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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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But larger organs of power and money have both adapted, the way evolving systems tend to do, and have found ways to capture market forces and regulatory oversight, and entrench their enshittification without fear of ever being unseated. Late stage (enshittified) capitalism and late stage democracy are feeling their oats.

Most noticeably, in my opinion, was the way the American power-sliding-leftward culture captured academia and media, which used to be the oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism. Now, all problems in society are laid at the feet of capitalism and free markets without examination of other possible governmental or societal causes. Any power shifts to the left are framed as “reforms,” and power shifts to the right are framed as “corruption” and “fascism.”

Was academia and media really all that different back then, as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism?" Or was it largely a façade then as it is today?

Earlier today Ron Unz posted a lengthy article about some WW-II revisionism synthesizing a bunch of his earlier commentaries on the topic, but what surprised me most was a related article he linked containing shocking pre-war correspondence that I had never heard of before, although I am no stranger to WW-II revisionism.

The context is that when the Germans captured Warsaw they captured the original facsimiles of secret correspondence from the Polish Ambassador to the United States, the authenticity of which have been confirmed many times over. Here's a document from the collection, a secret report dated January 12, 1939 (pre-war) by Jerzy Potocki. This is a translation of the full secret report on the situation in the United States as perceived by the Polish ambassador:

There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible–above all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited–this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe.

At the present moment most Americans regard Chancellor Hitler and National Socialism as the greatest evil and greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with a great many words and with most various calumnies incite the public. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states.

It is interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet Russia is almost completely eliminated. Soviet Russia, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in a friendly manner and things are presented in such a way that it would seem that the Soviet Union were cooperating with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever propaganda the sympathies of the American public are completely on the side of Red Spain.

This propaganda, this war psychosis is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is inevitable. At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America also must take an active part in order to defend the slogans of liberty and democracy in the world. President Roosevelt was the first one to express hatred against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose; first he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from difficult and intricate domestic problems, especially from the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating a war psychosis and by spreading rumors concerning dangers threatening Europe, he wanted to induce the American people to accept an enormous armament program which far exceeds United States defense requirements.

Regarding the first point, it must be said that the internal situation on the labor market is growing worse constantly. The unemployed today already number 12 million. Federal and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken place. But how long this government aid can be kept up it is difficult to predict today. The excitement and indignation of public opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other, have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights.

As to point two, I can only say that President Roosevelt, as a clever player of politics and a connoisseur of American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from the domestic situation in order to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand, to enhance the war menace overhanging the world on account of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by talking about the attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend. He described it as the capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace.

The prevalent hatred against everything which is in any way connected with German National Socialism is further kindled by the brutal attitude against the Jews in Germany and by the émigré problem. In this action Jewish intellectuals participated; for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and others who are personal friends of Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-mongers. These groups, people who want to pose as representatives of “Americanism” and “defenders of democracy” in the last analysis, are connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.

For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to put the President of the United States at this “ideal” post of champion of human rights, was a clever move. In this manner they created a dangerous hotbed for hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a mysterious manner. Roosevelt has been forcing the foundation for vitalizing American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring enormous stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is extremely convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is ever growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity of defending faith and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.

At least from the 1939 perspective of the Polish ambassador to the United States, the purported role of the media as "oversight mechanisms keeping a free people educated and informed about the agglomerating nature of socialism and fascism" was a farce then as it is now.

Or was it largely a façade then as it is today?

It was a facade, but it was a facade for multiple competing groups.

One of the biggest errors one can commit is reading history through the lens of the present rather than through the lens of the past. Yes, we now know that the USSR became a military juggernaut in WWII and subsequently became a superpower at the head of an international league of communist states whose power only rivaled the US and the West more broadly. But things looked different in 1939. Sure, Stalin was a strongman and a thug, but so is Paul Biya, and most Americans haven't even heard of him, let alone are concerned about him. I'm not trying to equivocate the USSR in 1939 with Cameroon today, but if one were trying to evaluate international threats back then, it would be ridiculous to put the Soviet Union in the same league as Germany. Russia had always been a backwater, and Soviet attempts to industrialize and modernize hadn't really borne much fruit, resulting famines due to agricultural "reforms". Furthermore, Stalin's purges had left the military apparatus in complete disarray, and this is after they had collapsed in the first World War and not exactly had much success before that. At the same time, Germany was a historically strong power is intent on remilitarizing in contravention of the Versailles treaty, all the while spouting rhetoric that war was necessary for national hygiene and demonstrating that not only did it wish to annex heretofore independent countries that had German-speaking populations, but that it would invade other countries as well, even after it had explicitly promised not to. If Roosevelt had taken the same level of caution toward Stalin as he did toward Hitler, he would have been an idiot.

