American diplomatic strategy in the late '30s and early '40s


  • @Clyde85:

    no matter what you say neither was “less” evil then the other. You have some personal grudge that Germany was beaten while Stalins empire remained, we get that, but no one wants to hear a fawning apologetic for Hitler and his cronies.

    This.

    I strongly feel that Stalin and communism were far worse than Nazism

    There is no such thing as something “far worse than Nazism”. The atrocities they committed against millions and millions and millions of “animals” or “lesser people”… There is nothing “far worse than Nazism” unless you deny a huge amount of “recent” (Past 100 years) established, documented, historical fact. I know Communism and Stalin are really bad too. But as I implied before, that’s a dead-end discussion. Would you rather be killed by firing squad or by lethal injection? That’s the kind of thing you’re debating. Stop.


  • @Gargantua:

    This is a historical discussion about political disposition.

    not a political discussion about history.  Kurt Godel hasn’t broken any rules or even -guidelines-.

    You don’t have to break any rules.  If IL decides it’s too political, it gets locked.


  • @Clyde85:

    This thread is not going to get very far, if it get’s too political (which it can do very easily) its going to get locked.

    Stalin and Hitler are two lions of the early 20th century who did horrid horrid things, and no matter what you say neither was “less” evil then the other. You have some personal grudge that Germany was beaten while Stalins empire remained, we get that, but no one wants to hear a fawning apologetic for Hitler and his cronies.

    Pretty much says it for me.  Kurt’s posts are creepy, not unlike something Goebbels would have cooked up.

    I’m no fan of communism (which is a massive failure and extremely bad idea…and its economic market control side is nearly extinct), but Stalin was more of fascist dictator than a communist.  It was all about the boss, not the party or the people.  We can’t even tell for certain if Hitler or Stalin killed more people–and they both have the top two spots of all time!

    As I’ve pointed out in the other thread, there is little reason to justify supporting the Nazi’s over the USSR.  It has nothing to do with left/right ideology, and everything to do with strategic positions.  Put Germany where Russia is (and vice versa), swap ideologies/leaders, and put Joe Stalin in league with Mussolini and Imperial Japan instead of Hitler.  There wouldn’t be much alternative to supporting Hitler’s Germany (relocated as Russia) against the others.

    Kurt’s basis for supporting the Nazi’s is political ideology.  Anything that is anti-communist works for him.


  • The thread is ok. Just don’t start bringing up FDR and evaluating his foreign or domestic policy.


  • @Imperious:

    Just don’t start bringing up FDR and evaluating his foreign or domestic policy.

    That’s no doubt!  :lol:


  • @KurtGodel7:

    If I am banned for expressing the view that the communists were significantly worse than the Nazis, it would indicate to me that one or more list moderators subscribe to the latter philosophy. I would then go about finding another WWII forum run by people who adhere to the former perspective.

    Which would be too great a loss for this site and greatly diminish the level of intelegent discourse on this site in the WW2 forums.

    I can see and understand what you mean, I too often sympathize with the German solider and the German army, but I have no sympathy for Hitler and is Nazi party. What they did was far worse then any of that “Stabbed in the Back” nonsense from WW1. Hitler and his party did more to stab the German army and solider in the back with their idiodic occupation policies (one of the biggest factors to Germay’s defeat IMO) and their equally stupid racial superiority theories. I know Stalin and his “communist” cornies were just as bad as Hitler and his Nazi party, most people here know this, no one is disputing this, but like Gamerman said it’s like arguing if you’d rather be shot and hung, either way you end up dead! Hitler and his Nazi’s were defeated by the Soviets in the end because the reaped what the had sowen in their occupation of Russian lands. Had a more moderate policy been used maybe things would have been different. Hitler and his Nazi party are forever stained by the horros they unleashed during WW2 and no matter how terrible Stalin was people are not going to believe the “lesser of two evil” argument.

