February, in which Evill states interfering with mass civilian movements was a major, even key, factor in the decision to bomb the city centre.
That is exactly why the American masses are brainwashed about WW2. It is cast into a Manichean struggle of good versus evil with Britain and the US being the good guys and the USSR convenienty swept under the rug. How else could this stupid human blunder be explained where 60 million people dead and half Europe handed over to Stalin. You better make you keep them in the dark about what really happened. Otherwise our dumbass leaders might look bad.
An edit function is sorely need for us guys who post things without first reading. Ugh!
Let me know what needs to be changed and I can do it.
I blame Hitler for our current “our values” UN centric human rights over kill world. They have brought us climate hoax pandemic hysteria and this lovely Ukraine sovereign democracy melodrama. Before WW2 topics were casually discussed that are now kryptonite.
You write well!! Perfect.
Some sites have an edit function so you can correct typos after you post. I’m an engineer. I’m constantly stumbling over language.
Exactly!!! Well said!!! How about how we talk horribly about the Germans who treated Jews horrifically but then pay no mind to the fact that blacks in America were being treated very similarly! White only areas. Blacks on the back of the bus. The only difference between Jews and blacks is blacks didn’t need to wear a patch or arm band because their skin did it for them.
And German was blamed for the Katyn massacre during the Nuremburg (Soviet show) trial.
Russia also liberated the same Finland from the Swedish Empire else Finn’s would have no country.
Europe is old. Everyone historically claims everything.
Americans like to point out Russia’s MR pact with Germany but for some reason history seems to stop there. If you wind back the clock a little further you’d see Russia trying to form a military alliance with France and GB against Germany and being rejected … they Russia was snubbed by Britain and France and left out of the Munich conference in 1938.
This was the last straw for the Soviets and they made a deal with Germany that insured that Germany would have to fight France first before the main event with the Soviet Union giving they time to reorganize their army.
IF Britain and France entered into a mutual defence treaty with Russia in 1938 Germany would have faced another war on two fronts like WW1 and WW2 would have been very unlikely.
Yes, Britain didn’t make a pact with the USSR because Stlin insisted on stationing troops with Poland and Poland wasn’t stupid (despite taking 5 polish persons to screw in a light bulb).
Theres more to it than that. The British were extremely anti Soviet … The Tsar and British royal family were blood relatives. The bolsheviks killed Uncle Nicky and all his family. If you read Russian sentiments the Russians knew Germany planned to invade the USSR … it was written in Mein Kampf and half of Hitlers speeches through out the 30’s after all.
Even so the Russians were more suspicious and more fearful of the British than Hitler. One of the reasons Stalin refused to believe spys reporting that Germany planned to invade in June ’41 was he thought it was a British provocation to get Russia fighting Germany to take the pressure of Britian.
The British engaged in a lot of trickery. I wouldn’t be surprised if the British created the conflict between Russia and Germany through propaganda and false flag attacks etc.
gman,
I see you have returned to the attempt you were making back in April to resurrect Neville Chamberlain’s view of Stalin’s policy. At that time, I attempted to explain to you, at some length, as I earlier had to Wally Courie on Colonel Lang’s blog, that Sean McMeekin and Vladimir Rezun (aka ‘Viktor Suvorov’) are not reliable sources.
(See https://sonar21.com/those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-condemned-to-repeat-it/ .)
Actually, the issues appear even more relevant today, given that it has become increasingly clear that both the launching, and the conduct, of the ‘Special Military Operation’ reflect the lessons which Putin, Gerasimov, and others have taken from the events of the summer of 1941 – in my own view, quite reasonable ones.
Accordingly, it seems appropriate to repost what I wrote back in April, in response to you, and a Russian posting as ‘Vladimir¬¬_RU’, who had conjured up what to me is a nightmare vision: ‘Each country will have its own history and its own truth.’
Just in case you want to know something of the credentials of the sources I used, I would pointed out that both Colonel David Glantz and Jacob W. Kipp – now alas dead – were pivotal figures in, and sometime directors of, what was originally the U.S. Army’s ‘Soviet Military Studies Office’ and is now the ‘Foreign Military Studies Office.’
My response ran as follows:
I hope it is not the case that ‘Each country will have its own history and its own truth’, because a central problem in the United States and Britain today is that so many people do not follow what serious historians in their own countries are writing, but prefer to listen to charlatans.
Not long after Sean McMeekin attempt to resurrect the apologia for Wilhelm Keitel – also Neville Chamberlain, of which more in a moment – by Vladimir Rezun (aka ‘Viktor Suvorov’), a ‘Facebook friend’ of mine, Wally Courie posted a link to an article summarising the argument of ‘Stalin’s War.’
The article is at ‘https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/05/09/stalins-gambit-did-the-soviets-plan-for-a-1941-offensive-war-against-nazi-germany/ .
As I know Wally through Colonel W. Patrick Lang, dating back to before that figure ‘lost his marbles’, I attempted a courteous response – drawing on the work of leading scholars of Soviet military and diplomatic history, Colonel David Glantz, Jacob W. Kipp, and Gabriel Gorodetsky. It read:
“‘With respect, I think some rather large problems with McMeekin’s attempt to resurrect the ‘Icebreaker’ hypothesis are implicit in the title of the article to which you link: ‘Stalin’s Gambit – Did the Soviets Plan for a 1941 Offensive War Against Nazi Germany?’
“It was amply apparent at the time, and has never been in question ever since, that Soviet contingency planning for a possible war was premised on the ideas deriving from the ‘Napoleonic’ strand in Clausewitz: the aspiration to seek a rapid decisive victory through offensive action.
“This had been the case ever since the victory of Mikhail Tukhachevskii over Aleksandr Svechin in the arguments of the ‘Twenties, which were discussed by Colonel Glantz’s then colleague at the ‘Soviet Army Studies Centre’, now the ‘Foreign Military Studies Office’, Jacob W. Kipp, in a seminal paper he published back in 1988.
“https://community.apan.org/wg/tradoc-g2/fmso/m/fmso-monographs/204276
“To mount a cogent defence of the ‘Icebreaker’ thesis, McMeekin would need to produce evidence showing that Soviet planners contemplated implementing their ‘offensive plans’ in 1941, and not simply on the basis that, if they concluded a German attack was inevitable, it made sense to strike first.
“Given that in his article, he signally fails to do anything of the kind, it clearly does not constitute any kind of refutation of Gorodetsky and Glantz.
“On the same basis, I could write an article headlined ‘Truman’s Gambit – Did the Americans Plan for an 1945 Offensive War Against the Soviet Union’?
“From a January 2017 report in, ironically, ‘The Sun’:
“‘Plan Totality was established by US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the summer of 1945, following the Potsdam Conference – where the Allies decided how to carve up defeated Germany.
