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"The enormous latent military power of the Soviet Union had been invisible to German planners, who foolishly dismissed the fighting prowess of Slavs, the sophistication of Soviet weapons systems, and especially the unparalleled organizational powers of the Communist Party, which could calmly and efficiently mobilize tens of millions of men to fight."

Beyond the Hollywood style bluster and propaganda of western media, history repeats itself, as the US is quietly discovering now.

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Minor comment/critique: You seem to obsesss a bit as to whether your posts are too long or too infrequent. So long as they are engaging, I (personally) don't think it matters too much. Most people can't write something this long and keep their audiences engaged. So long as you can, don't worry about the length!

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Big Serge,I hope all of this is going into a book,count me in on the pre order list

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Outstanding, simply outstanding work 👍

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And to think: the US teaches that Operation Overlord began the fall of Nazi Germany. The more posts of yours that I read, the more the scales fall from my eyes. Thank you.

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Very prescient work considering the same hubris and cluelessness is currently fomenting in Washington and the Pentagon with the even more ridiculous idea that attacking China as well is somehow going to lead to success. Personally, the US military seems far more inept and corrupt than the Nazis ever were and they must somehow intrinsically know this and everything being projected today by the Pentagon is really an outsized bluff. If not, they have gone full retard. And we all know what you’re never supposed to do.

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Here we go *grabs drink*

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Mar 23, 2023·edited Mar 23, 2023

Brilliant Analysis! Thank you for that insightful analysis. You are so right! The insane decision by Hitler to conquer the Soviet Union, egged on by his hubris of Aryan superiority and fatal misunderstanding of the capability and resolve of the Soviet Union (essentially the Russian colossus), doomed Nazi Germany, the minute that decision was made.

In some ways, we see the same hubris and failures being reenacted by the Combined West, in which I include NATO (analogous to Nazi Germany in pre WWII Europe) in the Ukraine war against Russia.

Firstly, the Combined West, with its enormous economic sanctions preparations for punishing Russia (well before the shooting war), still failed to crush Russia economically by those unprecedented sanctions. They overestimated their ability to do so. Very similar to Nazi's assumption of economic windfall through occupation of fertile and mineral rich lands of Western Soviet Union (aka Ukraine). Instead, the sanctions boomeranged to hurt the Combined West (with the exception of resource-rich US). A colossal strategic blunder by the Combined West!

Secondly, the Combined West underestimated the military industrial power of Russia. Whether it was the hubris of superiority of its race compared to slavs, or merely intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions, the effect is the same. Russia did not run out of shells or missiles or tanks. Instead, the Combined West, with its depleted miserable industrial production capacity, stares defeat in its face, due to its inability to keep up with Russia in existing armament and armament production. Turns out , Russia has an almost unlimited supply of armament due to its production capability and strategic stockpiles. The same problem was faced by Nazis, who did not expect limitless manpower and industrial resources that Soviet Union could marshall. Again, a colossal strategic blunder!

Thirdly, Russia is executing very skillfully a war of attrition, chewing up Ukrainian formations in an artillery war, where it excels, with minimal (but considerable) losses of its own manpower and materiel. Getting into a war of attrition against Soviet Union sealed the fate of Nazi Germany. The same fate awaits the Combined West. Third colossal blunder!

Fourthly, for Soviet Union, the war was existential, not one of conquest as it was for Nazi Germany. This allowed unimaginable sacrifices and hardships to be borne by the population. More than 25 million died in its Great Patriotic War, but the Soviet Union managed to crush Nazi Germany. Contrary to Western folklore, it was the Soviet Union that was mainly responsible for the fall of Nazi Germany, not the Italian and Normandy invasions by UK and US. This situation now repeats itself in Ukraine. For Combined West, the proxy war is one of conquest to maintain its hegemony over the rest of the world. For Russia, it is essentially existential. It will fight to the last Russian, if need be. Fourth colossal blunder by the Combined West!

Finally, the biggest and most consequential strategic blunder of the Combined West is in pushing Russia into the arms of China, by simultaneously pushing for a proxy war in Taiwan! The consequences are epochal! The unsurpassed industrial might of China (even ignoring its human resources) and immeasurable material (oil, gas, minerals and food) resources of Russia cannot be matched by the declining Combined West, with its emphasis solely on financial might. The inevitable emergence of a multipolar world, actively embraced by the Global South (because of the bone-headed moves, such as draconian sanctions and confiscation of private and state assets, which could one day be applied to anybody the Combined West chooses) and loss of the reserve currency status of the Dollar, Euro and Yen, is the dire consequence of colossal lack of imagination and blind belief in exceptionality and impunity of the Combined West. This is going to resonate for generations to the detriment of the Combined West. Already, BRICS has surpassed the G7 in economic might, when GDP is corrected for purchasing power parity (PPP). The trend is ominous!

