Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1. I don't want to take away Rommel's ultimate skill as a CIC and his outstanding career as a soldier, but he did have good forewarned intelligence (equivalent to the Ultra decrypts for Montgomery later), early in the North African desert war, via the help of the Americans. The American embassy had been raided in Cairo by Italian intelligence (during 1941) where their "Black code" had been stolen. Incredibly, the Americans did not report these codes as compromised, and did not immediately change their signal codes. Since, by Churchill's insistence, the American embassy attaches got much of the British forces' strength, readiness and disposition, Rommel (via the Italians) got this valuable intelligence firsthand as well and put it to good use with his limited forces in 1941 & 1942. There was little guesswork in Rommel's forces deployment and campaign objectives, early in the desert war.
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  2. The UK economy in 1945 was also geared to wartime production, particularly in heavy industry and armaments production (like the Soviet Union), but by 1950 (with some rationing still in place, like petrol rationing) was largely changed over to a pre-war type consumer economy. Surprisingly, despite the wartime destruction there, exactly the same thing (with more emphasis on trade exports), had occurred in West Germany. A consumer economy never seemed to properly develop behind the Iron Curtain; it was geared towards a perpetual war time economy. Russia, to a certain extent, is still in this mode today.
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  3. Arguably, the turning point came in June 1941, when the Wehrmacht's mobilization & attack of the Soviet Union. Stalin, prior to this, was holding his bargain with the nonaggression pact.
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  4. Wrong, they nearly failed at logistics. The infantry and artillery still relied on campaigns in Poland and France on horse drawn vehicles, as did (largely) infantry battalions invading the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The German armed forces continued to suffer from the lack of logistics mobility by having a scarcity of trucks and having a deficit of spare parts to keep the trucks going. Trucks were not standardized to a few types, keeping standardization and mass production supply of parts a continual issue (and of course the lack of available fuel). Rolling stock in railways were also inefficiently used and was continually in short supply. In a large long-distance land war, like Operation Barbarossa and subsequent army operations in the Soviet Union, logistics bottlenecks began to acutely tell on the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht to sustain offensives and later to defend against Soviet counterattacks. This was a major failing of OKW and OKH to put into effect BEFORE Barbarossa, but also due to inefficiencies in the total war economy production of the Third Reich (early in the war), and Hitler hurrying offensives out of personal convictions and political expedience.
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  5. The Google censor bar is high if the word "fetish" or "fetishism" is censored. Not a swear word, or a word invoking hate speech in context. Humans set the bar for the Google AI censor. How ridiculous.
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  6. Hitler did not start off anti-Communist. Like Mussolini he flirted with Communism at first (because he liked the totalitarian nature of it probably), but by being petite bourgeois from Austria, he probably had a Bavarian socially conservative reaction and rejected it. He preferred the mytical racial mumbo-jumbo of the Thule society as the Nazi ideology totalitarian basis. I knew about that before TIk pointed that out.
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  7. As you said it; Most bureaucracies, including army bureaucracies, take from a finite resource funded by taxation and waste enormous amounts of it in production and supply. That is even without factoring in corruption and graft losses in the system.
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  8. Are u seriously suggesting that the British Empire (at that time, that is what the Commonwealth was called), take on the Soviet Union, occupying and controlling most of Eastern Europe, including Poland, after being in a total war for nearly six years? Hmm, which decision would make more sense to the Western Allies leaders of the day, fight or diplomacy in dealing with a powerful dictatorship?
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  9. You're crossed the Rubicon here Tik, not because I think it but because many ideologues think it. The definition of totalitarianism is the subversion and humbling of the individual in service of the state. You somehow throw off your humanity (individualism) to become a servant of socialism (state monopoly). The state wants it all; heart and mind as a follower. However, the state is not some neutral abstract Godlike figure, but a real government run by a clique of elite. So you become a puppet of the state power and of the elite whom run it; a cog in their machine. Where does this machine go? Why to war of course; to absorb or to conquest other "liberal" nation states, once it has purged millions of any of it's own citizens who resist the state power within it's borders. The Soviet Union was a typical totalitarian state where all these events; civil war (expulsion) then expansionism (conquest) become the blueprint. This is no Jewish conspiracy, but a conspiracy of totalitarian ideologues like Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini and so on. The Jews (yet again) were made scapegoats for all this totalitarian justification for democide and state power. It's a falsehood; we're tyrants because the Jews are "capitalist tyrants" (which is projectionism). Noteworthy that Marx was an anti-semnite almost as rabid as Hitler.
