It’s Not Easy Being Red and Green

The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior of deluded lunatics. And yet much of the left insisted on approaching the war in just that fashion, and had Hitler not attacked Stalin, it might have remained stuck there.

The Cold War was even worse. The moderate left never came to terms with Communism. From the Moscow Trials to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left slowly disavowed the USSR, but refused to see it as anything more than a clumsy dictatorship. The only way that the left could reject the USSR was by overlooking its ideology and treating it as another backward Russian tyranny being needlessly provoked and pushed around by Western Europe and the United States.

Having failed the test twice, it is no wonder that the left has been unable to come to terms with Islam, or that it has resorted to insisting that, like Germany and Russia, the Muslim world is just another victim of imperialism and western warmongering in need of support and encouragement from the progressive camp.

The anti-war worldview is generations out of date. It is mired in an outdated analysis of imperial conflicts that ceased being relevant with the downfall of the nation-state and its replacement by international organizations and causes based around ideologies. Nazism could still loosely fit into the jackboots of the nation state. Communism was another creature entirely, a red virus floating around the world, embedding its ideas into organizations and using those organizations to take over nations.

Islamism is even more untethered than Communism, loosely originating from powerful oil nations, but able to spring up anywhere in the Muslim world. Its proponents have even less use for the nation state than the Communists. What they want is a Caliphate ruled under Islamic law; a single unit of human organization extending across nations, regions and eventually the world.

The left is incapable of engaging with Islamism as an ideology, instead it reduces the conflict to a struggle between colonial and anti-colonial forces, showing once again that the left's worldview is usually at least fifty years out of date. Mapping colonial and anti-colonial conflicts over a map of Mali, where the anti-colonial forces are represented by the slave-owning Tuaregs and the Arab and Pakistani Jihadis invading an African country, makes very little sense, but that is all that the left knows how to do.

The anti-war movement does not deal with wars as they are, but with a revisionist history of war. The continuum from Oliver Stone to Ron Paul resolves all questions through a historical revisionism that locates the source of every conflict in American foreign policy. By blaming America for it all, they are freed of the need to examine who the other side is and what it wants.

During WW2, Trotskyist unions in the UK claimed that American troops weren't coming to help fight Hitler, but to break up labor protests. That same obtuse obliviousness, the insistence that a conflict spanning centuries, religions and continents is all about their pet cause, is how the left has responded to every conflict since.

Their response to the Clash of Civilizations has been to include Islamists in the global rainbow coalition of minorities, gays and gender theorists, indigent third world farmers, transsexuals, artists and poets, sex workers and terrorists; without considering what the Islamists were or how they would fit into this charmed circle.

The left views the Islamists as just another front group to be used. The Islamists see the left the same way and in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia, the Islamists have a better track record of getting the better of the left. But the left never learns from history. It never questions its outdated Marxist fisheye view of events or realizes that the Industrial Revolution, feudal peasants and the banks are not a metaphor for absolutely every struggle that takes place anywhere in the world. And so the left dooms itself to repeat again and again the history that it refuses to learn.

The left only recognizes one ideological war. Its own. Through its narrow garret window, it sees only the dead hand of the capitalist establishment and the fossilized nation-state bound together by a devilish compact of greed blocking its way. It cannot recognize that there are other historical forces at work and other fanatics who dream of exploiting the collapse of the western nation-state for their own purposes.

Progressives see history moving forward in their direction and ignore the Islamists who see everything coming up Jihad. There are two ideologies who both see themselves as the culmination of human history going down the same track and only one of them can make it to the final destination. The Islamists understand that, but the left does not.

Rather than deal with Islamism, the left persists in fighting phantom wars against nationalism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism and imperialism; all things that are approaching extinction in its sphere of influence, while thriving outside its sphere of influence. The left is too busy fighting a civil war to see that if it wants to survive, it will have to fight a global war. True to its nature, it is determined to finish digesting the West before it is ready to defend it, and by the time that the left digests the West, with the help of its Islamist allies, the war will be over and the left will have lost.

