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Soviet help to Czechoslovakia was physically very much possible even without a Polish assistance, but the diplomatic arrangements between Czechoslovakia, France and the USSR postulated that the Soviet Union was allowed to intervene only on Czechoslovakia's request, and even then only after France had also agreed to honour her alliance with Czechoslovakia. Obviously it would have taken time for the Soviets to move into Czechoslovakia in force, so Soviet diplomats headed by Maxim Litvinov spent 1938 trying to convince France to do her necessary part in unblocking the Soviet participation in dealing with Germany. That never happened. Due to diplomatic delays and cautiousness of the Czechoslovak government the Soviets only ever proceeded with deliveries of bomber planes to Czechoslovakia (about 60 reached the country and 200 were planned to be produced locally). Finally in September 1938 the Soviets ultimately showed willingness to go into war even in absence of a French commitment, stating through Litvinov and ambassador Alexandrovskij that a formal accusation made against Germany in the League of Nations by the Czechs in case of armed hostilities would be enough to give the USSR a legitimate reason to start dispatching help. Litvinov also stated categorically that "a corridor [to get aid to CSR] will be found". Arguably the Russians could have used air-drops to live up to their word, their air lift capabilities were tested and sufficient to transport and para-drop entire brigades with heavy weapons into field conditions - and at least four brigades equipped and trained for air-drops were within reach of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich. After all Czechoslovak military attaches were invited to work with Soviet commanders in the years prior to 1938 on practical demonstrations of the Soviet para-troops doctrine. Romania agreed to allow an unlimited number of Soviet planes (as well as 100,000 ground troops) to cross its territory in mid-September 1938. Finally, in August Air Force gen. Fajfr signed an agreement that Czechoslovakia would accommodate 700 Soviet war planes in the event of a war, and Soviet military consultants were in Czechoslovakia specifically to provide help with air force logistics, evaluating existing airfields and scouting spots for possible improvised air strips. About Poland's role - Czechoslovakia's president E. Beneš actually expected, and quite rightly so, in my opinion, that Poland would be more likely to actually intervene alongside Germany against Czechoslovakia than to stand against Hitler, so in his plans of a 1938 war against Hitler, the USSR played an important role not only providing direct support, but also keeping Poland out of the war. In fact on September 23, a week before the Munich Agreement was signed, the Soviet government delivered a note to Poland stating that any pursuit of territorial claims against Czechoslovakia would lead to voiding the Soviet-Polish non-aggression treaty. Finally consider that on the fateful day of September 30 Czechoslovakia had 34 fully equipped divisions to Germany's 36. In my opinion enough to give the Soviets / a Western response / an German coup plenty of time to ruin Hitler's plans. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 22:08
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LeoMarr posted:Stalin's August 19th 1939 Speech directly stated that he wished for the capitalist countries to fight each other and exhaust each other enough to sweep through Europe. On September 1st Stalin began mobilizing his army by reducing the USSR's military age from 21 to 18, and then enacting a universal draft, which increased the soviet army from 1,900,000 to ~23 Million (5Mil Mobilized/18Mil Reserve) (From 1939 - 1941) I don't think you are in disagreement? i think you are both fundamentally saying Stalin's wish was primarily to prevent the capitalist Allies from directing the inevitable European war against Russia (he saw appeasement as exactly that, a plot to turn Hitler's obvious bloodlust to the East), instead trying to compel Germany to turn against France first. The fact that Germany and West would weaken each other in such a war, opening space for Soviet intervention and continental dominance was an extension of that. The Soviet military was molded to fit the long term strategy described by LeoMarr, while the MR Pact was an opportunistic move to safeguard a key variable in the strategy, Germany staying out of the Allied club. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 23:16
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LeoMarr posted:A second front was desired to exhaust Germany and the UK-US by having them fight each other, which was kind of true if you think about the balkans and how rapidly Stalin ate it. I don't think it can be reasonably said that making the capitalists fight each other was Stalin's main concern after the fall of France. That and Barbarossa threw proletarian fantasies into disarray, and made material survival and relief of Russia's strain the main focal point.
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Dec 10, 2015 23:35
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LeoMarr posted:I don't think you realize that pre-war soviet doctrine was Marxist-Leninism, in that capitalism will be overthrown through communist revolution. Yes, but I don't think you realize that Stalin was forced to make short term decisions that ran seemingly against this doctrine, but were necessary to ensure the Soviet Union would survive in a shape to play a role in international politics. Stalin won the war because he was ultimately able to slip out of the mindset of 1938 or even of June 1941, and turn towards pure pragmatism.
