70th Anniversary of German Terrorism: The Beginning of WWII

I will also remember the AMERICAN companies and people, some of whom's children and grandchildren went on to become Presidents, who helped Hitler along the way to the autrocities he was able to commit, and who financed Germany's rebuilding,

Sven, I never made 1 comment to you, or about you, I was commenting on the thread topic in question.

I do not believe michelle meant we could not address thread topics either of us started, moreover, I do not believe you did/do either considering you have participated in  threads I have started and indeed posted in.

I suspect you did not like my commentary, so you are using this to stop, or deflect from, my commentary on who actually financed Germany.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8230678.stm

I don't have any problem with a thread like this for September 1, but my own preference is to have such a thread for May 8/9. I think that we ought to commemorate the end of Nazi regime rather than any putative beginning.

However, it's only a small point. Discussing the significance of WW2 is still very useful. Carry on.

Easier to run to the moderators than to deal with remind's point, Sven?

As much as Hitler was a raving racist loony monster who had to be stopped, one must always remember that Hitler's Germany was the creation of repression and retribution after WW1. While almost everyone considers WWII as the necessary and just war, perspective comes from recognizing the roots of it in the first unnecessary and unjust world war, born of imperial intrigue.

No war has ever had noble roots.

[url=http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=4607]Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler[/url]

>by Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels

Quote:

In the United States, World War II is generally known as "the good war."

In contrast to some of America's admittedly bad wars, such as the near-genocidal Indian Wars and the vicious conflict in Vietnam, World War II is widely celebrated as a "crusade" in which the US fought unreservedly on the side of democracy, freedom, and justice against dictatorship.

No wonder President George W. Bush likes to compare his ongoing "war against terrorism" with World War II, suggesting that America is once again involved on the right side in an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. Wars, however, are never quite as black-and-white as Mr. Bush would have us believe, and this also applies to World War II. America certainly deserves credit for its important contribution to the hard-fought victory that was ultimately achieved by the Allies. But the role of corporate America in the war is hardly synthesized by President Roosevelt's claim that the US was the "arsenal of democracy." When Americans landed in Normandy in June 1944 and captured their first German trucks, they discovered that these vehicles were powered by engines produced by American firms such as Ford and General Motors. 1 Corporate America, it turned out, had also been serving as the arsenal of Nazism.

 

Fans of the Führer

Mussolini enjoyed a great deal of admiration in corporate America from the moment he came to power in a coup that was hailed stateside as "a fine young revolution." 2 Hitler, on the other hand, sent mixed signals. Like their German counterparts, American businessmen long worried about the intentions and the methods of this plebeian upstart, whose ideology was called National Socialism, whose party identified itself as a workers' party, and who spoke ominously of bringing about revolutionary change. 3 Some high-profile leaders of corporate America, however, such as Henry Ford liked and admired the Führer at an early stage. 4

Other precocious Hitler-admirers were press lord Randolph Hearst and Irénée Du Pont, head of the Du Pont trust, who according to Charles Higham, had already "keenly followed the career of the future Führer in the 1920s" and supported him financially. 5

Eventually, most American captains of industry learned to love the Führer. It is often hinted that fascination with Hitler was a matter of personalities, a matter of psychology. Authoritarian personalities supposedly could not help but like and admire a man who preached the virtues of the "leadership principle" and practised what he preached first in his party and then in Germany as a whole.

Although he cites other factors as well, it is essentially in such terms that Edwin Black, author of the otherwise excellent book IBM and the Holocaust, explains the case of IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, who met Hitler on a number of occasions in the 1930s and became fascinated with Germany's authoritarian new ruler. But it is in the realm of political economy, not psychology, that one can most profitably understand why corporate America embraced Hitler. . .

[url=http://www.comer.org/2006/bisz.htm]A Deeper Look at the Bank for International Settlements[/url]

>by William Krehm(Canadian)

Quote:

Twenty years ago I came across a booklet in a dusty box in the Robarts Library by Henry Hans Schloss, The Bank for International Settlements: An experiment in central bank cooperation, published by North-Holland Pub. Co. in 1958. In it I found two sensational facts, not widely known: Resolution Five adopted at Bretton Woods in 1944 calling for the dissolution of The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) at the earliest opportunity. The reason: BIS had surrendered the Czechoslovak central bank gold treasure entrusted to it by the Prague Government to the Nazis on their marching into Prague almost before they had even had the time to ask for it. That, in Schloss's judgment was what had led BIS to cultivate a low profile. I took it up from there: that low profile in turn commended it to the international banking community as an ideal bunker from which to conduct its carefully planned strategy for bringing the world back to their control - state of affairs that that had ushered in the depression of the 1930s. But Schloss, without going into further detail, had concluded that the other plentiful accusations against BIS for having served the Nazis before and during the war lacked supporting evidence. . .

