"But the Roosevelt administration, instead of slowing down shipments of trucks, tanks, and warplanes as the Red Army began its long “sweep westward” against an ever-weakening German Wehrmacht, instead ramped them up to something like hyperspeed."
The big US/UK fear was that Stalin would sign a separate peace with nazi germany. Moreover, the casualties that assaulting germany (without the USSR) would require would not win Roosevelt or Churchill many friends or voters back home.
Keep in mind that the majority of germany's combat power (and just about all of its european allies) were on the Eastern Front. The thought of any portion of those troops, planes, guns, etc. being freed up to fight in France or Italy did not exactly fill Eisenhower with joy.
Soviets had long unofficial negotiations with Germany beginning right after Stalingrad and ending somewhere in September 1943 in Sweden. Obviously, the USA was aware of them.
Both had these negotiations. But in different time periods. Soviets negotiated in 1943 when big parts of Western Soviet Union were still occupied. USA may have had direct or indirect negotiations with Himmler and associates in the beginning of 1945.
"I do think that it is possible for state actors to behave irrationally, and this does happen from time to time. I actually think it happens more frequently with U.S. foreign policy, which has always been subject to – not the vicissitudes of public opinion and/or “democracy” exactly, but a kind of emotional thinking, a fuzzy idealism about democracy, which has led to curious patterns such as the U.S. backing or installing figures such as Batista in Cuba or Diem in Vietnam before ousting them, responding to 9/11 with an ill-begotten crusade to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq, and other boondoggles."
Hell, the United States often behaves irrationally, and not because of an excess of idealistic zeal, but because it has so much power that it can try to brute force its will onto others.
To give an example, 2025 Russia would not try and force Paraguay into acting the way Russia thinks it should, because it cannot do so and any such attempt would wasting its time and squander resources and goodwill that it needs to husband for other purposes.
However, the United States has such an excess of power that it frequently gets caught up in stupid missions that seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, an entire sub-branch of the political lobbying industry is devoted to getting some congressman or cabinet member to adopt some wack cause as his own, in hopes that this will show up in a future budget or administration.
"OK, fine, we'll get State to set aside an earmarked fund to buy all the wooden arrows that Wakonda can produce!"
"OK, fine, we'll invade Absurdistan in order to support the Upper Revoltan separatist cause!"
It is also riven within by oligarchic factions — some of the apparently aimless lurching about on foreign policy being the sort of “externality” the rest of the world suffers as a consequence of the ongoing knife-fights in the US control room.
Interpreting the astroturfed meme wars raging on social media in The West (™) these past few years is the spiritual descendant of old school kremlinology, divining Soviet realities from tea leaves found in Izvestia and Pravda.
i think there's also a point to be made here about ideology informing the assumptions under which self-interested decisions are made: if you believe the assumption that the Iraqi (or Afghan, or South Vietnamese...) US-backed client state will be competent and stable, all these blunders look like great strategic moves. and at the time, the American state clearly believed those assumptions!
Public-facing rhetoric aside, I don't think anyone ever seriously believed that the Afghan or South Vietnamese puppet states were anything other than corrupt, brutal and incompetent, not to mention seriously unpopular. Certainly the information was out there for anyone who even sort of pretended to look.
The goal in Iraq was to turn that country into a failed state, and thus, no threat to Israel.
With all due respect, I don't think that's true; for example, the Bush administration did zero preparation for handling a failed state/insurgency situation in Iraq. Famously! And the justification for every investment of resources into Afghanistan and Vietnam was that they were temporary measures until the client states there could take over and handle things on their own.
I'm quite ready to believe that there were people in the US foreign policy establishment who saw the failures at the time, and played along with the party line through cynicism or naivety or whatever, but the institutions as a whole were incapable of anticipating or responding to these events. I'd argue that this is because they were ideologically unable to do so!
The US didn't prepare for a failed state in Iraq because that was a desirable outcome, even if they could not say so in public.
Note that the US left Iraq as quickly as it could. For that matter, those resources thrown at Afghanistan and Vietnam mostly flowed back to contractors, i.e. profit.
From certain lofty socio-economic niches in the USA/West? What look like abject failures to those who merely work, pay taxes and supply their children to grease the cogs of the war machine look like increased volume (with guaranteed higher profit margins!), improved dividends, stock buy backs to take corporations private & have all they have accrued from previous workers & investors all to themselves? And for personal funsies, a few % of the float can fund their third mega yacht.
If you were born on third base, are "morally flexible" and make the right noises? The opportunities are mind boggling... See video for an interesting case study:
Russian origins of WWI? Nice try, but by now, after 3 years of war in Ukraine, everyone knows about BRITISH (aka financial oligarchy with HQ in City of London) role in origins of both WWI and WWII (as well as the upcoming WWIII). It makes the only sense: All western wars against Russia are about grabbing Russian vast territories rich in natural resources.
Krainer's articles are based on these two books by historians:
Carroll Quigly: Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (1966)
Guido Giacomo Preparata: Conjuring Hitler. How Britain and America Made Third Reich (2005)
(Thank goodness there are still a few honest western historians who do not project their predjudices on objects of their research. This author definitely does not belong in this category, and unfortunatelly, we found out something not exactly flattering about Big Serge as well.)