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  10. I read a book that indicated that more than a handful of committed German communists had defected from Germany to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of these were skilled industrial workers, who became valuable to the Soviet war effort, working in Soviet munitions factories and training Soviet workers. However, after the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht in June 1941, these German-Soviet workers became suspected enemy agents (despite their clear political alligences and defection to the Soviet Union well before the war broke out), and were thrown into gulags and GPU concentration camps, despite their skills and production awards while working for years in Soviet factories.
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  11. George Orwell understood the politically manipulated economies of communist countries by publishing Animal Farm
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  12. Interesting that a Chinese restaurant near the mosque in Stockport, previously in a street full of knife and brick wielding thugs, where rampaging riots were occurring was untouched. I smell the stench of the CCP behind some of these antics. And why? International revolution and overthrow of elected governments is built in the totalitarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism and it's reached England, obviously.
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  13. This debate could go.on for another century. Yet, Tik's statements leading from the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939 is factually correct (unless you are a pro-Nazi crank) and I've heard Chamberlain's BBC radio recording in response to Germany's invasion of Poland. Chamberlain made an official statement that Germany had invaded Poland which violated an alliance that Britain had made with Poland. Hence, Britain was at war with Germany because Germany had not halted the invasion. This is a declaration of alliance support, not an official ultimatum of war declaration. The French government had a similar position as the British, but their declaration of support of a Poland alliance they had by declaring war did not expire until about 5 hours after the British. The Nazi German government and Hitler ignored both deadlines and created war with two powerful Western European states as a result. Something similar happened when Belgium was invaded in 1914 by Germany as well. Belgium was neutral and the treaty of Westphalia guaranteed her neutrality by the signatories
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  14. "History is wrong", even when you dig up old pots from thousands of year ago (archaeologists love ancient rubbish tips). It's a negative reactionary viewpoint that not only affects historians, but venerable professions like archaeology, forensic science and geology. That is why the scientific method works and the emotive method doesn't, i.e objectivity. What people write down, under certain regimes with their own biased objectives, are important (although not vital to evidence such as Hitler's Table Talk), and often their viewpoints and language do not concur with your own. We should be not bothered by that, but what they might have said (not verbatim, but in essence), might be useful. Now we're getting to a point of stupidity matching an eight year old and a CCP official: Possibly the Second World War never happened (even though it was allegedly over just under 80 years ago) and the Roman Empire was non-existent with lot of pots under the ground with a few marble ruins (the Romans built primarily with brick, by the way). Worse, putting the pots and ruins there was the work of forgeries (very busy and unnoticed forgers, by the way, seeing the extent of the Roman Empire in three continents). But we shouldn't trust what Cicero said or what Pliny the Elder said because it was mistranslated Latin or Greek, incomplete writing (because of bits of age damaged scrolls), had been repeatedly translated to and from other languages, or these (alleged) people lived in age very different from our own.
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  15. Just adding support to your comment on the Holocaust, which i agree was socially (and centrally) planned, the Holodomor (starvation) in the Ukraine (and other Soviet republics) was a socially and centrally planned democide by Stalin, just like the Holocaust by the Nazis. Same for the Great Leap Forward by Mao Zedong, and so on.
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  16. Tik, you probably know this but Hitler was occasionally a dabbler in the Occult. However, both Hess and Goebbels were more into that sort of thing than Hitler, admittedly. He had an Astrologer sometimes stay with him in the Berghof, Karl Ernst Krafft. Hitler predictably later had a falling out with Krafft, after Hess' unannounced flight to Scotland in May 1941 (Krafft and Hess were quite close), and imprisoned Krafft under suspicion that he was a co-conspirator with Hess. Krafft died of typhus when being transferred to a Nazi concentration camp in January 1945. I wonder if Krafft had predicted his own death? ;-)
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  17. Government are also a tough thing to make workable (not "right" because governments have competing memes and interests which always make it far from perfect). It's an evolution of body of law an collectivism, I.e. democracy (Greek "demos"; of the people) that have succeed best at this. Possibly because the voter becomes a small stakeholder. Democracy has succeeded in government over dictatorships (one man rule) either ideological or not, feudal oligarchies (whether traditional or not) or theocratic governments like Iran is today. Communism is the forth road of government. Not much of a success. In about 1970 there were 29 Communist states. Now, there is 5. Diminishmemt is not an expansion of an ideal.
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  18. Love not war is a good concept that is rarely practised because of political inconvenience.
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  19. Karl Marx's diatribe against Jews and Judaism (I'm neutral towards the latter), looks again like a hunt for a scapegoat and character assassination without evidence. "Jews are capitalists", well yes, but so is just about everyone else. A monetary economy is capitalism. For example, socialism and collective farming in the Soviet Union was an abject and tragic failure, particularly in the agricultural economy. Not just in the time of Lenin and Stalin, but all the time under other later leaders like Khrushchev and Brezhnev. If the philosophy of Marx guided the Soviet Union, then why did this large state only last 70 years? Ask Communists that.