One of the biggest errors one can commit is reading history through the lens of the present rather than through the lens of the past.

Indeed, and I can't think of a war where the post-war mythos served such a profound role in the post-hoc moral justification for starting the conflict than WWII.

Let's assume for argument's sake that Kennedy's view that neither Great Britain or France would have declared war against Germany over Poland without pressure from the United States. What is the justification for this pressure from the United States under the scenario? There's no credible threat against France or Great Britain, much less the United States itself.

If you remove the post-war mythos surrounding Holocaust and Hitler as the anti-Christ of post-war Progressivism, what in 1939 would motivate FDR to risk such an enormous conflict with disastrous consequences, and contrary to the opinion of 95%+ of the American public?

I'm sure there are many reasons we can point to, but none of them formulate the popular narrative we live under today for why we fought this war, and I think that says something profound.

In case you missed the point of my post, Hitler was the bigger threat. Roosevelt knew this—which is why he was so aggressive in his foreign policy—because all the evidence at the time pointed toward it. The "postwar mythos" you speak of is merely confirmation of this. You act as if Roosevelt was either entirely irrational or had some ulterior motive. And for what it's worth I trust Joe Kennedy about as far as I can throw his corpse. The guy was an egomaniac and an antisemite who made self-serving comments after the war to make it look like all the smart money would have backed him had it not been for that conniving Roosevelt. Even Chamberlain changed his tune when it became clear that Hitler had no interest in being appeased.

In an alternate universe, FDR doesn't die in 1945. He refuses to nuke the Japanese and the war drags out for 2 more years, tripling the number of American war dead. In 1949, after an incredible 16 years on the throne, FDR retires with a popularity rating in the teens. In the mean time, the Soviet Union has taken advantage of his weakness to absorb large amounts of Europe into its sphere including Austria and Finland. Hokkaido is now a Russian island. The communist party wins a plurality in French elections. In the United States, FDR is widely regarded as akin to Neville Chamberlain.

To me, it seems like FDR's biggest sin was that he was simply wrong about Communism. The Pollyanna attitude of his administration toward the Soviet Union is shocking when we read about it today. And his interventions during the Great Depression were largely ineffective. FDR died at the right time. His historical legacy remains intact because of Truman.

In an alternate universe the US just settles on a peace deal with Japan rather than surrender. Instead of relying on a racist caricature of the Japanese being completely insane and willing to fight to the last man, woman and child if the white man ever sets foots on their sacred shores, I think it's more prudent to assume that the Japanese high command recognized that the war was over and was looking for ways to end it on equal terms. Which, according to the mainstream US story, was exactly what was happening and was indeed the purpose behind the alleged Japanese plan of 'Ketsu Go'.

The notion that the only way to end the war was with American boots in Tokyo is a mythical one. The US did not need to drop the bombs since it did not need the complete subjugation of Japan. On that note, the US had no grand strategic forethought that could reach past the nose of the allegedly jewish propaganda described above. Leaving them with the USSR in Europe and China in Asia.

As is the case with most of the foreign policy ventures of the past, we are living through the failures of 'great' historical figures who amounted to little other than drinking the cool-aid of their time. With history serving as a sugarcoat that we can use to help convince ourselves that we are the end product of 'great' men making the best out of a bad situation. Things just happen, the moral arch of history bent in such a way that we had to do what was done. So no matter how inhumane and horrible we acted, just know it was ultimately justified. God bless and Amen.