Thank you for the recommendations and your reaction to ‚The Stalin‘s War‘. The more I read the book, the more I get incensed. A prejudiced, non-scholarly spin of historical events. I am too surprised at Big Serge‘s recommendation of this author
Cold war ,WW-2 & WW-1 isn't for resources as there were more significant challenges due to the communist USSR and WW-1 is for colonial division of world. The current war against Russia is for resources and more hegemony.
"Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend recaptures the distorted
personal and political narrative proffered by western historians for over 75 years. This magisterial work convincingly counters the biased distortions of both establishment and left historians through a balanced historiographic and philosophical exegesis of Stalin's complex life and leadership, as well as his contributions to socialism and the defeat of fascism. Losurdo's heretical counter-hegemonic history authentically counters the mythical, demonic figure of Stalin into a true-to-life biography of the most significant political figure of the 20th century. Fifteen years after its publication in Italian, Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's superb translation brings Losurdo's compelling corrective of Stalin to English readers."
Also, he'd just whacked most of the USSR's top brass who held preconceived ideas about warfare, the military equivalent of a climax forest burn off to stimulate forest regeneration? A nasty conflagration if you're stuck inside of it, but a couple of years later...
Loosing most of the military staff, from Tuchachevsky down in the late 1930s was disastrous for the Soviet Union. It was the poor show Russians held in the winter war against Finland 39/40 that convinced Hitler to pursue Barbarossa.
Stalin may indeed have had reason to suspect some in his military of being prone to foment a coup against his government (and kill him, naturally!).
He might also have had reason to suspect a few of his physicians... Though I suspect Лаврентий Берия was a more likely vector for Stalin's "death by natural causes" than those physicians? And the rest of the политбюро certainly had their own opinions about his ambitions?
Stalin certainly did throw out a lot of innocent (of those charges at least) babies along with the bath water during those purges- And he seldom undertook purges under a single motivation or with too narrow a range of targets, as long as the machinery was on motion, it could be used to solve numerous technically unrelated "problems"?
The USSR's failures during the first part of the operation to take Carelia as a buffer zone were at least partly due to Stalin's purges of experienced staff, it will be interesting to see if Trump's present day purging of our own general staff may have similar results?
The initial evidence against his military staff was actually fabricated by the Abwehr. It wasn't very difficult since Soviet and German military staff collaborated extensively in the 1920s and 1930s.
I have seen various claims that Stalin was manipulated into the 1930s officer corps purge by German intelligence psyops. At this distance in time, hard to know. The Viktor Suvorov “Operation Icebreaker” claim of USSR setting up for an offensive war to take Western Europe fall into the same category for me-
The 'whacking' may have been perfectly legal. The US Ambassador to Moscow at the time, Joseph P Davies, attended the trials of the officials and officers he had met socially. Davies came away convinced that they were as guilty as hell. Mostly Polish/British agents and the like.
How does it show that? Davies was a successful lawyer who had spent years in court professionally. He was chairman of the FTC, Ambassador to Belgium and in charge of War Emergency Problems and Policies at the White House during WWII. He was also special advisor to President Harry Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes with rank of Ambassador at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
90% of the evidence was false self-incrimination. People like Davies were not accustomed to that, so they fell for it. Arthur Koestler wasn't, so he wrote that wonderful "Darkness at Noon" book about it.
I am confused as to why there is any question about the post-Pearl Harbor focus on Europe.
The US had just suffered an enormous naval defeat at Pearl Harbor. The buildup of the US Navy to attack Japan across the entirety of the Pacific Ocean is a significant time and capital expense effort with no real threat of Japan on the US, whereas the threat of Germany winning against the UK and Russia - and forming Festung Europe against the US was very real.
I am curious as to you (Big Serge) and Mr. McMeekin's views of the McCollum memo and clearly related US actions in the Pacific prior to Pearl Harbor.
We know that now - it is far from clear that the US military and FDR knew that then.
Don't forget that US naval aircraft on said carriers, right after Pearl Harbor, were Brewster Buffaloes and the like - not the Corsairs and what not of later years.
C'mon - US Navy was assiduously studying Japanese carrier use in China-Japanese war that was already going on for 5+ years. It's not like they woke up in December 1941 and decided: now we need to build carriers! Anyway, at Midway just 6 months later US carriers carried the day...
China had no aircraft carriers - so not the least bit clear what you are trying to say. Was the Japanese experience of bombing land targets, largely unopposed, going to inform the Pacific-wide naval campaign for the US against Japan? Doesn't seem clear to me.
Furthermore, you did not address my main point: the US did not have warplanes capable of taking on the Zeros, in 1941, 1942 and parts of 1943. The F4U Corsair did not start serial production until 1942 - and pilots/crew need time to learn a new weapons system.
Japan had aircraft carriers from which it bombed targets in China BEFORE Pearl Harbor 1941. Obviously, the US navy was closely observing this. That China was underdeveloped at that point in time was irrelevant.
I repeat again, like I did previously: how does Japan bombing land targets against a largely helpless China, inform US Navy aircraft carrier strategists for an a fight is going to be carrier to carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
And you still have not responded to my comments about the old and obsolescent aircraft that were on said carriers, right after Pearl Harbor.