“‘The chilling strategy involved plans to obliterate 20 Soviet cities with America’s newly-tested atomic arsenal.
“‘Moscow, Leningrad and Stalinsk were all in the American firing line, with military planners claiming that all of the biggest Soviet cities could be wiped out in one surprise strike.
“‘Between 20 and 30 atomic bombs were set to be dropped if it came to it – a move which could have resulted in Russia and America wiping each other off the map.’
“https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/2619209/the-american-cold-war-strategy-which-could-have-plunged-the-world-into-a-nuclear-conflict/
“Actually, as the article brings out, at the time the United States did not have the requisite number of bombs, and it suggests that what was at issue was bluff. It is also however material that it would be more than four years before the Soviets tested a nuclear device, and they lacked an effective intercontinental nuclear capability until many years later.
“On the basis of McMeekin’s logic, I could off course conclude that, absent Stalin’s revival of plans for ‘deep operations’ into Western Europe, which actually happens in 1948, Eisenhower and Truman would have implemented their ‘genocidal’ plans.
“I do not, of course, believe anything of the kind. But if people in the West really want to defend the shoddy arguments of figures like ‘Suvorov’/Rezun – who incidentally was part of the ‘information operations’ ground centred around the late Boris Berezovsky – they must not be surprised if people on the other side start reviving equally bad arguments.”
This error, unfortunately, is relevant alike to ‘Russiagate’ and the shambles in Ukraine.
In December 2018, Luke Harding, one of the principal ‘stenographers’ for Christopher Steele, who has been a figure of some moment at the British end of the conspiracy to subvert constitutional government in the United States, published a profile of Rezun/‘Suvorov’ in the ‘Guardian.’
(See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/29/ex-soviet-spy-viktor-suvorov .)
An extract:
‘From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.’
Well over a year before Harding’s article, there had appeared the second volume of what is clearly the most significant contemporary Western biography of Stalin, by Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University, which was subtitled ‘Waiting for Hitler, 1929-41.’ Had Harding bothered to read reviews of this, he would have been aware that its author joined the long list of scholars who have explained that ‘Icebreaker’ is rubbish.
An economical way of ‘catching up’ with the current state of research on contentious issues is to look at the ‘Roundtables’ which the ‘h-diplo’ site devotes to important new works.
In that on Kotkin’s book, published in March 2019, you can see some of what are the actual disagreements between serious scholars being aired. Of particular interest is the response to Kotkin from one of the leading original critics of Rezun/’Suvorov’, Gabriel Gorodetsky, who is Israeli, but has studied and worked at Oxford, and has very extensive familiarity with both British and Russian archives.
(See https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/3839846/h-diplo-roundtable-xx-30-stephen-kotkin-stalin-waiting-hitler .)
Also published in 2017 was the culmination of Gorodetsky’s life’s work – the complete three volume edition of the diaries of Ivan Maisky, who as Soviet Ambassador to London was a pivotal figure in the events which Rezun/‘Suvorov’ and McMeekin misrepresent. (A one-volume selection was published two years earlier.)
The ‘Roundtable’ on the complete edition, published in September 2020, is at https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/6402047/h-diplo-roundtable-xxii-1-abriel-gorodetsky-ed-complete-maisky .
The ramifications of the fact that people in the West are happy to accuse Stalin both of things he did do and things he did not are too complex to go into here.
Something that is however of crucial importance is that the ‘Icebreaker’ restatement of Keitel’s apologia, according to which Hitler only pre-empted an attack by Stalin, is bound up with a restatement of the view held by MI6, and fed to Chamberlain, at the time, that there was a long-term Soviet strategy to ‘finesse’ Germany and the Western democracies into war.
Given Harding’s role as a ‘stenographer’ for Steele, and the evidence about the links of Rezun/ ‘Suvorov’ to MI6, a question raised is whether the patent difficulties of that organisation in making sense of current Russian policy are directly related to the fact its members have either reverted to, or never abandoned, delusions they held decades ago.
Likewise, this may be part of the background to the extraordinary way in which elements in the intelligence services of the U.S. and U.K. collaborated in the attempt to prevent the election of Donald Trump, and subvert his presidency once elected – in part because he had the actually quite sensible idea that it might not be sensible to push Russia towards China.
In so doing, of course, they contributed very greatly to undermining what was actually the greatest asset of the United States during the Cold War – the attractiveness of the economic and political system, and culture.
David,
There is no real argument here. Just which sources you believe. I think McMeekin’s book is great and I would reccomend it to all. Much of it conforms with other books I’ve read. Clearly Stalin was engaged in a huge military build up, otherwise he could not have sustained his losses at the beginning of Barbarossa.
By definition communism believes in world revolution. How else does one explain the interwar period and all the commie revolutions throughout Europe in that time period. How else does one explain Stalin’s territorial expansions post 1939. Both facism and nazism were reactionary ideologies to the communist threat.
Stalin clearly wanted Germany to fight it out with France and Britain so they would exhaust themselves. He would then capture Europe, striking a blow for world revolution. Instead FDR and the drunkard signed half Europe over to Stalin during their numerous meetings.
One lesson of history is that the worst rise to the top in rubeocracies.
“ There is no real argument here. Just which sources you believe.”
Exactly!!! This is my issue with history and how people so easily believe what is written in the history books as if it’s pure fact and it’s been proven like 2+2=4 when in fact most history books and historians fall prey to personal bias and/or threats from the elites to write in such a way that maintains the narrative they prefer.
Historians like to treat and act as if history is a science when it is not. Documents could easily be forged and manipulated before they were made public. Nothing about history is 100% and it’s certainly not a science.
I read the link
https://militaryhistorynow.com/2021/05/09/stalins-gambit-did-the-soviets-plan-for-a-1941-offensive-war-against-nazi-germany/
I don’t see anything there I disagree with and it certainly is compatible with McMeekin’s book (Stalin’s War)
An interesting book “The Wolf of the Kremlin” is about Lazar Kagonovich, written by his nephew. According to that book Stalin was very surprised and upset about Barbarossa. Not because he had no plans to invade, but rather because Hitler had beaten him to the punch and caught him flat footed. But I agree nobody but Stalin know what his actual intentions were. But one can reasonably infer.
An interview with McMeekin on his book
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4RLVwB23c1o
Mr. Habukkuk! I’m very pleased to see you participating here.
That’s true Larry. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat old mistakes.