Of course, all this presumes that there won't be a Third World War with exchange of nuclear strikes. If the Combined West chooses, in desperation, to escalate to this level in a conflict, where Russia has escalatory dominance, then ... ... humanity will be the ultimate loser and it will all be the result of strategic blunders and hubris of the Combined West (led by the 'exceptional' USA), bent on imposing its financial and military domination over the rest of the world.

On reflecting about the current events, it is but impossible to ignore certain facts. The Combined West, dictated by the US and UK, is an extension of old Europe (that includes UK)! Europe has always been resource poor, for centuries. In old agrarian societies, it did not matter much. But modern societies need mineral and food resources to thrive. Europe is deficient in both. So the only way for Europeans to build a 'Beautiful garden' was to conquer and pillage the 'Jungle', aka its colonies! That they have done successfully over the decades, with Spanish Empire in Latin America, British Empire in India and China, other European nations in Africa, etc. British managed to steal $41 trillion from its empire, mostly India. China was subjugated and humiliated for a century. So was India, Africa etc. One can regard US, Australia and New Zealand as essentially extensions of UK and results of its colonial conquests. No wonder, they act in unison in geopolitical matters. Germany, Japan and Korea are now mere vassals of Anglo-Saxons. But European colonial mentality is not gone! Instead, it has metastasized into conquest of the world by financial means. The petrodollar serving as the world reserve currency, combined with technological superiority, has enabled the Combined West to dominate the world, through overt and covert threats to economies of nations that do not tow its line in the global arena.

All this has been orchestrated by the so-called neo-liberals and globalists in UK and US, who have forever dreamed of imposing unipolar hegemony over the world through the so-called "Rules-based International Order", where rules are arbitrarily imposed (to subjugate) or revoked (for impunity) by the Combined West, at its whim. International order based on inviolable "International Laws," as encoded in the United Nations Charter and imposed collectively by the UN Security Council, has been conveniently abandoned by these people. It is a mistake indeed to call them neo-liberals or globalists. Instead, the appropriate terminology is neo-colonists or neo-hegemons. We do a disservice to the world by not using these labels, because a Globalist would work toward the welfare of all the world's nations and not just the Anglo-Saxons and their vassals.

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An accurate and comprehensive summation of Barbarossa's failure. Very impressive, Serge.

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In high school, I learned history

In 2022 & 2023, I am learning the truth

Thank you for your amazing writings

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An excellent write up Serge. Russia's ability to absorb defeats, retreat, regroup and return to the offensive could be observed on multiple occasions, for those who wanted to look. Napoleon's Russian campaign, the Russo-Japanese war - where Russian's eastern army was repeatedly defeated, but always successfully withdrew and regrouped in good order, denying the Japanese the decisive win they craved. For the Japanese, their 'victory' over Russia virtually bankrupted the country and set back its development for decades - the definition of a Pyrrhic victory. The same defeat and recovery can be observed during the First World War, and in the Russo-Finnish war of 1940. Everyone focuses on the Finns spirited defense, which stalled the Soviet advance for a matter of weeks. The critical outcome of that war was that the Finns lost as the Soviet's learned from their mistakes, regrouped and then continued the attack.

It's important to note that German war-gaming before Barbarossa all ended with German defeat, if the war became protracted. German intelligence about the Soviet Union was completely incapable, but that was the inevitable result of ideology. The west is doing it all over again, intelligence surrendering to ideology. https://stolzuntermenschen.substack.com/p/old-mother-hubbard

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Mar 24, 2023·edited Mar 25, 2023

To begin by saying that I only comment on the first two chapters up to Molotov's photograph because that's what I read. Not for lack of admiration for the author but for lack of time. To say that despite a fairly recent battle and war, there is no more mythologized battle in history! Especially because this comment could have been written as early as 1945 in the US. Who swallowed the WW2 story that Nazi prisoners from eastern front told them in the same Russophobic spirit with which characters like Patton and Churchill ended WW2. Full of desire to rearm nazi Germany to go back to fighting only Russia on the Eastern front! With what army after Berlin Batle it was never understood!? This after Russophobic invertebrates like Churchill spent the whole of WW2 crawling to Moscow crying for help! Where Stalin received him in an office with a trampoline.

Back to Barbarossa It's a myth, starting with the lack of reference to the nationalities that made up the Nazi army that invaded Russia in 1941! Basically from all over Europe. Germany alone never managed to mount the Barbarossa operation with only Wermarcht soldiers. Undoubtedly an alliance with even more nationalities than those fighting Moscow in Ukraine today. In many respects, a remake. Especially because if any army has also shown itself to be a worthy successor to the Wermacht in recent decades, it has undoubtedly been the US army. Both in terms of invasions and in terms of military doctrine and tactics such as blitzkrieg. All stemming from learning from Nazi officers after WWII. The ones that didn't die or went straight from the eastern front to madhouses! And the reason for an army with so many nationalities marching across the great European plain towards Moscow is the same as always, more than an anti-communist alliance in 1941 it was actually a Russophobic alliance!

