Who started WW2

It is not about political corectness, but about decency and common sense, therefor avoiding statements that can be offensive. If you would have said "a nation economically inferior" would have been fine, but not just "inferior nation".

And about those Red Army veterans, from the perspective of their experience, their attitude is examplary, unlike the younger generation that aggressively invades the Internet to make attacks on behalf of some principles, more or less respectful.

Now, can we get back to something more productive?

I don't care that much about statements that individual A or object A is inferior/superior to individual B or object B. But using the word inferior/superior to compare nations or very large human groups in the most general sense is close enough to the texbook definition of racism that many readers will be uneasy with it. Sticking with that for the sake of winning a debating point is not a smart move.

Relax. That's the way I understand it. Don't make me wrong now

[QUOTE=Alexandru H.,Jan 17 2005, 12:39 PM]Well, maybe if we consider some facts:
a) The international arena was known for many centuries for supplying history with the most unusual alliances or understandings. Let's see how ........[QUOTE]


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[/QUOTE]Now, the reason the Communists, and especially USSR, were not so victimised by history as the Nazis were.... [QUOTE]



I'd call 12 million dead pretty victimized. Of course the Russians were allies.....we all know what happened postwar.

[QUOTE]
To cnflyboy: Typical War propaganda translated in historical statements. I don't want to speak about the internal politics of the Third Reich (to which I am a harsh opponent, but so is everybody, so it's pretty much a finished chapter), but about international affairs, in which Germany was not the devil, but an important, if special actor. [/QUOTE]

IMO, this is a curious statement; their "internal politics"? What does that mean? Internal to what area? Poland? Belarus? Czech? Romania? Even if they somehow confined their psychotic "programs" to inside their 1939 border it would be hard to write it off so breezily as u seem to wish to. Of course they did not want to confine those "internal politics". Hitler wanted to expand them as far as he could possibly grasp.

I appreciate u r not a Holocaust defender.

Certainly, Germany was an actor; and of course after the first act (1914-1917) the Germans were tied to the whipping post, but if the Nazis were not devils..what else could u call "actors" who perverted the will, fortitude, and brave sacrifice of their people and launched the biggest military mistake in history (Barbarossa) underpinnd by a truly warped ideology.

Unfortunately, the German people woke up too late to stop the nightmare, though some tried.

Sorry

Meant to say: Alex; I hope u r not blowing smoke with the History of Diplomacy lecture to cover a, imo, rash implication u made.

The war started in Sarejvo with an assasination.

To claim the Nazis were not the agressors in 1939 is foolish.

Ironically, the Japanese, might fit your picture frame; there's reason to think they were backed into a corner by FDR's manipulating their oil (sound familiar?)


The Nazis were scumbags...too bad the Germans woke up too late and missed bumping off Hitler.

Too late indeed. And just a few had the bravery needed to do something...

Cnflyboy, do you know the book "Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the mystical crusade against Hitler"? I have the paperback edition by Penguin (Penguin, London, 1995; ISBN: 0-14-024716-5).
According to the authors, there were no less than 46 (yes, that much!) attempts to kill Hitler. "Forty-six serious but failed attempts on Hitler's life in twenty years reflect a strong anti-Hitler movement in Germany. For Stauffenberg, the bomb plot organized by his esoteric circle was more a moral and spiritual necessity than an act of political expediency". Those who dared to act against the regime belonged to a small elite, and remained so until the end of the war, unfortunately. Courageous, but too few.

I would like to quote the last passages of the book (pp. 297-298):

"On 22 July 1944, two days after Stauffenberg's bomb exploded at Rastenburg, an article appeared on page 4 of The Times of London. In the small hours of that morning, the article reported, shortly after German radio stations had closed down for the night, a broadcast was picked up on Frankfurt's wavelenght. Emanating mysteriously out of the war-torn darkness, the voice of an unknown and unidentified German officer issued a defiant proclamation:
Achtung, comrades. Achtung, soldiers. Achtung, listeners in Germany. Stand by for an annoucement of the utmost importance.
My comrades, the death of Klaus (sic) von Stauffenberg sounds the clarion to action, the call to battle with all means at our disposal, the call to us German officers to go on fighting until Hitler has been destroyed. Today Hitler has been forced to admit that sections of the German Officer Corps - those who are decent and honest - have taken their stand against him. He can no longer deny today that the German officers have gone over to organise resistance against him.
(...)
My comrades, the German officers with us are officers who have kept their uniforms clean and for whom honour and duty have remained fixed principles. These are our men. I call today on those officers who have not yet established contact with us, wherever they are stationed , at the front or in the reserves, no longer to obey the orders of Hitler and his henchmen".

