We are not a serious society. Our ruling class are men of no substance, lacking all knowledge and incapable of competent action on any front. The masses, while they sense a great deal is very wrong, are distracted by propaganda and ephemera. We feel we can afford to be unserious, because all of us lead lives of unprecedented material comfort. Any lack is eased by speedy delivery of sedatives designed to mask and hold down chthonic spiritual despair. To be sure, we do not lack for heralds of the coming storm—but we, high and low, have forgotten what a storm looks like. Read this book and you will remember, and you will also know what it is to live in a serious society.
Sean McMeekin, the author of Stalin’s War, has made a career out of what are often called revisionist histories, all about the first half of the twentieth century, several about Russia. I was suitably impressed by his The Russian Revolution, but that, and this, book are not really revisionist histories. Rather, they are correctives to the disinformation that has been most English-language histories tied to Communism during the past hundred years, and they seem revisionist because they discuss the facts objectively. The philo-Communists who to this day operate the academic wing of our regime’s propaganda machine dislike this, so they complain McMeekin is revisionist, a turn of phrase that suggests inaccuracy without needing to demonstrate any inaccuracy.
The author chose the title because World War II, in his view and contrary to what we are endlessly told, was less Adolf Hitler’s war than Joseph Stalin’s war. McMeekin does not mean the commonplace that Stalin’s Russia absorbed the majority of the Allied side’s deaths of the war (in fact, he seems to suspect historians have exaggerated Soviet war deaths). Rather, he means that the war was desired by Stalin, as a direct result of his Marxist-Leninist principles, largely followed the course Stalin wanted and acted to achieve, and hugely benefitted Stalin, while benefitting nobody else at all. In other words, cui bono? Stalin, unfortunately for the entire world.
This is, no surprise, a copiously footnoted and documented book, including what McMeekin says is a large amount of new information. Interestingly, at several points McMeekin complains that after the fall of Soviet Communism, archives were opened which contained very valuable data that has since become unavailable. He also notes that several Russian military historians write under pseudonyms, “to avoid government scrutiny.” But he does not explain the government’s reason, which is a little odd. Maybe it’s just that Vladimir Putin prefers the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War, and books like this, and the facts on which they are based, are inconvenient.
McMeekin goes through the stages of World War II, but he begins by going all the way back to 1917 and the years immediately following, when the Bolshevik regime set the invariant pattern for all its future interactions with the West. It combined duplicity with opportunism, always overlaid with the crucial goal of fomenting Communist revolution in the West, and in this effort was greatly aided by allies, some traitors, some mere fellow-travelers, who occupied crucial positions throughout the West. In fact, without massive aid from the West, mostly the fruit of turncoats or dupes in America and also in Britain, the Soviet Union would almost certainly not have been able to survive—not in World War II, and for that matter not later, though that is a topic for another book, and another day. The cast of characters changed from 1917 to 1945; the pattern did not.
Communist hopes for immediate world revolution dwindled in the 1920s, after the Poles defeated the Red Army and the Germans put down their traitors such as Rosa Luxembourg, but still, revolution always remained near to the hearts of both Soviet leadership and their innumerable allies in the West. By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had emerged victorious from the internal Soviet power struggle, exiling Leon Trotsky and using his skill at the boring work of bureaucratic power building to build a slick machine, grounded in terror and wholly ideological in focus. Thus, in 1928, Stalin (through the Comintern) inaugurated the Third Period, where global Communism was to return to the offensive. He demanded an uncompromising approach and direct action by the world’s Communists, and he got it. This was the period when Communists outside Russia refused to cooperate with other parties of the Left in any matter, loudly declaiming, for example, that socialists were merely “social fascists,” and worked tirelessly to advance the interests of the Soviet Union at the expense of their own country.