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Dec 10, 2015 23:59
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Cerebral Bore posted:I don't think that he realizes that Stalin's main policy always was Socialism in One Country, and that he literally had people shot for advocating a spread of the revolution through force of arms. I think he is right in the specific context of the years before 1941 that Stalin wanted Germany and France to fight a war that would allow his offensive forces to sweep through Central Europe and at the very least substantially strengthen Soviet influence. He's obviously wrong in thinking that this ambition survived Hitler's visit to Paris.
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Dec 11, 2015 00:04
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First, Stalin didn't want to risk Hitler's going to war earlier than necessary. He knew there were plentiful indications of a nearing war, but he wanted as protracted peace as possible, believing that Hitler would have little reason to hurry up opening a new front as long as the economic treaties between Germany and the USSR were in force (why grab loot by force if you can just ask for it nicely?) Second, because of this cautiousness, Soviet command acted indecisively, deployment of troops to the frontlines was slow, mobilization was delayed, and the Soviets tried to maintain plausible deniability by claiming their troop movements were only part of wargame preparations. Third, for the same reasons the Soviets' work on entrenchments in designated fortified areas was lax, troops of the second echelon were deliberately placed outside the useful range where they could support the first echelon (not to provoke the Germans), armored forces were poorly distributed along the front line forces, and the air force remained undeployed. Zhukov later wrote the Staff expected the opening stages of the war would include a period of border skirmishes during which the Soviets would remedy their well-known weaknesses. Fourth, while these careful and disastrously short sighted preparations were going on the Staff remained completely indecisive about the nature the war should take. Plans for a preemptive attack against Germany occupied portion of the Soviet leadership, including Timoshenko and Zhukov, til the day of the German attack, reducing the effectiveness of the already miserably insufficient defensive preparations. So to sum up the "problem", the Soviets were poorly prepared for defence because they didn't want to give an impression they were gearing for war, and their equipment and provisions were poorly adapted for defence because their leaders didn't have a coherent concept of the coming war, were in fact considering a preemptive offensive / a swift counter-offensive as a possibility til the last moments of peace, and because the Soviets failed to take a lesson from France and underestimated the mobility of their enemy, thinking their unaddressed shortcomings would be sorted out in the slow first days of the war, during which the Red Army would be reorganized correspondingly to whichever strategy would deem to be the most appropriate. tl;dr: The Soviets had neither defensive, nor offensive plans to speak of, their decision making prior to the war was clouded by fear, which prevented them from making effective precautions, and the Red Army as a whole was categorically out of position to lead both a defensive and an offensive campaign.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:50
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Ted Cruz says he's fighting for the rights of the working man. Also what Effectronica said.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:27
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It's true that the draft was secretive precisely because it was an act against the status quo in Soviet - German relations, arguably, but it takes a leap of logic to conclude the erosion of status quo was because of an imminent Soviet invasion of Germany rather than because as of the end of 1938 it was obvious that a major war would start in Europe sooner than later.
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Dec 12, 2015 17:56
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My Imaginary GF posted:The erosion occured because Hitler wanted to "liberate" the world from Judeobolshevikism and saw no difference between being a Jew and being a communist. I talked specifically about Stalin endangering the Soviet German relationship by enforcing draft. That Hitler wanted to destroy the USSR since forever is hopefully not disputed by anyone (LeoMarr?)
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Dec 12, 2015 18:08
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Oh yes, Germany has been totally devastated since 1945, completely in tatters.
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Dec 12, 2015 22:54
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Germany also lost parts of Silesia which had been under German rule since at least the partitions (I don't quite remember), as well as Poznań and its surrounding territories. The Saxons got Silesia from Bohemia during the 30Y war as a guarantee they wouldn't declare war against the Habsburgs. E: Wait, I got Silesia mixed up with Lusatia, Prussians won Silesia in their wars against Maria Theresa. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 23:09
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Woolie Wool posted:And speaking of worse things done to Russia, Russia recovered in the 1950s, completed its industrialization, and had almost thirty years of success This is some leomarr level poo poo
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Dec 12, 2015 23:27
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Woolie Wool posted:So are you going to actually refute the assertion that the USSR had a period of expanded influence and prosperity during the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, and that subsequent recoveries of the various nations wrecked by World War II do not mean those nations were not severely affected or that world wars are really terrible things, or are you going to take content-free potshots again? Yes. The Soviet Union post-war recovery was fueled by stripping her "allies" and other occupied territories of industrial machinery and resources and of severely underperforming compared to the West in every development indicator, actually lowering standard of living in the western parts of the Eastern bloc. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 23:33
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My Imaginary GF posted:One cannot understand the post-war world without understanding the pre-war German, Polish, and Soviet land policy. Germany was colonial; Poland, decolonial; Soviet, self-colonial. This post is gibberish. Woolie Wool posted:If the US Air Force sends B-52s to carpet bomb your hometown into a pile of cinders, it's OK because it will just be rebuilt, right? No harm no foul! See my expanded post. Also I don't think this post is even tangentially related to anything. Losing territory is qualitatively different from losing infrastructural power.