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  20. Turning plowshares into guns (or missiles) improves your defence; it does not improve your economic situation. War spends (mostly) taxpayers money. It does not make money like trade, manufacturing, services, tourism etc. Services are only war services. It is still taxpayer funded. War spending (on expensive warships, warplanes etc) defends your economic goods trade which does help your economy. On the other hand, occupying countries costs money. The winter of Northern Germany while occupied by the British army in 1945-46, risked mass starvation for the population there for example.
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  21. War War 2 was not a war between the goodies (Allies) and the baddies (Axis powers). This is a naive view of an eight year old. The strategic and geopolitical aims of all the belligerent countries are too complex to assess it this way. Also the Allies (including the Soviet Union) were not "good guys". As Neil Ferguson pointed out, World War 2 was a battle between evil (totalitarian Axis powers) and less evil (Western Allies). Also viewing this past conflict through a racist lens by Nazi leaders was not only morally wrong but also severely misguided.
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  22. The Italians did have fast cruisers. Their warships were quite good (if you ignore their anti-aircraft defences), just the training of crews needed a little more work. Like night time engagements at sea.
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  23. Fuck facial recognition camera technology; Big brother technology
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  24. A one hundred tonne tank, is senseless too. It presents many more logistical and tactical nightmares before it even moves; how can it cross most road bridges, most which could carry that weight. How do you load it onto railcars, if the tank is too heavy for the railcars and too wide for most rail bridges and tunnels, and so on.
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  25. Total eglatarianism leads to total tyranny. Read the pathetic story of New Australia, Paraguay.
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  26. The USN navy commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, not "Kinnel". Interesting story about Kimmel. This channel does not deal much with the Pacific War, but Kimmel was commander in Pear Harbor on the day of the Japanese carrier planes attack in December 1941. Kimmel was sacked for incompetence a few weeks later, but in reality he was a competent naval commander who didn 't have favourites in Washington,and was deliberably denied timely information on the defence of the naval base there before the attack. Hence his political "sacrifice". There are American historians who now take this view.
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  27. I've now caught up with the news at what happened at Southport. Hate crime is unfortunately on the rise. This sort of horrible thing does break out in the most peaceful of places, such as at a mosque in Christchurch New Zealand where a single gunman, Brenton Tarrant, mowed down and murdered 51 peaceful gatherers, and injured 89 more and separately in an Islamic centre there. On March 2019 and in New Zealand which is a pretty small and peaceful country with high democratic credentials, but at the time, fairly lax semi-automatic gun laws (since rectified). The murder was not quite as bad in Southport in scale obviously, but worse in some ways for exclusively killing children and where riots near simultaneously breaking out in other Northern counties of England and Northern Ireland. Unlike the New Zealand Prime Minister who handled this civil disaster well at the time (Jacinda Arden), the UK Prime Minister is poltically out of sorts with these terrible events.
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  28. Mao was a classist snob. What a suprise?
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  29. Is a corporation a Socialist organ? It's made up of shareholders who' have invested their money into the corporation project, so these shareholders divest management of the business into the CEOs and directors and receive a share of the profits according to the number of shares they hold. While the motive of the corporation is usually to compete with other businesses in the private sector for resources, manufacturing or service providing, the corporation does own the means of production of it's trading entity. Hence, corporations while capitalist are quasi-socialist while private business is not.
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  30. Normally rational people can and do make irrational decisions. To think otherwise, this is chop-logic; i'm blue therefore i'm not red.
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  31. Humans come to end of evidence and then use, "the spirit" or "god" or both. Pure mystical intellectual laziness.
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  32. The first 2 minutes of your video looks like an excuse for Brexit. Not a force of arms to withstand a hegemonic dictator on the continent, which i think that's you're implying (Hitler, Napoleon, Wilhelm II etc.) Brexit is a mistake, for one of many reasons, the EU is not an autocratic dictatorship (although some political detractors will falsely claim this, however it is certainly bureaucratic) but a democratically elected confederation (mainly) economic union of free European states. So Britain, you can't have it both ways.
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  33. The urge, nay the thirst for self-destruction, by listening to (and believing in) long dead and failed totalitarian dictators. But also an anti-Israel counter-current is propelling this new interest towards Hitler's speeches. Stuff about the "evil" Jews again (and again, and again ad-nauseam). Note Zionism is quite distinctive; this more likely explains the conundrum of modern Israel.
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  34. The Soviet archives can also be questioned as documents manipulated by political expedience of the time, seeing the propensity for the Soviet system to lie and obfuscate, fudging and distorting facts and figures throughout its existence, officially and for propaganda purposes, or simply to please the "dear leader". So I am not sure about the veracity of that source either.