Meanwhile, at home, Stalin was furiously industrializing, while at the same time massacring kulaks, starving millions of Ukrainians, and filling the gulags with slave labor for his industrialization program. None of his industrialization would have been possible without immense Western help; American firms in particular eagerly designed and built many of Stalin’s important factories, most notably the entire new steel-producing city of Magnitogorsk, as well as crucial infrastructure such as power plants. (American expatriates working on these Soviet projects were so numerous they had their own English-language newspaper.) At this point, the Americans wouldn’t yet simply hand over military design secrets—so Stalin initiated a giant spy operation, with its biggest focus being United States aviation. All this made Stalin’s military power grow by leaps and bounds—his prime goal, because without military supremacy, Communist global domination could not be assured.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the United States still did not recognize the Soviet regime diplomatically. This meant, among other things, that Stalin could not borrow American money, and was certainly not getting direct aid. Thus all American private assistance was paid for in gold and by Stalin selling or trading stolen artwork and antiquities. Moreover, Soviet tensions with Japan were increasing rapidly—but this presented an opening, because American tensions with Japan were also increasing, providing an apparent common interest. When Franklin Roosevelt, who had always been friendly to Communism and Communists, took office in 1933, Stalin was elated. Although the American people were (and remained) strongly opposed to Communism, the gullible Roosevelt was easily convinced that normalizing relations with Stalin would boost the American economy, something more than usually crucial due to the Great Depression. As McMeekin points out, Roosevelt naively thought the problem was that it needed someone like him just to talk to the Russians to “straighten out this whole question,” and that the Russians weren’t buying American goods because of political objections, not because they had nothing with which to buy American goods.
Setting the model for his behavior for the next twelve years, Roosevelt immediately gave away the entire farm, and then some. He gladly recognized the Soviet Union, over the strong objections of the State Department, and refused to ask for anything from Stalin in return, such as repayment of existing debts, or ending Communist spying and subversion (by which America, and the American government, was riddled—including by Harry Dexter White, a Soviet agent who throughout Roosevelt’s presidency was the right-hand man of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau). For this reason, and because he saw little wrong with Communism and a great deal wrong with National Socialism, Roosevelt’s administration adopted and retained a consistent pro-Soviet line, in both personnel (for example replacing the ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, who had a realistic appreciation of Soviet “deception and guile,” with a Soviet toady, Joseph Davies, who “saw unicorns”) and policy (as we will see).
Meanwhile, in 1935, Stalin adopted a new external doctrine, that of the Popular Front—where Communists allied with other parties of the Left, invariably with the intent of, and usually succeeding in, taking all power by force if able to win an election. In both Spain and France in 1936 this strategy was successful (although not long-term, stopped by Francisco Franco in Spain, and by the war in France). Stalin also pushed “collective security”—the idea that the nations of the West should cooperate to restrain Hitler, to Stalin’s benefit. The goal of all policies was, with zero exceptions, to further Communist triumph and domination; any particular announced policy would be ignored, modified, or rejected as necessary to that end. If there is a single historical fact that emerges clearly from the pages of this book, it is the total dishonesty and duplicity of all Soviet actions, something not taken into account by most diplomats and leaders of Western nations, whose credulousness and refusal to take into account past Soviet treachery encouraged even more bad behavior by Stalin.
One could look at it another way, however. Only Stalin acted consistently in a way to benefit what he saw as the interests of the Soviet Union, without any reference to, or thought for, the morality of his actions. Only power and practicality existed for him, filtered, to be sure, through Communist ideology, but that never placed any limit on taking advantage of the West. Roosevelt, and Churchill to a lesser extent, evinced the perpetual difficulty of the Anglosphere in dealing with Communism—even when not crippled by Soviet subversion, their governments approached dealings with Stalin through the prism of a personal relationship, acting in good faith with a strong moral overlay borrowed from the Christian obligations of the individual. You would think they should have learned early this was a mistake, and you would be right, but that’s what they did—even Ronald Reagan did, although he did it a lot less, and was rewarded by achieving his geostrategic goals.
If there is a villain in this book, it’s not Stalin, though McMeekin certainly has no love for him, but seems to regard Stalin’s ability to manipulate the Allies, never giving an inch or showing any reciprocity, mostly with a kind of detached horror. Rather, it is Roosevelt, with his satanic familiar Harry Hopkins, who, while probably not a Communist agent, acted in a way indistinguishable from one, consistently prioritizing Soviet interests over American ones. McMeekin quotes Roosevelt, “I just have a hunch that Stalin isn’t that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] said he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Most of the book is an explication of this theme.
As the 1930s drew to a close, though, Stalin spent a lot more time negotiating with Hitler than with Roosevelt. McMeekin details the steps leading up to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, as well as Stalin’s simultaneous negotiations with the British and the French. Stalin’s aim was to further a war between the Germans and the Western powers, the sooner the better; he believed this would be a grinding slugfest from which he could profit by picking up the pieces. Getting the party started by seizing much of Poland, as agreed upon with Hitler, was very agreeable to him. Less agreeable to him was the speed with which Hitler rolled up his half of Poland. Yet, before and after the invasion, Stalin punctiliously continued to fulfil promised enormous shipments of raw materials, most especially oil, to Hitler (for which he was paid cash), which enabled Hitler to advance his plans in the West, in the face of the British blockade.
