Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1.  @gratefulguy4130  And you'd be equally wrong to do so. Like Churchill and MacArthur, Eisenhower certainly had significant shortcomings but they are far outweighed by his crucial contribution to victory. The Anglo-American-Soviet alliance was arguably the most successful coalition war in history and Eisenhower's political skills were vital for keeping the western half of that alliance cooperating and focused on the ultimate goal. MacArthur may have been the most insufferable egomaniac in all of American history but after his mistakes in the 1941-42 Philippines campaign (which would have been a Japanese victory no matter who was in charge on the Allied side or what they had done) he was one of the few leaders in the whole theater who fully understood modern warfare and the coordination of land, sea, and air forces on a strategic scale. Nimitz was arguably the most competent commander in the entire Asia-Pacific war, but he was a naval commander and could never have conducted a successful land campaign on the scale of the 2nd Philippines campaign or the invasion of Japan itself had that proved necessary. The successes on land in his AO were entirely due to the complete isolation of relatively small garrisons by sea and air forces, and battles like Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa show how unimaginative he and his subordinates were when it came to land warfare and how costly and futile a protracted land campaign under their command might have been. MacArthur was wrong from a strictly military POV to insist on an invasion of the Philippines, but it's hard to argue that his conduct of the campaign was anything but extremely competent. MacArthur's postwar overseeing of the occupation of Japan was also nothing short of brilliant, and he deserves much of the credit for Japan's rapid transition from a militarist and violent aggressor to a peaceful member of the community of free nations.
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  2. Chamberlain: Tell Adolf it was only business. I always liked him. Ribbentrop: He understands that. Chamberlain: Can you get me off the hook, Joachim? For old times' sake? Ribbentrop: Can't do it, Neville.
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  3. This is extremely common in academia as well. Did Marxism get this from academics or did academics get it from Marxism? Yes.
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  4. I've never really understood why some people see such a large moral difference between one bomber dropping one superbomb and hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of conventional bombs. The people on the ground were just as dead either way. These days it's a bit different because nuclear war doesn't mean one or two bombs of 15-20 kilotons yield but thousands of warheads each having a yield 10, 20, or even 100 times that of the WW2 bombs. It's a level of destruction far beyond anything conceivable with conventional weapons.
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  5. Whom doesn't have a slur for people not in their group? Especially religion. Heathen, pagan, infidel, heretic, all are slurs.
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  6.  @Alv11269  No, they are not. You can't name a single international socialist group or conference that has included Nazis or fascists, despite the existence of literally hundreds of such groups and conferences. Marxists, Mensheviks, classical Marxists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Democratic Socialists have, despite their differences, frequently met and debated under the same roof, but not a single one of those meetings ever included fascists or Nazis. Arguing that Nazism is socialism because it isn't capitalism is like arguing that Islam is Christian because it isn't Buddhist.
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  7. Most English-language accounts of the Eastern Front have been based almost entirely on the German POV, so you're wrong.
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  8. "1. Is man always rational? Short answer is yes" You've already gone off the rails there. People do things they know to be self-defeating all the time.
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  9. It also appears in Celtic and Native American art. Often it represents the wheel of the sun rolling across the sky.
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  10.  @francis5600  Would you also argue that North Korea is a democracy? Because they have that in their name. And I'm neither a socialist nor arguing in favor of socialism. Socialism is bad. So is Nazism. That doesn't make them the same thing. All I am arguing for his historical fact over a fiction that serves a modern ideological agenda.
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  11. The flaw is thinking that credit for the victories goes to Germany alone. Just because lots of people fall for that fallacy, doesn't make it true. Rommel couldn't have won a single battle in North Africa without the Italian troops and equipment under his command, and he couldn't have even gotten to Africa to begin with without the Italian Navy giving him a lift.
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  12. Hitler: I declare war on the USA! FDR: Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.
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  13. Just be careful you don;t get drawn in. It can be extremely seductive.
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  14. True, but it's not socialism either.
