At last, some attention to the behaviour of the Lithuanian partisans, opening the door to the examination of the conduct of Soviet and Soviet-backed forces generally during the War, and to the character of the early State of Israel, rather more Soviet than Western-inclined, treated with corresponding wariness by the United States, a haven for war criminals who happened to be Red rather than Brown, and to this day not exactly the sort of place of which the American Right would otherwise approve.
And opening the door to an examination of the War itself, which could have been a mutual tearing apart by Hitler and Stalin, Hirohito and Mao, but in which, facing no threat, we instead chose to ally ourselves with one pair of monsters against the other, thereby subjecting ourselves to six years of nightly bombardment, massively and irreversibly disrupting our established social order, expending vast sums that might have been used to fight the Five Giants, spurring on the Holocaust, requiring us to give in to the Marxist terrorists in Palestine (who themselves scorned refugees from Germany), preventing us from objecting to the forced evictions of the ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe (who, since they had not been in the Weimar Republic, could not have voted for Hitler), forcing us to dismantle our Empire, and subjugating us to the Americans.
Which, in turn, opens the door to an examination of the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century, the American breaking of the stalemate between the Allies and the Central Powers, resulting, not in the return to the pre-1914 position that would otherwise have been inescapable (but with bellicosity exorcised from all the cultures in question), but instead in the disastrously cack-handed carve-up of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, in the emergence of the Soviet Union, and in the spitefully triumphalistic, manifestly unjust war guilt clause, which made the rise of Nazism inevitable.
I think the problem is that we initialy chose not to ally ourselves with Stalin. By rejecting his offer of alliance we, in turn, forced him into a position of quasi neutrality while Britain & France took on Hiler.Had Britain France & the USSR allied in dafencive pact with Poland, or even better Czechoslovakia WW" would either not have been fought or would have been over in weeks when the German General Staff saw what Hitler had got them into & shot him while resisting arrest.
ReplyDeleteWhatever one thinks of Hitler & Stalin - Germany wanted to expand & the USSR largely to be left alone & a sensible foreign policy would have been worked ob that basis. Once we were at war there was no way out except winning or losing.
We should never have had anything to do with either Hitler or Stalin.
ReplyDeleteDon't tell your regular correspondent Jock McTrousers - he thinks Stalin was a greatly misunderstood figure - who, amongst other achievements, killed fewer people than Tony Blair.
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