Stalin promptly also invaded Poland (along with the Baltic states), and by 1941 had murdered around 500,000 Poles (and tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians), which, as McMeekin points out, was “three or four times higher than the number of those killed by the Nazis”—although Hitler caught up later by killing Polish Jews. Stalin’s atrocities included the murder of the flower of Polish society in the Katyn Forest, but at no time did any Western government, not the British under Churchill and even less America under Roosevelt, criticize Stalin’s murderous ways, instead toadying to him in hopes he would help against Hitler. As McMeekin points out, by mid-1940 Stalin had invaded as many sovereign countries as Hitler (seven), with barely a whisper about it being raised by the American government.
Stalin did help against Hitler—at a very high price and on terms always radically favorable to him. Stalin gradually let his close relationship with Hitler deteriorate, and refused to join the Tripartite Pact, even when Hitler was at his zenith. Hitler resisted further Russian expansion at the expense of Rumania and Bulgaria; tensions rose. Stalin was confident; despite the debilities caused by the officer purges of the previous decade, the Red Army had far more tanks, artillery, planes, and other equipment than the Wehrmacht (including even five times as many submarines), and a three-to-one advantage in manpower, the result of Stalin’s aggressive buildup. Nor was this inferior equipment—much of it was based on designs stolen or bought from the Americans, including parts of the famous T-34 tank. What Stalin missed was that the Germans were far, far better at planning, logistics, and mobile war, and that German morale was far higher than Soviet.
Did Stalin always intend to attack Hitler, and Hitler just beat him to it? Or, as most historians have said, was Stalin surprised? The notable exponent of the former theory is the Russian historian Viktor Suvarov; McMeekin nods to him but does not endorse his theory, though at least to some degree he tends in that direction. Much of Stalin’s buildup in 1940 and early 1941 seemed designed for offense—such as the crash building of innumerable airfields directly behind the new Soviet borders gained in the preceding few years, and other infrastructure designed to allow easy movement past the front (all of which was ultimately made nugatory by its immediate capture by the Germans). This could, however, also be read as over-optimistic preparation for a counterattack, or as an attempt to deter aggression by showing strength. McMeekin does not come to a conclusion—but he most definitely comes to the conclusion that Stalin was not taken by surprise, and he did not suffer some type of mental breakdown when Hitler invaded, a later myth pushed by Stalin’s successors.
As is well known, the Germans smashed the Soviets, destroying nearly all of Stalin’s military equipment, and came very close to winning the war outright. But not close enough, and winter came, with Stalin staying in Moscow, pondering what to do. It was not that Stalin could not be a realist. He famously folded his cards when the Finns punched him repeatedly in the nose (if you count 200,000 dead Russians as a punch in the nose). It was that the Americans never gave him any reason to do other than he did, and what made his recovery possible was America.
In March, 1941, Congress had passed Lend-Lease, to allow the President to distribute material, from cobalt to tanks, to nations opposing Hitler. Until Hitler attacked Stalin, Roosevelt and his aides had been largely prevented by American public opinion, which unlike Roosevelt cared about Stalin’s murderous ways and saw little difference between Hitler and Stalin, from supplying Stalin as they wished. But the perception, made completely real by Hitler declaring war on the United States in December, that Hitler was now the aggressor, allowed Roosevelt’s coterie to open the floodgates—saving Stalin in the nick of time. Using endless shipments of raw materials, chemicals, tanks, and planes, delivered at great risk and cost by Americans to Arctic ports, Stalin managed to resist, then push back, Hitler.
Thus, the second half of this book is taken up with a nearly endless catalog of the astonishingly huge amounts of material given gratis to Stalin (while Britain was forced to pay through the nose for much less aid), often at the expense of American readiness; the constant super-aggressive demands of the Soviet Communists for more; the eager meeting of those demands by Roosevelt’s aides for whom the Soviet Union was at least as important as America; the constant sidelining of and lying to anyone who proposed limits on aid to Stalin, or any kind of payment, oversight, or quid pro quo; and how this aid prevented Stalin from losing the war in 1942 and enabled him to ultimately conquer half of Europe.