    If thats what were doing here, then I say screw Hitler and Stalin and say go Cthulhu, why choose the lesser of two evils  :wink:


  • @Red:

    Pretty much says it for me.� Kurt’s posts are creepy, not unlike something Goebbels would have cooked up.�

    I’m no fan of communism (which is a massive failure and extremely bad idea…and its economic market control side is nearly extinct), but Stalin was more of fascist dictator than a communist.� It was all about the boss, not the party or the people.� We can’t even tell for certain if Hitler or Stalin killed more people–and they both have the top two spots of all time!

    As I’ve pointed out in the other thread, there is little reason to justify supporting the Nazi’s over the USSR.� It has nothing to do with left/right ideology, and everything to do with strategic positions.� Put Germany where Russia is (and vice versa), swap ideologies/leaders, and put Joe Stalin in league with Mussolini and Imperial Japan instead of Hitler.� There wouldn’t be much alternative to supporting Hitler’s Germany (relocated as Russia) against the others.�

    Kurt’s basis for supporting the Nazi’s is political ideology.� Anything that is anti-communist works for him.

    You feel my posts are “creepy.” I can’t control what you feel. I can only control whether I tell the truth, even in cases in which the general public has been taught to passionately believe something other than the truth.

    You brought up the question of which mass murderers were the worst of all time. The top two were clearly Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. Also Genghis Khan should be included in this discussion; though the 40 million deaths for which the Mongol horde was to blame occurred partly under his rule, and partly under his son’s rule.

    Calculating the numbers of mass murders for which Hitler is responsible involves questions of assigning blame. One method to go about doing that is to perform the following calculation:

    1. Take the number of people within German-controlled territory
    2. Subtract away the number of people Germany could actually feed
    3. The resulting number would be the number of deaths to be blamed on the British food blockade.
    4. Any civilian deaths in excess of the number from step 3) would be blamed on the Nazi regime.

    The problem with the above method is that things were not always as black and white as the above methodology would suggest. For example, the Nazis took horses off of farms so they could be used by the military. Chemicals which could have been used to produce either explosives or fertilizer were often used for explosives. One could argue that these measures were necessary to win the war; and that defeat would subject Germany to mass murder both in Soviet-occupied territory, and in the territory occupied by the Western democracies.

    Deaths within German-held territories can be broken down into five categories:

    1. Deaths which occurred due to the British food blockade and the Soviets’ scorched earth policies. (The latter involved the removal or destruction of food and farming equipment.)

    2. Deaths which occurred as a result of Germany’s efforts to maximize its military’s success. (For example, taking horses off of farms so they could be used by the military.)

    3. Deaths which resulted from the general destruction associated with war. For example, the temporary destruction of transportation networks interrupted deliveries of food and medical supplies.

    4. Deaths which occurred due to Allied efforts. British and American bombers repeatedly inflicted massive attacks against German cities. The Soviet military routinely attacked columns of German refugees.

    5. Deaths which occurred primarily as a result of the Nazis’ wish to exterminate other groups of people.

    Unfortunately, I have not seen much research devoted to breaking things down in this way. Most historians tend to act as though the deaths from categories 1, 2, and sometimes 3, should be treated as though they belonged in category 5. Histories written from that perspective are no better, and no more reliable, than Allied propaganda leaflets.

  • '12

    Kurt, my problem with your reasoning is one of premises that you use for a basis for a ‘logical argument’ in terms of logic and rhetoric is the food issue.

    Succinctly, I see your point as:

    The allies didn’t help feed the German war machine food so therefore the Nazis were justified in starving millions of Jews and others because they were left with no choice by the bad allies.

    I will leave out the copious amounts of hand waving and sophistry.