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  35. This is something i don't know about the Wehrmacht's invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Did the German government issue a clear ultimatum to the Dutch government before their forces moved over the Dutch border or (like Belgium in World War 1 and 2) they violated the neutrality of non-belligerant neutral states (which by this act alone is and should be a war crime) by failing at least to issue such an ultimatum before invading? An act of war is at least a political act and you cannot absolve reponsibility of criminality and illegal actions by the armed forced of the state in violating treaties it's government previously honoured (the German government DID previously sign the Geneva convention including clauses witholding armed intervention against the territories of neutral states and their ships). There are numerous examples of violations and close violations of neutrality AT SEA in international waters long before WW2, so the Wehrmacht and naturally the Nazi government (with this full knowledge of historical precedence) committed a war crime just by invading Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark.
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  36. Where does Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill get their influence from?
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  37. Tami Davis Biddle may have been anti-war (as am i), but by describing the human faces and women and children killed (horrible though that is) to describe Dresden and to ignore similar effects caused by the Luftwaffe and pilotless missile bombing (V1 and V2 missiles) of British cities in 1940-45 (Coventry in 1940), bombing of Rotterdam etc, is shallow and incomplete at best.
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  38. It is psychobabble. Einstein did say that ideas should be clear and lucid. Hegelism does indicate the opposite.
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  39. I keep hearing that the German optical sights were overall superior for army gun equipment (motorized or towed). Why not capture German equipment and copy the German optics to add to their own? gunsights?
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  40. It was a wonder than Britain and other European states in general were able to get out of the hole that Feudalism created for a 1000 years. Oh yeah, global shipping trading and colonies. Plus, trade libralization (something Spain, Portugual and to a lesser degree France didn't initially have).
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  41. Zimbabwe is currently undergoing hyperinflation. So badly that a note with a ridiculous amount of zeros in monetary values. Hence, the banknote values are in words, e.g. fifty billion. In exchange rates, it is often worth less than the paper it is printed on.
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  42. The lazy-bones of Lutherism are a reaction against the work ethic? Further written large by most Protestantism?
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  43. Massive bureaucratic effort to consume all that paper. So Nazi Germany was a paper tiger economically.
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  44. We have to investigate the other rumour, that Hitler had syphilis ;-)
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  45. The trouble with all this is that many unsophisticated people are going to interpret Tik's discourse as his personal political view, instead of the critique of Hitler and Nazism that it actually is, based on quotes from Hitler's speeches and Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf and so on. A critique is a historical basis for argument about the politics of Hitler for example, with evidence. This does not apply to Tik's personal view of politics and his sympathy or dislike of Nazism. Probably dislike as Hitler is a demagogue, a war criminal and a tyrant (but not insane) and Tik makes that pretty clear.
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  46. I'm far from an expert on Hitler and the Nazi Party and the Hossbach Memorandum, but this document is of obvious importance in confirming Hitler's aggressive intent of territorial expansionism within Europe, and that he intended to carry out these plans without the prior provocations of major European powers such as France, Britain and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Hitler also expected reactions by these powers to his territorial aggressiveness, and he laid plans to counter it from the memorandum, which is also forethought in aggressiveness. It's also the first time i've heard of the Hossbach Memorandum. I agree with the thesis of Tik that totalitarian powers have quite a few immoral and unlawful elements in common, regardless of their right wing or left wing ideology, was forming in my own mind before listening to his theories. Thanks Tik for outlining this important document and exposing the reactions of historical propagandists which show sympathy to Nazism, and have a burning desire to whitewash this dangerous, destructive and unlawful (including constitutionally unlawful of the Weimar Republic) totalitarian power.
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  47. Could Rohm simply be a rival to Hitler's power and ambition to rule, an "enemy in the camp"? After all the SA were a very numerous faction of the Nazi party. The Night of the Long Knives was less about ideology and more about who was dictator. By bloodying up the leaders in the SA (Rohm and his deputies), additionally by shooting the conservative opponents of Hitler, such as Schleicher and imprisoning von Papen in the same week, Hitler eliminated two opposing camps of his dictatorship in one fell swoop. This was no longer then a "peaceful revolution" at this point.