Much of this seems unbelievable. Soviet agents literally freely roamed America “requisitioning” whatever they wanted, including crucial components such as ball bearings, resulting in shortages for America. “Soviet purchasing agents had such influence in the Roosevelt administration that they functioned, for all intents and purposes, like members of the US government.” America transferred scores of entire factories to the Soviet Union, along with their intellectual property, even when those factories could not be brought online for some years, and obviously could only be useful to Stalin after the war. And much more along these lines. The usual argument in defense of these practices is that enabling the Russians to kill Germans meant fewer Americans would die. Maybe. But McMeekin points out that not only was the aid excessive, Stalin was never asked for, or gave, anything at all in return. Moreover, these shipments (always at solely American expense and risk) continued, and even increased, up until the very end of the war, when Stalin was rolling up Europe.
Regardless of the actual reasons for this one-sided giveaway, which were probably some combination of Soviet discipline, the perfidy of American traitors, and typical Rooseveltian gullibility, the war ground on. McMeekin covers the fighting in detail, with a focus on Stalin’s military actions, and finally, we get to the last stages of the war, during which Stalin obtained nearly all of his prewar aims. Along the way, McMeekin also covers many other topics. These include Russia’s relationship with Japan (you probably did not know there was a Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, to which Stalin rigidly hewed until after Hiroshima), and how Stalin used Harry Dexter White and his pawn, Morgenthau, to advance the Soviet goal of increasing tensions between the United States and Japan, successfully encouraging a war. They also include Roosevelt’s cooperation in concealing Stalin’s many crimes, including most notably Katyn, and a long catalog of American (and British) cooperation in Stalin’s other betrayals, from Draža Mihailovich to the Warsaw Uprising. I will note that this is a daunting book, in that it is 800 pages, including the notes. It’s a very easy read, however, because McMeekin is an excellent writer. Don’t let the length scare you.
The apogee of Soviet influence in Washington was the promulgation in 1944 of the so-called Morgenthau Plan, to primitivize Germany for the benefit of the Soviet Union, and to likely kill by starvation as many as thirty million Germans. This was drafted and presented by Soviet agents, including but not limited to White, to Morgenthau as it became clear that Germany would lose the war. You would think being Secretary of the Treasury would not be a relevant position for deciding such matters of world-historical importance, but Morgenthau was socially and politically very close to Roosevelt. And, being a vindictive man, himself Jewish, Morgenthau strongly endorsed the plan fed to him. Almost nobody else in Washington, or at least anyone not in bed with Stalin, thought the plan was other than insane—except the dying Roosevelt, who was all for it, and given how he had used his power to benefit Stalin throughout the war, might have been able to do the same here. He did manage to coerce Churchill, by threats, into endorsing it. When the plan leaked, though, Roosevelt was forced to lie that he had not seen and endorsed (in fact signed) it, because the November 1944 election was around the corner, and Americans as a whole strongly opposed it. Nonetheless, Stalin still benefitted, because exposure of the plan, along with Roosevelt’s (hard to explain) demands for unconditional surrender, ensured fiercer resistance to the Americans on the Western front, allowing Stalin to roll up far more territory in the East.
In the final days of the war and afterwards, Stalin manipulated his allies at Teheran, Potsdam, and Yalta, where he yet again got essentially everything he wanted, including the continuation of massive aid, even though that no longer offered any benefit to his allies. At the same time, Stalin systematically plundered the industrial plant of all areas under his control, along with artwork and anything else of value, while raping and slaughtering millions, all without any objection from Roosevelt. And, finally, Stalin took advantage of American sacrifice, and the atomic bomb, to grab a great deal of territory in Asia, at zero risk and cost to himself—though Roosevelt’s death, and Harry Truman’s accession to power, limited Stalin’s grab to some degree, given that Roosevelt had been, in effect, eager to give Stalin all of Korea and parts of Japan. At the end, Stalin was sitting pretty, and here is where McMeekin leaves the story.
And so what? What’s done is done, I suppose. But we can learn about the future from a proper appreciation of the past, never more so than when one lives in an unserious and uneducated society, as we do. McMeekin, while adverting to the dubious nature of counterfactuals, suggests it might have been better, and could not likely have been worse, had America simply let Stalin and Hitler fight it out, with Stalin almost certainly losing without American aid. He rejects as the broken-window fallacy that the war brought America out of the Depression, and notes that not only did America pay in lives for a war in which Stalin was the clear victor, in “both territory and booty,” but got “erosion of their own civil liberties, with an ever-expanding security state contrary to the country’s founding principles and stated ideals, which bears increasing resemblance to the Soviet version they struggled against.” Very true, as we look around. Who would have thought in 1990 that in 2021 we would live in a regime with Communist-level propaganda and the technology to push it far more than Stalin ever could have?
