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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

Edit: This wasn't meant to seem curt - sometime though brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, perhaps if the Junkers or some other more traditional conservative faction had risen to power rather than such a reactionary party, Germany may have done X, Y, and Z. But it seems crass to me, almost prideful, to look at the 'unhinged gangsters' who 'volunteered' to beat the Spanish communists and then got the band back together in the Rhineland, Osterreich, the Sudetenland, Danzig, etc to give the Bolsheviks a genuinely good go and say 'if only!'

Yes, they lost, but they fought! By Jesu they fought. And it's just as easy to say 'it would've been better if they hadn't' as 'it would've been worse.' Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero). But he chose to go! He chose to fight! That he happened to drown when someone else might've not and (swamped the saracens) instead doesn't make him an 'unhinged gangster'

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

It would be pretty hard for Churchill to declare war in 1939. You might not know as much about WWII as you think.

Hitler declared war on Poland, in the face of explicit threats by Britain and France to join such a war on Poland's side. He could have just, y'know, not done that, and if he had he'd be remembered as the second Bismarck for the Anschluss and Munich.

Calls to mind the old joke about how if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle. Today we're used to the idea of a tiny shriveled ball sack-in-cold-weather Germany without a Baltic presence, but at the time, saying "just forget about the Germans in Poland" (which had just reappeared as a political presence for the first time in like 400 years) was a non-starter

was a non-starter

That doesn't stop it from being Hitler's choice. "I want to do X" is difference from "I was forced to do X."

"I want the communists to win the War in Russia and China" is difference from " I was forced xyz"

I am not being cute or trolling and don't know how to say otherwise. Our entire discourse is poisoned but please try to consider that sincerely. Or don't. Trying too hard to care is more cringe than it's ever been so not appearing to try too hard is a sign of legitimacy

I am not being cute or trolling and don't know how to say otherwise.

Stop engaging in rhetoric and deflection, as opposed to defending your substantive claims or acknowledging your mistakes. This will remove the appearance of trying to be a cute troll.

You: "I want to do X" is difference from "I was forced to do X."

Me: "I want the communists to win the War in Russia and China" is difference from " I was forced xyz"

Also me: Please consider this as it is rather than making me regret not dressing up the claim with rhetoric and deflection

Bruh

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

That's certainly a take, and a depressingly common one around here it seems.

Setting aside the fact that Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940, I'm just going to reiterate what I said the last time this topic came up a month ago.

Hitler's diplomatic position in August of 1939 was essentially that of a belligerent drunk at the bar who keeps getting in people's faces and asking "Oh Yah? Watch'ou goanna do about bro?" and then acts surprised when someone decides to "do something about it".

The Nazis were already on thin-ice for continuing their territorial expansion post Munich, rebuking the Anglo German Naval Agreement, and harassing neutral shipping in the North Sea wich the British regarded as their back yard. If they didn't want a war with the British, they could have easily avoided it by not doing any of those things and more critically by not aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks against a country that both the British and French had a security agreement with.

Edit to add: That last bit in particular also demonstrates that all that talk from current year nazis about "racial brotherhood" and "opposing communism" is a crock of shit.

For all the talk condemning "brother wars" Prussians seem particularly prone to engaging in them and as much as I want to make a joke about Martin Luther being to blame I'm worried about someone falling into the same trap I almost did with @Southkraut's comment down thread where I almost chewed them a new one before I realized they were being facetious.

We can, obviously, have it both ways and more than one thing can be true at the same time. Ethnic germans really were getting persecuted in newly-Polish territories. Maybe their diplomatic position was that of a belligerent drunk too.

We can, obviously, have it both ways

No, no you can't.

Agree to disagree?

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).

Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.

/u/johnfabian /u/netstack I may be a few generations removed from the old country but I sure as shit aint Chinese

Also Heil Hitler, we must have a bratwurst and save the Fatherland

it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"

Eh, whether or not the OP has any credibility, I’d like to avoid this brand of mockery.

Germany could have not invaded Poland.

Because I live up on a hill in a big house with a nice moat of acreage in a very safe place, this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times.

Had the Polish not been feeling their oats from their victories over the Soviets and actively persecuting Germans in their recently acquired territories shrug

this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times

And Putin's invasion of Ukraine was also a strategic mistake.

I think that this is not obvious, at least not yet. If there's a Taiwan blowup ending in nukes, and Putin stays out of it, he takes Ukraine. Yes, he could have done that with less casualties by waiting longer, but on the other hand a lot of those casualties work in his personal favour due to selectively conscripting the least-loyal elements of the Russian populace (and also to some degree the Ukraine mess has made a Taiwan blowup more likely).

selectively conscripting the least-loyal elements of the Russian populace

why do you think that? Right now, Moscow and St Petersburg are way less conscripted and they are also less loayal to Putin

Prisoners, fringe regions of Russia of dubious ethnic (as opposed to ideological) loyalty. I can't say for sure about the latter, but I've heard of protests in Bashkortostan regarding the conscription.

This would suggest that Hitler and Co's priority was not combating Bolshevism but expansionist German nationalism. Glorifying Hitler for fighting against the Bolsheviks ignores the series of anti-Boshevik states that he destroyed on the way to Russia. Poland, as you note, had just come off fighting a war against the Soviets.

Hitler was never really very anti-Bolshevik, never moreso than he was anti-Slav. Had Hitler aligned with Poland and the Czechs against Russia, things might have gone differently, n'est pas?