Perhaps too good to be true, maybe... The authors drew their own conclusions:
"Whose was that lost voice? For all one knows, it may simply have been a ploy of Anglo-American or Russian propaganda, though one would like to believe it genuine. In any case, and despite the voice's asertion, there were not, unfortunately, enough Stauffenbergs left in 1944 to make the decisive difference".

Too few. Too alone. And the common man in the streets was either too much afraid, too much aware of the regime's real nature to do anything. Or too much involved...

Well, not quite so, in my opinion. FDR might have used the oil card to corner the Japanese, but there's no reason to think of them as just mere actors, in the sense implied by Alex... They had an imperial plan for Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, that consisted basically upon the replacement of the "decadent Western powers" by their own view of a "sphere of Asian co-prosperity", a mask for an immense new Japanese Empire.

Their agression on China proved that Tojo and the Military in general (both the I.J.N. and the I.J.A., of course) they were exactly the same sort of scumbags as the Nazis. The performed all sort of unspeakable attrocities in China from 1931 on, and the degree just increased after 1937, when the situation blow up into full scale war on a unprecedented scale. The Japanese used chemical and biological warfare on the Chinese population, contaminating villages and even entire provinces (later on, they used Chinese, Russian and then Allied POW's as guinea pigs in appaling so-called "scientific" experiences with a wide spectrum of pathological agents - this was done by the infamous "Unit 731", in special facilities in Manchuria). And of course, I think we don't need even to mention the rape of Nanking, which ocurred in 1937 when the town fell to the Japanese Army. The numbers of civilians killed in a few weeks defies even the wildest imagination.

The Japanese were eager to wage war, to attack other nations... and they got it. Having a powerful, restless military is always a recipe for trouble, no matter how cornered your industry might be due to oil or raw materials shortage.

Wow, I've been accused to plagiate university courses I don't even know. Sorry, but diplomacy and international relations are not my thing, Indrid does that by himself, I like political theory and specialize only in this. What I've said is a personal opinion on some of the things international relations debate upon. Can I just imply that you are all against my judgement because your nation was once at war with Hitler? Or better yet, can I ask before talking to anyone, degrees in the subject? I think that the whole "History of Diplomacy" argument is quite laughable and communist, because it implies that only people that know nothing about something should talk.

And about those Red Army veterans, from the perspective of their experience, their attitude is examplary, unlike the younger generation that aggressively invades the Internet to make attacks on behalf of some principles, more or less respectful.

Well, if I remember correctly, Indrid's grandfather recollections published on this site were partly censored because some passages (and may I add, the interesting parts) seemed uninteresting to the owners of the forum I am currently invading. You might have kept the original version, but as any "young" historian, you are just trying to push the original version into your own framework. Now, please don't try to make me look like a veteran hater; some of them treated war like a spa; some of them were true to their humanity; and the rest killed, pillaged and raped (including in Romania). I don't consider the state of veteranship as a eternal state of grace, as I don't consider all young people a menace, or all the forum visitors as foreign invaders... I am not a social worker, working with groups and categories rather than individual people, the state does that (and what a lousy job it can do!)...

I don't care that much about statements that individual A or object A is inferior/superior to individual B or object B. But using the word inferior/superior to compare nations or very large human groups in the most general sense is close enough to the texbook definition of racism that many readers will be uneasy with it. Sticking with that for the sake of winning a debating point is not a smart move.

Political corectness! It never fails to surprise me! Too bad environmental, social or economical issues are not subject of this great attitude... Always the freedom of acting different is attacked... Don't say the f word, don't look at the beggar while running as far away as possible, don't ever say that women or black people are inferior, they are just different... You know what? I admit I am inferior in intelligence to Einstein, inferior in beauty to Chris Rock, inferior in athletic achievements to Zapotek... So what? I may speak romanian better than Einstein, know much more about how to unscrew a lightbulb than Chris Rock.... Inferior and superior are not absolute adjectives that refer to absolute characteristics, they are absolute adjectives that refer to particular characteristics. If you don't get it, then you really have a problem adapting to this world. It seems difference in the XXI century has become unfashionable.

- But difference is not the same thing as inferiority or superiority, says Chandanagore.
Alexandru replies:
- Neither is racism with what I've said, but we like to throw big words to one another. Personally, I don't see that greater difference between superior and greater and as a sensible individual as my discussion partners I would be infuriated if someone would call me "lesser".

We are what we are through the various parts and qualities that make us what we are. We are not one big atom. We are not equal, apart from the existence argument, which shouldn't be restricted to just humans. Ok, you are better than me at several things. Should I get angry and call you a racist? Should we ban sports, school grades (something like that happens in several schools in the US, by the way) just to let a child feel equal to one another? No, you are weak, get better, you are dumb, get smarter, you are English, get Swedish...