Yet in this counterfactual, I suspect the West would have ended up in the same dismal situation it is in today. After all, those few examples of Western countries that mostly avoided involvement in the horrors of the twentieth century are no better off than America or Britain. Franco’s success, for example, did Spain no good in the long run. And look at Ireland, which today is a dying country, completely shattered, with no children, a ruling class that welcomes invasion by millions of aliens, and a totalitarian, hyperfeminized reaction to the Wuhan Plague. This indicates that the root of Western collapse lies deeper, a wrong turn taken earlier, than World War II, or even World War I. Still, what we can learn from this book is that treating with the Left, any branch of the Left, as if they are capable of acting in good faith, rather than with mendacious duplicity, is a grave mistake. And also that the frequent natural state of man is conflict with existential stakes, something which seems very far away now. But that is an optical illusion, you will realize, if you read this book. As in your car’s rearview mirror, objects may be closer than they appear.
Seek ye the Storm Proven.
Vets.
Dylan Ratigan (of MSNBC extraction of America rant fame) set Kilo Company
Fallujah veterans up on a ranch in the West a few years ago. This is a wise man, and a very good investment.
https://www.ranchosantafereview.com/sdrsf-rancho-santa-fe-residents-join-forces-to-help-2012dec27-story.html
No, survival will not be improvised.
No, Caesar does not rise from the soil.
A Mao perhaps. Likely in fact as the closest thing in history to our elites is the Qing at the end of the line.
Want help? Sure. This merc/vet/cop/intel private sector job board around awhile.
In January hiring exploded.
https://www.watchdogjobs.com/
I think you’ll find watching that board worth 7$ Per quarter. It was the USA market that exploded. Finance is a big hirer, as are multinationals.
Cops, vets, Intel as “private security “ – it is inherently dangerous to combine these people inherently dangerous people and give them personal acquaintance with say Financial types, often they grow close as the guards are guarding them and their families. Not to mention the business education. No, this is not the solution, this is Brazil. It is something to watch, it is potential.
I should add that Cop/Vet/Contractor is often the same person (I am close friends and comrades with at least 2) and we all come from the same family clusters. Nepotism is best practice in Blood Trades. This is still not a solution, just potential.
Watch this space. This board doesn’t lie.
https://www.watchdogjobs.com/
I was responding to your intro about our elites cannot face challenges, never mind a storm.
Now that’s an interesting metric (the job board), and I agree, it does seem indicative/predictive.
I go no further than indicative, predictive would be giving into wishing.
But there’s something going on, nothing beyond self-preservation for them with money can be safely ventured.
It’s worth noting that until he gained power Mao did very little wrong. He didn’t rob peasants, abuse defeated enemies, throw away his soldiers lives, and in fact did a lot to organize infrastructure and food for peasants and his own men. If he had not been a communist, or if the US hadn’t prolonged the war by subsidizing criminal warlords, or if he hadn’t felt threatened by US intervention, it is possible that he might have ruled as a decent person.
With all due respect, that’s delusional, Ricky – Mao was mounting purges against his political enemies long before he gained power, far from subsidizing “Criminal Warlords” the US stabbed Chiang and the legitimate government in the back, embargoed aid during the civil war, and Mao’s greatest crimes like the “Great Leap Forward” had nothing to do with fears of US intervention, but with communist ideology. And as for Mao not being a communist, well, as my Jewish friends say “If my grandmother had had balabatim, she would be my grandfather!” The United States has done a lot of stupid things in the past one-hundred years, but we’re not responsible for everything that went wrong, or even most of it. Other countries had agency as well, and used it.
1) Any military leader has to purge challenges to his authority.
2) The idea that the “Republic of China” was even a government, much less ‘legitimate’, is risible and based on Cash My-Check propaganda (and I have in fact read books by his propagandist, Paul Linebarger), it was a nightmare of inept, disorganized crime with no functional administrative apparatus which existed solely to profit will connected plutocrats – as many anti-Reds observed at the time and after.
3) Any government that requires propping up by a foreign pirate empire like the USA is already illegitimate and deserves to be destroyed.
I never said anything about Mao’s ridiculous modernization schemes, as I said his being communist was one problem, although in reality he was more of a Nazi and his crackpot industrialization was brought on by a felt need to repel American aggression – you know the country that’d invaded Japan, Germany, and the USSR recently?
With all due respect, you need to read more history that isn’t written by Boomers from the state department.