Of course there is no readily available source, because of course there isn't, and I apologize but I'm just not gonna fight upstream to find the link, but there was a proposed German-Polish non-aggression pact renewal

I'm fairly certain from Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which I listened through recently that there were current treaties obligating Germany to respect and protect Poland's borders, and certainly there were treaties promising to hold to current Czech borders at the time that Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hitler was rather known for failing to respect treaties.

What would be more interesting, though still less dispositive than his actual real actions, would be if you could find a movement within Naziism (meaning Hitler) to rally an anti Bolshevik coalition in eastern Europe that predated Nazi plans to invade Poland. I don't think you can because Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Baltics were more or less part of the plan from Mein Kampf onward as I understand it.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole so please don't think I'm trying to be, but there's a lot of 'Rally Europe against Bolshevism' stuff in Mein Kampf

There's also a lot of "take over Poland and enslave/eliminate the inferior Slavs" stuff.

What comes to mind?

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  1. Rightful German Clay, had to protect the German minorities.
  2. They attacked us first! Remember the radio station!
  3. Had to be done to push the starting positions of the inevitable anti-bolshevik war further East.
  4. Lebensraum. We needed space to live.
  5. It was just an anglo puppet and we had to call them on their bluff.

Alright, alright, I'm just fooling around here.

Yes they fought, but their having fought no matter how much and how well doesn't save the Germany of today. We can trace our unmaking right back to them. Barbarossa, for all of his ineffectual campaigns and fruitless labors, left the Germanies roughly in the state he found them in. The Nazis took a struggling Germany and, for all the little glories they won, burned it right down to the ground and left the withered remains to the mercy of the victors. Certainly perfidious Albion had its schemes and probably quite a laugh at our fate, perhaps on can believe that Hitler himself would have preferred peace with them, but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

Unless you subscribe to some school of thought that completely denies the significance of consequence, I find no way to absolve the people who had complete authority over the country from complete responsibility for its destruction. Whatever our enemies might have done, however justified any given aspect of German military campaigning was, given that kind of authority those kinds of results speak for themselves.

And so as to not neglect the Unhinged Gangsters bit - I stand by that. Something like the Night of the Long Knives is decidedly ungerman.

but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

No! That's the point! England is a rotten mess of God only knows what and they're the one's who won!

That's true enough, but it wasn't so in 1945.

Thank you God for granting us the wisdom of our ancestors and the gift of distance from their mistake to properly evaluate them

Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.

It doesn't take a Churchillian titanic view of history to understand the trends and forces of the war were beyond the scope of who happened to hold office at the time. Churchill and his ultra-conservative faction had feared the rise of German naval power for half a century - unabated after the Great War - before their promise to Poland gave them the necessary excuse to smack Germany back down. And what happened to Poland after the war?

Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

You think if the Republicans had won in Spain this would somehow have led to the Red Army conquering all of Europe Command and Conquer style?

No, but I love the throwback, you or anyone else want to fire that back up sometime for nostalgias sake?

I think the Bolsheviks very openly and actively wanted to unite the workers of the world which would have certainly included going to the Atlantic if someone hadn't stopped them

In real life, the Soviets only reached even as far as Berlin because of copious American and British assistance. Without that, they might have at best fought the Germans back to Barbarossa start-lines. On their own, they barely beat Finland. The Red Army marching all the way to the Atlantic is ridiculous. "If it wasn't for us, the communists would have taken over!" was a useful bugbear for everybody from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco but Bolshevik conquest of Europe was always a fantasy.

Okay I'm open to it - let's say you're right - doesn't that make US the bad guys?

doesn't that make US the bad guys?

Wrong question. Ask: Were US good or bad players of the great game?

Look at the game board. At the beginning of session, there were seven players. At the end, only two were left.

The Red player who held one sixth of the board at the start, succesfully defended himself and was able to snatch few more squares.

While the Blue player beat and outmaneuevered all others and owned or controlled everything else.

Some people who are never satisfied might bitch that Blue victory should be even more lopsided, that if Blue optimized his play to perfection he might prevent the Red from taking the few squares he gained.

Or team color one could've teamed up with other color and the communists could have not won and their cities could've been firebombed into ashes instead.

On Earth 2 we're not surrounded by soul-sucking Brutalist architecture that seemingly popped out of nowhere and DEi tribunals that no one can remember voting for

I see what you were going for, but no, at the end of the war everyone like me had their both-metaphorical-and-often-much-more-literal dicks smashed into the dirt by the communists and their allies

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If the US is seen as the civilizational inheritor of the British Empire and French Empire, though (which collectively birthed it), then the map is less impressive, though.

No, because Stalin, bad as he was, was not as bad as Hitler. If Germany had not attacked the USSR, chances of the Red Army taking even half of Europe (let alone all of it) are basically zero. He did attack Soviet Russia, which in a roundabout way, led to Soviet domination over half of the continent, which they never would have achieved otherwise, and yet was still a preferable outcome to Nazi domination over the entire continent. Hitler did far more damage to Poland in four years than the Soviets did in forty.

No, because Stalin, bad as he was, was not as bad as Hitler.

I'm not sure I agree, but I think he was more easily contained than Hitler. Effectively, appeasement worked with Stalin: the US and UK granted him dominion over Eastern Europe, but unlike Hitler, Stalin didn't try (through direct force) to advance further.

If Germany had not attacked the USSR, chances of the Red Army taking even half of Europe (let alone all of it) are basically zero.

Considering that the Soviets built up an armored force and a bomber force larger than that of the rest of the world combined, plus trained and fielded more paratroopers than the rest of the world combined as well, I wouldn't be so confident in this view.

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Hard disagree but thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly

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