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Dec 12, 2015 23:37
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My Imaginary GF posted:I do believe there was a Peter Sellers film about this very subject. The Mouse That Roared is a great movie, and everybody should watch it. While the politics in it are simplified, it reflects the bewilderment the post-WWII world experienced over the fact that you can now lose a war, yet win the peacetime through economic policies.
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Dec 12, 2015 23:40
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Woolie Wool posted:And Germany did not lose that? Half of their cities were burned to the ground by the Americans and British, and the other half were sacked and looted by the Russians. Both West Germany and the USSR benefited from temporary, massive capital infusions from outside (West Germany mostly from the United States, the USSR mostly from the territories it sacked to help rebuild itself). Both recovered during the 1950s and 1960s, but the Soviet Union could not keep it going--I suspect because of the sidelining of reformers like Khrushchev and Kosygin. Raubwirtschaft only works once, there is no way it would provide the USSR with over twenty years of economic growth. Ultimately the West Germans were compensated for their losses and benefited from being part of the free trade club. Meanwhile the Eastern bloc was cannibalizing itself. The point is, you said the loss of territory was devastating. It was not since national power in modern Europe is not connected to landmass. You have been trying to deflect this point, which remains as it always was: The loss of Eastern territory didn't hamper Germany's ability to remain European economic powerhouse.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:07
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Effectronica posted:National power is not connected to landmass? Amazing, how much more powerful Switzerland is than Germany, given its extremely intensified economy. If we talk about post-WWII era, German's influence isn't derived from territory in any meaningful way, look up the Council vote distribution rule evolution for the EEC / EU.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:17
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Effectronica posted:Do you understand that economic power is not unrelated to the size of the nation, and that Germany's power from its economy is related it having almost a fifth of the EU's population and being the fourth-largest nation by land area? Do you understand that Germany wasn't decimated in either regard by the WWII peace settlement? Well, besides the unfortunate DDR thing. Germany retained its population centres and its economically vital areas.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:22
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Effectronica posted:Please don't change the subject just because you've recognized your error. I don't change the subject, the subject has been since the very first post in this sub-thread the (arguably off-hand) claim that Germany has been "decimated" by its territorial losses, which has since been twisted in every possible way. E: WW said "The territorial losses in 1918 were insignificant compared to 1945, where they lost all of Prussia except Brandenburg, which was absolutely devastating.", I made fun of that, that's all this debate has been about from my POV.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:25
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Effectronica posted:You said that "national power is not related to landmass", which is untrue. It is not. The UK can be more powerful than Ukraine, France can be more powerful than Russia... What matters is distribution of relevant production factors per the given level of economic structural development, not the raw number of square km occupied by a government. Germany was fortunate enough to retain its production factors ecept for capital for which it was renumerated during reconstruction. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 00:30
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My Imaginary GF posted:They also lost millions of Germans. I think losing people is more devastating than losing territory. Definitely. People are a rare resource, and the loss of people to DDR was the greatest loss of the FDR, arguably. I don't know what the distribution of the millions of exilees coming from Czechoslovakia and Poland was between the two Germanies, though. Also they got some migrants from Romania and hungary AFAIK and managed to attract a healthy foreign immigrant flow, eventually..
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Dec 13, 2015 00:33
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LeoMarr posted:Stalins such a nice guy, liberating countries from the woes of industrialization. By removing their industry. Stalin was a great guy for making political prisoners in "allied nations" mine uranium for the Soviet nuclear program (without offering these allies any ompensation).