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  15.  @gimzod76  Yes, Marx was a flaming racist, but that doesn't make racism a necessary part of Marxist ideology. You can take the racism entirely out of Marxism and still have a complete and coherent ideology, but you cannot take the racism out of National Socialism because National Socialism is entirely based on racism. Take away the racism and what's left has no coherence and makes no sense. This is not a defense of Marxism and its massive contradictions and impossibilities in other respects.
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  16. @Celes Uhm yes. You are correct about the origin of the term Slav, but the English word slave was derived from the word Slav by way of medieval French and Latin. "Slav" had come to mean "slave" in western languages because so many of the slaves traded in the Mediterranean region (by Arabs, Berbers, Venetians, etc.) were of Slavic origin.
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  17. The difference is that Rome never pretended it was any other way.
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  18.  @BIATEC88  Race is completely made up bullshit anyway so it is what anyone feels like making it. The Nazis said Jews were a race so for them, they were a race. The US Census Bureau says Jews are not a race so for them, they aren't. At one time in the US Irish and Italian people were legally nonwhite. I've seen Afrocentrists claiming that Samoans and African-Americans are the same race and they are the actual Old Testament Israelites but have no relation to black people in Africa today. So to point out one thing one person is saying about race and call it nonsense misses the point, of course it's nonsense, it's ALL nonsense, and it was all invented to justify things like slavery or the Holocaust that would otherwise be unacceptable.
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  19.  @peterflynn9123  Didn't they originally come from seating in the National Assembly in the French Revolution? "Left" and "right" are much too simplistic to describe something as complex as modern politics. Authoritarianism is neither left-wing nor right-wing, it's its own separate axis.
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  20. Japan lost their oil when their tankers were sunk by US submarines. They had lost the war long before they started losing Indonesia.
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  21. Well, by the time he asked that, the kulaks had ceased to exist (mostly because he starved them to death), so technically it was an accurate question at that point. "Dark humor is like food: not everyone gets it." - Josef Stalin, probably
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  22.  @parlyramyar  Again, false dilemma. Socialism involves collectivization, but not all collectivization is socialism. Socialism is opposed to capitalism, but not all that is opposed to capitalism is socialism. There are alternatives that are neither capitalist nor socialist. Feudalism (in the Marxist sense) is one such. Another I have pointed out in the past is the centralized Bronze Age palace system. A key component of socialism is control of the means of production by workers . In state socialism control is exercised by the state on behalf of workers, and the state itself is, at least theoretically, representative of the workers. (Of course this was never true in the Soviet state, but that is a flaw in the Soviet system as it developed in practice.) Socialism is about economic class, specifically, the working class. Nazism is not socialism (or capitalism) because nothing is controlled on behalf of or by workers OR capitalists and nothing is determined by economic class. Workers exist to serve the state, not the other way around. So do capitalists and their businesses. The state serves Hitler's mystic conception of the German volk , which is an ethnic class, not an economic one. In Hitler's flawed understanding of Nietszche, the volk effects its will to power through war, the state is the means of waging war, and the Party subordinates the state and everyone in it to this aim. As Orwell pointed out, the Nazis had some economic policies that were capitalist and some that were socialist, but in no case was this because any economic philosophy drove policy, it was because those policies were whatever Hitler and his party decided would produce the maximum efficiency of production in service to the state and thus to the war machine. TIK will never understand Hitler or the Nazis and their policies as long as he approaches them from the standpoint of rational economics and fails to understand what really underlay ALL of Hitler's philosophy and policy, which is the flawed interpretation of Nietszche and Darwin that held that the ultimate, and only valid, meaning of life was the struggle for superiority between ethnic groups.
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  23. The Nazis claimed to be a lot of things that they weren't. Christians, just for one example.
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  24.  @thinkingagain5966  Peace on the terms of Hitler controlling the entire continent was not in Britain's short or long-term interest. And Hitler had amply demonstrated that there was no peace or promise whatsoever that he could be trusted to keep. Even Stalin, much as I hate to say it, was a more rational actor on the international stage than Hitler. Hitler wasn't a madman, he was something far worse: a rational and extremely capable man with a thoroughly irrational and anti-humanist world-view.