Dropping the bombs was not simply about ending the war, it was also about sending a message how the post-war world would shape up (especially to Stalin and Soviet Russia): look what we can do. Don't piss us off.

I think it's more prudent to assume that the Japanese high command recognized that the war was over and was looking for ways to end it on equal terms.

No, it's still not. The fight-to-the-last-man "caricature" didn't come from racism, it came from a combination of the Japanese "Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign and their army-prompted civilian mass suicides on already-taken islands. The Japanese high command wasn't looking for ways to end the war before any nukes were dropped; they were attempting a coup d'état to try and prevent a surrender after two nukes.

No, it's still not.

It is and the Wikipedia link in your linked comment says exactly the same thing I did.

While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of invading and occupying the Home Islands too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat.

Like I said in my comment, the only reason for nuking Japan was to induce unconditional surrender. And my overarching point was the US did not need Japan to surrender in the first place.

In an alternate universe you could also have posited what actually happened and say this would have destroyed the legacy of FDR and Churchill, you cannot underestimate the power of post-war narrative building. I grew up hearing "If the United States hadn't defeated Hitler we would all be speaking German right now" and genuinely believing that we stopped Germany from conquering the entire world. So that map looks good in comparison to that post-war narrative and the legacy of those involved remains intact.

If France and Germany stay out of the war, what alternative map do you think arises that looks better than the one we ended up with? An Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviets was bad, but it's a dream world in comparison to one dominated by the Germans. Considering that the non-Jewish Poles either executed or forced into labor by the Nazis during the relatively brief period of occupation numbers in the millions, being a Soviet satellite was a walk in the park in comparison. More likely, though, the Germans would have lost the war in a similar manner to how they actually did (no, I don't think there were enough troops defending the west to have made a difference), except the Soviet Steamroller wouldn't have stopped at the Elbe. Stalin would have taken all of Germany, plus Finland, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Italy. And that's assuming that Hitler never pushed into Denmark or the Low Countries, which would have been easy pickings. I don't see how the US, UK and France all stay out of this war and the result is somehow better.

An Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviets was bad, but it's a dream world in comparison to one dominated by the Germans.

I can imagine a dream world where Germany becomes the leader of a continental European entente that includes Poland in the fold. Hitler made peace offers in 1940 that entailed making Poland an independent protectorate, is that really different from their EU and NATO membership today? That map looks like the map of today but minus a Cold War that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war...

Hitler wanted an alliance with Poland against the Soviet Union, and the Poles were inclined to negotiate with the Germans until some bad timing with leadership transitioning and pressure from the British to not negotiate with the Germans.

When Germany was in its strongest negotiating position in 1941, the Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess solo-piloted an airplane to Scotland, strapped on a parachute for the first time, and bailed out in an attempt to go around Churchill and make contact with England's peace factions. Apparently the peace offer was "the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over a planned attack on Russia". It's hard to doubt the sincerity of Rudolf Hess wanting to avoid war with Great Britain given what he did as the leader second in command only to Hitler.

Hess, by the way, was tried as a major war criminal at Nuremberg and convicted. He received a sentence of life in prison, and remained in prison longer than any other German leader until he committed suicide at the age of 93.

I won't speculate who would have won a war between Germany and the Soviet Union in either of those alt-history scenarios. Whoever wins that war, there is no chance in my mind the outcome would have been worse than what actually happened, with Churchill refusing every peace offer made by the Germans and settling for nothing less than unconditional surrender after the complete destruction of Europe and tens of millions of deaths, the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe, and the "denazification" psychological warfare that consolidated the truth regime we all live under today.

I can imagine a dream world where the Soviets become the leader of a continental entente that includes Poland in the fold. Is the Warsaw Pact really any different than EU or NATO membership today? That is, I can if I pretend that the USSR wasn't a horrible state that killed millions and violated the human rights of everyone else. You can continue to play a game of "let's pretend" and claim that anti-German propaganda was merely post-hoc rationalization for the US getting involved in war, but it doesn't fly. The German state actually was that bad. Any "independent" Poland in such a system would only have been independent to the extent that the German transplants would have had some form of self-government after liquidating the native population. This isn't some wild speculation; it's what Hitler said himself, and what Hitler started to implement during the occupation.