In recent years I have received more and more information that has significantly changed my view of Germany and Europe since 1871 (regarding the USA since 1864). Now the statements and stories of the old people who experienced the German Kaiser, two world wars, two famines and two currency reforms come to mind. You were right. Extremely short: The Germans were treated badly even before the 1st WW. An increase in this started massively after the 1st WW and continues to have an effect, with a few weakenings, to this day. Already after the 1st WW it was clear to many real experts that the next war is inevitable with the Treaty of Versailles. I maintain that England absolutely wanted to annihilate Germany militarily or at least to make it significantly less important. Because England has not tolerated any competitors on the continent for centuries, which could become a competitor. The English game went a bit wrong. Twice they underestimated the strength of the Germans and as a result the USA grew stronger while at the same time the British Empire lost importance. The USA is probably expecting the same thing.
All this is very extremely brief and many other aspects are still missing. The Germans have to put up with the accusation of being naïve and naïve. Unable to realistically assess the foreign and geopolitical impact.
one thing is certain: the kitschy historical picture from Hollywood is further removed from the real events than the moon is from the earth and, strictly speaking, is almost pure propaganda. I still remember a Hollywood war film that depicts the current flag of Germany black, red and gold as the flag of the Third Reich. The three colors come from the time of the German Revolution in 1848, when it was about the fight for freedom and democracy. At the time, I felt the film was an insult. Today I know: they didn’t know any better because they themselves believed in their own propaganda.
Carl,
I agree mostly. But, it wasn’t England, it was France that demanded to cruel terms of the Versailles Treaty.
My understanding for a while the British when I have to Germany is because before each world war Germany was about to supersede them economically. Germany was producing genius after genius like Albert Einstein and all the people that created the V2 rocket who went on to join NASA or went to Russia to help them build their nuclear bomb. The fact is that Germany was in many ways far superior than England in the rest of the world, but not because they were born that Way. It’s because of their culture and their way of doing things that Spond many geniuses and theoretical physics and in other areas as well that allowed for innovation that had never before been seen.
Even World War II was pretty much started by the allies or by the British because Hitler was doing what Russia is doing now because Hitler made very clear that all he wanted was German land back that was taken during the first world war. The biggest sign for me that Hitler didn’t want war was what happened at Dunkirk. Our history books say that we tricked Hitler for three full days from spotting 300 to 400,000 British soldiers on the beaches of Dunkirk with no protection whatsoever from the air or from the ground and that is just completely absurd. Personally, I think it was Hitler’s way of saying he didn’t want to fight a war because there is absolutely no way that the British had 400,000 soldiers on that one beach for three days and totally unprotected without the Germans knowing about it. I think it’s really low for the historians to make it seem like the British just got away and snuck out of Dunkirk without Hitler wondering where the hell did the 400,000 British troops went. I think it was Hitlers way of saying he didn’t want war. He said on many occasions that he didn’t want war with the British and that they were basically cousins or distant relatives. I think Hitler was provoked into war when the British and a French built up their military on the Germans border and Hitler was put into a situation where he had to attack. If in fact it’s even true that he attacked first.
So much of what happened during WW2 seems like a complete mystery to me and so much of it seems like lies and distortions of truth, especially when I do my own research and discover irrefutable facts that contradict what I’ve been told my whole life.
I agree with Sun Tzu, but that comes with the territory for those who seek to be good at being 1%ers (or whatever the percent is).
Otherwise, Americans have become fat, ignorant, lazy, pleasure/comfort seeking, feminized, drones. They are ignorant concerning just about everything outside of their daily distractions like sports and other forms of entertainment and consumerism. So the lack of knowledge about Russia’s contributions in WW2 is just par for the course. They are equally ignorant at this point about any other country’s contributions; even their own. All they can do is offer a high level, superficial “America beat the Nazis” because they saw it in a movie. Fewer know about the US fighting Japan, unless they paid attention during the movie “Pearl Harbor”, but that was released a while ago. So younger folks didn’t see it and don’t know. Or maybe they heard about the A-bomb and came to know about the Pacific theater that way. It’s hit or miss, really.
As for the historians writing the history that I learned in school, I get it. The Soviets were terrible with their Iron curtain and attempt to spread their rotten socialism around the world. True super villains. They could have nuked us during the cold war. All of that on top “the sixties” when stupid Americans begin to think that socialism might be lots of fun. So why give the socialists any credit? It might make their sorry asses look even better in the minds of fools.
And that said, it’s one thing to deliberately overlook an aspect of history when exposing it to the mass of dummies who will yawn and soon forget anyhow, being more interested in potato chips and MTV. It’s entirely another to not delve deeply into it when teaching people that need to understand, like military science classes for future military officers, war college attendees or political science/foreign relations majors at weird places like Georgetown and the Ivy League.
Somehow I learned about the Soviet contribution and the high cost paid when I was still a child. I think it is because my father had an excellent library in our home and had the Churchill series on WW2. I read those volumes cover to cover more than once. Churchill gave the Soviet devil his due in those volumes. There were other books on that history that also covered the topic fairly well. But then I was raised to respect education and intelligence above all else; and to seek it constantly. Intellectual development was even more valued than physical development and moral uprightness, which were definitely stressed.
Now that I think about it, it seems strange to me that the glory of the Soviets in WW2 isn’t taught at weird sick places like Georgetown and the Ivy League given the high percent of profs there that are f’ing commies.
America did win WW2, indirectly. Who helped to industrialize the USSR? Who provided them with massive knowhow, and resource before and during the war?
FDR had a big hard on for Stalin. His “brain trust” (talk about an oxymoron) took trips to the USSR to drink in all the wonders of the new exciting managerial state.
It is safe to say that Americans have NEVER known who they are or even how their own country came about, and what its ‘Founding Fathers’ had in mind. Slavery and genocide from the very beginning, and an exploitating merchant banker class, who have been at war with the vast majority. The US Constitution itself excluded 95% of the population. Every gain the people have made has seen a counterattack by, as George Carlin said ‘The Real Owner’.
He nailed the situation in 3 minutes with his “The American Dream” riff…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc
From what I can see, the US has NEVER fought a peer military competitor (aside from the Revolution). The Spanish Empire was already weak. WWI saw Europe already exhausted when the fresh US came in. WWII was based on the idea of Germany and Russia fighting to weaken each other, and then the US and UK landed in Normandy only after it was clear that the USSR was going to win. Couldn’t win in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. And now in desperation, it wants to take on Russia and China, but only by using proxies.
The fight against Japan in the Pacific was a peer to peer I think. Otherwise, your point stands.
The US Civil War was peer to peer as well.
The Revolutionary War was the nascent United States punching way above its weight – and winning. That is where the archetype of the American spirit comes from. That spirit should have been nurtured. It was for a while.
Then we let a bunch of low life mutts and whiners into the country. Worse our sense of fairness compelled us to give them an equal voice. They dragged us down.