Gotta love a “libertarian” parroting communist propaganda, defending a Communist regime that killed 70 million people, because US bad and it wasn’t real communism and Mao was a Nazi, or something. For God’s sake…
I am currently reading this, a fantastic book. One thing that consistently comes through in this work, as in others, is Franklin Roosevelt’s staggering arrogance and fundamental unseriousness as a person, let alone as any kind of a leader. As one brought up by Cold War liberal parents, who hated Communism and Nazism equally but loved Roosevelt, I remember my shock when I realized that the juvenile, flippant, immature, vengeful and petty man that Roosevelt really was, was far from the wise and compassionate statesman that my parents (well educated people, by the way) had believed in. In truth, the United States got off lightly. “Our Democracy” was never in more danger than when this buffoon occupied the White House.
Great post, Charles. I’m putting this book on my Christmas list. I’m currently reading The New Dealers’ War. If Biden really thinks he wants to be FDR, then he needs to quadruple-down on the duplicity and manipulation.
Thank you! Well, FDR wasn’t senile; I think Biden is going to fall short of that goal.
John T. Flynn’s “A Country Squire in the White House” is my favorite book on FDR.
I honestly believe that, since the American Revolutionary War, the wrong side has won in every war the USA has been in – both because the US is an unjustly aggressive pluto-military leftist empire, and because each victory enriched our criminal ruling class and degraded the culture. Spoiled Boomers getting fat off the Empire right before it starts to crumble being an example.
So…where can we find our Rightist American Stalin?
Who could at least control a Soviet bureaucracy.
It would be nasty for the Bureaucrats. Nothing could be more just.
The American right are liberals, and therefor weak and easily manipulated by the left. You need a Machiavellian right, which means the Protestant Constitutionalist losers with a television where their brain should be have to be expelled from any position of influence. I am a libertarian at heart, but it’s clear to me that tolerance and all that rubbish is not on the table for the right, unless they want to be in concentration camps with their ghey principles.
True.
As long as this country honors those presidents who blunder us into bloody wars (Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Johnson) more than they honor those who get us out, or keep us out of wars (Coolidge, Nixon, Eisenhower, Reagan, Trump) this country is going to have foreign policy problems…
Unfortunately Anglo culture is one of pirates, and America is one of the most militaristic countries in history. It’s baked into the cultural DNA. Even I, as a libertarian law advocate who wants F15 pilots hung for war crimes, am a gun nyr obsessed with military history across time. We’re absurdly martial, which really weirds our my Danish friends – and I’m so embedded in this martial culture that I laugh at them when they find my collection of autoloader rifles excessive.
PS: If this list seems too partisan (and it probably is) I’ll gladly add Carter to the “good” list, and Chimpy Bush to the “Bad” side of the ledger. Carter was a bad president in most ways that mattered, but at least he was moral enough not to get us involved in a war to get re-elected, and if I could take back one vote I’ve ever made, it would be those for Bush II. Looking back on it, the worst president since LBJ.
True. Which is why we need fighters, not ideology.
We need fists not brains.
The actual so-so-lists can have their blessed safety net if they will fight. I don’t care, and certainly with all these bailouts the Capi-so-so-lists haven’t got any real objection.
In a similar vein is “Death Ride: Hitler vs. Stalin” by the revisionist historian (ie real historian) John Mosier, who takes apart the government propagated myths about the German/Russian conflict.
Looks interesting; I’ll get a copy.
If only Kornilov succeeded, there would have been no Red October and the Twentieth Century would have been radically different!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kornilov_affair
https://www.deviantart.com/rvbomally/art/The-Army-is-the-People-COMMISSION-827023907
I strongly recommend against using Wikipedia for anything, even casual references. The entire thing, from science to Spanish history, is full of leftist propaganda and distortions. There is virtually nothing on there that can be relied upon without extensive cross reference and criticism, meaning no reference at all is better than Wikipedia. I won’t even go to the website anymore.
If the Wuhan Plague happened in the mid-20th Century (before the digital revolution), there would have been two options for governments.
a) Go out and take your chances (https://www.city-journal.org/1957-asian-flu-pandemic)
b) Blow the nuclear air raid sirens and wait till shortwave radio/CONELRAD gives the “all clear”!
It is true our elites are not serious people.
Nor are the American people.
Sigh.
Humanity only learns from hard experience.
This is part of the learning curve and only starting. Our “supply chain disruptions “ and “mandated” disruptions are simply economic sanctions. Our foreign policy is now our domestic policy. We shall see DC’s true face as the North Koreans, Syrians and Iraqis saw it, this is beginning. Our Elites are serious enough about smashing defiance.
Meanwhile Ma and Pa Netflix take comfort in Virginia elections. Back to grilling!
