Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "The Hossbach Memorandum PROVES Hitler Wanted to Wage a War of Aggression" video.

But only as part of an integrated European economy, and that was utter anathema to Hitler and the Nazis. The same goes for Japan - it's doing much better than it did under militarist rule, but only because it gave up trying to conquer all its neighbors and agreed to trade peacefully with them instead.
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The first fatal flaw in your analysis is separating the Vietnam War into separate and barely related conflicts. From Hanoi's point of view it was one continuous struggle for national liberation that started in 1945 and ended in 1975, separated into phases named by the principal opponent in each stage. For them the Paris Accords of 1973 were not the end of anything but American involvement. A vital clue in this interpretation was their rock-solid insistence that any "peace" treaty left their forces in place in South Vietnam ready to renew their offensive any any time they chose. The South Vietnamese government understood this as well and that is why it was vehemently opposed to the treaty, but they had no power to compel the US to stay in the war or support the South after the treaty was signed. Yes, Hanoi really needed a truce in 1973to stave off the collapse of their offensive capability to US bombing, but they understood that Nixon needed an end to US involvement in the war even more, and that they held the upper hand in the truce negotiations and could hold out for their bottom line which was the maintenance of that offensive capability not only against, but in South Vietnam. The Napoleonic Wars are a good comparison, and I think most historians, while giving individual names to the various phases of those wars, would indeed regard them, or certainly all of the phases after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, as one continuous conflict that Napoleon ended up losing, separated into phases defined by who was actively fighting Napoleon at any given time. Every one of those wars was fought for the same reason, Napoleon's desire to make France the hegemon of Europe with his own Imperial dynasty at its head and the refusal of the other European powers to accept that result, and ultimately they achieved their goal and Napoleon failed utterly in his. Any temporary successes he achieved along the way, however impressive, didn't affect that ultimate result. As you stated, the American goals in the war were the preservation of South Vietnam as an independent, non-communist country, and the containment of communism in Southeast Asia. Regardless of the temporary lull in the fighting in 1973 - a lull that every major player on the planet other than Richard Nixon, and probably even he, understood could not possibly be anything but temporary and brief - the fact remains that within two years of the American withdrawal South Vietnam was absorbed by the communist Hanoi government and Laos and Cambodia were controlled by communist governments as well. Watergate and Nixon's fall certainly made South Vietnam's position more difficult by cutting off any possibility of continued US support, but I believe the ultimate result, the complete conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North, was inevitable from the day the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Public support for any continued US involvement in Vietnam was about zero even before the Watergate scandal broke, and the Saigon government simply wasn't capable of resisting the North's attack without massive US support, if not active intervention, and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam understood that. The lack of US enthusiasm for keeping its promise to Saigon was not a surprise to Hanoi, they had been counting on it - they could watch CBS Nightly News even if their subjects couldn't. The second fatal flaw in your analysis is confusing battlefield success with strategic success. Body counts and battles won do not determine the winner of a war, achievement of the political goals of the warring powers do. If we go by body counts and number of battles won, the British won the American Revolution and the Confederates won the American Civil War, but obviously no one would claim that. Britain lost its American colonies (aside from Canada) and the South was forced to remain in the Union, so they lost those wars. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were taken over by communist governments, so the US lost its struggle to prevent those outcomes by military force. As to America gaining by, for instance, lessons learned, the British Empire's naval superiority and general geopolitical position against its greatest rival, France, were better in 1784 than they had been in 1775, but again, few if any historians would argue that that means the British won the American Revolution. Don't get me wrong, I am an American patriot and I think the US military achieved remarkable things in the Vietnam War and were forced to leave the conflict by purely political, not military, factors, but like Napoleon's astounding victories in battles like Austerlitz, military successes mean nothing if they fail to achieve the political goals they are intended to achieve. The simple fact is that the US did not possess the political will to win the Vietnam War, and so it lost the Vietnam War. North Vietnam's military position in 1968 was not good, the Viet Cong had virtually ceased to function as a fighting force, the Soviets lacked the stomach for a direct showdown with the US over Vietnam, and Hanoi's relations with China had broken down to the point that China was no longer a sanctuary or sufficient supply route for the North Vietnamese, so if the US had had the political will to mount an invasion of North Vietnam comparable to MacArthur's invasion of North Korea in 1950, the result very well may have been a collapse of the Hanoi regime and a complete US victory - but the US did not have that political will, and all of the leaders involved knew it, so there was no such invasion and no US victory. (And of course, there was also the possibility that such a radical change in US policy might have resulted in an equally radical change in Chinese and/or Soviet policy and a much more destructive direct war between superpowers, and that possibility is a large part of the reason for the American unwillingness to support such an invasion.) The real crying shame is that the Johnson administration, and especially SecDef MacNamara had concluded by 1965 that the war was unwinnable for political reasons, but they lacked the moral courage to try to explain this to a then-hawkish public and accept the political cost of having the war lost on their watch. I'm pretty sure Nixon and Kissinger understood this as well, and they had no more moral courage than LBJ did, but they were much better politicians and managed to spin the inevitable loss into a US victory under Nixon's administration followed by a "loss of the peace" under his successors. He just got booted out of office more quickly than anyone anticipated and his successor lacked both the political support and the motivation to stave off the debacle in South Vietnam until a Democrat was in the Oval Office. IMO it is a testament to the consummate and devious political skills of Nixon and Kissinger that they sold their BS so cleverly that intelligent and informed people like you are still buying it today.