Even during Midway - the US Navy air forces suffered terribly against the Japanese. It is just that a single Dauntless formation managed to penetrate and successfully attack the Japanese carriers; all of the other formations were annihilated <- noting that the Battle of Midway was June 1942.
The depth of your so called analysis is exceedingly shallow.
There is famous story, in its most canonical version narrated by Feynman:
"Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
The very last question and answer in Serge's post reminded me about this story. I wanted to emphasize "come away with a begrudging sense of respect" and "grudging" in the question and answer, respectively. Sounds like something shameful, something you seek an excuse for. To me it looks like somebody acquired some sort of stereotype, assigned an archetype of a villain if you will, and and then, confronted with facts, needed to painstakingly push it away. The latter part, pushing away, is good of course, a fool would not be able to do that, but acquiring such a stereotype in the first place (just like that first measurement by Millikan) is a problem in itself. As a joke and ridiculous over-exaggeration, one almost needs to "Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Stalin" :) If you want to be serious, just substitute "Love" with "Think Objectively About" and do not rely on stereotypes and demonization which you would then need to grudgingly overcome.
A hypothesis on why even educated researchers are prejudiced against believing incongruous data or changing algorithms to match rather than working to discard the unexpected data points might be derived from biology & psychology studies of which part of brains exhibit higher activity when doing purely logical functions vs. those that show more activity when an existing belief is challenged... Which are similar to the types of brain activity found when another monkey tries to take away something YOU OWN.
---------
One parent in psych and the other in physics. I am damned and will end as Cassandra did, without so much as seeing a butterfly emerging from the container after the horrors.
Great point about America losing its constitutional government circa 1941. I have been using 1947 as the date, but it was the war that created the USA we have today.
The seminal work of "saving America from democracy" began long before- I would say the die was cast with the political maneuvering by Alexander Hamilton which lead to the coastal moneyed men and their spiritual descendants subjugating all other's interests ever since, leading to the first of an unbroken chain of failed attempt at a push back- the whiskey rebellion.
Representative democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
The technical term for this is a "beard". That is, a cover for the rulers to do what they want, even though the rulers themselves are wildly unpopular. After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
The people who choose the Robert Kagans for fast tracking in certain academic & NGO lanes, pay for the Robert Kagans post graduate education and then to have their publishing platforms and sinecures while they push those financiers agendas.
As you see with Stalin, he was a free agent and was not pursuing some financier's agenda. The conceit that power is downstream of money is wrong. Lots of time in history, if you had power, you then acquired money too.
Power and money are two sides of the same coin, these are never really separate. Look at Peter Thiel openly choosing our vice president in return for his financial backing and Miriam Adelson et alia essentially buying a couple of elections for Trump?
i think this is where the communism of the 'elites' is easy to spot; there isn't a higher rung, it's just an amorphous blob of those that control the money, with different aims other than maintaining the political status quo.
oh, so that's how it is, the honey of (mostly)objective military history covers the bitter kernel of western psy-ops :))))
ideology plays no role and nothing ever happens, no?
ussr was just another empire aiming at expansion and Stalin was paranoid(after the russian civil war to say that is not just in bad-faith is disgusting really); how many western states attacked the newly communist state though? i mean the west did the same thing as it did in china with the boxers rebellion and your conclusion after the ussr fighting the whole west is that...Stalin was paranoid. can't make this shit up.
ofc not a word about the banks and such, nothing about the us using germany as a tool against both the british empire and the ussr in the inter-war years, etc
boy, lemme tell you how it was before i hit that unsubscribe button cause the good parts are not worth this 'subtle' propaganda:
- the german empire started to be a great problem for the british one(with the us help)
- the brits tried to contain them hence wwi
- they couldn't mostly because russian collapse
- us happily did business with both parts and waited to enter the fray until both parts were exhausted and they could be sure that they will 'inherit' the earth
- a lot of capital crossed the ocean and the price for that was intervention in russia cause that capital was fucking afraid of the communism
- intervention failed so plan b was that crazy revisionist german guy already supported by the german capital
- from the very start the idea was to use the new german 'reich' against the ussr
- but that crazy german guy had this crazy idea that the international capital is just a tool for enslaving countries and turned out to be not so easily controlled after all
- nobody expected the fall of both poland and france in such short order and now a ussr-germany non-agression (or whatever)pact meant ousting of the said capital from europe and a huge part of asia
- the game now morphed into trying to destroy both germany and the ussr
- because of the ethnicity of those who controlled said capital and what that crazy german guy started to do on their coreligionist, destroying germany became first aim hence land lease to ussr and shit(worth mentioning that if the ussr would have destroyed the germans by itself and by god that would probably happen with even greater losses, europe would have been forever lost to that capital)
- after finishing with the crazy german guy they continued with the plan of destroying the ussr
- they thought they did it in '91 and they had a good party on those laurels
- but guess what, a historical phenomenon of the ussr scope doesn't just get deleted from the collective memory and those pesky russians didn't just roll over and here we are again
tl;dr it's the economy/class-war stupid, and the whole bloody history of the 19 century(and since) is just the global capital trying to eliminate any other alternative.
