Trump, Bannon and the Coming Crisis

[Eric the Green]

(02-17-2017, 04:00 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(02-17-2017, 03:29 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(02-17-2017, 01:31 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

(02-16-2017, 10:41 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Oh, and roughly 80% of German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front.  Large Communist movements existed in France, Italy, and other places in Western Europe during that period.  Had the US not intervened, the Red Army probably would have pushed through to the Channel.

I disagree.  Without the US there would have been no Western front.  Germany was not a pushover and it would have taken the USSR quite some time to defeat them one-on-one. Britain might have tried something in the Balkans, and when they got bogged down maybe settle for recovering Norway.  As the USSR rolled back the German positions at some point I think Churchill would have grown fearful of exactly what you suggest.

Hitler came to power partly because German capitalist elites preferred the Nazis to the Communists.  In the end I think Churchill would have come to the same conclusion and made peace with Hitler.  But Churchill had gambled that the Americans would get involved, in which case his side would have the preponderance of the power and the capitalist West would in the end come out on top (as they did in 1991).

Good points, EXCEPT there is no such thing as making peace with Hitler.

There wouldn't be peace for Hitler. He would still be fighting the USSR. Peace with Britain would simply mean that the Brits would stop launching ineffective assaults against Germany, allowing them to deploy their full power against Russia. Leaving a still -powerful Germany intact could have resulted in an eventual Russian-German settlement that would put the "iron curtain" (to use Churchill's simile) further East than it ended up.  Hitler would eventually die, and his empire would as well, just as did the Soviet empire.

Over the years the Russians and Germans fought, the British could absorb the French and German overseas empires into their own.

I rather think that if Churchill had made peace with Hitler (which was not in his nature to do anyway), the Germans would have regrouped and invaded Britain successfully eventually. Hitler's empire could never have been stable like the Soviet one. It was inherently expansionist, while the Soviet one was a buffer against aggression from The West. When The West no longer appeared to be a threat, the Soviet Empire dissolved.

Who knows what might have happened if The West had made "peace" with Hitler. But if Hitler had survived without a western invasion for another 20 or 30 years, he would never have made peace with Russia. His primary goal in life was to defeat it and take over the European part of it at least. Hitler was a romantic conqueror, like Napoleon and Alexander the Great. There are those who say that those three were all the same person, through reincarnation.

Hitler would never have given up on conquering Britain either. Without the USA, German advances in rocketry and nuclear weapons might have enabled them to subdue the world without further fighting, and enact a new Dark Age. WWII was an existential threat to the USA and all civilization, IMO. And there was a time limit imposed by the time it would have taken Germany to build the bomb. As the PBS series about Nazi mega-weapons shows, the Germans were brilliant at weapons technology.