Is the Warsaw Pact really any different than EU or NATO membership today?

Yes, because the Warsaw Pact became the immediate enemy of Western Europe, and West Germany (composed mostly of former Nazi leadership) became the immediate ally of the West. How is this at all coherent? Why couldn't we just skip to that part where Germany is allied with Western Europe against the Soviet Union (which is what Hitler explicitly wanted) without destroying Europe and gifting the USSR half the continent? If Poland had entered the fold as a satellite for Western Europe as Germany had wanted, and as Poland is today, then that is the more logical outcome unless you buy into the post-war propaganda lies that Germany aspired to conquer Western Europe and the world. Hitler also wanted Great Britain as an ally against the Soviet Union, so why was a Total War with unconditional surrender necessary to align West Germany with the West against the USSR?

The US, Great Britain, and France wanted war with Germany and Germany did not want war with them. Instead, we fought an entire World War and destroyed Europe in order to create a pact for a true enemy to the West. It's completely incoherent and unjustifiable without the post-war mythos.

That was the appraisal of General Patton by the way:

We may have been fighting the wrong enemy (Germany) all along. But while we're here (on the Soviet border), we should go after the bastards now, 'cause we're gonna have to fight 'em eventually.

Patton wanted to arm the just-defeated Germans and attack the Soviet Union, proposing we "may have been fighting the wrong enemy." How do people's hearts not sink for Europe when they realize what could have been avoided if the West hadn't waged total war with unconditional surrender demands on Germany, rebuffing Germany's peace offers every step of the way? Obviously, their mind is on the post-war mythos rather than the reality of the situation at the time which is much harder to defend without relying on those narratives.

You're leaving out the part where the Nazis still control Germany and Eastern Europe. The situation today isn't what Hitler wanted because Poland and all the rest are actually independent countries run by their own people and not satellites settled with German transplants with the native population relegated to second-class citizens at best and exterminated at worst. They also have at least some semblance of modern democratic, liberal institutions that Hitler never would have tolerated. This is what the West thought was worth fighting a war over.

Yeah, I was trying to think of places that the Soviet Union would have snatched with a weakened U.S. and it wasn't easy because they had already snatched so much. I think unquestionably Hokkaido, Austria, Finland, and Greece. Beyond that, I don't know. Maybe Turkey, Cyprus, parts of Iran?

Why FDR continues to get a pass for enabling and celebrating a genocidal dictator I'll never know.

Definitely Turkey. The USSR trying to wrest the straits away from Turkey after the war is the reason it's in NATO.

Wouldn’t your point be considerably undermined by the near indisputable fact that Nazism was, in actual fact, a severe threat to both fundamental human right to life as well as world peace? And the fact that despite all this FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis? There is no global Jewish conspiracy.

It was a threat to Europe certainly, but I don’t think it would have affected the Americas as much. They were genocidal especially against Jews and Romaní. But given the oceans that surround the American continent and the fact that the shortest pacific route would require a launch from the USSR, which I don’t think they could do without taking Moscow.

The threat is moral. The retreat of democracy, liberalism, human rights, and other enlightenment virtues. And certainly after the war the narrative of the Allies (except the Soviet Bloc) who later became NATO “saved the world” with the center of the alliance in Washington DC, who could boast a strong economy and military readiness because those oceans mean that war didn’t destroy our cities or kill our civilians. This same “save the world” motif tends to show up when we want to go to war. Every war since then has been fought “to stop human rights abuses.” Putin has in recent times been recast as hitleresque in the sense of seeking to destroy Ukraine, and wanting lebensraum. Even NATO bombings in Serbia were cast as stopping genocide.

Most of those later stories are at least somewhat true. But the larger point is that the logic of NATO’s right to stand astride the globe and to sanction or bomb or invade are based on the logic of WW2. We are holding ourselves out as moral paragons on the basis of human rights and liberal democracy and free trade as the proper way to do things.

Wouldn’t your point be considerably undermined by the near indisputable fact that Nazism was, in actual fact, a severe threat to both fundamental human right to life as well as world peace?