Sorry, but screw the Native Americans. Stone age dwellers were doomed to be conquered by someone from somewhere by the industrial revolution. I don’t understand the mentality that asserts the Americas should have been – or could have been – left as some gigantic nature preserve into perpetuity.
thanks for sparking a great discussion.
Eric. I usually agree with what you say and learn alot from what you write, but I disagree here.
The problem with America is more fundamental than ‘feminised males’ and who was let in, though obviously the current state at Southern border is insanity.
“Then we let a bunch of low life mutts and whiners into the country.”
This is the starting point. Who is “we”? Quakers, Amish, Catholics, Protestants, Germans, Jews, Brits…America was never a ‘we’. It was always multiple ‘we, us and them’. This was never reconciled in American history.
The flag and anthem, dream and constitution plus ‘enemies’ were the tools used to pull the country together. People may hate each other but love the country right?
So the idea there was ever a united we in America is nonsense. What there was was a greater illusion of a united we as people lived in their own ethnic and cultural or north south pockets. As that changed the fault lines that were always there began to show.
The recent rejection of flag, twisting if Constitution and promotion of gay men and males pretending to be female is nothing to do with immigrants who tend to be more conservative. It’s an entirely white male lead phenomeno. Trans movement is funded by 5 US billionaire families plus Google. They will make mega bucks selling hormones to kids for life once gender is a choice.
So your analysis is wrong. You are falling for a distraction trick. The LGBTQ, far left etc anti-flag agenda is not a product of new in America. It is entirely a creation of old American money and the deep state.
Ps native Americans from.stone age saved Europeans from.starvation and never ending famines by cultivating potato, tomato and corn.
They also discovered the plant that stopped headaches, stolen by pharma as main ingredient in Aspirin.
They were also on the verge of their own industrial revolution before Europeans popped over. But demean them as you wish if it makes you feel better
Ash,
“we” = men (and women) who were both God worshipping and products of the enlightenment. They believed in hard work, delayed gratification, integrity, honor, education and freedom. And yes, largely white Anglo Saxon Protestants.
Those were the ideals. Did they always live up to them? No, of course not, flawed humans and all of that are always at play. However, they had the ideals to guide them. Understanding and integrating the ideals into the core of their being meant that there was a lid on chaos, degeneracy and corruption. One had to at least keep up appearances and one would be shunned if one fell too far below expectations.
It is easy to sit back and search for examples wherein a lack of those ideals were on display. Selective filtering allows one to present a lopsided case. It ignores the far greater incidence of those ideals in action than not.
Through the early 1900s new immigrants were looked down on until they proved themselves able to adhere to the ideals; or at least to make a worthy contribution to our society. That is how it should be. Any serious organization worth belonging to does the same thing, whether it be the Marine Corps, a Fortune 100 company or a prospective spouse of standards and means. You have to prove yourself worthy of being a member. Otherwise, the organization degrades via infiltration by noncontributory dead weight, underminers and the incapable. As a result of the social hazing, it used to be that new immigrants rose to meet expectations; to prove themselves. That was good for everyone, including the new immigrants. There were no handouts or sympathy for those who failed to rise to the standards.
At some point, some critical mass of slackers was achieved and, being slackers, rather than try to pull their weight, they demeaned the ideals and standards. Slackers drag down as opposed to rising up. It’s just what they do. Predatory scum in politics saw what was happening amongst slackers and played to it, openly calling the ideals and standards unfair/unjust/antiquated. Thus the slackers cheered their new found allies running for office and voted the predators in and the predators assumed permanent positions of power via the political machines they built. That, IMO, is how it all fell apart.
Much of that I agree with. No question that largely Anglo-Saxon , with some Germanic, lead America created what to the rest of the world looked like Disney for grown ups. Freedom, meritocracy, opportunity. They saw opportunity and took them.
My Texan grandmother used to say the best and worst things created came from America (worst in her opinion was loss of religion, same sex marriage for context).
However I did 8 years of research on following money trails to see who controlled what. Like others in this area I realized so much if what we see as social decline, wealth movement and chaos is managed. And it usually tracks back to a handful of people and organisations.
E.g.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement
Fauci gets away. Clinton’s. Steele. Maxwell a scapegoat. This is the problem.
Systems set up to stop this are failing. There should be red alerts.
My concern is that the real culprits get away hiding behind smoke and mirrors.
In this context it is extremely important for them to remove the biggest threat – multi generational Americans steeped in its old and values
Immigrants just want opportunity they have no say in these people’s power. The young can be indoctrinated.
So Americans with traditional American values are the threat because they will challenge and claim ownership of the state. Unless you distract them. And make it painful.
Ash,
I generally agree with you, though I see the decline to where we are as more of a natural/organic process and you seem to see it as deliberately engineered (like a conspiracy). It’s a difference of emphasis. I do not deny the engineering/conspiracy aspects. Also, I think you and I are looking at different points on the timeline. I’m more focused on how we got to where evil carnival barkers and river boat gambler types, like the Clintons and the rest of the current swamp, could build machines and implement the social engineering you speak of. Whereas you are focused on the post Clinton era and the methods be employed.
So we’re not really disagreeing. Thanks for the discussion. I enjoy it 🙂
You call them a slacker, but in reality, they’ve utilized the foundation for which this country is built on, which is freedom, and I’ve used it to question the social norms and the standards for which we judge our fellow Americans. You talk about the industrial revolution and how Native Americans were inferior etc. yet the geniuses that are behind the technological revolution are literally all slackers. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and practically all the people in Silicon Valley that have invented all the technology we use at this point would be classified as a slacker in your world. Throughout every great civilization there comes a time when the status quo is no longer excepted and when the younger generations begin to question the norms and the structures that were created by those before them. Before the industrial revolution, the inventors who invented the technology to spur the industrial revolution would have been killed hundreds of years ago when religion ruled and science was banished which went on for a very long time.
The reason that we have slackers is because there is a serious problem within our society. You don’t seem like the type of person that really cares much about other people so I wouldn’t expect you to know that suicide is the second leading cause of death for those between the ages of 10 to 24 which means that our youth are more likely to die by their very own hands then by being murdered by some stranger or by someone they know. When you live in a society where our children are more likely to die by their own hands than by being murdered by somebody else’s hands then you’re gonna start having slackers because slackers are generally young and people that are upset with the status quo and want to change things but don’t know how so all they can do is resist by being different and by not doing what they’re told. Without slackers we wouldn’t have what we have today whether you wanna believe it or not. Slackers are always the ones that challenge the status quo and if the status quo wasn’t challenged when religion ruled and science would’ve never prevailed. If our founding fathers, who are considered slackers to the English monarchy didn’t resist and fight the monarchy then we wouldn’t have the great country that we have today. I can guarantee you you won’t have slackers when you have a society where people are thriving and they’re appreciated and where kids are not killing themselves at 10 years old because of the bullying via social media and the classism where a few get a lot and the many just get enough while all day on TV they are showing kids and adults they haven’t made it in life.