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  48. Whoopi probably has heard of the black on black massacres of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda in the 1990s, which was a genocide (perpetrated mainly by Hutus against Tutsis), which is arguably a race conflict as clear as the Nazis genocide of Jewish people. Like anti-semitism there is also clearly a sectarian basis for the violence in Rwanda. Also, in this genocide in Rwanda, white people were not at all involved and was only had a little to do with European colonialism a century earlier. The Hutus denigrated the Tutsis as "cockroaches", using other racial slurs and so on before setting about attacking them with machetes. There was no conspiracy of white people in Rwanda or elsewhere in the 1990s to fan the flames of this genocide. To me, this was racial hatred along ethnic and religious lines (read Nazi rabid anti-semitism). Both the Hutus and Tutsis are black African people, so Whoopie is skating on thin ice by weighing in on the Holocaust as "just a war" between whites. Africans commit genocide against Africans as well.
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  49. The two finger image of Churchill. This speaks volumes about the man from enemies and allies alike.
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  50. So we finally got it. Chamberlain was responsible for the Second World War, thus the British government he represented is mainly responsible for it. I missed this plot against Hitler's life, yet there were many.
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  51. Why put God there in the first place? Suppose God may not exist, then if that is so, then all of this ridiculous chop logic is a pointless waste of time,
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  52. 1.Fascism, Nazism and Communism = The dictator will make the total decisions (of your life, relationships and livlihoods) for you, in the name of " The people" or "The collective" or "The party", 2. Feudalism = The monarch and the nobles will make the total decisions (of your life, relationships and livlihoods) for you, in the name of " The king or emperor", 3. Democracy = pretty well the same except allowing for some liberties of the individual, and the individual adult is allowed be a tiny stakeholder in the nation state by the vote (these last two concepts are disallowed by the totalitarian fascists, communist and hereditary monarchs with total power). Note that these types of governments exist in about the 190 nation states of planet Earth, with democratic nation states being in the minority of all countries.
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  53. You don't need a belief system because someone else wrote the script, to mold reality into their benefit or ulterior motives (Karl Marx again, but also Hitler), which is often at cross purposes to your well being. Marxism is clearly also nihilism. Is you don't believe that then read the history of Jonestown and it is clear as the light of day. History is indeed a record of the past, but surely we can draw moral lessons from it? Totalitarian governments are a corrupt people killing machine, driven by ruthless ideological anti-humane insanity and steered by an amoral or immoral dictator. Surely, this is a bad thing?
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  54. Hitler sounds very similar to Trump, and vice-versa. Trump + Hitler = Trumpler ;-D
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  55. "We are not monsters", but politics has a very sinister way of becoming monsterous, eh? Hitler and his over-inflated ego believed he was the "Man of Destiny" for a militaristic revived Germany. He said it on numerous occasions, many believed him like fools. Hitler then having gained the instrument of state power of the strongest state in Europe, then like a vengeful murderer, bloodied Europe with it. Hitler, far from being an object of ridicule was above all a sinister lawless usurper peddling a racialist hate-flavoured flawed ideology. Then like Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong, created hell on Earth within and without the borders of his "Thousand Year Reich". We can all be thankful that he didn't succeed.
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  56. History is doomed to repeat itself. This time not by the Germans.
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  57. Tik is bored talking about just World War 2 battles and generals. He is correct in examining the politics of that era. After all, war is a political act.
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  58. Benzine is a German word for petrol or gasoline. There is also an aromatic compound called benzene, which is typically not a refinery precursor for petrol (which is octane), but is used in the explosives industry to make TNT (a common explosive in shells and bombs).
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  59. Well, Gudarian the technocratic expert on armoured warfare himself, either makes a grossly absurd argument (meaning that he's lying badly) or is genuinely and shockingly stupid about this; You need a force of numbers in the immediate battlefield to prevail, so producing more tanks (and yes this requires an even larger and more robust logistics train to deploy them) makes more sense than worrying much about their technical capabilities, if they are not too obselete. Further, if you worry about being overwhelmed by enemy armoured counterattacks, deploy more anti-tank guns, or redesign their range and armour-piercing effectiveness. Easier and cheaper to mass-produce this than design a new tank.
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  60. I don't agree with the analysis that Tic put forward, except that it makes more sense than "we're all Aryan brothers" nonsense proposed by Halder and Rundstedt. I strongly suspect that the halt order was given; 1. Because of the end of the logistics train that the the Panzers found themselves and needed time resupplying initially and 2. The French Army in the Dunkirk sector fought more skilfully there in a non-outflankable defense than the Germans had so far expected or received and so the Panzers attempted pushing forward after a scant few days of refitting, but without sufficient infanty and artillery units to overwhelm a well-prepared French Army defense in depth around the Dunkirk perimeter. Having been knowingly been defeated by the French in this critical action, which failed to prevent the British Army from evacuating Dunkirk (as well as some French soldiers), Rundstedt and Halder et al. Then later lied about the Halt Order, that erstwhile pushed the blame onto the dead Hitler's shoulders (again), and not about it being an actual battlefield defeat of the German Army in the offense in this sector (on their part to save face etc.), by the French Army at that critical time. Note that the French surrender was not signed until June 22, from which date the remaining French Army would cease fighting. Note that the last troops were evacuated from Dunkirk by June 4, when it was finally taken by the Germans, nearly 3 weeks before the armistice was signed.
