[Prosthetic Conscience]

Quite frankly, I do not care about the fate of the European Jews under Hitler, I'm not antisemitic but whether 6-10 million were shot or gassed is of no consequence to me, I care about my own people and my own country, and I have no particular desire to give up all what we had built up over the centuries for the sake of a few million foreigners. The wartime generation were propagandised and brainwashed to a ridiculous extent, they were brutalised and had their personalities so utterly restructured that they were effectively 50 million mouthpieces for the Ministry of Information.

Well, if you're saying you have no care the entire world outside your own little circle, to the extent of not caring if they are murdered or not, then we'll just call the character you're giving us here xenophobic and psychopathic instead (a fake, I presume). But neither you, nor the persona you are portraying 'built up' anything. You're too young. Propaganda, brainwashing, and brutality was, of course, what turned my distant relative into a racist little shit. It was what the Nazis did best. Some day, someone will teach you some history.

Well, you collaborated with the more murderous and far more anti-European USSR, so you're in no position to call Nazi collaborators scum.

Everyone can call Nazis or their supporters scum. That's a fundamental rule of PoFo:

Generally speaking we are very relaxed about people's views. Be they liberal, conservative communist etc, but promotion of hate ideologies is not allowed. Common sense will tell you that such things are prohibited by the forum rules, but just to state it explicitly: Nazis and any hate ideologies will not be tolerated

[Section Leader]

Well, if you're saying you have no care the entire world outside your own little circle, to the extent of not caring if they are murdered or not, then we'll just call the character you're giving us here xenophobic and psychopathic instead (a fake, I presume). But neither you, nor the persona you are portraying 'built up' anything. You're too young. Propaganda, brainwashing, and brutality was, of course, what turned my distant relative into a racist little shit. It was what the Nazis did best. Some day, someone will teach you some history.

I know full well what the Nazis did.

Churchill did EXACTLY the same thing, turned an entire nation into bloodthirsty fanatics. Can you not honestly see the similarities between Hitler and Churchill? Both were scumbags who turned themselves into messiahs and brought ruin to their own nations.

[Varg]

Communism is a hate ideology too.

[Far-Right Sage]

Hitler had no issue with the Greeks, but he still subjected it to a brutal occupation. Hitler was not just not just bullying and aggressive he was demented. While he lived no peace was secure. We should have gone after him sooner not tried to weasel out of a war even lomger.

Well that’s just inappropriate slander and propagandistic posturing which frankly has no place in a serious debate. Greece had to be occupied out of reasons of strategic necessity following Rome’s failure in the Greco-Italian War. The point I was referring to was the general German lack of desire for gobbling up large parts of the British Empire.

It shouldn't have taken six years. France should never have fallen. British troops should have been on the German border ready to attack. It only took so long and cost so much because of incompetence, lack of will and lack of aggression. The last thing Britain needed was more peace.

The reality is that this was a conflict which much of the British public as well as the British political establishment didn’t want to involve itself in, and so it unknowingly set its own course for how it would fight in the opening days.

Much of the Empire lasted into the 1960's, Britain had already partially given up Egypt and Iraq. The Sun was setting on the empire, irrespective of our participation in WWII. but I fail to see how acting like a bunch of pansies would have prolonged the empire. No doubt events like the fall of Singapore helped undermine it, but then with such cowardice and incompetence how did Britain deserve to have an empire?

The crown jewel, the British Raj, came unhinged with the Indian partition of 1947, and what you’re failing to see is that both the United States and the Soviet Union maintained a shared interest in breaking up British hegemony as well as the French and other European colonial entities. Following the conclusion of World War I and during the reign of King George V, over a quarter of the world’s surface area was ruled from London and this was considered its zenith, so I see no plausible reason the empire would have collapsed without the conditions Britain itself helped set in the Second World War.

The health of the British improved during the war. The social health and cohesion of Britain improved remarkably. Its passed now, but in the sixties and seventies it was a standing joke amongst the young how much the older generation enjoyed the war. It was called our finest hour for a reason and you suggest we should chosen peace for a few more consumer goods. Really FRS you've become the most dreadful peace-monger. You're worse than the leftie liberals.

There was a reason Churchill was unseated and Clement Attlee and Labour brought in, before even the anticipated Potsdam Conference. The British economy was a train wreck after its supposed “victory” and politically, the country never recovered.

