Posts by Simon Grigg
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So Keir, we seem to be back to a variation on Manifest Destiny as that seems to be the only logic your argument flies under. Britain was destined to have someone like Churchill to fight Hitler because of their qualities as a nation, people and democracy. Mostly I'd argue they were lucky to have someone like that.
And a great many what-ifs go the other way
Agreed, but they would need to be pre-determined if I was to follow your drift so they are no longer what-ifs. Because any number of the countless ones may have changed the outcome of the war and that outcome invalidates your theory absolutely.
I'd be keen to know who exactly the Iron alternatives to Churchill were as I've yet to read a history that comfortably identifies one. Maybe they're not looking for the answer at the correct simplistic level?
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a regime that fought one war and lost,
But much of the point of this thread is that it's a huge mistake, and very dangerous, to box Nazism in like that. It was not "a regime", it was the culmination of a century of all sorts of things. It didn't simply rise up, and fight one war. If it hadn't been Hitler it may well have been someone else. In 1918-33 Germany was filled with violent not-so fringe groups, with running battles in the streets and murder being commonplace. Even the centrist Social Democratic Party (today's SPD) had their loosely allied Free Corps who murdered thousands. Many, on the right and increasingly in the centre were espousing very radical policies that differed little from the NSDAP's.
Germany and Central Europe, brutalised by WW1 and a Prussian leadership which legitimised violence as a means to an end were a disaster waiting to happen. None of which excuses Adolf Hitler or anyone else.
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I stopped smoking because Marlboro were secretly backed by the KKK (that's true, right?) and now this ...
Nivea (Beiersdorf) was a company stripped from it's Jewish owners in 1938..they were sent East to resettle, and it was never returned. I repeatedly ask my wife not to use it.
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For instance, the Nazi inability to decide between butter and guns was a Nazi failure; organising your economy is one of the most important things about winning an industrial war, and Nazi-ism wasn't up to it, and so they got destroyed by nations which did in fact have a sensible industrial policy.
Not true As pointed out above, the Germans were able to do both and still had slack. Their military was if anything oversupplied with many things in 1944-45. It was not industrial failure that bought down Germany but a raft of other events.
It wasn't chance that Churchill was Prime Minister; it was the result of a series of conscious decisions made by British politicians.
Nazi Germany would have arisen whether or not Churchill existed. His existing was not a pre-requisite of WW2. A quick squizz through British politicians of the day pretty quickly demolishes the idea that there was any other alternative to Churchill if Britain was going to hang in there. it was a very fortunate chance that there was a man such as him waiting to fill the Prime Ministerial role in 1940. Otherwise..who knows. Once again, he was the perfect man to get Britain through that year, but was continually a disaster waiting to happen in the years that followed, but fortunately chance gave us a pig headed US leader and some very fine American soldiers who kept the war in the west on track. Plus a vicious Russian leader who refused to roll over (remember Lebensraum as a concept pre-dated Soviet Russia..it did not require communism in Russia to happen..so if 1917 had not occurred Nazi Germany perhaps would've been facing Tsarist Russia in the East).
There are so many what-ifs in the way the SWW played out, the dysfunctionality of parts of the German leadership, was just one and one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
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Not unlike other states one could name, however.
Indeed, but this is one thread we've managed to keep the Candyman out of, so lets not push it....
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What do you think?
I thought of that book when I looked at these images.
The question that remains unanswered happily, is how the Nazi state would have existed if it had won and I'm not sure if that bland state was possible for any extended time. It needed continuous conflict. That was a part of it's essence, with roots deep in Prussia.
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Keir, I'm having trouble finding the logic in your argument.
I'm utterly confused by your 'series of foreseeable decisions made by an exceptionally transparent British leadership' line. Most of the battles as to whether to concede in the UK were made behind closed doors and were anything but transparent. The British public had no idea what was going on.
It was Churchill and almost Churchill alone for a while that gathered the British to carry on. Many powerful figures in the the UK establishment, including Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, wanted to fold in 1940 and if the UK had not had Churchill or a similar flag waver it would likely have been a very different story. It was a very happy chance that someone like Churchill was leading Britain in 1940, especially when one considers the shitty standard of the other politicians that filled the front benches of Westminster at the time. The Nazis did not choose to go to war against the man, it was a lucky chance that when war came, Churchill was there.
