I'm going to keep returning to this point until I get an answer to it. After all, the Soviet Union actually began the War as a de facto member of the Axis, with the Soviet Army fighting alongside that of Nazi Germany, and notably staging a joint victory parade through the streets of Brest-Litovsk. (If there had also been a Soviet satellite in Spain at that time, then we really would have lost the War, and that very early on. Hitler would then have turned east anyway, but our war would have been over by then.)
Yet we managed to forgive Stalin. And more than once, we indicated our willingness to forgive Mussolini, too; indeed, returning to the "balancing the Myth of Winston Churchill" of earlier today, in 1940 Churchill had been all ready to give Mussolini Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, and if he had wanted them also Kenya (with its large community of white settlers), Uganda, and what was then Somaliland. Instead, he later had to content himself with carving up the Eastern Mediterranean into a Soviet and what he intended to be a British sphere of influence.
Of course, some people don't like to be reminded of Stalin. People with backgrounds in Straight Left, for example.
And I must also return to the supreme tragedy of the twentieth century, namely the decision of the United States to join the Allies in 1917, rather than, by refusing to do so, to force them to make an equitable peace with the Central Powers, rather than the guarantee of another war that was the Treaty of Versailles.
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Your neocon enemies, like all neocons, are Nazi-Soviet Pacts made flesh.
ReplyDeleteThey are people whose Fascism is a linear development of their Stalinism or Trotskyism, and has in no sense replaced or even altered it.
And of course they are allied to old-fashioned common or garden Nazis in Bosnia, Kosovo, Denmark, Flanders and other places.
The point about Spain is hugely important and you should write more about it.
ReplyDeleteIt is notable that the more Catholic a part of Germany was, the less likely it was to vote Nazi. And it is likewise notable that the Catholic-inclined Mussolini regime was always the weak link in the Axis and surprised a lot of people by joining the War in the first place.
The very Catholic Franco and Salazar stayed out altogether and became Western allies after the War. But Hitler overthrew just as profoundly Catholic a society in Poland, as well as a government drawn from and supported by the most Catholic sections of society in Austria.
Keep it up over Churchill. The Tories have always claimed him as one of their own even though he barely was and they routinely despised him long after the War.
That way they were able to keep themselves in existence when they should have just disappeared in the late Forties. "We are the party of Churchill," they said, as if he had won the War on his own.
He regarded himself as above party, but that was just pomposity married by that stage to senility.