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  61. I'm sick of hearing that the Rothschild's are the source of MOST (not just a few) major conspiracies in the Western world. Putting that the Rothchild's are Jewish for a moment aside (which as being Jewish should never be a conspiracy in it's own right, because it's downright anti-semitic and xenophobic), why the Rothschild's should bother to associate themselves with a myriad of diverse political conspiracies to me makes no sense. Unfortunately now, when I hear a conspiracy in which the Rothschild's are allegedly involved, I immediately switch off as being the work of an anti-semitic crank. A crank as monomanic as Hitler was in reality.
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  62. Not at all. Unconditional surrender and the invasion of Germany in 1945 guaranteed the end of the Nazi Party and all it's works (well, not the immediate end of the effect of concentration camps, but freed the survivors and brought some criminal protagonists of these camps to justice). Had peace or an armistice been signed with Nazi Germany before it's defeat meant the survival of the party, totalitarianism in Germany and perhaps another third ruinous war.
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  63. Intresting logic, particularly with Trotsky. Jews in Europe for centuries were not allowed to own land or be members of the artistocracy. In the close-fisted quasi-feudal societies of pre-industrial Europe, this gave basically one path for weathy Jews wishing to put their wealth and influence to use; banking. In a sense, before the twentieth century,Jews were a victim of the religiously xenophobic societies they found themselves in. By making wealth and influence through the institutions of usury (banking), and by having a different faith (not recognizing Jesus as the redeemer of mankind mythology for example), they invited to be despised, and sometimes persecuted in witch-hunts. This is a perfectly fertile soil for the paradigm of the martyr and altruist.
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  64. Mein Kampf, was essentially Hitler's ideology that he applied, from the point where he completed that book in the 1920s until when he shot himself in April 1945. The ideology was mediaeval and deeply immoral obviously. However deeply convinced Hitler was of his own ideological position, he probably was not mad and could make decisions that had some bearing on reality until 1943. After this (highly important) year of WW2, Hitler increasingly lost touch with reality. This was partly due to ever mounting success of his numerous enemies where increasingly German battles were becoming less and less effective at turning the tide against them and also due to flattery, soothing and outright lying of his underlings. Another factor was his near assassination in July 1944, where he was blown up by a bomb placed under a nearby table in a conference room by a cabal of officers determined to get rid of him. He vengefully had the ringleader officers hung by piano wire (much in the same manner of the mafia). We can assume that from that point onwards that Hitler was much more mistrustful of his underlings & the army was going to lie even more about the strategic situation.
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  65. Speaking as an Australian, not only was Churchill an idiot, he was also vindictive and a killer of thousands of young Australians in both World War 1 (Gallipoli) and World War 2 (Greece and Crete). Additionally, he was a treacherous and egotistical thug and was prepared to sacrifice Australia to the tender mercies of the racist, totalitarian Showa era Japanese. In defiance of PM Curtin of Australia, who badly needed seasoned troops (at home and in New Guinea, there were only a few thousand badly trained and equipped militia at that time) to defend New Guinea and Australia during the early onslaught and rapid expansion of the Japanese during the Pacific War in 1942. Churchill refused to supply warship escort to the 7th AIF division troopships while it was steaming towards Fremantle, for two weeks, withdrawing these escort ships in a huff after having yet another phone battle with Curtin when he refused to divert these troops to Burma (by then a lost cause). Leaving these men defenceless against potential attacks by Japanese naval ships, submarines and warplanes. That is how much Australians in the know despise Winston Churchill.
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  66. While Hitlers political-economic desires make some sense, like the Reich needs oil for economic and mobility reasons, his goals were absurd. Even if the Nazies took Astrakhan and Maykop, how would they get the oil underground there (we presume the Soviets would have taken or burnt their stocks at the refineries), can he ship or freight it far towards a locale where the Reich could refine and redistribute it? The Reich struggled to get sufficient food and manufactured stocks of it's own mainly from Germany to the front line-troops. Pure fantasy, even for the time.