God, you found Hitler and voila, a new Black Plague swept the world. Get rid of MTV, that's the source of true evil, not evil men that died 50 years ago; get rid of hip-hop, that is the Devil, not the right to speak, to which we are equal. And we are equal in that because we shouldn't be equal. As we exist only to die.

The war started in Sarejvo with an assasination.

To claim the Nazis were not the agressors in 1939 is foolish.

Ironically, the Japanese, might fit your picture frame; there's reason to think they were backed into a corner by FDR's manipulating their oil (sound familiar?)


The Nazis were scumbags...too bad the Germans woke up too late and missed bumping off Hitler.

So, Gavrilo Prinkip is the true author of the war? No, how about Serbia, because it refused the austrian requests? Well, how about Austria, since it was so big and scary? Maybe the Germans, because they fought better and almost won it? Let's look at the financial records... my, my, the Germans had to pay an astronomical sum, they had to be guilty...

The Nazis were aggressors in 1939. Please all try and read what I've said. So was Gavrilo Prinkip...Is he guilty for the great war? No. Did the germans want war? Yes. Did they want a great two-front war? No. Did they declare war to the world? No. Was the declaration of war to Poland intended towards the whole world? No. Did the Allies (and that included two nations that had colonies all over the world) declare war on Germany? Yes.

Now, I don't know so much about first-level diplomacy, but, like Osama bin Laden, the germans declared war on one nation. If that nation will bring after this a whole coalition of forces against the germans, then you have a generalized war. But who made it that way? The germans? Or the Allies?

Let's consider this as well: if the allies wouldn't have declared war on Germany, would the German-Polish war be considered a world war? No! Because, and bear with me, they were two european nations fighting a limited war. But you know what? Some smart Englishmen woke up one morning and said: Well, the second world war began right in 1933 when nazism took over Germany. In fact we are not fighting Germany, we are fighting aggresors that originally conquered Germany and declared, through their own wickedness, war to the world.

Ok, this is a diplomacy lesson and not an ethical one. The germans were pure evil for 12 years, ok! But diplomats still came around, international relations still continued and facts still hold ground against such one-track arguments (they were bad thus they are guilty of everything that happens). I already see it on TV regarding the terrorism issue, I think it's too much of contemporary propaganda to keep it in the history records.

Germany, at diplomatic level, was a simple actor. No, that wasn't the first war that existed in this universe, and it's a certainity it's not the last. So spare me again with making them sound worse than they were. In certain fields, they were quite guilty, in others they made like everyone else. The US invented eugenics and began the sterilizing process, racism was invented by a french, an englishmen and a mystical russian, and war began with Cain and Abel. And because Abel had no children, let's not pretend we are all victims here.

Well, not quite so, in my opinion. FDR might have used the oil card to corner the Japanese, but there's no reason to think of them as just mere actors, in the sense implied by Alex... They had an imperial plan for Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, that consisted basically upon the replacement of the "decadent Western powers" by their own view of a "sphere of Asian co-prosperity", a mask for an immense new Japanese Empire.

And what do you think a political actor is? Just like in the movies... bad actors have bad parts, good actors get the good ones. Japan was an actor that decided that it needed a better part. Big deal! Diplomacy is a field in which superiority and inferiority are judged by the results and methods of achieving them not by a great ethical plan that unites them.

This post has been edited by Alexandru H. on January 18, 2005 03:01 pm

I believe the reasons for WW 2 is previous than 30`years.Germany was late on share the world domination with others(UK,France)sow start the WW 1.Was defeat and humiliated.She want again to be in top,even to the first place,and revenge too for WW 1 humiliation.The atack against Poland,even if UK and France dont interfere,dont stoped Germany in shes war planes.Soon or later will be an clash with other great powers,and a world war will be inevitable.Dont forget that USSR have agressive plans too,and UK will fight for shes colony with everybody.Germany know that she atack Poland,will be like a war declaration against France and UK,sow is the principal guilt in this.

No, I don't think that. It would have been too naïve... Besides - happily! -, I don't have a "movie-like" perception of world history. Japan did tried its luck in the big arena. But by deciding that it needed a "better part", as you say, the nation got involved in a snow-ball process, that eventually ended with two atomic bombings. Big deal? Hmmm... don't think so. The human and economic losses were huge. They gambled and they lost. And some high placed Japanese officials knew their nation was doomed if any attempt at a large scale, multi-front war against the Western powers was to be put in practice, as it indeed was...