You see, this is why we have much to learn from the Native Americans. I can assure you they didn’t have their kids milking themselves more than they were being murdered.
I’m not saying America should have been left to the native Americans, but one thing the native Americans taught us, at their expense, is the fact that we may have evolved technologically, but we also are far more barbaric because instead of using our advances in technology, we used it to massacre and rape how many native Americans and African Americans? With your logic, it was a good thing we had slavery because it’s not like those stupid Africans in huts were doing anything better. But in reality, the native Americans and the African slaves have only shown us that we have evolved technologically, but morally, we are far more inferior. We are so inferior to them because with all the gifts we have been granted by the FEW geniuses who we leach all our technology from, because let’s be honest here, it’s not like you’ve invented anything meaningful in your life, and the technological and industrial revolution was created because of the result of a small tiny percentage of geniuses, and you, myself, and everyone else have leached off of them, so in reality, you’re no different than a Stone Age cave dwellers except you just happened to be born into a different family, but it’s not like you’re some sort of genius that has invented anything of importance. Take away all the inventions that you were blessed with because of other people and you’d be a cave dweller lol
But the biggest sign that we are inferior to the native Americans is our thirst for more and our never e dung desire for total control over everything. We are so power hungry that we’ve created bombs that could destroy the entire earth several times over. If you think we’re smarter than the native Americans then I guess we have a different understanding of what intelligence is. My understanding of intelligence is trying not to destroy the entire planet in one Armageddon type event. I think the fact our superiority has devised the real possibility of total destruction of the human race shows how unintelligent we are.
You see, there are different types of intelligence. They are people that are great with math, physics, and the sciences, but then there are people that are really good with human interaction like being salesman or great therapists and leaders. Your problem is that you think technology and science are the only types of intelligence there is, which leaves you naive and lacking a great deal. It would be interesting to see what type of relationships you have with your family and your loved ones if you even have any.
“Couldn’t win in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. ”
LOL How’s Saddam’s government doing now? Regarding Korea I reccomend this as a brief backgrounder:
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/08/mayday-korea-by-william-r-polk.html#more
“Slavery and genocide from the very beginning, ”
Tell the people who keep immigrating here, maybe they’ll stop coming and stay home in their utopias.
“The US Constitution itself excluded 95% of the population.” Wow, sounds like commentary from an expert who never read the document, or the commentaries written when debate over its adoption was happening.
Fredrick,
One challenge having a forum that offers legitimate criticism of the US and its policies – especially when led by someone with credentialed background – is that, in addition to concerned patriots, it attracts America haters of all stripes. They test the waters, push the limits to see how much of their hateful propaganda can be spewed and disseminated. Note that they never have any viable solutions other than global socialism and that sort of pipe dream level thinking.
Eric,
I understand that one must not ‘feed the trolls’, but occaisionally one must call them out lest the casual reader think there’s nothing worth seeing here. (Which is a big reason professional trolls cruise sites such as this)
“Dissent is the GREATEST form of PATRIOTISM”
Thomas Jefferson
There is nothing wrong with criticizing our nation because how do you expect things to get better if we are all like you and pretend the house isn’t burning. The house is burning btw
Realness,
No s***. And the geriatric leadeship of the Democratic party is, along with GOPe, are responsible for a great deal of it. Destroying the ‘mythos’ of the American Republic to please some cultural marxist or historical absolutists isn’t going to be doing America any favors now or in the future.
Sir, there was a series produced after The World at War, called The Unknown War. It specifically focused on the Soviet effort in The Great Patriotic War. It had 20 40-minute episodes, each one focused on a different aspect / battle of the war in the Soviet Union. It included archived Soviet material and exclusive interviews with Zhukov, Chuikov, and Averell Harriman.
All episodes are on YouTube. If one has an interest in this period of history and the Russian view of it, I highly recommend it.
Yes, I’ve watched it. Terrific. Unfortunately, it is the odd man out.
And I thougt I had seen all documentaries of the world wars. THX for the ‘intel’.
Another thing that most Americans are unaware of is the evil done after the war. This short book published in 1946 is worth a read. Instead they will tell you of the Marshall Plan.
https://archive.org/details/grharfk
Sorry, again in German. It is difficult for me to translate correctly. If you are interested, you can translate it with DeepL.
—
Geopolitics is not enough to understand the feelings and thinking of Russians in 2022. You also have to understand the mental level. What we see in Russia is not just propaganda or the psychological preparation of the population for war. The shock of the catastrophe of World War II still lingers in the subconscious of the Russian population. It has now been reactivated.
After Russia, under Putin’s leadership, had succeeded in improving the livelihoods of the population, younger Russians in particular were very attached to the West. They too did not understand the true nature of Western capitalism. Consumption and carefree living filled her life.
Two episodes from my life as a German.
In the 1970s, high-ranking Russian officers stayed with my father. His buddy, who later became general of a tank division in Jena/Thuringia, another general who was later promoted to the Moscow general staff, and other officers. Warm good people. It was celebrated merrily and the consumption of vodka was enormous. There was laughter, discussions, songs sung and the accordion hardly took a break. Suddenly there was absolute silence and an elderly officer with white hair was crying softly. He was visiting the GDR. In a naval captain’s uniform. He was a submarine commander. I was just a stupid teenager. I did not understand. To me, these men were heroes. Why could someone like that cry? My father explained to me that he fought in WWII and all his brothers died in it.
In 2014 I chatted with a student in Donetsk and other Russians. I chatted as the shells pounded on the apartment buildings. I thought the Russians would hate me as a German now. Because Germany is attacking Russia again. But that was not the case. They admired German culture and engineering. (Had they only known that the first was destroyed – Americanized – and the second is in decline.) Their feeling was just a failure to understand why Germany was doing this. They couldn’t understand. So just a surprise.
Now in 2022, most Russians no longer want to communicate with us Germans. bitterness and anger.
On the subject of the United States. George Carlin said, “Capitalism is a freak show and we in America are in the front row of it.” Everything capitalism is and does is only possible through the brainwashing of schools, universities and the media. Charles Bukowski said, “Do you remember who you were before the world told you who to be?”
I am not blaming a people who have never had a chance to understand the world and life. Except for a privileged few.
