Cyracuz wrote:Would I be too bold to say that it is thanks to Hitler that we have the current situation on the world. When Hitler started his campaign the other powers of the world were forced to ally. Without this common threat to unite them there is no guarantee that there would be such unity in the west as there is today.
And maybe if Hitler hadn't done what he did, Albert Einstein and others like him would have just stayed in Europe. No one would have been prompted to pursue the idea of a nuclear bomb. At least not so quickly and ruthlessly.
Your contentions are sufficiently vague as to seem to be worthy of consideration, and sufficiently vague so as not to oblige you to defend a specific position.
For all that FDR wanted to deal with Hitler and the NSDAP, as well as the war in Europe--Hitler's war was more than two years old before he obliged FDR by declaring war on the United States. Even absent a second world war in Europe, Japanese militarism would have had to have been dealt with, and that entailed the English, the French and the Dutch, as well. Japan and the Soviet Union were already at war when Germany attacked Poland in September, 1939. Events don't occur in a vacuum, nor can they be neatly compartmentalized--this is the Pacific, this is Europe and never the twain shall meet.
Absent a war in Europe in 1939-45, the Soviet Union would still have been the bugbear of English conservatives, and very likely of American conservatives as well, sooner or later. But our current world situation is focused upon and focused by Muslim fundamentalist fanaticism. And that fanaticism arises from western interference in the Muslim world. That interference arises from two causes, one major, and one minor. The major cause is petroleum, which accounts for the middle east and Persia, and the far east as in the Dutch East Indies; the minor cause is what the English called "the Great Game" and entailed keeping the Russians out of southern Asia, as the Russians plotted as feverishly to get a warm-water sea port on the Indian Ocean. Both the issue of petroleum and the issue of Russia's move toward the Indian Ocean stretch back to long before Hitler became an insignificant regimental gopher in the Great War.
Whether or not Hitler had been able to take over the NSDAP, there still would have been an NSDAP. Whether or not the NSDAP had become the right-wing, xenophobic, "encirclement" standard-bearer, despite its "socialist" roots, there would have had to have been some such political "tent" in Germany, because the DAP of 1919 was just one of many political splinter groups eager to seize power. After the NSDAP won the largest portion of the popular vote (but not a majority), they formed a coalition with the largest right-wing party in the Reichstag. Shortly thereafter, the Reichstag fire was engineered, and adding another right-wing coalition partner in the form of a Catholic party (a no-brainer for the NSDAP, born as it was in Catholic Bavaria), Hitler was able to pass the Enabling Act, which allowed him to legislate without reference to the Reichstag. Thereafter it was a simple matter to outlaw all opposition, and pack the Reichstag with his supporters.
Every move Hitler made could have been made by someone else. Every paranoid delusion popular in the German nation of the day which Hitler exploited--the Versailles
Diktat myth, the "Stab in the Back" myth, the encirclement myth--could have been as easily exploited by any other demagogue. In fact, even if Röhm and the SA were a bunch of dull-witted gorillas, political thugs best suited to beating up their opposition in the streets--they were to a certain extent loyal to concept of socialism. Had a left-wing demagogue as persuasive as Hitler appeared, the same thing could have happened with a socialist rather than a fascist party--the NSDAP was originally intended to be as socialist party.
What distinguished Hitler from all the other would-be successful demagogues of his day was his skill at gutter politics and back-stabbing, and his ruthlessness. Hitler's only concept of loyalty was loyalty to himself by those who would aspire to share some small crumb of the absolute power he sought. In that regard, he had an advantage over anyone else who actually believed in the dogma of their favorite political party. What also distinguished Hitler was his ruthlessness in pursuing his idiotic plan to take the Ukraine and settle Germans there--that lead to disaster for the nation for pretty obvious reasons. His finally distinction was, because of his almost unique ruthlessness was his willingness to pursue racist policies to the ultimate conclusion--he wasn't the only antisemite in Europe, nor the only hater of "Gypsies" and Slavs. He was the only one whose ruthlessness was so free of restraint the he could contemplate such slaughter with indifference.
So all that Hitler added to the mix was an insane obsession with invading the Soviet Union and a completely sociopathic racism. His ruthlessness (and, i would add from my personal perspective, his stupidity in all areas outside gutter politics) are the only things which distinguish him. He was productive of nothing original. The NSDAP would still have existed without Hitler. Göring and Himmler both would have taken the positions in the party that they occupied in the 1920s without Hitler. The German people would still have believed in the Versailles
Diktat and Stab in the back nonsense without Hitler, and would have succumbed to the "encirclement" paranoia without Hitler. The likelihood that there would have been war in that time period, involving Germany attacking to "retake" their old borders (also quite a myth--the "Sudentenland" in Czechoslovakia, for example, had never been a part of Germany at any time in history), is very high. Hitler was not the only German politician who attempted to exploit those attitudes, he was simply the most successful. The NSDAP was not the only party which exploited those attitudes, they were simply the most successful. Göring and Röhm and their Brown Shirt bully-boys were the only political thugs on the street--they were just the most successful.
I reject your thesis for two reasons. The first is, that not everything in history is inevitable--so for example, without incredible, block-headed stupidity on the part of George III and the governments which served him, the American Revolution need never have taken place.
However--some things are inevitable. If Napoleon had not invaded Russia in 1812, his empire would have fallen apart because he failed to do so, just as it fell apart because he did so and failed. Spain was bleeding him white, and the Continental System was a becoming an ugly joke--if he ignored Russian defiance of the Continental System, his empire was doomed as surely as it was when he did march into Russia and lost a half-million man army.
And, as surely as Napoleon had no choice but to invade Russia, or lose his empire anyway--any political leader of Germany in the 1930s was obliged to defy the French and take back the Rhineland, and face the issue of East Prussia and the Poles. That Hitler's propaganda machine seized upon Czechoslovakia and the so-called Sudenten Germans was simply a difference of detail. The Rhineland beckoned, and so did Danzig. The humiliation the German people felt at the outcome of the Great War could not have been ignored by any politician who wanted to survive and thrive in 1930s Germany. The Weimar Government had already solved virtually all of Germany's economic problems--the war reparations which people continue to falsely claim crushed Germany were never paid, the Germans paid less than 10% of reparations, and most of those payments were in-kind payments made before 1921. The crushing inflation and unemployment which the NSDAP exploited in the 1920s was gone by the 1930s. What was inevitable was that for any great leader to arise in Germany in the 1930s,
and to survive, he would have to have not only faced and dealt with, but exploited the paranoias of the German people at the time.
I reject your thesis for a second reason--our allies of today are our allies of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, with Germany added, and a few Muslim states who think it in their best interest to be our friends (you may be unaware, but Japan was our ally in 1919, too). The alliances which we have and upon which we rely now are essentially the same as those we had then. Conservatives who whine about the French ninety years later would have had as much to whine about in 1919.
The great issue of world security today has nothing to do with the issues of the Second World War. It has to do with the relations between the Muslim world and the West. And the seeds of that strife were sown long, long ago, when Jackie Fisher and Winston Churchill took the sensible and innocent decision to re-equip the Royal Navy with steam turbine power plants to replace reciprocating steam power plants. That meant switching from coal-fired boilers (unreliable heat and steam pressure, and very inefficient fuel-to-heat conversion) to oil-fired boilers (high, steady heat and steam pressure, and highly efficient fuel-to-heat conversion). The so-called "law of unintended consequences" has kicked in with a vengeance.
Virtually no aspect of the contemporary world is a legacy of the Second World War.