Nothing new happened in VA, our elites have always lived Republican and governed Democrat. They have no intention of living like peasants or suffering like peasants, or having their brood schooled as the peasants are schooled. Our elites have always lived Rumson and governed Camden ~ respectively the Gold Coast and Mogadishu of NJ.
Back to grilling and Netflix they go.
The TV Race, as the TDS boys call it, have indeed been celebrating. “You black pillers said we couldn’t win!” they chant in the comment sections, though of course they don’t understand that the criticism I have is leveled at the lumpenrepublicans even more than at the “Demon KKK Rats” (these people are very clever, in their own minds). The Left is at least organized and powerful, all the conservatives do is lose and act as a safety valve to prevent the Right from turning to Benito Pinochet and actually beating the Reds for once.
Thank you for this brilliant review, as always!
Sean McMeekin seems to be a very good historian, and he has other very interesting books as well, such as on the fall of the Ottomans and the make-up of the Middle East, a theme worthy of much consideration, especially in how the Ottomans developed an offensive mentality towards any minorities when they renounced Ottomanism and worked to pursue a Turkish state, starting with the Young Turks and the CUP and continuing to the present day. If I remember well, he has one on the Baghdad railway plans as well, which are believed to have played a role in motivating the Germans and Austrians to start WW1 in order to make Serbia fold/possibly even annex and build the railway connecting to the Middle East, although I’m not too knowledgeable on this(famously this was believed by the Hungarian authorities at the time, who did not want to enter into the war, but were dragged by the Austrians). Related to the topic at hand, he’s written a new history of the Russian Revolution as well, presumably informed by the 1991 opening of the archives as well, although I haven’t read it and cannot comment.
With regards to the view on Stalin, I agree on the cui bono part. One qualm I’d have is that it’s not really correct to label him a revisionist, since that label was used by the pro-Soviet New Left historians, i.e. William Applebaum and his yoke. Rather, he’s more of a post-post-revisionist, which is the current that turned on Stalin once the archives opened. But labels have generally been limiting and confusing(I remember when I had to comment on Cold War historiography back in high school and had to explain why a certain fragment fit one of the labels for the schools of thought. I like to think it trained me in spotting leftists at the very least.) For this reason, I think McMeekin is much more, in that what he brings to the table isn’t just to incriminate Stalin for being the Devil, but FDR & his acolytes for enabling him, since those who empower leftists are worse than leftists themselves.
FDR was a Wilsonian, in that he was quite influenced by the naivete of Woodrow Wilson on foreign policy and allowing for the great powers to maintain world peace through international organizations. Much was made of his sympathy to Germany’s pre-war economic recovery and of how he was supposedly pro-fascist(some Austrian economists painted this picture with regards to how Keynesian economics was fascist) when in reality he was more enamoured, like most Democrat bien-pensants, with the Communist success. Stalin reportedly chose Yalta as the site of one of the conferences precisely because it was in a war-trodden area, which would have impressed FDR and motivated him to make even more concessions(he did, but not sure if he would have done it either way), so it’s clear he sensed his weakness, so to speak.
The curiousness stands in the support Stalin gave to Hitler until a few days before Barbarossa(without which he couldn’t have defeated France so easily), and to whether he purposefully meticulously supported Hitler to deceive him as a supporter while he was building up close to the frontier, did it so that he wouldn’t be the aggressor and would be on better terms in dealing with the Allies, or something else, but I guess I’ll have to check the footnotes to further investigate this question.
With sincere thanks,
Peter
P.S.: Your pieces on a future Caesar have also been very good, but I unfortunately couldn’t find time to comment at the time. I agree that, for models of comparison, we’d have to look at Lenin or perhaps Ho Chi Minh, who might have managed one of the best successions in that not only was there no one person to redo the administration after his death, but the group was cohesive enough to not be divided and managed to resist enough to win, although their struggle was against a foreign target, more than an internal one.
Thank you. All true! (I reviewed McMeekin’s book on the Russian Revolution a year or two ago; it also was excellent.)
So, the Soviet Union emerged from the war not only militarily victorious, but hugely benefited and strengthened, and the United States only took losses.
What planet is the writer living on? The USSR was militarily victorious, but ended the war ravaged, devastated, nearly prostrate (aside from its military establishment), and mourning the loss of 27 million of its citizens. It’s economy shrank by 20% during the war, and 40% of all its housing was damaged or destroyed, leaving 25 million citizens homeless, with 2.6 million disabled soldiers to deal with.