The left is undone by its own conception of history as a treadmill moving forward through historical stages, rather than a chaotic morass of forces colliding together. In the progressive understanding of history, progressive forces defeat reactionary forces and humanity advances to the next stage. There is no room in that neat orderly evolution for the violent chaos of Islamism and its resurrection of tribal forces, ethnic grievances and religious intolerance into a worldwide movement that is every bit as fanatical and determined to forcibly carve out its own vision of a new world order.

From the progressive perspective of history as an evolutionary process, Islamist tribal fanaticism is from too early a stage to threaten the left. Socialism must battle against the industrialism of the previous stage, with each generation advancing the future by destroying the achievements of the previous generation in a species of grim historical cannibalism. The left fears being held back by capitalism, not by Islamism. It does not believe that the values of the 6th century can compete with it, only that the values of the 19th century can.

The left's rigid view of history has caused it problems before. It rejected Zionism as a historical aberration, and spent over a century fighting against the idea with spiteful hate, propaganda, terrorism and tanks. In the left's view of history, a Jewish State is an attempt to turn back time by building a state whose roots are in religious scripture. Israel is ahistorical and must therefore be destroyed.

What it rejected as ahistorical for the Western Jew, who was expected to assimilate into the Socialist society, rather than building a nation state of his own, it accepted from the Muslim world, which it deemed more backward and in need of passing through all the historical stages to get to the red finish line. The left has been willing to tentatively accept Islamism, even when it is destroying Arab Socialism, because it assumes that Muslims are backward enough to need an Islamic simulation of Socialism.

While the left sees itself as progressive and Islamism as reactionary, it is the left that has trouble adapting to new developments, while the Islamists have successfully glommed onto everything from the Cold War to the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of international organizations and even the War on Terror, and exploited events for their ends. In the new century, the Islamists have been riding the left over the finish line, without the left realizing that it was being ridden.

The Islamists are intellectually and morally backward, but unlike their collaborators on the left they are not bounded by an inflexible vision of history. Their strategy is flexible and they are willing to do anything that works. They are utterly unconcerned with the tactics they use or with the historical implications of movements and events so long as they lead to them toward a Caliphate.

The Islamists do not need to understand the left. All they need to do is go on using it. The left does need to understand Islamists, but generally chooses not to. When some among the left, like Christopher Hitchens, take a long look at the Islamists, they have the same reaction that the USSR did when the Nazi tank began rolling across the Russian border, and realize that it's come down to fight or die.

The left dwells in an intellectual bubble of its own making. It transforms that bubble into an elaborate place, furnishing the space until it resembles a miniature world, but a bubble is not a world, it can only ever be a bubble. Ideology is the left's bubble. It is the lens that the left sees through, the air that it breathes and the clamor that fills its ears. Ideology conditions the left to view history as an orderly progression. An arrangement of chess pieces moving forward in a complex strategy to cripple their opponents.

The left is often vicious, hysterical and irrational, but underneath that is the vision of an orderly historical progression toward a great society. Trapped inside the bubble, it cannot realize that the world is going backward, not forward, that the 21st century is really the 7th century and that the future is the past. The Islamists understand this quite well. The left cannot.

I don’t think that most people have any idea just how anti-war most Americans were going into WWII. Nor do I think people understand how anti-British many Americans were.

There were probably several reasons for the anti-British sentiment. We had fought Britain in two wars for national survival and had a tough time of it. People were still taught history then, and they thought of Britain as an aggressor. Globally, Britain was still a colonial power, and we were anti-colonial by birth right. Finally there were a lot of Irish immigrants that had absolutely no use for the British at all.

Even after WWI we were still making warplans to fight the British and defend our Eastern seaboard from the Royal Navy.

If the USSR had sued for peace as it did in World War One, Britain could not have succeeded in negotiating anything less than an unconditional surrender. Such an unconditional surrender would have resulted in a genocide equal to or greater than that experienced by Poland. Germany already had plans in place to exterminate the British leadership, intelligentsia, and military. Military age males were to be executed or sent as slave labor to Europe. Uselss mouths such as the elderly and infirm were to be liquidated in extermination concentration camps in Britain. females were to be liquidated in the extermination concentration camps, unless they were deemed to be useful for slave labor and Aryan breeding programs. The Royal Navy Fleet was to be used in the war Against the United States and its New World allies.