If Roosevelt had not been re-elected in 1940 the likely outcome would have been a Nazi victory in Europe as Britain would have been bankrupt by April 1941, long before Pearl Harbor.
If the storms in the channel in June 1944 had arrived a little earlier, a week or two, then there is a very strong chance the the Germans could've thrown the Allies back into the sea.
One wonders what would have happened it the Americans hadn't repeatedly overrulled and ignored Churchill's demands in 1943 and 1944. Many were as potentially disastrous as those pushed through by the German leader..Winston had a history of bad military decisions and many of his generals were buffoons.
But, yes, industrial might played it's part, but reflect on those figures for German military production, without ever, unlike the Allies, even touching upon civilian and consumer production until late 1944. And the sophisticated machinery being designed and built in German factories right until the very end. Nazi design continues to be utilised conceptually in aircraft wings to this day. Thank god the Soviets cut the fuel lines and the Swedes finally cut off their mines (albeit only when it was clear the Germans were about to lose).
If we are to stand back and hopefully prevent a drift into something similar happening again, I really think we need to look a little further than the argument that we won because we were not Nazis and they were, some sort of mid 20th Century variation of Manifest Destiny. There are lot of reasons we won and they lost, including the failures of the Nazi leadership, but it's dangerous to assume that the sole reason was an ideological failure or a national deficit on the part of Germany.
After all, one of the victors of that war was the equally odious Stalin.
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But at least they are alive to talk about it sixty years later. Should we feel sorry for them? I prefer to feel sorry for the 25 million dead, innocent and defenceless most of them, victims of their aggresssion in the East.
I don't think it's an us or them issue. Isn't that what we, the Allied democracies, claimed made us different (as much as the lines were very much blurred by area bombings etc)?
The Soviets suffered horrendously during the war but I'm uncomfortable using that to justify anything, and perhaps, although equally irrelevant, it's worth pointing out they were no slouches when it came to atrocities and no innocent party in the years leading up to June 1941.
It was the same problem I had with the right's justification of the horrors of Iraq. Our atrocities are more righteous than your atrocities simply doesn't work on any level. They are still atrocities.
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I am clearly the only person in the world running Vista on both a desktop and a laptop with no problems at all.
Same Danielle. I run a Mac myself (with Vista on a partition simply because I need to access Indo banks and NZ insurance companies...and refuse to pay the $600 that shitty MYOB charges for a win to OSX upgrade) but am responsible for 4 Vista and 1 XP machines. The XP machine gives far more problems than the Vista ones.
I feel as if I'm odd as I've found Vista rather stable over the years. Never an issue. No blue screens, no farts, nothing....and they never seem to attract the swarms of viruses that MacLore swears will plague them.
I have Mac-using friends who get very angry when I tell them this...
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If I follow your gist, the threat is always there.
yes, you do, Joe. The most horrifying thing about totalitarianism is not how much of a social mutation it represents but it's roots in normalcy.
For all the evils of Fascism, National Socialism and such, most of its adherents and champions were not always the monsters or freaks and social outcasts, as we see them routinely portrayed, but doctors, accountants, lawyers, petty bureaucrats, small & large businessmen, educated people and soldiers. One of the harrowing things about the BBC Auschwitz series I mentioned earlier was the way it portrayed, in re-enactments, the bland normalcy of the likes of Rudolf Höss, Eichmann and the casual workman like atmosphere of the Wannsee Conference, which sounded like a housing board discussing allocations as they condemned millions to a grave.
For all the wacko wingbats you find on the fringe, and the verbose nastiness that spews from the likes of Limbaugh, Beck or others closer to home, the real danger comes when those closer to the centre start listening and regarding it as a part of the normal political landscape. And thus the rise of the Nazi party began long before Versailles and the Munich Putsch, when the awful extremism and discourse of violence, that proved to be the manifesto of Nazi Germany, found it's way into the political mainstream as it had in much of Europe, but very especially in Germany and Austria, in the decades before WW1.
In our rush to (rightly) vilify the Nazis we should never forget that. But mostly we have, and that is what scares the fuck out of me.