[Transcript]
“war will never lead to a good outcome.”
That is for people who don’t know history.
Look at Japan and Germany now, without war, does she think we would be here.
Such platitudes are the new normal in campuses and so-called intellectual circles unfortunately.
The more platitudes, the better it seems.
(Emphasis original. Source.)
The Western Allies reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution and at least 53% of South Korea’s police officers in 1948 worked for the Axis.
Italian anticommunists pardoned Fascists while punishing thousands of partisans; there was no equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for the Italian Fascists; the liberal bourgeoisie refused to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities in Ethiopia; British officials recycled Fascists for their control of Eritrea in the 1940s; and there were continuities between Fascism & the post‐1945 Italian police.
When the Western Allies took Algeria from the Axis, they let the fascists continue running the internment camps; important elements of the Fascist era survived in postwar France.
The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946); West Germany’s régime was polluted with surviving Axis personnel; fascist elements survived in West Germany.
Let’s not forget that the German and Japanese régimes today are both riddled with conservative xenophobes, but knowing Herzlians, they’d say that that’s actually a good thing!
The Western Allies did not fight WWII to save Jews and Roma any more than the Entente fought WWI to save Armenians, otherwise Imperial America would have accepted far more than 110,000 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1941 — a measly fraction compared to the hundreds of thousands who attempted unsuccessfully to apply for immigration, and frequently perished as a result. See David Swanson’s Leaving World War II Behind, ch. 2, for ample evidence.
Even the Herzlians’ precious colonial project had no interest in receiving a huge influx of Jewish refugees:
Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee.
“When they asked me, couldn’t you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, ‘NO!’ and I say again, ‘NO!’…one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance.”
(In Days of Holocaust and Destruction, by Yitzchak Greenbaum)
In the beginning of February, 1943, Yitzchak Greenbaum addressed a meeting in Tel Aviv on the subject, “The Diaspora and the Redemption” in which he stated:
“For the rescue of Jews in the Diaspora, we should consolidate our excess strength and the surplus of powers that we have. When they come to us with two plans—the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land—I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraization of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the “KerenHayesod” (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! and once again No!”
(Holocaust Victims Accuse, pp 26)
The early settlers considered Shoah survivors to be ‘weaklings’ (with the possible exceptions of those who chose to become militarily involved in ethnically cleansing Palestine). The settlers embraced a philosophy where it was only right that Europe’s weak or old Jews perish so that there would be plenty of room available for strong and young Jews.
Contrary to popular misconception, WWII did not ‘need’ to happen at all, and the bourgeois states could have prevented both World Wars if they made better decisions. Leaving World War II Behind is abundant with evidence against the tired WWII argument, but for brevity’s sake I shall quote only this segment from chapter 3:
By behaving more wisely, governments could have chosen not to launch World War I, or not to end World War I in a manner that had people predicting WWII on the spot. […] If we went back an additional 20 years to the proposals for peace discussed at the Hague in 1899 but never acted upon, our case would be that much stronger.⁷⁴
Jane Addams and her colleagues not only predicted in 1919 that a second world war would come, but also detailed what would need to be changed about the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations in order to avoid it — and launched a global peace organization to advocate toward that end. That organization, which is still around, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), posted on its website in 2019 an account of what had been said one century earlier.⁷⁵
The famous 14 points promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, nine of which WILPF took credit for having proposed to him, were largely lost in the Treaty of Versailles, replaced by brutal punishment and humiliation for Germany. Addams warned that this would lead to another war.⁷⁶
Of course, there is a more straightforward and more obvious reply to this blockheaded argument: without war, no state would have exterminated millions of Jews along with dozens of millions of other people!
I realize that one stranger on a conservative website seems insignificant, but unfortunately the WWII argument is a common one that anticommunists use to justify all sorts of neoimperialist endeavors from massacring thousands of houseless indigenes to preventing peace with the Russians. It needs to be put to rest and this example was the ‘best’ comment underneath some news that I found.
The famous 14 points promoted by President Woodrow Wilson, nine of which WILPF took credit for having proposed to him, were largely lost in the Treaty of Versailles, replaced by brutal punishment and humiliation for Germany. Addams warned that this would lead to another war.⁷⁶
I don’t buy this. The Treaty of Versailles was incredibly lenient on Germany considering Austria-Hungary was cut in half, the Ottoman Empire was completely dismantled, and the Treaty of Frankfurt from 50 years earlier had been harsher on France. France managed to pay all the reparations of Frankfurt, including giving up portions of its territory to Germany, without invading and occupying its neighbors.
Immediately at the end of WWI, the Germans were already scapegoating communists and Jews for losing the war on the home front. This rhetoric was only amplified as the Depression began rippling out from Wall Street, along with food scarcity due to famines and droughts happening in the East and the Dust Bowl in the US.
The main causes of WWII was anti-communism, food and farmland, and capitalism’s failure to handle the Depression. The Treaty of Versailles could have been harsher or more lenient on Germany and the Germans would have still chosen to start another world war and enact the Holocaust.
I guess that I should have quoted a better example, but Swanson does not argue that the Treaty of Versailles was the sole or main cause of WWII:
With widespread agreement that all governments would arm and prepare for more wars, predicting that Germany would be embittered by too much punishment or that too little punishment could allow Germany to launch a new attack were both safe predictions. With the ideas of prosperity without armament, the rule of law without violence, and humanity without tribalism still so marginal, Foch’s prediction made as much sense as Jane Addams’.
[…]
The Treaty of Versailles was only one thing among many that did not have to happen. The people of Germany did not have to allow the rise of [German Fascism]. Nations and businesses around the world did not have to fund and encourage the rise of [Fascism]. Scientists and governments did not have to inspire the [Fascist] ideology. Governments did not have to prefer armaments to the rule of law, and did not have to wink at German outrages while encouraging a [Fascist] attack on the Soviet Union.
It is worth remember that the Treaty of Versailles also ensured that the German Reich never would get back its colonies in southwest Africa, but that is beside the point here.
I hate how much people fetishize World War 2. There have been a lot of other wars in human history that are much more reflective of the situation in Palestine.
Do they realized that Nazi German had contradicted their support to war after the d-day invasion? The support to wars also justify the terrorism and resistance against Pax Americana. At the very least, Pax Americana and the Western European empires should stop complaining about military aggressions by any countries that oppose the fragile ego of Western European diaspora. They might even need to praise the immigration of people with no European ancestry who come to the Western European diaspora to replace any white people that became too parasitic from free riding from the Indian Residential fake schools that secretly continued after 1997, the inheritance thief of abducted Indigenous children in the fake cultural assimilation projects, and colonial authoritarian free riding.