Sven wrote:

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Last time I looked the Germans do not proclaim themselves the "leaders of the free world" and deem it appropriate to speak on my behalf as a citizen of a western democracy.  When the evil empire stops claiming to speak on my behalf I will cut them as much slack as other countries that commit atrocities.

So, as I have believed all along, it's not so much about remembering the innocent Japanese victims from August 1945 or even about remembering and analyzing the acts of the Americans in that month as it is about a current hatred of America.  If only America changed its current ways, then we could all forget about August 1945. 

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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]

I did not say that anywhere on this forum or any where else so fuck off and stop trying to twist my words.  You do not debate any point you just presume you somehow know everyone's mind better than they do and then you respond to your twisted view.  Try responding to people's actual words instead of your stupid interpretation of others posts. 

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Soothsayers had a better record of prediction than economists

Sven wrote:

Yes, Fidel. Your post perfectly illustrate the Unified Theory of Babble (i.e., all threads ultimately lead to the evil United States).

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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]

Read William Krehm's article. More than just corporate America were enamoured with Hitler and the Nazis. Support for Hitler went as high as the former governor of the Bank of England and European banksters. The BIS should have been shut-down decades ago. Keynes and others recommended that BIS be disbanded for aiding and abetting the Nazis. Instead they kept a low profile for decades. And at some point later that unelected group of central bankers were advising western governments on monetary policies in the 1980's and 90's, including Canada. I'm not criticizing or even blaming the large majority of Americans, Sven. I heart the large majority of Americans and sincerely want to see all of you evil-wicked devil worshipping pagan Yankees with access to publicly funded health care.

Sven wrote:

N.Beltov, if you then add 20 million dead Russians to the mix, you've got about 30 million dead (and that's just the Russians and the camps).

The Russian, and Soviet, dead were not all victims of the camps, so I've left those numbers out. The death camps are in a class of crime by themselves.

A million Leningraders, for example, were estimated to have died in the 900 day siege of that city. I've actually been to Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery where, according to the somewhat unreliable Wikipedia, around 470,000 are buried in 186 mass graves. I can tell you from personal experience that walking past the mounds, each of which has many thousands of dead, where they stretch both ahead and to the sides with many rows of these huge mass graves, is the most sobering and disquieting experience of my life. Each step you feel the hundreds or thousands of dead that you are walking past, and by the time you get to the Motherland statue there is no need for anyone to tell you to show some respectful silence as you are unable to speak in any case.

Quote:

Although hindsight is 20-20, German plans could almost certainly have been crushed had France and the U.K. taken concrete steps in the 1930s to stop Germany when Germany started violating the Treaty of Versailles soon after Hitler came to power in 1933.  That is a lesson that should also be learned.

My nephew recently showed me a role playing game modelled on World War 2. The game is a bit of a perversion of the facts as it represents, not the 2 sides of the Axis and Allies but, 3 sides in the conflict. I asked him if it were possible for the UK, France and the Soviets to come to the aid of CzechSlovakia in 1938 to prevent the war. "You can't do that in this game," said my nephew.

It was CNTL-ALT-DELETE for me shortly thereafter.

Yes, that's it ... Heart of Iron III. There's enough propaganda trivializing the "small" role the Soviets played in WW2 without participating in a game in which they are not even part of the Allies, much less the major contributor to the Nazi defeat. Gah.

William Shirer, using the numbers of divisions of troops and so on, formed a very different conclusion than that "It is very doubtful that the Allies could really have done much ..." in 1938. Of course what I've outlined is a great big "What if ...?" as the French and especially the British were not willing to discuss practical military arrangements and the Soviet role was contingent on French participation. If the Nazis had had to fight on two fronts in Europe immediately, and not hold that off until June 1944, the duration of the war would have been much shorter I think. I'm not including the fighting in Italy here, as it was away from the main territory of Germany and of less significance because of that.

Funny I aked my Meme about that a few years ago. She has no illusions, she said the russian won the war, we only raced to berlin to make sure the whole continent wasn't communist. And that about sums up what happened. We aited till the Nazis had been battered by the russians for 2 years and went against an army that had low morale and low supplies, and we barely won. Meanwhile the russians, not so willingly in some cases put out all the stops and turned the eastern front into  meatgrinder for boths sides.

However they did blunt the attack and inflict severe damage on the Nazi war machine. But the cost was extremely high with 10,000,000 soldiers and equal number of civilians killed. More than everyone else combined IIRC.

