Speaking of the politics of history:
Since the Bush Administration, there has arisen an erroneous assumption that the USA and US capital played a predominant role n the rise of the Nazis and their military aggression. Originating from real contacts with the Bush Family and Hitler, these assumptions rest on a number of deeply, even fatally, flawed concepts.
First among them is that all collaboration with the Germans was done by capitalist democracies. The fallacy here actually arises very early on.
In the http://www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Timeline/Inter-war-period-1918-1939/A-family-business/1922/The-Weimar-Republic-and-the-Soviet-Union-sign-the-Treaty-of-Rapallo/ Treaty of Rapallo of 1922, the Soviet Union, then entering its lightest and softest it ever got, signed a treaty with the Weimar Republic. Integral in this treaty was a sequence of furtive deals that paved the way for the establishment of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army alike. Thus immediately we see that most essential in the return of Germany to military prominence were none of the capitalist states (who in fact were still occupying very important parts of Germany at the time), but the Soviet Union.
Then, to boot, in 1939, the Soviets and Nazis signed the http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1939pact.html Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which gave the USSR a green light to expand its territories into Eastern Poland, Finland, and Latvia and Estonia. Lithuania was supposed to be in the Nazi sphere, but didn't roll over and play dead when Hitler demanded it do so, and so Hitler assigned the third Baltic state to the Soviet Union. Making a permanent mockery of Nazi claims to be vehement champions of anti-Communist ideology. This pact was the reason for the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, which led to the Katyn Massacre (which led to Nazis being hung for this Soviet massacre in the Nuremberg Trials, while during the Cold War only extremist anti-Soviets accused the Soviets of the massacre, according to Moscow when it turned out that it really had been the USSR all along). It was also the reason for the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three states whose forcible absorption set in motion a ticking time bomb that blew up in 1991. Significantly, in the light of allegations of Western Europe and the USA betraying Eastern Europe, they never went so far as to assign an entire country to the Soviet sphere and thus extend it, working instead to roll back Soviet expansionism.
Nazi-Soviet collaboration extended to the point of Nazi battleships and cruisers being able to evade the British blockade in Soviet ports, and the Soviets giving the Nazis vital aid that was the main reason their dictatorship didn't splinter by 1941. Yet this vital aspect of European history gets a major cover-up and no real coverage in modern histories, even almost 21 years from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Why is this?
Essentially it's because history is a set of self-serving fables we tell ourselves, which erase certain corners of the past we would rather not look into. If certain groups are deemed evil, then their crimes will be told, but themselves self-servingly and only through a mirror darkly. The democracies hide that appeasement morally compromised their cause from the start when they willingly dismembered a democracy and chose instead to rally behind a dictatorship with a talent for always choosing the worst geopolitical options available to choose. The Communists compromised themselves much further when they actively participated in wars of aggression and carried out large-scale, lethal massacres against their neighbors.
In the end, historically speaking, as I said in my post about how I see the world operating, the determining factor in life is force, not "good" or "evil", though both terms can describe individuals. The degree to which the crimes of the past become veiled and hidden from the future's gaze, lest in gazing into that abyss it gaze also into them certainly illustrates this factor
. The only answer that exists to this willful use of the Big Lie mislabeled as history is for the historian thus to illuminate the dark and squalid corners of the past, and to expose the nature of that time, even when it makes modern eyes wish that they could close and block out what is thus discovered.
That's what I think. What do you think?
First among them is that all collaboration with the Germans was done by capitalist democracies. The fallacy here actually arises very early on.
In the http://www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Timeline/Inter-war-period-1918-1939/A-family-business/1922/The-Weimar-Republic-and-the-Soviet-Union-sign-the-Treaty-of-Rapallo/ Treaty of Rapallo of 1922, the Soviet Union, then entering its lightest and softest it ever got, signed a treaty with the Weimar Republic. Integral in this treaty was a sequence of furtive deals that paved the way for the establishment of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army alike. Thus immediately we see that most essential in the return of Germany to military prominence were none of the capitalist states (who in fact were still occupying very important parts of Germany at the time), but the Soviet Union.
Then, to boot, in 1939, the Soviets and Nazis signed the http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1939pact.html Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which gave the USSR a green light to expand its territories into Eastern Poland, Finland, and Latvia and Estonia. Lithuania was supposed to be in the Nazi sphere, but didn't roll over and play dead when Hitler demanded it do so, and so Hitler assigned the third Baltic state to the Soviet Union. Making a permanent mockery of Nazi claims to be vehement champions of anti-Communist ideology. This pact was the reason for the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, which led to the Katyn Massacre (which led to Nazis being hung for this Soviet massacre in the Nuremberg Trials, while during the Cold War only extremist anti-Soviets accused the Soviets of the massacre, according to Moscow when it turned out that it really had been the USSR all along). It was also the reason for the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three states whose forcible absorption set in motion a ticking time bomb that blew up in 1991. Significantly, in the light of allegations of Western Europe and the USA betraying Eastern Europe, they never went so far as to assign an entire country to the Soviet sphere and thus extend it, working instead to roll back Soviet expansionism.
Nazi-Soviet collaboration extended to the point of Nazi battleships and cruisers being able to evade the British blockade in Soviet ports, and the Soviets giving the Nazis vital aid that was the main reason their dictatorship didn't splinter by 1941. Yet this vital aspect of European history gets a major cover-up and no real coverage in modern histories, even almost 21 years from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Why is this?
Essentially it's because history is a set of self-serving fables we tell ourselves, which erase certain corners of the past we would rather not look into. If certain groups are deemed evil, then their crimes will be told, but themselves self-servingly and only through a mirror darkly. The democracies hide that appeasement morally compromised their cause from the start when they willingly dismembered a democracy and chose instead to rally behind a dictatorship with a talent for always choosing the worst geopolitical options available to choose. The Communists compromised themselves much further when they actively participated in wars of aggression and carried out large-scale, lethal massacres against their neighbors.
In the end, historically speaking, as I said in my post about how I see the world operating, the determining factor in life is force, not "good" or "evil", though both terms can describe individuals. The degree to which the crimes of the past become veiled and hidden from the future's gaze, lest in gazing into that abyss it gaze also into them certainly illustrates this factor
. The only answer that exists to this willful use of the Big Lie mislabeled as history is for the historian thus to illuminate the dark and squalid corners of the past, and to expose the nature of that time, even when it makes modern eyes wish that they could close and block out what is thus discovered.
That's what I think. What do you think?