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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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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.

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