In the eevent of the loss of the Soviet Union and the occupation of Britain, the pre-war United States was already preparing to build an inter-continental bomber force. Some of the propased bases for this inter-continental bomber force were the Potuguese Azores, seized bases in North Africa, and/or captured Mediterranean island bases. The disparity in the ground forces was to be compensatedd by air supremacy, strategic bombing, and the atomic bomb weaponry.

That's interesting. Not just because it discusses the alternative strategy of dealing with Hitler, but it shows the complete and total lack of concern about what Japan was doing on he other side of the world. Totally ignoring a real threat until it slaps you across the face is as American as apple pie, I guess. The difference between the reactions to 12/07/41 and 09/11/01 is astounding, and it does not bode well for this country.

1941. Germany had lost the Battle of Britain and was not doing all that well on the seas either. I believe that Germany attacked the USSR because it couldn’t invade Britain any time soon. Had the USSR surrendered before December 1941 the US would not have entered the war, but Germany still wouldn’t have been strong enough to force surrender upon GB which still had the support of it’s Empire and the United States. I think the settlement would be that GB lifts it’s blockade of Germany and keeps it’s empire IOW: a stalemate. A triumphant Germany would not have made the same mistakes with Russia that it did in 1917.

Hitler had always planned upon conquering and colonizing Russia, as can be seen in his book, Mein Kampf. Stalin had always planned on invading Germany and the rest of Europe. It was not a question of if there would be invasions. There was only a question of when and how the invasions would occur. After the deeat of Goerings Adler Tag campain in the battle of Britain, Hitler found it necessary to consider the problems he would face with a longer and more costly campaign to invade and conquer Britain, when Hitler’s intelligence services were telling him how Stalin’s preparations for his own offensive against Geermany and Eeurope were approaching readiness.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know Stalin’s plans were doomed to failure due to the poor combat performance of the Red Army and Stalin. But Stalin was not ware of this incapacity to perform in 1941. Just as he vastly overestimated the capabilities of the Red Army in its campaign against Finland in 1940, he had no clue how bad the Red Army would actually perform in Operation Barbarossa.

Hitler decided he could not afford to have Stalin attack him in the ear while he was drawn into a prolonged campaign against Britain in 1941 or 1942. Instead, he gave the Kriegsmarine the mission to starve Britain into submission with a submarine offensive and blockade, while the Whermacht disarmed and defeated Russia. Hitler badly needed resources to continue a prolonged war. Russia and the Middle East had those oil and other resources, while Britain did not. So, Hitler trusted the Kriegsmarine to handle the threat in the Weest, while the Wehrmacht conquered the threat and the future resources in the East.

Without the United States actively engaging the Kriegsmarine in the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain had absolutely zero chances for surviving much beyond late 1942 to late 1943. Eveen with the support of the United States, the Battle of the Atlantic was being lost until 1943, when the loss rates were suddenly and deecisively reversed. Prior to a date in 1943, the Allies were losing more merchant ship tonnage than it could build by a substantial margin. If things had kept on going the way they were, Britain would have been starving to death by late 1943 to early 1945. The cross channel invasion and strategic bombing campaign in the ETO would have to have been canceled or greatly reduced. The new anti-submarine efforts of the U.S. 10th Fleet and the Royal Navy reversed looming defeat into the steady and inexorable destruction of the U-boats. Hitler could have built far more U-boats and crews before he invaded Poland, but he miscalculated the Allied response. So, the Kriegsmarine went to war unprepared to blockade Britain and starve it into submission and surrender before the United States could intervene with its entry into the war. Hitelr could still have defeated the successful Allied anti-submarine campaign by the earlier construction of the advanced design U-boats in quantity, but he chose not to do so in time and numbers to overcome the Allied successes in 1943. Hitler failed to anticipate these events when he made his 1941 decision to proceed with Operation Barbarossa.

Japan was not ignored at all in the pre-war planning. In fact, it was envisaged that Japan was to be the foe of the United States, while the Britiash Empre and France dealt with Germany and Italy. The German Blitzkrieg of Western Europe in 1940 upset some of those earlier war plans and brought other alternative war plans to the forefront.