I wish! Some satellite. Where was Britain when Americans were dying for freedom in the mosquito ridden jungles of Indo China? But any way American dominance was inevitable and way preferable to kissing Hitler's arse

Harold Wilson was dead set against it, and ultimately the British couldn’t have done much with what we were limited to, and it was not in any great interests of theirs to do it.

[Preston Cole]

Collaborating with the Soviet Union was the right thing to do.

That's your problem right there. This mentality is what created that unholy alliance which still lives on and leads Europe and the Americas to ruin.

[Rich]

Quite frankly, I do not care about the fate of the European Jews under Hitler, I'm not antisemitic but whether 6-10 million were shot or gassed is of no consequence to me,

Well some of us do and what greater pleasure was there than wading knee deep through Nazi blood. If this thread goes on any longer I'll turn into a raving nationalist.

It's strange. I had a number of people on PoFo down as fascists. i thought they admired the warrior spirit. The virtues of national spirit forged through struggle. Apparently not. It turns out they're rabid peaceniks who'd make John Lennon look like a war monger. Anyway at least the Churchillian spirit is not completely dead here in Britain.

[Potemkin]

It's strange. I had a number of people on PoFo down as fascists. i thought they admired the warrior spirit. The virtues of national spirit forged through struggle. Apparently not. It turns out they're rabid peaceniks who'd make John Lennon look like a war monger.

Actually, that's just Section Leader. He's an example of what I'm now going to call an 'Iron Sky' Nazi, the right-wing version of of a 'Red Alert' Commie.

[Far-Right Sage]

And my parents fully understood that, if we had collaborated with an anti-semitic genocidal regime, we'd have no self-respect as a nation whatsoever.

I'm sure that you can understand that anyone who contemplated co-operating with Hitler would be looked on as scum, can't you?

Frankly, this post is just a ridiculous slew of moralistic hogwash.

You seem to have no issue with your nation's collaboration with another anti-Semitic (Stalin's Doctors' Plot), Russian chauvinist (deportations of Koreans, Crimean Tatars, Kazakhs, and other minorities to Siberia) and genocidal regime (Ukrainian Holmodor, no I don't and never have bought that it was an "accident" anymore than the "excesses" of the Cultural Revolution, the Bengal famine, or the Irish potato famine) which killed millions more and aggressively expanded to the detriment of other European nations (or did you forget about the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, the war of conquest waged against Finland, and the Soviet invasion of Poland?)

I'll now await a bunch of excuses centered around how Hitler was "worse" because he was "racist". Give me a fucking break.

I certainly consider those alleged "Westerners' who not only contemplated but carried out collaboration with the Soviet Union to be the scum of the Earth.

[Section Leader]

It's strange. I had a number of people on PoFo down as fascists. i thought they admired the warrior spirit. The virtues of national spirit forged through struggle. Apparently not. It turns out they're rabid peaceniks who'd make John Lennon look like a war monger. Anyway at least the Churchillian spirit is not completely dead here in Britain.

I believe in war, but that doesn't mean I think all wars are good. For example the First World War was good because Edwardian society needed a start to shake it out of it's idle slumber and awake to the 20th century. But the Second World War was just meaningless slaughter that resulted in the rise of modern liberalism. Everything liberals think of as "bad" can now be easily crushed and brushed aside by associating them with the enemy and acts perpetrated by the enemy.

BUT, this doesn't mean I look down upon the men who had to do the fighting, quite the contrary infact, and I would have gone too without complaint no matter if I was British, German, French, American, Russian, Ukrainian, Italian or Japanese.

[Organon]

Britain could have avoided war by not declaring it.

See "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World" by Patrick J. Buchanan. See this article for a summary of Buchanan's argument:

http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/20 ... -want-war/

So they intended to leave these areas out of their co-prosperity sphere before this, just like the Germans would stop their lebensbraum at Danzig?

If Britain had not handed an unsolicited war assurance to Poland and goaded her into refusing reasonable negotiations with Germany, it is quite possible that Germany and Poland would have entered into an alliance together against the Soviet Union. Danzig was 95% German and belonged with Germany; even many British statesmen agreed with that. What obstructed German-Polish negotiations was unnecessary British meddling. Hitler had no designs on the British Empire and his desire to avoid conflict with England would have entailed that he would have had no designs on Western Europe. His primary foreign policy aims were gathering lost German elements and confronting the Soviet Union, which was a threat to not only Germany but all of Europe, including Britain.

