From the The World According to AmericanGoy blog – WW2 Operation Barbarossa 1941 – the Real History version. American Goy is a critic of Israel and claims to be a progressive. I guess he’s a liberal anti-Communist of some sort.
This is the more usual kind we were used to from the pro-Nazis, though now it seems to be going mainstream Far Right anti-Communist, unlike the typical stuff we deal with in the US I dealt with in a previous post here.
This is the incredible argument that Stalin actually started WW2. Not Hitler, but Stalin. Hitler actually attacked the USSR to save all of Europe from Communism! Hitler was the savior of the West! Stalin was getting ready to attack all of Europe to convert it to Communism via armed assault.
Yes, yes, I know. You are shaking your head.
Did the USSR under Stalin ever support one armed revolution outside the USSR? Of course not. Did Stalin’s “revolution in one country” reject the Trotskyite support for simultaneous world revolution in all of the capitalist countries,to be spearheaded by the USSR, since converting several advanced capitalist countries to socialism was necessary for socialism to succeed? Of course it did.
Socialism in one country meant building socialism in the USSR and leaving the rest for later, if ever. What this means is that while Trotskyites might have supported attacking all of Europe to convert it to Communism (actually they probably would have supported the local CP’s’ revolutions instead), it’s inconceivable for Stalinism.
Never mind any of that. Never mind reality.
There’s a book out, Icebreaker by Viktor Suvorov, written in 1990. Suvorov is a Soviet defector. Usually these guys have about zero credibility and many of them went to work for the CIA or the MI5 as soon as they got to the West. This book lays out the case for Operation Barbarossa revisionism.
Suvorov has written another silly book, Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. This book came out last year.
More along these lines: Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation by Joachim Hoffman (2001), Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941 by Albert L. Weeks (2003).
Hitler: Stalin’s Stooge, by James B. Edwards (2004), is truly absurd. Stalin brought Hitler to power as part of a grand plan to conquer Europe for Communism! Sheesh.
Somewhat more normal is Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. This is standard rightwing isolationist, and somewhat anti-Semitic, doctrine. The US and UK caused the war by not allying with Hitler, the great anti-Communist fighter.
The US racist right, of which Buchanan is a representative, was never comfortable fighting on the Western front. The Nazis said they were fighting for the Whites of the world, and the KKK and even most US Whites were pretty much de facto Nordicists at the time.
Only 20 years before, the President of the US had signed the 1925 Immigration bill, intended to reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, since Jews, Poles and Italians were genetically inferior to superior Nordics, who saw themselves as the only real Americans. Calvin Coolidge, in signing the bill, issued an explicitly Nordicist statement that was uncontroversial at the time.
Nordicist books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race were all the rage at the time, especially among the US elite. There is a passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where the White bluebloods are standing around at a party talking favorably about Grant’s book.
The KKK at the time was explicitly Nordicist and especially disliked Italians and Catholics. Much of the US South was under the sway of more or less Nordicist segregationist doctrine. It’s easy to see how a de facto White Supremacist and even Nordicist and anti-Semitic White US society might feel uneasy about going to war with the most explicitly White Supremacist and Nordicist state that ever existed (Nazi Germany).
Hence, the US had to be more or less kicked, dragging and screaming, into the Western Front war. We only got into the fight when the Japanese attacked us in the East. A few days later, we declared war on Germany too.
The Holocaust had already been underway for a bit on December 7, 1941. The killings in Poland in the ghettos, mostly by starvation, had been going on for 1 1/2 years. The Polish government in exile had long been issuing urgent bulletins about the reality of Generalplan Ost in Poland, and especially its effects on the Jews. It’s hard to say how an anti-Semitic America felt about these reports, but we couldn’t be bothered to join the fight with manpower.
To this day, the White nationalists in the US generally either more or less sympathize with the Nazis or at least say that the Western Front was not our fight, or, at the very least, a tragedy (Whites massacring each other for little reason).
There have been a flood of Operation Barbarossa revisionist books that have come out since the USSR archives opened in 1990, and I don’t really know what to make of them. I will just leave you with the excellent rejoinder from the great Eastern Star blog, The Other Revisionism. I will just leave it up to J. Slavyanski to lay out the case. Some of these questions may never be solved; we may just have to reconcile ourselves to that.
Much more reasonable is the book Gruesome Harvest by Ralph Franklin Keeling. It lays out in horrible detail the Morgenthau Plan, which called for the destruction of Germany and would have resulted in the deaths of many millions of Germans and a pre-industrial, primitive agricultural Germany with its knowledgebase, education, industry, wealth – its entire modern society – completely destroyed.
A sort of modified Morgenthau Plan was actually put into place, resulted in mass starvation and malnutrition of millions of Germans, and probably killed millions of German civilians. After a while, the horror was evident, and the plan was revoked in favor of the Marshall Plan. Morgenthau was Jew and was Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. His plan can be reasonably seen as World Jewry’s desire for mass revenge on the German people and a reverse genocide of Germans, in retaliation for the Holocaust.
A good overview of the thinking involved is Ross Vachon’s great Semitism Run Wild essay. I am acquainted with Ross; he’s a good guy.
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I just listened to Buchanan’s book on CD and it doesn’t claim anyone should have allied with Hitler. At every point in time it seems to claim “This action was a mistake”. A sort of greedy revisionist history algorithm. He doesn’t claim that Stalin was going to attack Hitler either, just that it was smart (though immoral) for Stalin to enter the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact because it gave him time to build up his strength for the inevitable war with Hitler. He’s also sort of inconsistent in that early on he notes that Hitler had determined to destroy the Bolshevik regime and turn the tables on France back with Mein Kampf but later he suggests that his attacks on both countries were highly contingent on other events that occurred (generally tied into hostilities with England). A generous interpretation would be that although he did ultimately want to do those things, his hand was forced earlier than he’d wished.