- 05 Jun 2012 04:09
#13977438
I have marshaled several historical facts to clearly establish what Adolf Hitler's real foreign policy aims were. If you want to go beyond that and on some vague appeal to "Nazi" love of war, claim that Germany would have turned on the West after defeating the Soviet Union, then do that, but just don't assume you have some basis for doing that other than propaganda peddled by the History Channel or the countless Allied histories written about Germany. There is no compelling evidence to indicate that Hitler would have betrayed an Anglo-German alliance had one been established.
Furthermore, given the absolutely indispensable role of Adolf Hitler to National-Socialism and the centrality of his views for the NSDAP, any precedent that he would set for future National-Socialist successors would have been decisive and binding. Even Hitler's last will and testament states very clearly that he never truly desired war with England, France or America.
It is ironic, especially given the unfortunate realities of our hindsight, to claim that the British Empire would have to be motivated by the future aims of leaders of nations that were current allies. It was apparent to Churchill and the rest of the British government what the global aims of the Soviet Union were, and that any vacuum opened up for Soviet power would inevitably result in interests opposed to those of the European colonial powers, but that did not affect British policy. As they very clearly conveyed in their overt propaganda in the 1920s and the 1930s, the Soviets spent the decades after the war supporting anti-colonialist and anti-European movements in the Third World. The fact is that the only sane position would have been to base an alliance on concrete manifestations of respect for the British Empire, which only emanated from Adolf Hitler, who among all the statesmen at the time the war was starting was the only one that transparently wanted to see the British Empire endure.
As for these remarks on National-Socialist "expansionism", its parameters were clearly set out in Hitler's writings, speeches, and the duration of his leadership of the party.
Many court historians like to appeal to German actions in Western Europe, in the Low Countries and France, as a basis for German "aggression", but those were epiphenomenal to the war imposed on Germany by Britain and France. The fact is that if Britain had remained neutral or, preferably, engaged Germany on friendly terms, Germany never would have invaded France or the Low Countries. Those were incidental to a war that Britain started and that Hitler, multiple times, attempted to end. Lastly, there was nothing unique to German "expansionism" that did not already have some precedent established in British and broadly European colonial history. The relevant question is not whether Germany sought living space and further resources; of course it did. The relevant question is where and from whom. I have answered that question, and on the basis of my answer I hold my position that this was not only unopposed to authentic British imperial interests, but from a broadly racist perspective, was aligned with them. The British, who were not only Aryan but ethnolinguistically Germanic, were intrinsically aligned with basic German foreign policy, coupled with the fact that British power was naval and colonial, and German power was and would remain rooted in soil, and Eurasian in scope, as Hitler explicitly conveyed and as was conveyed to the British government by Ribbentrop in 1937.
- By FiveofSwords
- By wat0n
- By Unthinking Majority
- By litwin