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Dec 13, 2015 00:34
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Effectronica posted:Malta cannot economically outproduce the UK in any realistic scenario. Landmass is, in fact, a part of economic power. Sorry that the Will doesn't Triumph over material factors. You aren't reading my posts, land is a production factor, with variable time / space value. There will always be an anchoring of national output to physical constraints, but it takes really extreme contrasts for these constraints to become insurmountable. In this way your example is the exception that proves the rule.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:40
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Woolie Wool posted:My point wasn't even strictly economic, and indeed it was examining the psychological and military factors that fueled German nationalism, so your attempting to attack it from a purely economic basis was completely off base to begin with. The loss of Prussia was an enormous national humiliation and a humanitarian disaster (on top of the five hundred simultaneous humanitarian disasters already unfolding in the reason, the majority of which were of course Germany's fault). The devastation may have even been necessary for the denazification process to work depending on who you ask (most of the Allied leaders at the time would have probably said yes) but 1945-1955 was a very, very bad time to be a German. And as for national power, Germany and the entire EU are basically pawns on the United States' board, whereas pre-WWII and especially pre-WWI Germany were great powers in their own right and not part of somebody else's sphere of influence. The United States benefited massively from World War II at the expense of all other great powers except the USSR, including its own allies France and Britain. Maybe that's why our political class seem to be permanently living in it. The average German now lives better than the average American, but Germany's ability to oppose American interests, even if it wanted to, amount to gently caress all. By contrast, the Kaiserreich had great leeway to pursue its own interests even against the interests of other great powers, and was able to do so for decades until Wilhelm II got a bit too comfortable testing the limits of German power and turned a war between a dying empire and a third-rate Balkan country into World War I. This sort of aggressively romantic view of the war outcomes fortunately belongs firmly on the trash heap of history.
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Dec 13, 2015 00:45
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Woolie Wool posted:Europe alone has a large number of such "exceptions" who have very rich economies and very high standards of living and absolutely no way to leverage that prosperity into real power. Norway isn't going create a sphere of influence anytime soon, nor are the Netherlands, Monaco, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, or to go outside of Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, etc., etc. Norway is a great example to prove my point being a fairly large Euro country with good natural resources. Woolie Wool posted:What is "aggressively romantic" about "world wars really suck and we keep losing them and getting humiliated, we should probably not wage world wars again", or "being evicted from the land your family called home for 400 years really sucks, we should not do things that will cause this to happen to us again"? The fact that I acknowledge that real humans who live in real countries are not beep boop robots and are affected in many ways by what their countries do and have happen to them? If none of these things would have affected Germany or the German people, why did Allies do them to Germany? Punishing the German state and even the German people was an essential part of the post-World War plans, to try to get them to stop being belligerent assholes all the time, and by all accounts the lesson eventually took. quote:What makes you think, if the UK or France stepped into the power vacuum (or, God help Europe, the US did so directly) left by the Morgenthau Plan, things would be different? Ultimately austerity comes from global capital.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:03
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Unit 731 is just the tip of the iceberg, the Japanese systematically murdered something like 30 million people in China alone in their anti-Communist pacification campaigns. On the other hand the American government was quite happy to support the KMT which was about as brutal in their treatment of the civil population (Yellow River flooding, anyone?), so there were hardly winners in that theatre.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:37
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icantfindaname posted:That statement is completely true though? The two largest industrial and demographic centers in Germany behind the Rhineland were Saxony and Silesia, and Saxony ended up behind the Curtain and Silesia got the full ethnic cleansing treatment. They were both less important than the Rhineland, but that was major blow to West German economic capacit Uh, do you have sources for this? I find it hard to believe Saxony was more important than, say, Bavaria.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:40
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Effectronica posted:Just give it to the JCP. They were independent of Moscow. Of course, that would have never happened, but eh. The idea that only 20 million people died in China and Manchuria during the Second Sino-Japanese war is quite optimistic.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:44
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icantfindaname posted:Imperial Germany population density: Interesting. i knew Saxon cities were the industrial backbone of the DDR, but I suspected they were insignificant compared to the West. Thanks.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:45
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Effectronica posted:Historians generally agree on a 15-20 million range of people dying in China in WW2, about half of them due to famine and disease. There were at least 10M military losses to the National front. Then we have some number over 20M of civilian casualties caused by the war (including the whole period since limiting this conflict to 1939-1945 makes little sense). This number is hard to verify, and I will admit the combination of military and directly caused civilian casualties reaching 30M is likely the highest estimate, but I'm going to say that it makes sense because the pacification campaign included the redirecting / withdrawing of food in occupied areas based on commander discretion, so famine casualties are difficult to separate from deliberate acts of war.
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Dec 13, 2015 01:52
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So even if it was a more conservative 20M, what does it change about the fact that the popular focus on Unit 731 and Nanking has been part of obscuring the true scope and nature of Japanese war crimes (which were by no means limited to China). It's comparable to if the coverage of Nazi atrocities never progressed past the first battle of Warsaw. Sorry for my rambling, I just loving hate this period's Japan.
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Dec 13, 2015 02:11
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VitalSigns posted:Luckily for Europe America was smarter than this and didn't expect the Marshall Plan to be paid back, because we had a government that knew the national budget isn't the same as your local credit union's bookkeeping. America provided most of its Marshall aid through grant programmes invoiced to the US government and delivered as goods and services, not through loans deposited to accounts of independent governments. Which meant that Marshall Plan, especially in Germany, wasn't and couldn't be used to combat what would nowadays be called austerity.