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  25. Arguing that Nazism is socialism because it isn't capitalism is like arguing that Sikhism is Jewish because it isn't Buddhist. It's a textbook example of an invalid syllogism, a variant of the false dichotomy: a is not b, c is not b, therefore a=c.
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  26.  @Alv11269  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is very easily (and only) understood as a temporary alliance of convenience between two utterly unscrupulous and dishonest actors, each of whom had what seemed to him pressing reasons for delaying the ultimate showdown between them that both of them always knew was inevitable. Hitler wanted to avoid a two front war while he dealt with the UK and France, and Stalin needed time for his army to recover from the Great Purge and also feared the UK and France would draw him into a war with Germany with false promises of support and then back out leaving him holding the bag. What it had absolutely nothing to do with was ideology. And there is no such thing as right-wing socialism, it's a contradiction in terms. You're making the same mistake as left-wingers who want to claim that Stalin was "really" a right-winger.
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  27.  @francis5600  If by "mid-century" you mean "postwar", sure. And most of the "socialist" policies of the Nazis were inherited from as far back as Bismarck. The Nazis didn't roll back those social programs but they didn't institute them either. Like Bismarck and his successors in the Empire, they were content to leave the center-left some social programs in return for not opposing their own, completely different nationalist and militarist agenda.
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  28. Racism in the modern sense was an invention of capitalism in the early modern era, and preceded the existence of the term or ideology "socialism" by at least two centuries. This is not a condemnation of capitalism, it is simply historical fact. Racism emerged because the new capitalist colonial powers needed cheap labor to work the cash crop plantations in their newly won American colonies, and racism provided a convenient justification for using captive people from Africa as slave labor while denying them the economic and political rights that indentured servants from Europe expected to earn through their labor, while at the same time claiming to adhere to Enlightenment values that were incompatible with concepts like chattel slavery. Today racism can be found in, and used by, capitalism, socialism, or any other economic system. The two concepts exist on two different axes. It's sort of like arguing whether socialism or capitalism is more authoritarian, it's a meaningless discussion because there's no necessary relationship between any of them - there can be authoritarian capitalists and authoritarian socialists, and there can be liberal (in the traditional sense) capitalists and liberal socialists. Likewise socialism is neither more racist nor less racist than capitalism. The fact that people refuse to accept that is how you get flaming racists like Jeremy Corbin on the left who insist that they can't possibly be racists because they're left-wing, and useful idiots on the right who can't accept that people who literally march around wearing swastikas and chanting anti-Semitic slogans are Nazis because the original Nazis were socialists, not conservatives. As for "socialism," I wouldn't quite say it's a term that is too broad and diverse to have useful meaning, but it's getting close, and if you're going to have a useful discussion of it you have to have a thorough understanding of its history and development. Yes, socialism historically had diverse branches, some of which were more left-wing and some, like National Socialism, more right-wing, but it's dangerous and generally mistaken to try to place Nazism on the spectrum of modern socialism because of developments both during and after its time. For one, while the DAP did include some left-socialists when Hitler joined it and accumulated more in the early days of its leadership, those people were purged when or shortly after Hitler took power as Führer und Reichskanzler and had virtually no impact on the policies of the NSDAP when in power - the Night of the Long Knives being the most dramatic episode in this purge. Second, because National Socialism was so thoroughly discredited by the events of World War 2, it has virtually nothing to do with socialism as it has existed as a movement since that time. Modern socialism is almost entirely the product of either Marxism and its Bolshevik successors, or from the Democratic Socialism that developed as a response to the excessive authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks and their allies. And after the excesses of the USSR the extreme authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks was also largely discredited on the left in the West. To say today that one is a socialist, whether of the Marxist or Democratic variant, is to indicate adherence to beliefs and policies like trade unionism, internationalism, and the primacy of the material