Um die Gefühle und das Denken der Russen im Jahr 2022 zu verstehen ist Geopolitik nicht ausreichend. Man muss auch die mentale Ebene verstehen. Es ist nicht nur Propaganda oder psychologische Kriegsvorbereitung der Bevölkerung, was wir in Russland sehen. Der Schock über die Katastrophe des Zweiten Weltkrieges ist noch immer im Unterbewusstsein der russischen Bevölkerung vorhanden. Er wurde jetzt reaktiviert.
Nachdem es Russland unter Putins Führung gelungen war, die Lebensgrundlagen der Bevölkerung zu verbessern, waren vor allem die jüngeren Russen dem Westen sehr zugetan. Auch sie verstanden das wahre Wesen des westlichen Kapitalismus nicht. Konsum und sorgloses Leben füllte ihr Leben aus.
Zwei Episoden aus meinem Leben als Deutscher.
In den 70er Jahren waren hohe russische Offiziere bei meinem Vater zu Gast. Sein Kumpel, der spätere General einer Panzerdivision Jena/Thüringen, ein anderer General, der später in den Moskauer Generalstab befördert wurde und weitere Offiziere. Herzliche gute Menschen. Es wurde lustig gefeiert und der Konsum von Wodka war gewaltig. Es wurde gelacht, diskutiert, Lieder gesungen und die Ziehharmonika machte kaum Pause. Plötzlich war es absolut still und ein älterer Offizier mit weissen Haaren weinte leise. Er war in der DDR zu Besuch. In der Uniform eines Marinekapitäns. Er war Kommandeur eines U-Bootes. Ich war noch ein dummer Teenager. Ich verstand nicht. Für mich waren diese Männer Helden. Warum konnte so einer weinen? Mein Vater erklärte mir, dass er im 2. Weltkrieg kämpfte und alle seine Brüder waren darin gestorben.
2014 chattete ich mit einer Studentin in Donezk und anderen Russen. Ich chattete, während die Granaten auf die Wohnhäuser einschlugen. Ich dachte, die Russen würden mich als Deutschen jetzt hassen. Weil auch Deutschland wieder Russland angreift. Aber das war nicht der Fall. Sie bewunderten die deutsche Kultur und Ingenieurkunst. (Hätten sie nur gewusst, dass das Erste zerstört wurde – amerikanisiert – und das Zweite im Niedergang ist.) Ihr Gefühl war nur das Unverständnis, warum Deutschland das tat. Sie konnten es nicht verstehen. Also nur ein Erstaunen.
Jetzt 2022 wollen die meisten Russen nicht mehr mit uns Deutschen kommunizieren. Verbitterung und Zorn.
Zum Thema USA. George Carlin sagte: “Der Kapitalismus ist eine Freakshow und wir in Amerika sitzen darin in der ersten Reihe.” Alles was der Kapitalismus ist und tut, das ist nur durch die Gehirnwäsche durch die Schule, Universität und Medien möglich. Dazu sagte Charles Bukowski: “Erinnerst du dich, wer du warst, bevor die Welt dir sagte, wer du sein sollst?”
Ich klage kein Volk an, das nie eine Chance hatte, die Welt und das Leben zu verstehen. Ausser einige wenige Privilegierte.
Free market capitalism is human freedom which has lifted people out of poverty. It all about the ability to buy and sell on an open market. Crony capitalism and socialism are all about restricting freedom under phoney pretense.
A concise statement of the truth.
In addition, going off the gold standard has harmed the ordinary person and benefited the banking and political elite because they get to print as much phony money as they can get away with and saddle the ordinary person with the immense debt and the ensuing higher prices that comes with hyperinflation of the money supply. It is no coincidence that Russia, China and other countries are buying more gold for their reserves and rejecting the bankrupt US dollar as the reserve currency of the world.
At one time many years ago gold and silver were money used by ordinary people. IMO they are the basis for an honest monetary system and are effective governors of inflationary tendencies of bankers and politicians.
It also creates billionaires and oligarchs like Soros who influence ordinary lives and policy far more than any elected politician.
In the end the mega rich call the shots and there is no way of holding them to account. With each recession, covid, this war, trillions move from middle class to mega rich. It becomes a cycle. The top eventually gets so powerful that capatalism unregulated eats its own children because it turns into unaccountable tyranny.
To paraphrase Churchill on democracy – capitalism is the worst of all systems except that it’s better than all the rest
That Churchill quote something that should be pondered and repeated often.
People like Soros need the law on their side. That’s where the politicians come in. It’s a symbiotic but corrupt relationship. Without the willingness of the state to intervene in the economy to protect special interest groups/individuals, Soros would be just an ordinary man, who creates his wealth by satisfying consumers or illegally by extortion, fraud or theft.
“Unregulated capitalism” as you put it eats its own children because the state is morally and legally corrupt. It refuses to treat all of us as political equals, to stay out of our lives except when we violate the person and property of others.
So in one sense I agree with you. But that’s not the fault of the free market. The market is corrupted by the misuse of the law, i.e. of the state.
There was made in 1978 a very good USA documentary series about the Great Patriotic War 1941 – 1945. It was narrated by Burt Lancaster and called “The Unknown War”. It was shown on Russian TV with a Russian language voice over. I have lived for many years in Russia and first watched “The Unknown War” in 1993 in Russia, in Voronezh, with my then Russian wife-to-be and my future mother-in-law, who was born in 1944. When watching the series, my wife’s mother suddenly said to me: “Why is this series called ‘The Unknown War’?” I told her that it was because most Americans know very little about it, that they believe that the war against Nazi Germany was won mostly by the efforts of the USA. To say that on learning this fact, my mother-in-law was amazed would be a gross understatement.
I never really understand why people say “feminized ” or “chick think” woman fought of the eastern front ,and not just as nurses but pilots ,tankers and snipers ,plus I have run into some pretty seriously aggresive woman ,outright vicious and mean.I mean have people ever seen the dynamics of a group of females? Its terrifying
My uncle taught high school and said when girls fought it was really serious they would go for blood .
Look at Irma Grese at Buchenwald or a host of other females in history who where absolute monsters.
Well, I’ve read hundreds of books on the subject myself.
Also all situation reports of the German OKW from 39 – 45. (OKW = Oberkomandoe Wehrmacht) There was a report every day and it contained everything…… For example the question of whether submarines could be dismantled into parts to transport them to the Mediterranean without having to cross the Strait of Gibraltar.
The fact that Russia was and still is given less attention in this country is the result of the cold war.
And it is also thanks to the language and the Cyrillic script.
Very many can speak English, except me….(((-: but only very few Cyrillic.
That’s why the part of Russia on the war is also neglected.
Without Russia Germany would have won, there’s no doubt about that…… but that’s about all you hear and see here. We would love to see Russian films… translated, of course.
The same applies to books, we hardly have anything to read that Russians wrote and that was also translated.
