Ringo
Platinum Member
The EU claims that the “Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939” enabled WWII. It omits ten crucial facts:
- The Soviet Union was not even among the first ten countries to enter into treaties and non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany. In 1939 alone, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, Italy, Estonia and Latvia all signed non-aggression pacts with Hitler. Poland entered into one as far back as 1934.
- The Soviet Union tried to form an anti-fascist alliance throughout the 1930s, and was repeatedly rebuffed by European powers.
- Despite that, the Soviet Union was the most powerful bulwark against fascism before the war. The International Brigades in Spain represent the most concrete example of organised antifascist military resistance before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. These Brigades were led by communist parties armed by the Soviet Union, who were abandoned by Western “democracies” and their policies of "non-intervention” which simply left german and italian intervention uncontested.
- In that same tradition, Stalin offered to send one million troops to deter Hitler’s aggression during the 1938 Sudetenland crisis. Poland and Romania objected, while France and Britain decided to pursue appeasement. That appeasement aimed in part at ensuring that Germany’s energies were directed eastwards, against communism.
- The Soviet Union was the primary target of German imperialism. The USSR’s leadership was aware of this from the early 1930s — and Germany’s leadership did not hide the fact. Hitler had repeatedly promised that Germany would be the “bulwark" of the West against “Bolshevism”, a position that found broad sympathies among the Western ruling classes. Auschwitz was first built to house Soviet POWs, 3.5 million of whom were exterminated during the war.
- Nazi Germany was simply the turning inwards of Western European colonialism. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager — the concentration camp — to describe an instrument of mass extermination.
- Adolf Hitler drew particular inspiration from the US settler-colonial model. He remarked approvingly how the US settlers had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnants under observation in a cage”. He sent jurists to study the US Jim Crow laws, which formed the basis of the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
- The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, then liberated Europe. If not for the US, which moved quickly to suffocate the rising communist movements on the continent, we might have seen socialism rise at least in Greece, Italy, France and, eventually, Portugal.
- After the war, West Germany quickly reneged on the Potsdam Agreement, filled its security services with former Nazis. NATO, also filled with former Nazis, was founded to wage war on socialism and anti-colonial struggles. In the process it resuscitated the Wehrmacht and paved the way for the German revanchism we are seeing today.
- As a result, we have endured decades of US-led imperial hegemony, whose effects are a dying planet and tens of millions of lives stolen by imperialist wars and sanctions alone. That hegemony has absorbed and expanded the historical mission of fascism, carrying it forward into a new century. Gaza is the clearest expression of that process today — but it is by no means the only one.
- The Soviet Union was not even among the first ten countries to enter into treaties and non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany. In 1939 alone, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, Italy, Estonia and Latvia all signed non-aggression pacts with Hitler. Poland entered into one as far back as 1934.
- The Soviet Union tried to form an anti-fascist alliance throughout the 1930s, and was repeatedly rebuffed by European powers.
- Despite that, the Soviet Union was the most powerful bulwark against fascism before the war. The International Brigades in Spain represent the most concrete example of organised antifascist military resistance before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. These Brigades were led by communist parties armed by the Soviet Union, who were abandoned by Western “democracies” and their policies of "non-intervention” which simply left german and italian intervention uncontested.
- In that same tradition, Stalin offered to send one million troops to deter Hitler’s aggression during the 1938 Sudetenland crisis. Poland and Romania objected, while France and Britain decided to pursue appeasement. That appeasement aimed in part at ensuring that Germany’s energies were directed eastwards, against communism.
- The Soviet Union was the primary target of German imperialism. The USSR’s leadership was aware of this from the early 1930s — and Germany’s leadership did not hide the fact. Hitler had repeatedly promised that Germany would be the “bulwark" of the West against “Bolshevism”, a position that found broad sympathies among the Western ruling classes. Auschwitz was first built to house Soviet POWs, 3.5 million of whom were exterminated during the war.
- Nazi Germany was simply the turning inwards of Western European colonialism. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager — the concentration camp — to describe an instrument of mass extermination.
- Adolf Hitler drew particular inspiration from the US settler-colonial model. He remarked approvingly how the US settlers had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnants under observation in a cage”. He sent jurists to study the US Jim Crow laws, which formed the basis of the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
- The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, then liberated Europe. If not for the US, which moved quickly to suffocate the rising communist movements on the continent, we might have seen socialism rise at least in Greece, Italy, France and, eventually, Portugal.
- After the war, West Germany quickly reneged on the Potsdam Agreement, filled its security services with former Nazis. NATO, also filled with former Nazis, was founded to wage war on socialism and anti-colonial struggles. In the process it resuscitated the Wehrmacht and paved the way for the German revanchism we are seeing today.
- As a result, we have endured decades of US-led imperial hegemony, whose effects are a dying planet and tens of millions of lives stolen by imperialist wars and sanctions alone. That hegemony has absorbed and expanded the historical mission of fascism, carrying it forward into a new century. Gaza is the clearest expression of that process today — but it is by no means the only one.