welfare of workers that were absolute anathema to Hitler and the Nazis. This is why TIK is 100% mistaken in saying that modern socialism has its roots in Nazism and is where the "real Nazis" are found today - modern socialism is the descendant of the people who were most diametrically opposed to Hitler from 1933 to 1945, people who ended up in concentration camps if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves under Nazi rule. (Or, for that matter, Soviet rule, since Stalin hated and persecuted non-Bolshevik socialists more than anyone else.) (You did find a lot of former Nazis in government in Eastern Europe after 1945, though usually not in higher leadership positions - those were reserved for people who had been reliable Soviet stooges the whole time - but that has a lot more to do with Stalin's cynicism and Cold War practical necessity than with any ideological affinity between those people and Soviet Communism. Some former Nazis did very well in the West as well for the same reasons. Most of them were not Nazi true believers anyway, they were people who were happy to jump on Hitler's bandwagon when it helped their careers and just as happy to turn their coats when that became more advantageous.) Likewise, the people who today claim or demonstrate an affinity for the Nazis generally have nothing to do with Hitler's economic policies and usually little or no knowledge of them; the parts of Nazi ideology that are reappearing today are mostly its racism, jingoism, militarism, and ideological elevation of violence as both a means and an end in itself.
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  29.  @valenrn8657  True, but that has nothing to do with race in the sense we use it today. The Thracians, Lydians, Gauls, Italians, and other neighbors of the Greeks were not very different from the Greeks in terms of physical appearance, it was purely by virtue of speaking something other than Greek as their native language that Aristotle classified them as barbarians. And they were no more or no less seen as barbarians than Ethiopians or Nubians. The ancient world had little or no notion of all of humanity being divided into three (or any other number of) races. Even the classification of the descendants of Noah's sons in the Torah, which in the early modern era became closely associated with the idea of race, only covered the people in the general vicinity of the Israelites and didn't correspond to either ancient or modern actual relationships of people: Semitic Babylon and Nineveh were founded by a grandson of Ham, while non-Semitic Elam was founded by a son of Shem, and the Canaanites who were virtually identical to the early Hebrews except in not adopting monotheism were said to be descendants of Ham. It's funny, people today get all wrapped up in arguing things like whether Hannibal or Cleopatra was black, but in the very numerous writings about those figures it's worth noting that the Romans and Greeks writing about them never uttered a single word about their race. To the ancient world Hannibal wasn't black and he wasn't white, because those concepts didn't exist: he was Carthaginian. No one particularly cared how dark his skin was or how curly his hair was or what shape his skull was because for the most part those things meant very little to the ancients except as interesting personal trivia.
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  30. If you want to be left alone, and the Crips want to rob you, and you're too poor to pay for Michael Moore's private security entourage, and there's no state with a police force and courts and prisons, how do you accomplish being left alone? Self defense is all very nice, but I'd prefer not to get in gunfights on a weekly basis - even winning 95% of them my long-term outlook would be pretty poor.
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  31. I don't know as much as I should about Korean history, but in Japan that works because the Japanese had nearly exterminated and/or assimilated their ethnic minorities before the modern era. That's the case with most mono-ethnic states.
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  32.  @parlyramyar  This basic point cannot be emphasized too much: for socialists of all stripes, ethnic and religious conflict is a distraction from the only really meaningful conflict, that between economic classes. For Hitler and the Nazis, class conflict was a distraction from the only really meaningful struggle, that between ethnic groups. Those world-views are diametrically opposed. This is why Hitler despised both communism and capitalism - he saw both communism and capitalism as nothing but tools for the inferior (in his view) Jewish race to exercise control over the superior Aryan race.
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  33. I would add that the land campaign wouldn't have been necessary if the local naval commander hadn't lost his nerve in the battle to force the straits with naval power alone. In purely military terms, the loss of a few obsolete and largely useless pre-dreadnought battleships was insignificant next to the chance to force the Ottoman empire out of the war and open the Black Sea to Allied shipping.