Without the US helping to industrialize the USSR and providing massive resources including aircraft and tank designs and food, the USSR would have lost the war. But I agree, they did the lion share of the fighting. I personally wish the US would have stayed out of the war as the America First patriots wanted. Charles Lindbergh is an unsung hero on this account.
The USA gave Russia 14,000 aircrafts, 8000 tanks, 400,000 vehicles, lots of artillery guns canned food with the Russian lend lease act. We basically gave them everything they needed
If anyone is interested in reading an honest meticulously researched account of the “Great patriotic War” I suggest “When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler” by David Glantz and Johnathan House.
The authors both taught at Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth Kansas and the research came straight from German and Russian archives.
It’s a rather dry and technical read but the picture it paints is a very different one than the generally accepted account written from the German perspective written by Franz Halder. It’s not that Halder was lying but Halder only saw what he saw and had reputations to uphold … this account was written from direct evidence after all the actors were dead and all the archives were opened in 1995 then revised as new evidence came to light.
It doesn’t paint the Russians in an especially pretty light and it certainly destroys the myth of the superhuman German soldier. You’ll find that Germany lost the war in the holding battles in front of Moscow and Hitlers stand fast order may have saved Germany from being routed in the winter of 1941 / 42 before the USA entered the war and any US lend lease made it to Russia.
Aside from Solzhenitsyn’s books, there are a couple of books on the Battle of Stalingrad written by Russians: “Life and Fate” a novel by Vasily Grossman, a WW2 combat journalist who witnessed the defense of Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin. The manuscript was confiscated by KGB in 1964 prior to publication. A microfilm was smuggled out 10+ years later and was published in many languages. Then there is “Stalingrad Battle of the Century” by Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov who was a Soviet military commander who led the 62 Army at the Battle of Stalingrad.
To quote from the translator’s forward of Chuikov’s book: “The Battle of Stalingrad was an exercise in extermination. It is extremely difficult to create an objective history of war and battle. Those who were not there can only produce accounts based on hearsay. Those who survive remember through a lens of passion and trauma. Surviving Stalingrad and remaining sane was quite an accomplishment. Vasily Chuikov was a man hard as rock. His men called him ‘Kamen’, the Stone, and he was sane when he wrote this book. His story is worth hearing.”
The most important book of the year, and arguably the decade, regarding the decline of the United States was published about two months ago by Michael Hudson. It is entitled The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism. Now 83, Hudson has been and continues to be at the top of his game as an economist and economic historian. In the late 1960s it was his analytical work that conclusively demonstrated that the exodus of the USA gold stock that had been accumulated during World War II was due entirely to overseas military spending. A few years later, while most economists, Treasury and FED officials were clutching their pearls over the severance of the USD from gold, it was Hudson who figured out that the 4x increase in crude oil prices in the wake of the Yom Kippur War presented the US the opportunity to set the dollar up as the international reserve currency. About the same time he published his first book, Super Imperialism*, which described the process by which Wall Street had become the dominant financial operator in the world over the course of the 20th century. Coming from the classical left himself (decidedly not at all like the so-called left in Anglo-America of the 21st century) he expected the book to gain a lot of traction in that quarter. It did not, but instead was adopted as a playbook by Wall Street to ramp up what they had previously been doing on an ad hoc basis. Thus the now collapsing “Rules Based Order,” wherein we make the rules and you take the orders. Perhaps the best way to sum up Hudson’s outlook is a twist on the title of Frederick Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. The rentier infested financial capitalism that now pervades the United States and its allies, which is essentially the path Hayek asserted would lead to wide-spread prosperity, has instead put us and our allies on that road. And he is not optimistic about whether we can get off of it.
* Super Imperialism is still very much pertinent. Hudson published the third edition of it in 2021.
You can get an introduction to Hudson’s thinking from a two part interview posted about a week ago at Naked Capitalism:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/michael-hudson-talks-about-almost-everything-with-jonathan-brown.html
The post contains links to videos of both interview parts as well as a complete transcript of both.
Alternately you can listen to the two interviews as podcasts:
Part I: https://shepheardwalwyn.podbean.com/e/michael-hudson-part-i-a-philosophy-for-a-fair-society/
Part II: https://shepheardwalwyn.podbean.com/e/michael-hudson-part-ii-a-philosophy-for-a-fair-society/
As to who started the intentional bombing of civilians, here is an excerpt from J. M. Spaight, Principle Assistant Secretary to the British Air Ministry book “Bombing Vindicated”,
“We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland. That is a historical fact which should be publicly admitted…. It was a splendid decision . It was heroic, as self -sacrificing as Russia’s decision to adopt her policy of scorched earth”.
The night bombing of London in September 1940 followed six successive British attacks on Berlin. Britain perfected the fire bombing of cities as outlined in Irvine’s book, “The Destruction of Dresden”
Yep! It’s undeniable fact that the British began indiscriminate bombings and night bombings. In fact, in these WW2 documentaries they show clips of US fighter planes just flying around shooting at any vehicle moving and then eventually they’d find one that would blow up because it had a stash of weapons etc but most if the time it was just indiscriminate.
The Murmansk Run
My father was a merchant seaman and he felt like they contributed a lot:
“The voyages across the North Atlantic and from Iceland to the Russian ports of Murmansk, Archangel, and Kola Inlet involved more hazards than in any other kind of naval duty. Severe weather was commonplace. Ice fields could be encountered at any time of year. Floating mines were a constant menace. German submarines, surface craft, and warplanes could strike at will from nearby bases in German-occupied Norway. And, prior to the spring of 1943, when an effective Allied antisubmarine offensive got underway, ships and men making the so-called “Murmansk Run” had about one chance in three of returning.”
My father was also a merchant seaman and did the Murmansk run a number of time. He was torpedoed twice … both time off Iceland, both times ended up in a life raft for an extended period. He was an engineer and on one occasion the torpedo struck the engine room just as he left killing everyone down there.
He was also involved with the repatriation of Russian POW’s to Murmansk after the war. The POWs were guarded by GRU to keep them from jumping overboard and he said you could hear the machine guns going after their cargo departed. They were warned not to leave the ship but he took a walk and was confronted by NKVD guards, detained but was allowed to return to the ship … thankfully the NKVD was merciful that time.
Hollywood, a poor educational system, general lack of intellectual curiosity, and now social media are corruptive forces. All of these forces are backed by commercial forces that brainwash Americans. For example, McDonalds, Burger King et. al. are “force multipliers” for Hollywood tall tales via their promotional ads and campaigns.
Despite Russia arguably slapping the US/NATO upside the head in Syria and now in Ukraine I bet anyone over 90% of Americans STILL believe that US is militarily superior to Russia when i concluded close to a decade or more ago it wasn’t.