All Great Powers are a severe threat to both the fundamental human right to life and world peace, this isn't saying much. Are you saying Germany had a plan to attack the West? That's a popular conception but one that is also dismissed among the reflection of "insiders." There's an interesting 1945 diary entry from James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense:

Played golf today with Joe Kennedy [Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Great Britain in the years immediately before the war]. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain’s position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy’s view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt’s urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn’t fight; Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war.

What Kennedy told me in this conversation jibes substantially with the remarks Clarence Dillon had made to me already, to the general effect that Roosevelt had asked him in some manner to communicate privately with the British to the end that Chamberlain should have greater firmness in his dealings with Germany...

Looking backward there is undoubtedly foundation for Kennedy’s belief that Hitler’s attack could have been deflected to Russia…

The idea that the media is so full of this cynical, power-seeking narrative building today, but in the 1930s was when it was actually dedicated to the truth of "keeping a free people educated" is what looks naïve in the context of these insider perspectives.

So Great Britain took a stand and pressured Poland to not negotiate a settlement over 95% ethnically German Danzig. Then Great Britain declared war on Germany after their invasion of Poland, which the Germans did not expect, then however-many-tens-of-millions dead and the Soviet Union conquered half of Eurasia, including all of Poland... If you don't trust the media narrative-building today it should also make you somewhat suspicious of the narrative-building of the past.

I don’t think you can simply call the entire body of WWII scholarship “suspicious narrative building”. I’m especially astonished to see an actual argument… arguing that the West’s meddling caused the war? Dude. It was brutal and vicious German expansionism, abetted by Soviet greed, that caused the invasion of multiple neighbors, an outright war of conquest. And that’s not even getting into the obvious Holocaust and associated war crimes angle. I do appreciate the source but it’s the height of narcisssism on the part of the two Americans quoted to take full responsibility for the UK going to war. They aren’t as influential as their egos think. Don’t forget Poland was the last straw of a long string of events and invasions. If you want to find a culprit, Munich is a good start as even Hitler admitted he was willing to back down if push came to shove. But the acquiescence gave him a false sense of weakness for later moves. In particular, it’s well documented Hitler thought until the very end that the UK wouldn’t join in and was a bit in denial when they did — but a lot of that had to do with his idea of Britain as a racially superior country, and in his schema the racial winners didn’t fight each other, and less the actual actions of the UK itself.

FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis

If I recall correctly, America was attacked in Hawaii by the Japanese, and that was used as justification to land Americans in France to fight the Germans. If FDR failed to bring the US into war with the Nazis, what am I thinking of?

Yeah that’s exactly where it breaks down, that’s a misunderstanding. Germany declared war on the US! Not the other way around. It wasn’t actually a total given that we would have preemptively declared on them first. And if we had declared first, it would have been a much more difficult sell to the public. Being the recipient, even if it may seem a bit of a technicality, nevertheless quieted a lot of domestic opposition. On top of all that, there’s the military reality of the Pacific campaign — pure numbers aren’t useful, as you need lots of ships to make use of those numbers, and time. While Europe was a lot easier to just ship over men by the hundred thousand much sooner, once the war is truly Axis vs Allies.

What was used as justification to land Americans in France to fight the Germans was the fact that Germany had declared war on the US shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Do you really think the US was neutral in the war before that time?

That is irrelevant to what was used as justification for the Normandy invasion, which was what OP's claim related to.

You don't have to answer the question if you don't want to. The assertion was "FDR actually failed to bring the US into war against the Nazis", but to me that depends on whether or not the US was actually neutral before Germany declared war.

That was not the assertion that I was responding to.

The US had been waging undeclared war in the Atlantic against Germany for about a year prior to Hitler's declaration of war.

Germany declared war on the United States, which was very welcome to the UK and Winston Churchill. There was actually some debate in congress I believe about whether Pearl Habour meant that the US should get involved at all in Europe, and it may have hypothetically gone the other way. The Soviets did not declare war on the Japanese until late in the war, and visa versa the Japanese did not feel under obligation to declare on the Soviets when Hitler launched Barbarossa.

Hitler for some reason thought the US was weak and it was in Germany's interests to openly declare war, which was... bold.

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