The B-17 and B-24 bombers were conceived as hemispheric defenses against hostile naval fleets approaching the continental United States. The B-29, B-32, B-36, and other very long-range bombers were conceived as inter-continental bombers. The inter-continental bombers were intended to be used against Japan, Germany, or other threats if and when the bases required very long-range missions.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so determined to stay out of the major wars, Hap Arnold was nearly fired in 1941 when he warned Roosevelt about the dangers of waiting too long to obtain the Congressional appropriations needed to build the aircraft and ar forces needed for a U.S. defense in the war.

President Wilson’s deal with Britain was to make war loans to keep Britain afloat in World War One, if Britain used the loaned monies to purchase war supplies from the United States. After the war loans were given to Britain, Britain reloaned the same monies to the other allied powers using the same kinds of terms. The allies were to use the loaned monies to purchase war supplies only from British manufacturers. So, not only were the U.S. taxpayer funds not spent by Britain to purchase war supplies from U.S. manufacturers and U.S. labor, but Britain used the U.S. taxpayer funds to require the other allied nations to purchase only from British manufacturers and British labor instead of those in the United States. Then Britain added insult to injury by suspending repayment of the war loans when the allies defaulted on their repayments of the war loans to Britain. During the Great Depression, U.S. taxpayers were furious with Britain for what they viewed as British duplicity.

It is for these reasons the British diplomate in the Second World War referred to the U.S. Lend-Lease to Britain as such a great act. He had a double meaning, given the forgiveness of the British default in the same war loans of the prevous war.

“Hitler never wanted to fight UK. He actually wanted to make peace after the Battle of France, leaving UK free to dominate the rest of the world while he took Europe. He assumed, not unreasonably, that the Brits would make peace after such a total defeat. He was absolutely shocked when they gave no sign at all of interest in peace.”

It is true that Hitler envisaged an alliance with Britain when he wrote Mein Kampf, and his hopes were encouraged somewhat by the later naval treaty with Britain. However, Hitler reversed his attitude towards Britain in 1938 when Britain entered into alliances with Poalnd and France in the aftermath of the Munich agreement that surrendered the Sudetenland from czechoslovakia to Germany. from that point onward Hitler planned the conquest and recolonization of Britain by German colonists as the British population was exterminated in an even more comprehensive manner than Poland. Hitler’s comments in 1940 were more in the form of disingenuous propaganda to disarm those Britons who were disposed to fight to the bitter end. Hitler’s genuine intent by 1940 was to enslave and exterminate the population of Britain.

“From the POV of Nazi ideology, fighting in western Europe at all was a diversion from the true German destiny in the East.” Once Britain made it clear that it would remain a threat to Germany’s ambitions with a blockade of the continental powers as was accomplished in World War One, Hitler’s priority was to neutralize the threat in the West before pursuing the conquest of lebensraum in the East. Hitler intended to fight on one front at a time, which is why he entered into the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Stalin’s imminent invasion plans and Germany’s desperate need for war material in Soviet territories caused Hitler to compromise his strategy. Hitler’s failure to defeat and occupy Britain in time to open sea trade for petroleum, iron ore, rubber, and other critical war supplies forced his hand into taking on Stalin’s forces before the completion of the the western campaigns.

I’ve read a number of books on the subject and I disagree.

Hitler considered the British to be for the most part perfectly good Aryan racial material, unlike the subhuman Slavs who needed to be exterminated eventually.

Had he succeeded in his conquest of Eurasia, access to the sealanes would have been more or less irrelevant.

Hitler was so convinced he would be able to cut a deal with Britain that the Germans didn’t really have anything even vaguely resembling a plan for conquest of Britain. They more or less rolled up to the English Channel and said, “Whoa, where did all this water come from? The tanks are going to have a little trouble getting to London.”

He was even less prepared to cross the Channel than he was to fight a winter war in Russia. In both cases he assumed the enemy would do what he wanted them to do, and was shocked when they failed to follow his script.

The Battle of Britain was to a considerable extent more like a tantrum and an attempt to intimidate the British into making peace than it was an actual prelude to an invasion.

Operation Sea Lion required that the Germans have BOTH naval and air superiority for a considerable period, and they never came close to getting either, even briefly.

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