There is a general disdain and lack of appreciation for history. This is excacerbated by social media and 24 hour news that leads to quick takes and “mental” saturation. It’s among the reasons the “West” is losing interest in Ukraine.
This lack of appreciation of history and liberal arts in general is nothing new, over 15 years ago I was academic counseling at a local university and several students I encountered said , in relation to standard Western Civ. class: “Why should I be interested in the White Man’s history?” As a Black person with a BA in and who has always been fascinated by it especially in terms of geo-political forces I was somewhat shocked, but even more disappointed. My personal and educational experiences are among the reasons I vehemently reject tearing down statutes and removing the names of persons from buildings, because those are emblems of history you don’t have to like or endorse them they represent that era for better or worse.
One a personal note, my parents were Mississippi share croppers from birth until they were in their 30’s, my grandparents sharecroppers all of their lives. So for me those mental midgets and twerps were tearing down symbols of my families lived experiences.
To get back to the topic. This ignorance is incredibly dangerous especially when Twitter is hiring spooks and ex-members of the FBI and national security state in droves, no doubt to add “commissioned and non-commissioned troops” to the information wars. As for change of behavior when the truth is revealed? I’m not optimistic. BBC, Crux, and a host of new outlets continue to lie and warp the reality in Ukraine, just to to YouTube channel and hit the news selection.
In a “informed democracy” citizens would want heads to roll for the largest criminal enterprise in US aided and abetted by MSM and Big Tech. I say largest criminal enterprise in US history because unlike invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan every citizen of the world let alone the “West” and the United States will feel the affects of these sanctions for decades. With Russia in the military and economic driver’s seat we’ve only begun to feel the effects of Russia tightening the screws.
There is no simple fix for inflation and recession, not interest rate hikes that drive down wages, household income as well as employment. Expect stagnation and a Japan-like lost generation. We don’t have the leadership needed to course-correct America or the EU for that matter, and we will have fewer and fewer financial resources as recesssion, stagnation, near or actual depression is FURTHER exacerbated by DE-DOLLARIZATION.
Jim Cramer and CNBC
https://www.npr.org/2006/11/24/6535284/retreating-youth-become-japans-lost-generation
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1539364282520969218
https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/22/the-federal-bureau-of-tweets-twitter-is-hiring-an-alarming-number-of-fbi-agents/
It’s all by design. The final battle ground is that of the mind. It’s why I chose to go into clinical psychology because I think the only way things will change is when people learn to be civil, objective, and seek the truth. I know that it’s all about mind control these days which is what social media, TV, sports etc is all about. I think God is so bad that our youth between the ages of 10 to 24 are more likely to die by suicide then by being murdered. The second leading cause of death where are teenagers is suicide and third is murder which just goes to show how powerful social media and the TV has become. In order to maintain A strong consumer they need to instill unconsciously a deep sense of insecurity within each person and it’s a whole lot easier to do it to kids because they are far more vulnerable. Do you notice how everything is about comparing each other in social media? Everybody is taking pictures of themselves trying to show that they’re living their best life and trying to make everybody else jealous of who they are and what they have? They are dividing us through all this consumerism and it’s why the media is so afraid of the word nationalism because nationalism is the antidote to all of this bullshit. If we were a much more nationalistic country we would start seeing each other as different and start seeing each other as brothers and sisters. Yet, since we become a globalist hub for all the nations in the world we now live in a country where Asian immigrants live in One city Hispanic immigrants live in another city and all these immigrants will come to America but they will not integrate into the American culture and nation which is creating a huge just connect and problem within our country. We need to have nationalism and we need it badly. When we hear nationalism we only hear about white nationalists and all that bullshit but what happenedTo the days when we used to be proud of our country and be patriotic?
Ditto for the edit function before hitting send. : )
Additionally, the supply chains further disrupted by sanctions and consumer inflation due to China tariffs no end in sight, and no signs of US companies re-shoring.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/brics-working-on-new-global-reserve-currency-and-alternative-mechanism-for-intl-payments-vladimir-putin/articleshow/92407851.cms?from=mdr
https://think.ing.com/opinions/brics-the-new-name-in-reserve-currencies
https://tass.com/economy/1469823?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/swift-dollar-decline.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/business/russia-oil-china-india-ukraine-war.html
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/india-china-may-be-buying-more-oil-from-russia-than-known-says-us-122062300105_1.html
European vassals will rue the day they failed to look out for their own country’s interest. One thing I despise about the Greens in US and EU, they never cite nor complain about the Defense Industries/Military Industrial Complex being the #1 polluters in the world. Let’s pick on cow and sheep farmers. Do you understand why I say there is no leadership now?
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/dutch-farmers-protest-plan-curb-nitrogen-pollution-2022-06-22/
True. The Brits colonised Palestine. They were indebt to Jewish banks since about 1923 I think and they agreed to give them the land of the Palestinians in return for money.
The rest I will read more about. That is shocking if Netanyahu said that.
The Straussian neo con Jewish Israel America is not transparent. It’s not considered ok to raise dual loyalty issues but when 10 senior officers of state in the US are Jewish with neo con or Straussian backgrounds you have to ask.
BRIEF HISTORY LESSON:
ACLU “THEN”:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/e-lessons/skokie-and-brandenburg
ACLU NOW:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial/629808/
https://www.insider.com/aclu-wrote-amber-heard-washington-post-oped-johnny-depp-2022-6
REFLECTIONS OF ICONIC FORMER ACLU LEADER:
https://www.thefire.org/so-to-speak-podcast-transcript-ira-glasser-aclu/
“Europe and the UK would be speaking German,”
German is the second language for most people in Central and Eastern Europe. It has been, for a long time, even before WWI.
As an aside; I’ve heard it said that English, German and Russian are the only languages that you need to know, in order to get around Europe
Actually English is a second language for most European and not German. In fact, most European nations require in their public and private schools to teach the kids their homeland language and also English. FYI if you go to Europe most Europeans now I can speak English pretty well. However most Europeans do not speak German.
Larry thanks for posting “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
In our case I think we belong to the last category of SunTzu “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”In the video you posted not even a single American answer who won the freedom from or who were the founding fathers. How is that for total lack of self awareness. Then with the media and our esteemed leaders telling us day in and out that we are the best, greatest so on so forth that bring us to total lack of knowledge of our adversaries. With such a population adoring those great leaders how can we loose?
When I first starting writing for World at War back in the day, I asked my editor a rather smart question.
“What articles are you looking for?”
His answer. “I need stuff on the Eastern Front. Stuff that is from the Soviet perspective. Most of my writers (americans) will only cover the Eastern front if it involves the SS.”
So I started books on the Eastern front and started getting published a lot more than some other people.
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