The Empire based bankster clans interest in maneuvering ALL the nation states & imperial actors with money, propaganda power plays and necromancer level 10 political thuggery are not unknown to those of us who still read.
And once again, nobody is perfect yet there is something to be learned from nearly everyone.
So America won World War II, losing 1/4 of a million men. Well, well.
According to you, the Russians were idiots for insisting on fighting with nazis 200 divisions...and you say this as someone who only reads a lot but "plata o plomo nada de nada"
Exactly, only an arrogant American STILL does not understand that Russians were (and again are!) under EXISTENTIAL THREAT coming from the West, and had no other solution than to defend themselves! They didn't choose to sacrifice 27 million people in WWII - this many people died while defending their homeland!
Fortunately, I know Scott Ritter who is normal and does not have predjudices against anyone, otherwise I would develop a very bad stereotype about American military experts (I am on the brink). Well, I will rather unsubscribe here, because I do not want to be exposed to western psyops. Brainwashing on stereoids!
Nobody is perfect. Nobody knows it all. And nobody is a rational actor free of prejudices and blind spots- Most definitely including Serge AND Scott Ritter, who I also have read.
I submit that people who only read writers and opinions they are predisposed to believe in are losing a critical dimension of situational awareness. And analyzing WHY the writing which gives you the most unthinking, visceral offense does so is a good tool for getting behind your own filters...
Perhaps you could re read the article, you seem to be taking an unusual spin. Both of these guys very well understand that the Russian people carried "the winners" of WWII to victory on a tidal wave of their blood-
They certainly are also aware of Nazi eugenics policy and specific plans for what % of conquered area population were to be liquidated after their victory. And that their intent included destroying whatever remained of the USSR (or any other Russian state) as an entity. Which we are in the midst of the second iteration now, the one that is a farce?
"Of course, one could make the counter-argument that Hitler would have been better off grudgingly allowing the Soviets to continue supplying the Wehrmacht with most of what it needed, rather than invading Russia to seize Soviet resources, but this would imply that he trusted Stalin, a man who had just used Soviet economic leverage to (try to) bully him into sacrificing vital German interests."
It is self-evident that Hitler would have been better off because in reality Hitler ended up dead in 1945 and Germany ended up destroyed.
"""" Yes, the Wehrmacht was by then badly attrited and it is certainly possible, even likely, the Red Army could have saved Moscow absent Lend-Lease aid."""""
RE: Moscow
No - certainly possible- anything is possible - but I do not think it probable
and I think even the Russians/Stalin would admit that
It was too close Germans were too close - there were there - Russians initially made errors and got lucky sending in reinforcements just in time - The Russians fought incredibly hard - Stalin had given orders no one leaves without dying first - no retreat. Every person in Moscow women and children, were out digging tank ditches - everyone alive - anyone that could carry a gun was given one
Moscow was extremely close to going down -extremely
For all who might read this -- I mention a Very well done initially RUSSIAN documentary
Janson Media released the English-dubbed version of the documentary series
Soviet Storm: WWII in the East. It was originally a Russian television series titled The Great War.
Or for all readers on Amazon prime for free - it will be worth your time
"But the Roosevelt administration, instead of slowing down shipments of trucks, tanks, and warplanes as the Red Army began its long “sweep westward” against an ever-weakening German Wehrmacht, instead ramped them up to something like hyperspeed."
The big US/UK fear was that Stalin would sign a separate peace with nazi germany. Moreover, the casualties that assaulting germany (without the USSR) would require would not win Roosevelt or Churchill many friends or voters back home.
Keep in mind that the majority of germany's combat power (and just about all of its european allies) were on the Eastern Front. The thought of any portion of those troops, planes, guns, etc. being freed up to fight in France or Italy did not exactly fill Eisenhower with joy.
Important note ^
Soviets had long unofficial negotiations with Germany beginning right after Stalingrad and ending somewhere in September 1943 in Sweden. Obviously, the USA was aware of them.
It is not USSR but USA which has those negotiations with germany
Both had these negotiations. But in different time periods. Soviets negotiated in 1943 when big parts of Western Soviet Union were still occupied. USA may have had direct or indirect negotiations with Himmler and associates in the beginning of 1945.
"I do think that it is possible for state actors to behave irrationally, and this does happen from time to time. I actually think it happens more frequently with U.S. foreign policy, which has always been subject to – not the vicissitudes of public opinion and/or “democracy” exactly, but a kind of emotional thinking, a fuzzy idealism about democracy, which has led to curious patterns such as the U.S. backing or installing figures such as Batista in Cuba or Diem in Vietnam before ousting them, responding to 9/11 with an ill-begotten crusade to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq, and other boondoggles."
Hell, the United States often behaves irrationally, and not because of an excess of idealistic zeal, but because it has so much power that it can try to brute force its will onto others.
To give an example, 2025 Russia would not try and force Paraguay into acting the way Russia thinks it should, because it cannot do so and any such attempt would wasting its time and squander resources and goodwill that it needs to husband for other purposes.