By contrast, the US emerged as the clear, dominant leader of the world order. We engineered the global financial system at Bretton Woods and led it afterwards. We produced the world’s reserve currency, and we prospered by much of the world’s surplus wealth being invested in our economy, the safest place it could be put. Our populace, having taken relatively trivial losses in the war, rose to a standard of living previously undreamed of. Finally, by forging a global system of strong, prosperous allies, we encircled the USSR and kept it largely contained, struggling to catch up with us.
Please, Charles. And you claim to have formulated a system based on reality!
Well, you can read the book yourself, which contradicts the statistics you offer, and make up your own mind. But, more generally, McMeekin’s point is that the Soviet Union would have collapsed without us sacrificing for Stalin’s benefit, not that the United States did not prosper after the war. It was those who suffered under Communism for another 45 years, like my relatives, who did not prosper.
The US also enabled the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War, as well, especially after 1965 or so. This is well-documented. Only when Reagan arrived did this change.
If the USSR had collapsed and Hitler triumphed in his goal of “Lebensraum” in the east, of course the allies might all have been defeated. There are those, among whom you may be numbered, who think that would have been a better outcome.
Did you ever read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “The Wave of the Future”? She argued that the West had no choice but to collapse of its own decadence and effeminacy, and the obvious replacement was fascism–vital, virtuous, virile, and, of course, vicious fascism. Just like her hubby, she argued that it was pointless to oppose them. They were unstoppable. Better to join them. But I’ll bet your ancestors, like hers, don’t include any Jews.
You should also read “The Story of a Secret State” by Jan Karski. He fought with the Polish underground during the war and visited one of the extermination camps, disguised as a guard. That was so he could be smuggled out of Poland and finally sit down with Roosevelt in the White House and give a first-person account of what the Nazis were doing in his country. It’s an incredible story. I had a first-edition copy of it, but my son, an army officer and amateur historian, seems to have nabbed it.
All this is trite, simplistic, and unsophisticated “history.” It also borders on personal affront, which gets you banned.
Obviously Stalin was not only a cold-blooded realist, but likely the only one in the 1930s and 40s, as well as being a murderous human being well-fitted to the inhuman system he was atop of. That said, after the invasion of France the only way to conclude WWII was with Nazi Germany in full control of Europe, or with the Soviet Union as its full or partial suzerain. Had the Nazis won in the east (which they almost did), there would have been no way of defeating them. Normandy and the successful campaigns in North Africa and Italy were possible only because Germany was tied up in an (at that point losing) Eastern Front. Neither would have been successful against a well-fortified Europe under full German control. So the question that faced policymakers was this: which is better, an economic basket case communist Russian government retaining half of Europe, or a resurgent fascist Germany retaining the whole of it? For the UK, this was an easy call: communist Russia at its height was little more than an economically sclerotic overly-large Russia, which the UK already had experience dealing with in its recent past. The German threat was new and far more serious; Hitler’s economy was far less destructive than Russia’s, and applied across the whole of Europe would’ve been a far more frightening foe to contend with than the Soviet Union ever was. For the US, a Europeanized Nazi regime would have presented the largest threat from the old country since the War of 1812. A hot or Cold War with a Nazi Germany with all that power would’ve been an awful burden for our country. Even if Stalin had attacked Germany (which was Churchill’s hope and expectation after the fall of France), this would’ve changed nothing about the awful calculus of the situation.
*Caveat: we definitely could’ve played our much stronger hand more aggressively in the post-war settlement – something which Stalin expected and was pleasantly surprised did not come to pass. This might’ve led to marginal gains in Austria, Germany and the Balkans especially, but probably not in Central Europe where the Red Army’s uncontested presence made the fates of those poor people an inevitable outcome. If this had been pushed and if China had not gone red, it’s possible that there would’ve been no major Cold War conflict in the first place.
Maybe; this is certainly plausible. Although just as plausible is that the German regime would have itself mellowed, but not become Left, and we would all be in a much better situation today.
This is the greatest book I have ever read, truly eye-opening to the extent of communist infiltration in the American bureaucracy under FDR’s administration. It’s the greatest argument against the modern slander against Joseph McCarthy as well, given the overwhelming evidence of his vindication.
Chuck,
If you want to do a dive into Joe McCarthy, I suggest this great book by M Stanton Evans
“Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies”
Evans details all the dirty tricks played on Joe by who we’ve come to know as the Deep State. In a case of perverse projection, the term Americans have come to understand as McCarthyism, is what was actually employed to destroy him.