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Dec 13, 2015 14:35
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VitalSigns posted:What. In one case the donor government retains the ability to censor the recipient's spending by actually delegating the spending on its own agency, in the other the recipient government has the discretion to spend money on stuff like welfare transfers, social security and other things that have been the centerpiece of the austerity debate in recent years. Ultimately the former model helps national welfare, obviously, but that's actually exactly what austerity proponents have been saying all along (i.e. instead of providing no-strings-attached loans, enforce structural reform, which is just a fancy word for telling the recipient country what they can and can't spend money on, just like in the case of the post-WWII grants). quote:It's also wrong, because money was provided to the governments of Western European nations although at first most of it was spent buying materials from the US since it was one of the few countries whose industry wasn't destroyed by war, but as time went on a greater proportion of it was invested into rebuilding the industrial base of Western European countries. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 18:59
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Tens of millions of slaves, including Korean women, were distributed all over the empire through government agencies and supervised by the military, it's literally impossible for the Japanese to wash their hands over this with any amount of credibility.
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Feb 6, 2016 19:49
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vyelkin posted:Asking which army on the whole had it worst is really subjective since how do you compare freezing to death in the Russian winter with dying of malaria in the jungles of Burma, but there are a few specific examples of unpleasant encounters with nature from the war, like the Battle of Ramree Island where it's possible dozens or hundreds of Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles (though strong doubts have been cast on the exact magnitude of this event) or the sinking of the USS Indianapolis whose survivors were left floating in the Pacific Ocean for three days with sharks eating them periodically. Worth noting that the deadly winter of the Eastern Front was preceded by some of the worst rasputica period on the record, during which the army exhausted itself swimming in viscous mud. So in a way they experienced the best of the two worlds - the numbing cold of the winter, and the humid, sweaty and torturous nightmare that is usually associated with the monsoon season in SEA.
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Aug 25, 2016 11:38
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If you have some time, read up on Wang Jingwei of the Reorganized Government in China, he was a fascinating and pretty tragic figure.
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Aug 25, 2016 15:54
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Disinterested posted:Horses would get up to their heads in it and be shot. Artax, no
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Aug 25, 2016 20:17
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Fascism as a political ideology has two main pillars: - the totalitarian role of the state - the state embodies the dialectic truth of history. All apparent contradictions and binary phenomena of modern society must be suppressed under the authority or the government, and refurmulated into a unifying, total, all encompassing vision for the nation. all social activities are percieved as belonging within the scope of the state, there is no duality of the private and the public, because this binary system, too, is subsumed into the unifying framework of state, and reduced to conflicting aspects of a single monad. in short, literally everything a person does is political. furthermore the dialectic and permanently evolving nature of our understanding of social organization requires a constant process of rebirth and cleansing through violence. - corporativist government - corporations, state and workers are mobilized to work together through a framework of corporate governance. entrepreneurs, employees and state officials share responsibility for national well-being and serving the public interest, while also jointly fulfilling the functions usually limited to the political system, i.e. the classes of modern economy that would be antagonistic under capitalism and socialism are ostensibly expected to work together as fully submerged elements of a single political entity, serving this political entity through their own means. Simply put, all economic actors are brought into a single forum to serve the state, be the state and make decisions for the state.
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Sep 22, 2016 20:53
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Sure fascism is more, but also less than any single doctrine, because it was formed organically from a social substrate, and had a rigorous ideological framework imposed onto it retroactively. Even the most influential fascist authors like Gentile, the guy who wrote Mussolini's political philosophy, never got past the problem of their ideas conflicting with the practical life aspects of fascism as a political movement.
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Sep 22, 2016 21:56
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The question of whether fascism was conservative is debatable. Strictly speaking, fascism in its original form, i.e. Italian fascism, wasn't conservative, and in fact Mussolini routinely worked to destroy traditional institutions that he didn't like. The coatriders often were conservative, but it's a question if they should be called fascists for other reason than being more or less geopolitically aligned with the Axis. I suppose if there were a way to frame Italian fascism in one simple sentence it would be - It's a philosophy that frames the individual as synonymous with the budding consciousness of the rightful social order (the individual is the dialectic, rather than merely thinking about the dialectic), and uses this supposed complicity of the individual on the actualizing of the spirit of the collective reality to enslave him by the elites (compared to Marxism which externalizes its historical materialism into an impersonal theory) steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Sep 22, 2016 |
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Sep 22, 2016 22:25
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