What a grand statement! Although, I do agree with your view (successful achievements vs. unsuccessful ones, are directly connected with the methods employed to reach a certain goal), I don't really understand your point here - does my previous post imply that I support and/or believe in the existence of such a "great ethical plan"? There's no ethics in diplomacy. Rather pragmatism or realpolitik or whatever word one might find appropriate, even machiavellian, that is, to use clever and deceitful schemes to achieve what one wants (especially in politics). But not ethics...

This post has been edited by Ruy Aballe on January 18, 2005 04:13 pm

By textbook definition, racism is obviously related to (human) race. It's not applicable here.
Better words would be intolerance, or discrimination, perhaps xenofobia.

Gen. Dénes

This post has been edited by Dénes on January 18, 2005 04:16 pm

From "Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary" (O.U.P., Oxford, 1995; ISBN: 0-19-431421-9):

"racism (...): a) the belief that some races (race3 1) are superior to other. b ) unfair treatment or dislike of somebody because they are of a different race (...)".

note:
"race3 (...): 1 (...) any of the groups into which humans can be divided according to their physical characteristics, eg colour of skin, colour and type of hair, shape of eyes and nose (...).

From "Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language" (Merriman-Webster, Springfield, 1993; European reprint edition by Könemann - ISBN: 3-8290-5292-8) - a more detailed definition;

"racism (...) 1: the assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another which is used coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others. 2a: a doctrine or political system based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles. b: a political or social system founded on racism (...).

This post has been edited by Ruy Aballe on January 18, 2005 04:51 pm

Thanks, Ruy, for the details.
It's exactly what I meant in my above brief post.
Comparing nations or countries is not racism. It's a common misuse of the term.

Gen. Dénes

This post has been edited by Dénes on January 18, 2005 05:27 pm

O.K., I admire your well worded salvos; u r truly the Juggernaut of this forum. And your counter-mainstream points r well taken. Have u considered Law School?

All I'm saying is I thought u were being an apologist (in the philosophical sense, I'm sure u know the meaning) for the acts of the 3rd Reich which reopened continental combat. I guess I was mistaken. Sorry.

Personally, I think the French and Brits might well have entered a cold war- like detente if Hitler had not been an aggressive/expansionist "actor" in 1939.. I don't know about Stalinist Russia, but I doubt she would have invaded Germany with the ferocity she showed in 1944-45, absent Barbarossa . The U.S. had a strong isolationist streak going vis a vis European entanglement, right up to Pearl Harbor, as I'm sure u know.

Is your drift that Germans had no choice but to invade/accede other countries?

My point re the the Sarejevo assisination is that the events 1914-1945 can be considered of a piece. As such, we should look for the roots of the conflict, if that's what we r doing in this thread, early in the 20th century; the competition of the imperialist powers, the breakdown of czarist Russia, the militarism of the Kaiser, the dreadnought fever of the Brits; all good candidates, imo.

Your "reductio ad absurdem tactic (Cain and Able) is amusing but not helpful, and I trust is not an evasion.

...and neither do I.

It was to save Poland that Britain and France went to war in 1939.

In 1945 Poland was not saved but changed occupiers and Europe had lost millions of some of it's best men in the process and unspoken losses that can never be replaced.
Both England and France were wrong to go to war. Churchill himself remarked
"We have slaughtered the wrong pig"

Can someone explain why Britain and France declared war on Germany only and not on the Soviet Union as well when they attacked Poland 3 days later? I can't.

Also one should listen to the wise words of Historian Irving who argues that as Winners in World War 1, it was France's and Britain's responsibility to keep peace.
Instead they went ahead and declared war.

Hitler made a reasonable deal to England to stop fighting Germany and keep her world Empire.
After world war two the British Empire was finished, thus Churchill destroyed his own empire as well. As you can see - Britain who was dominant for centuries and had collonies allover the world...(The sun never sets on the British empire, they used to say) - Britain is nothing today, and is only licking the boot of America. It may have won the war, but what did it really fight for? And what did it go to war in the first place ?

Finally, regarding treaties and pacts.. Napoleon himself said that pacts are made to be broken...
The war between the Russia and Germany may be a just war, and I don't pick sides, let the best man win, but France and Britain those two cowards that declared war, they deserve to get beaten.

This post has been edited by Der Maresal on January 18, 2005 07:22 pm

Britain and France were tied to Poland by the guarantees they offered in case of a German attack. I do not see any explanation for the use of such harsh words, which could very well qualify as insults.

You ask why didn't the Allies declare war on the Soviet Union also. I already offered the motive. They were not compelled to. Romania, for instance had an alliance with Poland against the SU, but was absolved from it by the Polish Government in exchange for the safe passage.