Which brings me straight to the second point or second idea that also appears in the text according to which it seems that Moscow fed some illusion in WW2 that Hitler's final objective was not always Russia!!!! When Hitler hadn't said anything else in the last 20 years!!!! Since he wrote Mein Kampt in prison! The EU itself in 2019 use the same purposeful misinterpretation of the Molotov Pact to approve an infamous resolution blaming both Moscow and Nazi Germany for WW2?! 77 years after celebrating many times together in Normandy the victory over Nazi Germany! We will say today, very hypocritically! Perhaps as a thank you for the nation with the most dead and after Stalin had spent the entire 1930s trying to convince England to both stop the rearmament of Nazi Germany prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles! With money coming from all over the Anglo-Saxon world! Like Nazi Germany's submarine program which continued to receive funds from the US via Switzerland throughout WWII! Maybe that's why it is also today the only truly dangerous armed wing of all the US Armed Forces, without great antidotes like the current missiles for ducks like the aircraft carriers! Anglo-Saxon universe, namely the perfidious Albion that had already provoked the WWI because of the Tsar's approach to the cousin Kaiser! And cousin King George V watching ships disappear over the horizon with the Empire.

And back the EU infamy that is perceived today was already part of the anti-Russia propaganda for the current conflict. That is, to legitimize the provocation of the conflict by the US as well as all the anti-Russia measures that followed by the collective West. And two years later, in 2021, the EU stopped condemning the glorification of Nazism in the UN! Already after having also legitimized the 2014 coup in Ukraine, from which emerged a First Interim President, Oleksandr Turchinov, who the EU itself had already condemned in Parliament for being openly neo-Nazi!

And to demystify the Molotov-Ribentropp Non-Aggression Pact, which apparently may even have given Russia some illusion that it would not have to face Nazi Germany despite all of Russia's industrial efforts in the 1930s precisely to arm himself for this purpose, the very Poland also signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler before WWII!! That like the Russian Pact was already signed never to be fulfilled by both parties. Like thousands of pacts throughout history! The US is still tearing up the Disarmament Treaties it signed! And Germany and France dealt with the Minsk Accords as we know!

A pact that only came about after Moscow's intelligence realized that France and England had asked Hitler during the Munque Accords in 1938 to attack only Russia, which France and England turned a blind eye to! Russia, according to historians after the opening of the historical archives of the USSR, sought mainly two objectives with the Pact. Time to arm itself precisely against Nazi Germany given the industrial backwardness with which Russia entered the 20th century! In addition to the wear and tear of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I, no one was less prepared for WWII than Russia!

And also to try to annul a "pilgrim idea" that still crosses the minds of Polish nationalists today! With which Russia was at war practically the entire period between the two WWA. Piłsudski's Intermarum Federation as a barrier between Russia and Western Europe as if today there was still a Russian Empire or USSR?! Indeed who reads Piłsudski's speeches today will notice many similarities with Zelensky's rhetoric about the great barrier to Russia. Probably written by the same Russophobic Anglo-Saxon intelligence that has also funded Banderas since the end of WWII! Intermarum barrier from Baltic Sea to Black Sea as it's also perceived by many fans in the US! That manipulate Rumsfeld's new Europe precisely as a barrier against Western Europe! Which it seems that only Western Europe doesn't understand! Even after Borrell admitted that the two main pillars of European growth in recent decades were Russian gas and trade with China! Even after the US blew up the Baltic gas pipelines!

And Hitler lost WWII in Russia in the same way that military personnel in the past were much more classified than a megalomaniac with a tiny mustache. Because Russia has always proved insurmountable at home! As confirmed today on Donbass. Where ironically most Nazi prisoners died in coal mines in the decade following the end of WWII! And of course a lot has to do with the dimension of Russia itself! Which is not quite a gas pump as some would have believe!

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'Instead of fighting a war of maneuver and movement (the type of war that Germany excelled at), they were now waging a battle of attrition, which was the sort of game that the Soviet Union was always going to win. ' And so to Ukraine...and Bakhmut.

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Thank You, Big Serge. I had studied Operation Barbarossa in college, but a lot of that was the schemings of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill.

This is a unique presentation of the facts and implications, which defiy simpistic summation.

Thank you, again. The truth has no shortcuts.

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Incredibly wise analysis. Indebted.

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This is an absolutely fantastic piece!

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