However, the United States has such an excess of power that it frequently gets caught up in stupid missions that seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, an entire sub-branch of the political lobbying industry is devoted to getting some congressman or cabinet member to adopt some wack cause as his own, in hopes that this will show up in a future budget or administration.
"OK, fine, we'll get State to set aside an earmarked fund to buy all the wooden arrows that Wakonda can produce!"
"OK, fine, we'll invade Absurdistan in order to support the Upper Revoltan separatist cause!"
It is also riven within by oligarchic factions — some of the apparently aimless lurching about on foreign policy being the sort of “externality” the rest of the world suffers as a consequence of the ongoing knife-fights in the US control room.
@eg
Yes.
Interpreting the astroturfed meme wars raging on social media in The West (™) these past few years is the spiritual descendant of old school kremlinology, divining Soviet realities from tea leaves found in Izvestia and Pravda.
i think there's also a point to be made here about ideology informing the assumptions under which self-interested decisions are made: if you believe the assumption that the Iraqi (or Afghan, or South Vietnamese...) US-backed client state will be competent and stable, all these blunders look like great strategic moves. and at the time, the American state clearly believed those assumptions!
Public-facing rhetoric aside, I don't think anyone ever seriously believed that the Afghan or South Vietnamese puppet states were anything other than corrupt, brutal and incompetent, not to mention seriously unpopular. Certainly the information was out there for anyone who even sort of pretended to look.
The goal in Iraq was to turn that country into a failed state, and thus, no threat to Israel.
With all due respect, I don't think that's true; for example, the Bush administration did zero preparation for handling a failed state/insurgency situation in Iraq. Famously! And the justification for every investment of resources into Afghanistan and Vietnam was that they were temporary measures until the client states there could take over and handle things on their own.
I'm quite ready to believe that there were people in the US foreign policy establishment who saw the failures at the time, and played along with the party line through cynicism or naivety or whatever, but the institutions as a whole were incapable of anticipating or responding to these events. I'd argue that this is because they were ideologically unable to do so!
The US didn't prepare for a failed state in Iraq because that was a desirable outcome, even if they could not say so in public.
Note that the US left Iraq as quickly as it could. For that matter, those resources thrown at Afghanistan and Vietnam mostly flowed back to contractors, i.e. profit.
Where America is concerned, profit IS the point.
@eg
"The business of America is business"
-President Calvin Coolidge, January 1925
@Feral Finster
From certain lofty socio-economic niches in the USA/West? What look like abject failures to those who merely work, pay taxes and supply their children to grease the cogs of the war machine look like increased volume (with guaranteed higher profit margins!), improved dividends, stock buy backs to take corporations private & have all they have accrued from previous workers & investors all to themselves? And for personal funsies, a few % of the float can fund their third mega yacht.
To be fair, the megarich never pay cash for anything. Everything is borrowed. ;)
@Feral Finster
If you were born on third base, are "morally flexible" and make the right noises? The opportunities are mind boggling... See video for an interesting case study:
https://theofficialurban.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal?utm_medium=reader2&triedRedirect=true
Russian origins of WWI? Nice try, but by now, after 3 years of war in Ukraine, everyone knows about BRITISH (aka financial oligarchy with HQ in City of London) role in origins of both WWI and WWII (as well as the upcoming WWIII). It makes the only sense: All western wars against Russia are about grabbing Russian vast territories rich in natural resources.
I recommend reading this three-part article about Munich Agreement by Alex Krainer (in a word: how the British screwed Czechoslovak Republic and made Hitler's army strong): Part 1: https://thenakedhedgie.com/2021/12/17/appeasement-the-shocking-truth-about-the-1938-munich-agreement-part-1-of-3/ Part 2: https://thenakedhedgie.com/2021/12/18/appeasement-the-betrayal-in-munich-part-2-of-3/ Part 3: https://thenakedhedgie.com/2021/12/19/the-three-block-global-agenda-today-and-the-role-of-finance-part-3-of-3/
Krainer's articles are based on these two books by historians:
Carroll Quigly: Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (1966)
Guido Giacomo Preparata: Conjuring Hitler. How Britain and America Made Third Reich (2005)
(Thank goodness there are still a few honest western historians who do not project their predjudices on objects of their research. This author definitely does not belong in this category, and unfortunatelly, we found out something not exactly flattering about Big Serge as well.)
Try this: https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/10685214/h-diplo-roundtable-xxiv-5-stalin%E2%80%99s-war#comments
Thanks for the link, I really appreciate it. -regards, a.v.
Thank you for the recommendations and your reaction to ‚The Stalin‘s War‘. The more I read the book, the more I get incensed. A prejudiced, non-scholarly spin of historical events. I am too surprised at Big Serge‘s recommendation of this author
Cold war ,WW-2 & WW-1 isn't for resources as there were more significant challenges due to the communist USSR and WW-1 is for colonial division of world. The current war against Russia is for resources and more hegemony.
El GordovSergio reads books without letters. Doña Tatiana, he is blind and well paid.
Un pendejo y un Kabron es lo que es el Big Serge
@Oscar
You don't give any concrete examples of WHY Big Serge is such "a huge idiot & a jerk"? Just ad hominem?
"Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend recaptures the distorted
personal and political narrative proffered by western historians for over 75 years. This magisterial work convincingly counters the biased distortions of both establishment and left historians through a balanced historiographic and philosophical exegesis of Stalin's complex life and leadership, as well as his contributions to socialism and the defeat of fascism. Losurdo's heretical counter-hegemonic history authentically counters the mythical, demonic figure of Stalin into a true-to-life biography of the most significant political figure of the 20th century. Fifteen years after its publication in Italian, Henry Hakamäki and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's superb translation brings Losurdo's compelling corrective of Stalin to English readers."
https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Domenico-Losurdo-Stalin-History-and-Critique-of-a-Black-Legend.pdf
★
You miss the part were Losurdo was honest enough to discuss Stalin's "white legend".
That is a mere introductory quote, the rest is in the book.
Still an interesting omission.
Stalin had something the other leaders lacked, according to Field Marshal Alan Brooke, 'a first-class military mind'.
@Godfree Roberts
Also, he'd just whacked most of the USSR's top brass who held preconceived ideas about warfare, the military equivalent of a climax forest burn off to stimulate forest regeneration? A nasty conflagration if you're stuck inside of it, but a couple of years later...
Loosing most of the military staff, from Tuchachevsky down in the late 1930s was disastrous for the Soviet Union. It was the poor show Russians held in the winter war against Finland 39/40 that convinced Hitler to pursue Barbarossa.
@barnabus
Stalin may indeed have had reason to suspect some in his military of being prone to foment a coup against his government (and kill him, naturally!).
He might also have had reason to suspect a few of his physicians... Though I suspect Лаврентий Берия was a more likely vector for Stalin's "death by natural causes" than those physicians? And the rest of the политбюро certainly had their own opinions about his ambitions?
Stalin certainly did throw out a lot of innocent (of those charges at least) babies along with the bath water during those purges- And he seldom undertook purges under a single motivation or with too narrow a range of targets, as long as the machinery was on motion, it could be used to solve numerous technically unrelated "problems"?
The USSR's failures during the first part of the operation to take Carelia as a buffer zone were at least partly due to Stalin's purges of experienced staff, it will be interesting to see if Trump's present day purging of our own general staff may have similar results?
The initial evidence against his military staff was actually fabricated by the Abwehr. It wasn't very difficult since Soviet and German military staff collaborated extensively in the 1920s and 1930s.
I have seen various claims that Stalin was manipulated into the 1930s officer corps purge by German intelligence psyops. At this distance in time, hard to know. The Viktor Suvorov “Operation Icebreaker” claim of USSR setting up for an offensive war to take Western Europe fall into the same category for me-
The 'whacking' may have been perfectly legal. The US Ambassador to Moscow at the time, Joseph P Davies, attended the trials of the officials and officers he had met socially. Davies came away convinced that they were as guilty as hell. Mostly Polish/British agents and the like.
Just shows what idiots most trial observers were.
How does it show that? Davies was a successful lawyer who had spent years in court professionally. He was chairman of the FTC, Ambassador to Belgium and in charge of War Emergency Problems and Policies at the White House during WWII. He was also special advisor to President Harry Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes with rank of Ambassador at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
The guy was a pro.
90% of the evidence was false self-incrimination. People like Davies were not accustomed to that, so they fell for it. Arthur Koestler wasn't, so he wrote that wonderful "Darkness at Noon" book about it.
And you know that...how?
Pretty damning review of his work: https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/10685214/h-diplo-roundtable-xxiv-5-stalin%E2%80%99s-war#comments
thank you. Really helpful discussion. -a.v.
I am confused as to why there is any question about the post-Pearl Harbor focus on Europe.
The US had just suffered an enormous naval defeat at Pearl Harbor. The buildup of the US Navy to attack Japan across the entirety of the Pacific Ocean is a significant time and capital expense effort with no real threat of Japan on the US, whereas the threat of Germany winning against the UK and Russia - and forming Festung Europe against the US was very real.
I am curious as to you (Big Serge) and Mr. McMeekin's views of the McCollum memo and clearly related US actions in the Pacific prior to Pearl Harbor.
While Pearl Harbor was a setback, Americans lost no aircraft carriers there. And it were carriers that decided the Pacific war.
We know that now - it is far from clear that the US military and FDR knew that then.
Don't forget that US naval aircraft on said carriers, right after Pearl Harbor, were Brewster Buffaloes and the like - not the Corsairs and what not of later years.
C'mon - US Navy was assiduously studying Japanese carrier use in China-Japanese war that was already going on for 5+ years. It's not like they woke up in December 1941 and decided: now we need to build carriers! Anyway, at Midway just 6 months later US carriers carried the day...
China had no aircraft carriers - so not the least bit clear what you are trying to say. Was the Japanese experience of bombing land targets, largely unopposed, going to inform the Pacific-wide naval campaign for the US against Japan? Doesn't seem clear to me.
Furthermore, you did not address my main point: the US did not have warplanes capable of taking on the Zeros, in 1941, 1942 and parts of 1943. The F4U Corsair did not start serial production until 1942 - and pilots/crew need time to learn a new weapons system.