  • @KurtGodel7:

    The top two were clearly Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

    Actually Kurt, point of intrest, it is believed that Chiang Kia-shek and his KMT is responsable for more death’s in China then Mao. He is only credit with putting down a Taiwanese revolt in the 50’s that killed around 30,000 people, but during is regin in China (1928-1949) it is believed that he killed over 10 million of his people, and this dose not factor in the yellow river flood of 1938 caused by the blowing up of the dikes on the river. The KMT estimated that only 800,000 people drowned but this is considered an extreamly low figure. A more accutare number is around 3 or 4 million people dying from the sudden flood and resulting chaos. Even that number is innacurate as it omits the millions that dies from the fammine this caused by these actions


  • @Clyde85:

    @KurtGodel7:

    If I am banned for expressing the view that the communists were significantly worse than the Nazis, it would indicate to me that one or more list moderators subscribe to the latter philosophy. I would then go about finding another WWII forum run by people who adhere to the former perspective.

    Which would be too great a loss for this site and greatly diminish the level of intelegent discourse on this site in the WW2 forums.

    I can see and understand what you mean, I too often sympathize with the German solider and the German army, but I have no sympathy for Hitler and is Nazi party. What they did was far worse then any of that “Stabbed in the Back” nonsense from WW1. Hitler and his party did more to stab the German army and solider in the back with their idiodic occupation policies (one of the biggest factors to Germay’s defeat IMO) and their equally stupid racial superiority theories. I know Stalin and his “communist” cornies were just as bad as Hitler and his Nazi party, most people here know this, no one is disputing this, but like Gamerman said it’s like arguing if you’d rather be shot and hung, either way you end up dead! Hitler and his Nazi’s were defeated by the Soviets in the end because the reaped what the had sowen in their occupation of Russian lands. Had a more moderate policy been used maybe things would have been different. Hitler and his Nazi party are forever stained by the horros they unleashed during WW2 and no matter how terrible Stalin was people are not going to believe the “lesser of two evil” argument.

    If thats what were doing here, then I say screw Hitler and Stalin and say go Cthulhu, why choose the lesser of two evils� :wink:

    Thanks Clyde. I appreciate the compliments you and gamerman have given me. I also appreciate Gargantua’s recent post on my behalf.

    To address your point about German occupation policy within the Soviet Union: there was division within the Nazi Party about whether the German occupation of Soviet territory should be benign or harsh. Ultimately those advocating a benign occupation lost the power struggle, leading to a harsh occupation policy. In contrast, Germany’s leaders from WWI had chosen a benign occupation policy for the eastern lands they occupied. That policy was part of the events which convinced the people of the Ukraine that “Bad things come from Russia, good things come from Germany.”

    One of the Nazis’ main reasons for invading the Soviet Union in the first place was to obtain the food necessary to avert starvation in Germany and German-occupied Western Europe. It’s possible that the Nazi leaders concluded that, if they permitted widespread starvation to occur in German-held Soviet lands, they would be seen as dire enemies no matter what else they did. Ruling by fear may have seemed like their only practical option. I acknowledge that their racial ideology almost certainly contributed to this decision. They probably saw Slavs as cowardly and easily intimidated. (Such views would have been reinforced by the Red Army’s abysmal performance in its 1940 Winter War against Finland.)

    Also, if Germany’s food situation was such that millions of people would starve to death no matter what course Hitler chose, he certainly would have preferred those millions to be Slavic rather than German.

    More generally, I would break the Nazi ideology down into three components:

    1. Love for Germans and other Nordic peoples
    2. Indifference or even contempt for most non-Germanic/non-Nordic people (such as Slavs)
    3. Hatred towards the Jews

    The Nazis were at their worst when acting upon the third of these components; and at their best when motivated by the first component. As an example of the latter, Hitler instituted improved workplace safety standards, improved clean air and clean water standards, reduced the unemployment rate to close to zero, significantly increased wages for German workers, greatly increased their vacation time, reduced the workweek to 40 hours, and arranged for government-subsidized cruises so that those workers could see the world. He also led an anti-smoking campaign which significantly reduced the rate of tobacco use within Germany. The Nazis encouraged physical exercise; and arranged for groups of adults to exercise together. German children who grew up in the '30s were consistently well-fed and in good physical condition. This contrasted with the poorer classes of English society–so strong a contrast that even someone as strongly biased as William Shirer noted it.