Quote:

Although hindsight is 20-20, German plans could almost certainly have been crushed had France and the U.K. taken concrete steps in the 1930s to stop Germany when Germany started violating the Treaty of Versailles soon after Hitler came to power in 1933.  That is a lesson that should also be learned.

Since Washington wasn't bombed in order to stop the USA from launching an unprovoked attack based on outright lies*  on Iraq, we can assume the lesson hasn't been learned. 

To Sven's credit, he at least acknowledges that the war started in 1939, not in December 1941.  On the other hand, is there some official USian policy aimed at making the word "terrorism" useless?

*I don't know which lie was cruder, "Weapons of Mass Destruction" or "Polish infiltrators."

Quote:

One operation remains relatively well-known: the August 31 seizure of a radio station just inside Germany by men dressed in Polish military uniforms.

The purported attackers - including prisoners who had been tricked with promises of freedom - took control and announced on air in Polish that the station at Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, in western Poland) was in their hands.

Several were then gunned down by accompanying Nazis, with their bodies left as proof of the "Polish invasion," news of which was fed to the world's media.

Similar attacks by bogus Poles took place the same day at a nearby German customs post and a forest guard's post.

Chincinski noted that in an August 22 speech, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler told top military and SS leaders: "I will provide a propaganda reason to start a war, no matter whether it is credible. Later, no one will ask the victor whether he had spoken the truth or not."

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and Dubya apparently learned nothing from history either.  They're lucky they haven't been hanged, as the war criminals at Nuremburg were.

That's common knowledge, but if it gives you a chance to do some Frog-bashing, by all means, go for it.

The Two Ronnies had a joke that went, "A US official, in answering questions as to why his country is so bellicose, said, "We were late in joining the last two world wars, so we want to be first into World War III."

But what about Dubya?

Should the PPCLI have burned the White House to the ground to stop the mad dogs in Washington from invading Iraq?

Sven wrote:

N.Beltov wrote:

William Shirer, using the numbers of divisions of troops and so on, formed a very different conclusion than that "It is very doubtful that the Allies could really have done much ..." in 1938. Of course what I've outlined is a great big "What if ...?" as the French and especially the British were not willing to discuss practical military arrangements and the Soviet role was contingent on French participation. If the Nazis had had to fight on two fronts in Europe immediately, and not hold that off until June 1944, the duration of the war would have been much shorter I think. I'm not including the fighting in Italy here, as it was away from the main territory of Germany and of less significance because of that.

Taking action in 1938 may or may not have been too late to avoid a long-term and general war.  But, in 1936 (or earlier), the French and the Brits could very likely have stopped Hitler in his tracks...if they would have had the will to do so.

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[b]Eleutherophobics of the World...Unite!!![/b]

In 1936 Churchil said of Abyssinia that it was a "wild land of tyranny, slavery and tribal war. ... No one can keep up the pretense that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy and equal member of a league of civilized nations," sounds like some Americans talking about Iran or Iraq. Regardless it is what Winston Churchill was saying about why the league of nations should not intervene to prevent the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, since of course the Italians were civilizing the heathen rogue state.

It surprises me that a progressive site like rabble is playing the racist card to blame Germany for starting WW II and blaming the U.S.A. for the use of nuclear weapons on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945 and NOT the underlying causes (nazism, fascism, militarism, racism, greed, etc.,) of both these atrocities. Since Aug. 9, 1945, we are ALL (not just the U.S.A.) guilty of morally approving the use of nuclear weapons: all our mainstream media either simply repeats the facts and stats of the attacks or explicitly or implicitly rehashes the arguments used to justify the use of those weapons.

It has been 70 years since the outbreak of WW II and 65 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet our cultures are no closer to outlawing and banning war and creating a nuclear weapons free world. We (as world cultures, I mean) can do better than that. A lot better. Shame on us.

Quote:

But, the more general point remains: If the peaceful countries of the world (whoever they may be) want to prevent war, then they must have the military strength and the will to use that military strength to stop a country from starting a war.

Glad to see you make that argument. So when Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq join together to defeat Israeli aggression and terrorism, we can count on you to lead the cheering.

Your position uses the same failed logic as those open-carry gun nuts. If everybody has a gun, the thinking goes, then there won't be any crime! The problem is, if everyone has a gun, the likelihood of its use goes up. We hear this every time some kid shoots up a school or employess shoots up his workpalce. But there is not a single example of a mass shooting in which the guy doing the killing is stopped by an armed citizen, even in the most heavily armed nation on earth. The shooter keeps going until he runs out of bullets, kills himself, or is killed by police.