The question I have for you is, given all of that, how was it in Britain's interest to meddle fatefully in German-Polish negotiations and ultimately to prop up the Soviet Union?

It's strange. I had a number of people on PoFo down as fascists. i thought they admired the warrior spirit. The virtues of national spirit forged through struggle. Apparently not. It turns out they're rabid peaceniks who'd make John Lennon look like a war monger. Anyway at least the Churchillian spirit is not completely dead here in Britain.

Churchill could easily have decided it was in English interests to support a military campaign against the Soviet Union. I have little doubt that Hitler would have welcomed English support in a campaign to ensure Europe's future and whose progress would have cemented English and German friendship for decades to come and decisively deal with a regime that was a threat to both.

[Decky]

Churchill could easily have decided it was in English interests to support a military campaign against the Soviet Union.

He did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

[Kirby]

He did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

Churchill was drunk when he came up with that.

[Smilin' Dave]

Churchill was drunk when he came up with that.

He might have been drunk when he ordered the study (in fact it's highly probably, Churchill was drunk all the time ) he wasn't actually involved in authoring it. Instead it was by assorted chiefs of staff (IIRC the scans of the original have an extra section resulting from discussions with the US).

[Decky]

Churchill was drunk when he came up with that.

Obviously, they guy was drunk by midday all day every day, what's your point?

[Organon]

Well, that's pretty hypocritical and disingenuous of Churchill in 1945, considering he had spent the last six years warring against the only real threat to the Soviet Union, repeatedly and with good nature meeting with Stalin and toward the end of the war, actualizing Stalin's European interests.

The difference between Adolf Hitler on the one hand and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin on the other is that only the former admired the British Empire and wanted it conserved. Roosevelt thought that the British Empire was an anachronism that needed to fade away and Stalin viewed it as the principle European imperialist and capitalist power. Therefore, the British Empire would have better served its own interests by aligning itself with Hitler and Germany. This is not a perspective that can only be obtained with hindsight. British leaders were aware of Hitler's views, and equally aware of what animated Stalin and his interests and also that America would be a primary beneficiary to a dissolved British Empire.

History bears out what was foreseeable to the British in 1939, for by the time England "stopped Hitler", Britain was a bankrupt power on its way to losing its empire, and US and Red Army troops were squarely in the middle of a Europe that today is a cautionary tale against multiculturalism.

[Smilin' Dave]

Well, that's pretty hypocritical and disingenuous of Churchill in 1945, considering he had spent the last six years warring against the only real threat to the Soviet Union

1. If you read Operation Unthinkable it proposes rearming German military units
2. Churchill only teamed up with the Soviet Union because at the time, it was the only real threat to Nazi Germany which at the time seemed like the more immediate threat (did anyone come up with an explanation as to how Nazi Germany did not threaten tradional British interests in Europe and potentially to its empire?).
3. Up until April 1940 the British were still making prepartions for a bombing campaign against the Soviet Union so it's not like they had been all chummy from day one. See Operation Pike:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pike

[pugsville]

Cautionary Tale for Multiculturalism? How does that make any sense or relevant?

Hitler's Nazi Germany was unpredictable. They were arming to the teeth, The Western allies could hope that they were not the target or they could try and limit the expansion of a aggressive warmonger threat. Hitler said lets of things, and generally he could not be trusted, nothing he said in public or diplomatically could be taken at face value, or trusted. The Whole Nazi philosophy was about the Strong taking form the weak. If Germany managed to incorporate Russia, with all those resources why wouldn't they take the rest of Europe?


Helping Nazi Germany conquer Soviet Russia could have been a massive mistake. The Soviets were pretty passive internally focus paranoid mass murders. The Nazis were more aggressive over confident expansionist mass murderers.

At the time no one took the Soviet military power seriously. Soviets were not perceived as a threat, The Nazis were.


The Long term decline of Britain's dominance and empire was due to a large number of factors WW2 make have made it quicker but the empire was going, and the 19th century world industrial superpower was created by circumstances that would change, and it's decline was pretty much certain.