    Another point worth mentioning is genetics. In nature, animals tend to have large numbers of offspring, only some of which survive to have offspring of their own. The fittest animals are most likely to be among the survivors, leading to upward genetic pressure. That source of upward genetic pressure has largely vanished for humans. Instead, the human gene pool is changing based primarily on the number of children individual people decide to have.

    I have seen a Nazi propaganda poster which lamented the fact that intelligent, law-abiding people were having far fewer children than their less intelligent law-abiding counterparts, who in turn were having fewer children than unintelligent criminals. Communists have taken the opposite view of this situation. Karl Marx thought that individual differences were determined almost entirely through environmental factors. The communist movement would move even further in that direction.


    Lysenko [caused] the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union.


    Mendelian genetics is the only scientifically credible form of genetics. The Stalin/Lysenko persecution of geneticists represented an attack on science–a far more severe attack, at least in terms of body count, than anything the Catholic Church had done to Galileo.

    While communists have since backed away from Lamarckist quackery, they have continued to promote an anti-scientific, “yes, but” approach to genetic science. “Yes, Mendelian genetics theory is true, but it doesn’t do much to explain differences between humans.” “Yes, Mendelian genetic theory may apply to humans, but it does little to explain differences in human intelligence.” That sort of thing. Communists have violently opposed efforts to improve–or even arrest the decline of–the human gene pool, on the theory that such efforts are Nazi-like. Despite vast amounts of scientific evidence to the contrary, communists continue to claim that intellectual differences between individuals are caused almost entirely by environmental factors.

    Upward genetic pressure, applied over time, caused apes to evolve into humans. Downward genetic pressure, such as we are now witnessing, will cause humans to . . . ?

    I would argue that, to deal with current and future challenges and threats, the human race requires two things. 1) Ability. 2) Willingness to work together, and to sacrifice for a larger cause. Communists’ anti-scientific notions about genetics, in combination with the current decline in the gene pool, represent a direct, immediate threat to the first of these two things. Communists’ racial theories and racial objectives are a serious threat to the second.

    Ants are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony because they are genetically similar to the colony’s other ants. What is true for ants is also true for humans: people are willing to sacrifice more for their own children than they are for other people’s children. Adopted children are four times more likely to be abused, despite the fact that adoptive parents are screened, whereas people who want to have and raise their own biological children are not.

    During the rise of the Roman Republic, individual soldiers were willing to sacrifice themselves for Rome. Government officials often placed law and honor above their own self-interest. During the decline of the Roman Empire, these things had ceased to be the case. Bribery was the norm rather than the exception. The phrase “Roman soldiers” had become almost an oxymoron: few if any real Romans were willing to fight for Rome. The definition of what a “Roman” was had become blurred. By this point, Rome had become what may (for its time) have been the most multicultural city in human history. “All roads lead to Rome.” Large numbers of people from widely disparate places had congregated in Rome.

    Scientific studies have shown that people are happier and more altruistic when in homogenous workplaces than they are in racially diverse workplaces. Rome’s loss of its homogeneity and its loss of altruism were almost certainly not coincidental factors. Other places which have become racially mixed–such as Latin America–are also, like the dying Roman Empire, associated with high levels of government corruption, and a low level of military effectiveness.

    Based on this scientific evidence and on this track record, it would make far more sense to preserve the existence of race, than it would to support communists in their goal of globalizing and destroying race. There may come a time when it is critical for humanity’s future that large groups of people work together to achieve a greater purpose. If or when that time comes, we will need to have better institutions than existed in the declining Roman Empire or in Latin America to deal with such challenges.

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