Japan had aircraft carriers from which it bombed targets in China BEFORE Pearl Harbor 1941. Obviously, the US navy was closely observing this. That China was underdeveloped at that point in time was irrelevant.
Yes but so what?
I repeat again, like I did previously: how does Japan bombing land targets against a largely helpless China, inform US Navy aircraft carrier strategists for an a fight is going to be carrier to carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
And you still have not responded to my comments about the old and obsolescent aircraft that were on said carriers, right after Pearl Harbor.
Even during Midway - the US Navy air forces suffered terribly against the Japanese. It is just that a single Dauntless formation managed to penetrate and successfully attack the Japanese carriers; all of the other formations were annihilated <- noting that the Battle of Midway was June 1942.
The depth of your so called analysis is exceedingly shallow.
There is famous story, in its most canonical version narrated by Feynman:
"Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."
The very last question and answer in Serge's post reminded me about this story. I wanted to emphasize "come away with a begrudging sense of respect" and "grudging" in the question and answer, respectively. Sounds like something shameful, something you seek an excuse for. To me it looks like somebody acquired some sort of stereotype, assigned an archetype of a villain if you will, and and then, confronted with facts, needed to painstakingly push it away. The latter part, pushing away, is good of course, a fool would not be able to do that, but acquiring such a stereotype in the first place (just like that first measurement by Millikan) is a problem in itself. As a joke and ridiculous over-exaggeration, one almost needs to "Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Stalin" :) If you want to be serious, just substitute "Love" with "Think Objectively About" and do not rely on stereotypes and demonization which you would then need to grudgingly overcome.
@Kirill
A hypothesis on why even educated researchers are prejudiced against believing incongruous data or changing algorithms to match rather than working to discard the unexpected data points might be derived from biology & psychology studies of which part of brains exhibit higher activity when doing purely logical functions vs. those that show more activity when an existing belief is challenged... Which are similar to the types of brain activity found when another monkey tries to take away something YOU OWN.
---------
One parent in psych and the other in physics. I am damned and will end as Cassandra did, without so much as seeing a butterfly emerging from the container after the horrors.
Great point about America losing its constitutional government circa 1941. I have been using 1947 as the date, but it was the war that created the USA we have today.
Some would argue that it already started with 1933 and the threat to pack the Supreme Court.
But hey, maybe it would have lost the shop when dealing with people like Hitler and Stalin while maintaining a constitutional government.
nah it started earlier with killing the leftists.
insomuch the us had a constitutional order at any time, which is a tall proposition.
@Vade Retro
The seminal work of "saving America from democracy" began long before- I would say the die was cast with the political maneuvering by Alexander Hamilton which lead to the coastal moneyed men and their spiritual descendants subjugating all other's interests ever since, leading to the first of an unbroken chain of failed attempt at a push back- the whiskey rebellion.
Representative democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
The technical term for this is a "beard". That is, a cover for the rulers to do what they want, even though the rulers themselves are wildly unpopular. After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
@Feral Finater
Aim a rung higher?
The people who choose the Robert Kagans for fast tracking in certain academic & NGO lanes, pay for the Robert Kagans post graduate education and then to have their publishing platforms and sinecures while they push those financiers agendas.
As you see with Stalin, he was a free agent and was not pursuing some financier's agenda. The conceit that power is downstream of money is wrong. Lots of time in history, if you had power, you then acquired money too.
Power and money are two sides of the same coin, these are never really separate. Look at Peter Thiel openly choosing our vice president in return for his financial backing and Miriam Adelson et alia essentially buying a couple of elections for Trump?
i think this is where the communism of the 'elites' is easy to spot; there isn't a higher rung, it's just an amorphous blob of those that control the money, with different aims other than maintaining the political status quo.
indeed, this is why i think that the united states being a democracy at any point it is a tall proposition and very hard to defend :))
oh, so that's how it is, the honey of (mostly)objective military history covers the bitter kernel of western psy-ops :))))
ideology plays no role and nothing ever happens, no?
ussr was just another empire aiming at expansion and Stalin was paranoid(after the russian civil war to say that is not just in bad-faith is disgusting really); how many western states attacked the newly communist state though? i mean the west did the same thing as it did in china with the boxers rebellion and your conclusion after the ussr fighting the whole west is that...Stalin was paranoid. can't make this shit up.
ofc not a word about the banks and such, nothing about the us using germany as a tool against both the british empire and the ussr in the inter-war years, etc
boy, lemme tell you how it was before i hit that unsubscribe button cause the good parts are not worth this 'subtle' propaganda:
- the german empire started to be a great problem for the british one(with the us help)
- the brits tried to contain them hence wwi
- they couldn't mostly because russian collapse
- us happily did business with both parts and waited to enter the fray until both parts were exhausted and they could be sure that they will 'inherit' the earth
- a lot of capital crossed the ocean and the price for that was intervention in russia cause that capital was fucking afraid of the communism
- intervention failed so plan b was that crazy revisionist german guy already supported by the german capital
- from the very start the idea was to use the new german 'reich' against the ussr
- but that crazy german guy had this crazy idea that the international capital is just a tool for enslaving countries and turned out to be not so easily controlled after all
- nobody expected the fall of both poland and france in such short order and now a ussr-germany non-agression (or whatever)pact meant ousting of the said capital from europe and a huge part of asia
- the game now morphed into trying to destroy both germany and the ussr
- because of the ethnicity of those who controlled said capital and what that crazy german guy started to do on their coreligionist, destroying germany became first aim hence land lease to ussr and shit(worth mentioning that if the ussr would have destroyed the germans by itself and by god that would probably happen with even greater losses, europe would have been forever lost to that capital)
- after finishing with the crazy german guy they continued with the plan of destroying the ussr
- they thought they did it in '91 and they had a good party on those laurels
- but guess what, a historical phenomenon of the ussr scope doesn't just get deleted from the collective memory and those pesky russians didn't just roll over and here we are again
tl;dr it's the economy/class-war stupid, and the whole bloody history of the 19 century(and since) is just the global capital trying to eliminate any other alternative.