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  34.  @TheImperatorKnight  That is an incorrect definition of socialism. You are conflating central planning with social ownership, and they are not the same thing. You are conflating ownership with direction, and they are not the same thing. I pointed out to you an example of the distinction between control and ownership in our legal system, but you refuse to hear anything that might educate you. And it's not the existence of profits, it's who the profits are going to.
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  35. @mendaix The human races aren't species. One might note that the children of mixed race couples are no less fertile than anyone else.
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  36. That depends on the context. You are speaking of the Hindu context. In other contexts the left-facing swastika represents the wheel of the sun rotating clockwise and the right-facing is an inversion of this.
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  37.  @oslier3633  Race was codified in the slave codes of Virginia and other US states, as well as many other countries with colonies in the Americas, more than 100 years before Darwin was born. Darwin's contribution was to call race the result of natural evolutionary processes rather than an act of God.
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  38. Sure, the DAF had some real control. But that just begs the question: who was in control of the DAF? It was party officials, not workers or workers' representatives.
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  39.  @bludfyre  Absolutely. Just like communism, it can work wonderfully as long as human beings stop being human. I'm sure Vulcans could have a perfectly functional ancap society. But they cold also have a perfectly functional communist society. It is logical for everyone to contribute everything they can and take only what they need, so of course that's what every Vulcan does. Humans, not so much.
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  40. About 600 years. before that the Anglo-Norman kings' main objective was to unite Britain, France, and Ireland under their rule.
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  41. FDR was not the least bit eager for war. He was resigned to its necessity given the hyper-aggressiveness and rapaciousness of the Nazis and the fanatical militarists ruling Japan. That is not the same thing at all. The world owes him, and Churchill, an incalculable debt of gratitude for preparing their respective countries for the inevitable war while their more foolish contemporaries still clung to hopes that Hitler and Tojo (and the rest of his cabal) were reasonable men who could be dissuaded from war with reasonable concessions.
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  42.  @jrton1366  I think he believes that taxation for the purpose of redistribution of wealth is socialism - that is not the same as saying all taxation is socialism.
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  43. Go beyond YouTube for your education?
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  44.  @markmanning6542  WTF does archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia have to do with Jewish propaganda? None of what I said comes from the Bible.
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  45.  @CantusTropus  (Also, the person I responded to said they were in the same structure and hierarchy. The point s that there has never been any hierarchy or structure that has included both. You saying they are the same is not a structure or hierarchy, it is simply a category you're inventing. If you want to prove me wrong, name an example of a structure or hierarchy - that is, any sort of real-world organization, not just a category in your mind - that has included both socialists and fascists or Nazis.
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  46.  @Alv11269  No, I have never been a socialist. Most of what you claim simply doesn't follow. Just for one example, the fact that the Imperial German government, purely out of perceived self-interest, aided Lenin in order to destabilize their enemy and hopefully pull it out of the war, says absolutely nothing about any alleged relationship between the Nazis and Bolsheviks.
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  47.  @kdegraa  How's that crypto investment going for you these days?
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  48.  @bobhabib7662  That is not the definition of socialism. Socialism is social ownership of the means of production, which means something else entirely. Many forms of socialism do not involve state control (for example, a system that maintains a market economy but in which every business is owned by a collective of its own workers), and many systems that are not socialist involve state control (probably the best example of the latter I can think of were ancient Bronze Age societies - centrally planned, but in no way socialist). Many socialists envision a system in which the state does not exist at all (although personally I don't think such a system could survive very long, that doesn't stop some people from advocating for it), or one in which its role is strictly limited and has no part in economic planning.
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  49.  @AJAYSINGH-ns1vv  I don''t care what the Rigveda says. It may be a wonderful piece of literature but citing it as a source is laughable. You would react the same way if I told you that my evidence was the Bible or the Koran.
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  50.  @Darth_Insidious  By "their own oil fields" you mean ones they stole from the Dutch and British, of course. Also, they did have another choice - end their genocidal war in China.
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