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  67. To be initially slightly reasonable to Churchill, there were significant Australian forces in North Africa (and Greece) at that time. However, in early-mid 1942 when major British offensives out of Egypt were being planned against Rommel, the Japanese invaded Rabaul and New Guinea (if you don't know where that is, get a map). The two main Australian army divisions in the Middle East (the 7th and 9th), were needed to defend Australia much closer to home by a rapidly advancing and utterly ruthless enemy. At the time, Australian undertrained and undermanned consripts called Militia were fighting seasoned Japanese troops in those Pacific places and losing. While Churchill very grudgingly released the 7th division from North Africa, like the schoolboyish idiot that Tik correctly identifies, insisted that they steer themselves (while steaming towards Australia across the Indian Ocean) towards the lost cause of the Japanese invasion of Burma. To his everlasting credit, the Australian PM John Curtin fought Churchill over long phone calls to prevent this, and in high dudgeon, Churchill refused to supply RN troop ship escorts (for 2 whole weeks) while most of the troop ships steered towards Fremantle. This is grave act of unnecessary treachery that could have been an unmitigated dssaster for the defence if Australia in 1942 , for which i personally hold Mr Churchill plausibly responsible. Okay, i've rammed this point home, unintentionally.
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  68. Living standards in the 2 decades after WW2 only recovered in Western capitalist countries, e.g United States, UK, France, during the 1960s. These 3 countries continued to spend significantly into their industrial-military complex (although not at total war levels) because of the Cold War and decolonisation (which did not go well for either Britain or France). However, not at the expense of bringing back the pre-war consumer market, although this was slower to recover in Western Europe (and Australia), than the United States. For example, petrol rationing continued into the early1950s in the UK, and ended in Australia only by 1950. Furthermore, meat rationing in the UK continued until 1954. This was a sign of not a fully recovered consumer market, in capitalist countries, as a result of the total war military economy from 1939-1945. The socialist-totalitarian Soviet Union did not even get anywhere near as, say Western Europe, in establishing a proper consumer goods market by 1960. Consumer goods were always scarce in the Soviet Union, including in the economically better times of Krushchev. I agree with Tic, socialism (in any guise) fails miserably at economics.
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  69. Mainly the horrors of British WW2 logistics. The US logistics barely gets a mention. The payment of incentives is called a "kickback" i think. You'll deliver these on time (or before), not damaging or thrashing your truck and you get a pay bonus (at the, end of the month). With GPS systems, supply trucks are now regularly tracked (yes, in WW2 there was no GPS). In the competitive world this makes some sense. But knowing human beings, we get a pay incentive scheme called corruption. Especially when a supply bottleneck appears or an item is in short supply. How to make the corruption easier (as two third parties may agree) does cut profit to the supplier and makes the buyer pay more. Hmmm, money does work.
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  70. Was Oswald Mosley, and his blackshirts, a fascist (in the Italian sense) or a Nazi (in the German sense)? A similar question might also be posted for the Republic of Ireland's Eoin O'Duffy's blueshirts movement.
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  71. Identifying a philosophical movement, like Communism, as a work of faith is itself flawed; it cages rationalism and puts reason to sleep. Faith, by it's definition is cultish. So Communism is a cult, Facism and Nazism are also cults as much as any religion. Take it like a cult and put your reason to sleep as the sacred leader gets to decide your life for you. This is a Faustian and fatalistic pact. A fatal price for intelligence and rational autonomy for an individual to pay. This is not selfishness (plenty of fanatics are strangly selfish in their thirst for nilhism of themselves and unbelievers), but the understanding of yourself and the world around you. The doctrine of Christianity is sin. This a revolting mythological adversion of the self and denies the sexuality of both men and women. I'm not arguing that this sexuality should take the forefront but it should not be cankerous and twisted. Drinking in sin and believing this is "inherited" makes a half-life, a toxic inverted mythology, a belitteled individual harressed by guilt of nothing. If you stop believing in this mythology of sin, you unlock the jail cell and walk away free and be generous minded and reasonable.
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  72. I don't really want to dignify this bunkum with a reply, but there is no actual scientific basis of race of humans other than superficial appearance. Dark skinned people naturally come from sunnier climates, where darkness brings increased protection from stronger sunlight and UV light. It's the only reason. Whereas eye colour may be more sexually selective than you think (by the female). In any case, all modern humans are a species of bipedal ape from Africa.
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  73. Cognito Ergo Sum; Descartes
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  74. War crimes happened in their hundreds or thousands of events on both sides during WW2. The bombing of Coventry by the Luftwaffe was a war crime as was Rotterdam and Warsaw. Where do we put a threshold? When more than a thousand civilians are killed any one air raid by any side is classified as a "war crime"? That would make hundreds of war crimes during WW2 from aerial attacks from both sides alone (the Japanese bombing Chinese cities inclusive). The real point I want to make is that the right of the nation state to bear arms is not legally rescinded throughout countries on planet Earth to this day and so the possibilities of war crimes continue until the present and into the future. As the historian Niall Ferguson succinctly pointed out that WW2 (a peculiarly racialist war) that the conflict was between evil (the Axis powers) and lesser evil (the Allies). None of the belligerent state actors in that conflict were "good guys", and all war aims were political and seemingly ongoing nearly 80 years afterwards.