but you probably know that, dontcha :)))
@Vade Retro
The Empire based bankster clans interest in maneuvering ALL the nation states & imperial actors with money, propaganda power plays and necromancer level 10 political thuggery are not unknown to those of us who still read.
And once again, nobody is perfect yet there is something to be learned from nearly everyone.
Wow, that is just brilliant! Thank you so much for this scathing rebuff to the not-so-subtle propaganda try by Mr McMeekin.
Really enjoyed reading it :))
Estimado y Grande Don Sergio...
So America won World War II, losing 1/4 of a million men. Well, well.
According to you, the Russians were idiots for insisting on fighting with nazis 200 divisions...and you say this as someone who only reads a lot but "plata o plomo nada de nada"
I’m very curious to learn where I’ve said that the Russians were idiots for fighting? That doesn’t sound like something I would say.
Exactly, only an arrogant American STILL does not understand that Russians were (and again are!) under EXISTENTIAL THREAT coming from the West, and had no other solution than to defend themselves! They didn't choose to sacrifice 27 million people in WWII - this many people died while defending their homeland!
Fortunately, I know Scott Ritter who is normal and does not have predjudices against anyone, otherwise I would develop a very bad stereotype about American military experts (I am on the brink). Well, I will rather unsubscribe here, because I do not want to be exposed to western psyops. Brainwashing on stereoids!
@Tatjana
Nobody is perfect. Nobody knows it all. And nobody is a rational actor free of prejudices and blind spots- Most definitely including Serge AND Scott Ritter, who I also have read.
I submit that people who only read writers and opinions they are predisposed to believe in are losing a critical dimension of situational awareness. And analyzing WHY the writing which gives you the most unthinking, visceral offense does so is a good tool for getting behind your own filters...
Perhaps you could re read the article, you seem to be taking an unusual spin. Both of these guys very well understand that the Russian people carried "the winners" of WWII to victory on a tidal wave of their blood-
They certainly are also aware of Nazi eugenics policy and specific plans for what % of conquered area population were to be liquidated after their victory. And that their intent included destroying whatever remained of the USSR (or any other Russian state) as an entity. Which we are in the midst of the second iteration now, the one that is a farce?
Wonderful read. A small correction, as I often see this mistake made: The PH book is "The Phoney Victory", not "Phony War".
"Of course, one could make the counter-argument that Hitler would have been better off grudgingly allowing the Soviets to continue supplying the Wehrmacht with most of what it needed, rather than invading Russia to seize Soviet resources, but this would imply that he trusted Stalin, a man who had just used Soviet economic leverage to (try to) bully him into sacrificing vital German interests."
It is self-evident that Hitler would have been better off because in reality Hitler ended up dead in 1945 and Germany ended up destroyed.
stalin is a bad guy who bullied poor adolf who never ever even hinted at exterminating not just the communists but the slavs as a whole.
what a bad bad boi this stalin was.
"""" Yes, the Wehrmacht was by then badly attrited and it is certainly possible, even likely, the Red Army could have saved Moscow absent Lend-Lease aid."""""
RE: Moscow
No - certainly possible- anything is possible - but I do not think it probable
and I think even the Russians/Stalin would admit that
It was too close Germans were too close - there were there - Russians initially made errors and got lucky sending in reinforcements just in time - The Russians fought incredibly hard - Stalin had given orders no one leaves without dying first - no retreat. Every person in Moscow women and children, were out digging tank ditches - everyone alive - anyone that could carry a gun was given one
Moscow was extremely close to going down -extremely
For all who might read this -- I mention a Very well done initially RUSSIAN documentary
Janson Media released the English-dubbed version of the documentary series
Soviet Storm: WWII in the East. It was originally a Russian television series titled The Great War.
Or for all readers on Amazon prime for free - it will be worth your time
you can thank me later
yeah but moscow burnt a lot of times.
@Vade Retro
AFAICT?
1238
1382
1547
1571
1812
Any I've forgot?
(Washington DC has only managed 1X so far, we are underachievers)
Stalin had given orders
no one leaves without dying first
Now that is a good name for a book
Muscular history? you mean as in stimulating the sphincter to empty all the contents into the toilet where they belong?
It is entirely predictable that as the west can no longer hide the Russian victory over fascism in Ukraine, the fascist propaganda surges.
Wonderful surprise to see this in my inbox. As always a great read.