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Montemayor has done some good videos on battles, but if you really want a great WW2 channel, check out the World War Two channel with Indy Neidell - he does a week-by-week review of everything that happened 79 years ago that week in every theater of the war, and most of his focus for the last few months has been on Asia and the Pacific.
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I find it highly ironic that a bunch of late 20th and 21st century anarcho-libertarians have adopted as their symbol a man who plotted to assassinate an entire democratically elected legislature and replace them with a foreign-imposed theocracy.
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@Botzorz What exactly constitutes the occupying force you imagine controls Germany? What army? What paramilitary police force? Who is going to do the arresting you claim will happen to anyone speaking out against it? And why was this foreign occupying power powerless to prevent the only country that has ever expressed a wish to leave the EU from doing so? Why isn't Boris Johnson in a deep, dark cell in some EU prison or Gulag? And where are you spouting this rubbish from? Have you ever even been to Germany? Or known anyone who lives there?
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@PhillyPhanVinny That was a politically motivated fiction that served everyone's interests except the South Vietnamese people's. The Republicans could claim they had a achieved a victory LBJ had failed to win, the Democrats could turn the public's focus back to domestic affairs they cared a lot more about than they had ever cared about fighting communism, the antiwar crowd could say "Hey, we won, we don't have to pay any more attention to what's going on there," the military could deflect criticism and attention from its massive internal (chiefly social and morale) problems, and newspapers always sell more copies making people feel good about themselves than the reverse. It's a bit like all the UK newspapers that hailed the Munich Agreement as a massive success for Chamberlain and appeasement, and didn't want to listen to that cranky and politically incorrect backbencher who said it just made war more inevitable and sooner rather than later.
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@circleofsorrow4583 I'm curious how old you are. I served in the US Navy in the mid 1980s, and it and the other services were only just recovering from the massive social and morale problems they faced in the 1970s as well as the severe underfunding resulting from the public's post-Vietnam anti-militarism. The state of readiness of our military, particularly the Army, under the Carter administration was pathetic, as shown by the Desert One debacle. I'm not knocking the people who served in those years, against all odds and on a shoestring budget they kept the professional pride and knowledge alive until they could pass the torch to a new generation untainted by the 70s rot who could hold our heads high and be proud of our service and our traditions, but our military came out of Vietnam much, much weaker than it went in. And in the 1970s it looked and acted very much like a military that had lost a major war and felt completely unsupported, disrespected, and even spat on by the civilian population.
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@Pep The US Army was tiny in the 1930s. It was smaller than Portugal's. The US had a sizeable navy, but it was smaller than it had been in 1918, largely because the US and UK had pushed very hard for naval limitations treaties in the 1920s and 30s. Anyway a big navy isn't much use for aggressive war if you're thousands of miles from your main rivals and your army and marine corps are the size and strength of the police force of a sleepy rural town.
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@nottoday3817 The USSR fought, as it always did (and continued to do for five decades afterward), to secure control of a broad-based leftist coalition and subordinate it to Moscow. When it became clear that almost no one in the Republican coalition, even the radicals, had any interest in being subjected to a Stalinist puppet government, Stalin abandoned his support for the Republicans and left them hanging for the Falangists and their Nazi and Fascist sponsors to devour. There was no one more consistently persecuted, attacked, and betrayed by Stalin and the other Bolsheviks than other leftists who provided any alternative to Bolshevik control. Stalin's early support for the Republicans had little to do with resistance to Hitler since it was clear to anyone with a brain that, despite some ideological affinities, Franco had no more intention of becoming a Nazi puppet than the Republicans had of becoming a Stalinist one.
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@valenrn8657 The kaiser's naval expansion had more to do with the UK's entry into WW1 than Belgium did. The UK simply could not risk having its greatest rival control the other side of the English Channel whether that rival marched through Belgium or around it. Belgian neutrality was mostly a convenient excuse for intervening. This is why Kaiser Bill was so surprised that Britain would fight over "a scrap of paper" - he failed to understand that his foolish policies had given them much more than a scrap of paper to fight over.
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Get out while you still can, unless you're either independently wealthy or have a trade to practice and are pursuing higher education purely for your intellectual betterment. (Advice from someone with a B.A. in History.)
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@TheImperatorKnight Normally I'm the first to jump on Nazi apologist BS, but I think that is a fair statement, or at least, half of one. The Austrians were granted self-government, but not full autonomy or self-determination in that they were not permitted to determine, by democratic means (i.e. voting), whether they wanted to remain a separate nation or would prefer to merge with Germany. I don't doubt that some Austrians preferred to remain independent, but that doesn't change the fact that this decision was imposed on all of them by the Allies, and that this denied them self-determination. Of course, this refers to the denial of self-determination by the Allies: the idea that Hitler liberated them is of course nonsense since they had no more real choice in the matter in 1938 than they had in 1919 (the Nazi referendum being a complete farce).
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