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  75. The real ugly story of this propaganda is the need to find an outsider as a scapegoat, and Jews (through no fault of their own) become scapegoats writ large. This serves the tenant of totalitarianism; to find a scapegoat, in which you might notice that both the Nazis and the Soviets (to varying degrees) used anti-semitism as a platform of scapegoatism. This conveniently deflects away from your own social ills and heaps it upon another's head. Furthermore, the scapegoat is depicted as not being passive but active and scheming, making them appear underhanded and dishonest. That Nazis brainwashed Germans through anti-semitic propaganda to commit horrible mass crimes against millions of innocent ethnic communities across Europe should be enough to convince anyone who is not a totalitarian demagogue, that this approach is pure reprehensible evil.
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  76. A river may not flow actually, It is simply a channel of still water, although that may define it as an elongated lake. It may be a dry channel without water, where water did flow once. But a river channel was or is a channel that does or did hold water.
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  77. Nautical stuff. Quays are pronounced as "keys"
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  78. This is still a political minefield from both sides that will agree or disagree for primarily Nationalist reasons. It's dangreous and emotive to use the revanchist card on say, the Versailles Treaty when the armistice treaty of Brest-Litovsk, forced on Russia by Germany in December 1917, was far more punative for the Soviets. Notably to say that the Second War war in Europe certaintly consumed more money, resources and killed more people than the First World War, but the Germans were pacified by having their cities largely destroyed , their amies captured or surrendered, their horrible concentration camps exposed for all to see, and their country occupied by the victorious but sorely provoked allies. Which is what you get when you meddle in totalitarian politics and the cult of the leader.
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  79. Adding to Hitler's ruthlessly insane and immoral (and just wrong in many points) theories of conquest and colonization in the east, was that he did not only want Germans and Nordic types to undertake this task (I won't say Aryans, which are also connected to Iran and Northern India; not Nordic types), he thought (irrationally) that the British and Americans would also join in this colonization as well. Early in the war, Hitler was not terribly interested in invading Britain, he thought he could come to some negotiated peace.
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  80. Anything that is faith based IS a cult. This might include Communism as faith based class conflict. I'm not questioning class, just that it's in perpetual conflict as an article of faith as Marx put it. Mysticism and faith a bed fellows. That is why a rejection of mysticism might lead to a rejection of faith. If you need faith and dogma to "keep you going" is your personal preference, but still does not validate this kind of thinking as reflecting reality. You can by dogma be or appear wrong. What so you have left when mysticism and faith dissappear? You have nature. A non-personal paradigm of existence with physical laws. Furthermore, useless to pray to a law of nature, like gravity. It does provide an intellectual space for pantheism, except that this again is mystical; God as being outside of nature and the great cosmic experimentalist. Not evidence based again.
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  81. We're also lead down the economic fact that slave labour is significantly less efficient than free or paid labour. Futhermore, slaves needed feeding, housing and guarding also all that would be less than subsistence level and many slaves died of disease and malnutrition. One comes to the conclusion that the purpose then of slave was more for punishment for who they were, than what their forced labour could provide. Phased as; hard labour, malnutrition, brutal treatment, disease and death, so ruthless extermination played as the final solution in planned ethnic genocide and hard brutal work was a catalyst in that direction.
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  82. Abhorrent mass-criminal treatment by the Nazies. Mind you, the German POWs did not get much better treatment in the Soviet Union. Such is totalitarianism of the state. The Wehrmacht abrogated it's moral duties on the alter of National Socialism.
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  83. Propaganda (including distortion or obfuscation of facts), directed at the actual economy leads to economic shocks, where the shock is not publicised (the same thing, dare I say, happens when you direct propaganda and oppression to disease control). I met a lady who emigrated from Latvia in the 1980s, which verifies your analysis of a socialist economy. She used to sit and watch people in the supermarket buy goods for hours, as she said, this didn't ever happen in socialist Latvia.
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  84. The only honest German account of this campaign, or indeed any of their battles during World War 2, is the one attributed by a Napoleonic era Prussian, Major General Carl von Clausewitz; "War is the continuation of politics by other means."
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  85. The Soviets had already rapidly industrialized in the 1930s, and some factories had been moved before the Germans had captured the western Soviet cities, like Kharkov. Another factor was that the Soviet Union was fighting one main enemy; Nazi Germany, unlike Germany which was fighting 3 main powers by that time (and it told in time). Nevertheless, the SU lost a lot of its best agricultural lands and the enemy had occupied the majority of the populated SU at the time.
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