[Preston Cole]

If Germany managed to incorporate Russia, with all those resources why wouldn't they take the rest of Europe?

Why would they? Allies like Italy, Romania, Vichy France, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia and Finland didn't have a fraction of the resources Russia had; beyond political and military collaboration, what would be the purpose of taking other independent European countries?

[Organon]

Cautionary Tale for Multiculturalism? How does that make any sense or relevant?

You snipped that from my statement. Also, I used 'against', not 'for'. That adjectival phrase modifies 'Europe', and can be left out. I used it to emphasize how Europe has wrecked itself.

I am suggesting that many of the outcomes of World War II were foreseeable from the perspective of 1939, including bankruptcy. If Britain went to war in 1939, and it was Britain that started war by declaring it, knowing that it might be defeated and occupied by Germany as an eventuality of that war, certainly long term collapse of the Empire and implosion was a foreseeable possibility.

Hitler's Nazi Germany was unpredictable. They were arming to the teeth, The Western allies could hope that they were not the target or they could try and limit the expansion of a aggressive warmonger threat. Hitler said lets of things, and generally he could not be trusted, nothing he said in public or diplomatically could be taken at face value, or trusted.

The Western allies could do more than hope, and breed irrational acts like the British war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, which virtually assured the war.

From Hitler's perspective, no doubt the British and French were unpredictable. In 1935, Britain implicitly weakened the Stresa Front by entering the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, in which the naval might of Germany was restricted to a fraction of the British. This conveyed to France and Italy that Britain was not going to pursue a blind anti-German foreign policy, and it conveyed to Hitler that some aspects of German continental policy were being recognized. If Britain was motivated by something else, say merely tying down Germany, this was not explicit in the agreement. It was an act of goodwill on Hitler's part, assuming that the framework of a compatible alliance was being formed and willfully reducing German strength at sea meant gaining something concrete for Germany on land. Suddenly, after several years of good relations, Britain reverses its previously stable position by making an enemy of Hitler and Germany, and accomplishes what has to be the most idiotic feat in the history of British diplomacy: Giving a war guarantee to a military regime nestled between Germany and the Soviet Union.

But in any event, the framework of that 1935 Naval Agreement was completely ideologically sound. Germany was a soil and land power, and Britain was a colonial and naval power. Hitler operated on the assumption of that basis in viewing Anglo-German relations. He had no designs on the British.

Hitler's basic foreign policy was laid down in Mein Kampf: Align Germany with Italy and Britain, reclaim lost German peoples and lands, and destroy the political basis of the Soviet Union to gain for the German people not only additional resources but, metaphysically, space to live and flourish.

It is evident from Mein Kampf that Hitler admired the British and wanted an alliance with her Empire, and this comes out in several later remarks. There is, however, no evidence that up until the start of the war, Hitler ever contemplated destroying the British Empire he so admired.

This is why even after the British and French declared war, Hitler tried to sue for peace twice, at least once before and once after the capitulation of France, why he allowed British soldiers to flee at Dunkirk, why he would periodically shred bragging about the defeat of some British force somewhere.

Every single thing Hitler did from 1933 to early 1939 was an expression of these basic foreign policy goals, from his reoccupation of the Rhineland to his reincorporation of the Saar after a plebiscite delivered a majority in favor of return to Germany, to the reincorporation of Sudeten Germans and lands, the Anschluss between Germany and Austria, the occupation of pro-Soviet Czecho-Slovakia, and the campaign in Poland that had as its immediate objective reclaiming German Danzig and as its long term aim the other pillar of Hitler's foreign policy: Military confrontation with the Soviet Union. None of these were moves on the chessboard of Europe that, given his written and stated goals, would be unpredictable, and there was no basis given Hitler's explicitly written and stated goals that they were part of some grandiose design to one day take over and dominate the world. Given that they encompassed not only the aim of reuniting Germans but also confronting a mortal enemy common to England, France, Japan and America, it should have been welcomed if not actively aided.

[Organon]

Also, Germany's real aims were not solely apparent from Mein Kampf and Adolf Hitler's subsequent remarks. It was also directly, explicitly conveyed to the British government by German Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop. The following is included in Churchill's postwar recollections, from a meeting that took place between Ribbentrop and Churchill in 1937, fully two years prior to the outbreak of hostilities.