General statistics
List of Youtube channels
Youtube commenter search
Distinguished comments
About

Bruce Tucker
TIKhistory
comments

Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Why Britain wouldn’t just let Hitler go East" video.

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.
93
About 600 years. before that the Anglo-Norman kings' main objective was to unite Britain, France, and Ireland under their rule.
5
After Germany invaded Poland despite the British and French guarantee. So no, Germany started a war knowing full well that Britain and France would have no choice but to join it. And it's very clear from the historical record that not only did Hitler understand that, he wanted Britain and France to declare war. He understood that the only way he'd have a free hand in Russia was to knock Britain and France out of the picture first. Where he miscalculated was thinking that Britain would agree to peace when France was conquered. Had he studied the Napoleonic Wars a bit more closely he might have realized how unlikely that was.
4
The idiot Kaiser set the stage for WWI by threatening Britain's naval supremacy with no logical reason for Germany to do so.
4
Nelson, poor fellow, simply wasn't able to see the signal telling him to withdraw.
3
@shorewall Roosevelt was more of a socialist than Hitler was. However "socialist" is too broad an umbrella to have much meaning in this context. Roosevelt was a Democratic Socialist and Hitler was a National Socialist, those are very different things. The simple answer is that Hitler was an extreme totalitarian and Roosevelt was a strong believer in liberal democracy and the idea of a world dominated by extremist right-wing totalitarian governments was anathema to him.
2
The situation today is in no way comparable to 1914 or 1939. Britain no longer has a world empire to threaten and neither Britain nor any of its European rivals is a world power.
2
What compelling reason did the US have for backing either side in 1914?
2
Every country wants a balance of power, except when it wants hegemony. That's the difference between Britain and the rest - after the 15th century Britain never deluded itself that it could dominate all of Europe or even have a significant empire there, instead they wanted a balance of power in Europe that would free them to build an empire everywhere else in the world. The Ottomans, the Habsburgs, France, Germany, Russia, all tried and failed to bring all of Europe under their sway. Even the ones that were too small for that to be any hope went through their own European empire-building phases - Sweden wanted to control the whole Baltic littoral, Poland-Lithuania wanted to control all of Eastern Europe, Serbia wanted to unite all the South Slavs under its own rule.
2
Most of the people arguing that are ones who regret they weren't there to help murder Jewish people.
2
@Swift-mr5zi With Ireland it was personal.
2
In most cases I think you are right. Especially if they go on to talk about an international financial conspiracy.
2
He's riffing on Michael Corleone in the Godfather.
2
Did Thatcher going really change anything? Blair was only too happy to jump into Iraq and Afghanistan. I'd say the real change was in the 1950s and 60s when the UK woke up to the fact that it was no longer a great power and became a US ally and dependency instead.
1
You make that sound very one-sided. Like Hitler, the Japanese militarists engaged in a long series of violations and escalations, invading Manchuria, invading China itself, conducting numerous massacres and atrocities in the course of that invasion, bombing a US naval vessel, invading French Indochina, bullying Thailand into a very one-sided alliance, and making their intentions very clear to absorb other European colonies like Malaya and the Dutch East Indies into their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". What was the US supposed to do, just sit by and whine while Japan conquered and brutalized half of Asia? And why was it unreasonable to expect japan to surrender half of China? (To the Chinese government, not to the US.) They were conduction an aggressive war. No one was asking Japan to give up an inch of territory it controlled before 1937, including its conquests in Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria. And as for the US naval buildup, Japan, not the US or UK, was the first to repudiate the Washington and London Naval Treaties. The US naval building program was a response to Japanese aggression, not the cause for it.
1
It was because they were self-interested that they didn't stop Britain from doing it. Their self-interest didn't coincide with India's.
1
At the time, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand had very low populations and were not very industrialized compared to Western Europe. India could have been a very formidable force, the problem for Britain was, if India were allowed to have its own very formidable military, how long would it have remained a British colony? It's about like saying the Confederacy could have won the American Civil War if it had just conscripted and armed all its slaves.
1
That's the gist of it. However evil, murderous, and untrustworthy he was, Stalin was at least a rational actor on the international stage. Hitler was not and was never going to be. he was a loose cannon and war with him was inevitable unless his own generals removed him from power.
1
@shorewall The biggest problem for Russia right now is that Putin's personal interests are becoming more and more divorced from Russia's actual strategic interests. We'll see what happens when he leaves the scene, which, given his age, can't be but so far off.
1
Hitler knew that invading Poland meant war with Britain and France and he did it anyway. He not only knew that, he wanted war with the Western Allies because he knew that was the only way he'd get a free hand to conquer the USSR. The blame for starting the war is 100% his. Britain didn't start any wars, it joined a war that Hitler had started.
1
@nordlandak6853 Germany invaded Poland two days before Britain and France declared war. Germany started the war. Britain and France intervened in a war that was already underway.
1
It was okay for Britain to have an empire outside of Europe (as France, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US, and even Japan did) but not okay for anyone to dominate Europe. Sure, it's racist, but it's also rational. Britain's empire in India was no threat to anyone else in Europe. Germany building an empire in Russia and/or France was an existential threat to everyone else in Europe, and thus, the world. And you are incorrect about the start of WW1. It doesn;t make sense to you because you are ignoring the thinking and policies of Germany's military leaders, who effectively controlled foreign policy. Germany tried to keep Britain neutral, but its general staff worked very hard to make sure the Austro-Serbian crisis was fanned into a war between Germany and Russia and France, because they felt they could win that war in 1914 but in a few more years Russia's rapid modernization would make it impossible for Germany to win such a war. Read David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer for an account of how and why the crisis played out the way it did.
1
I think it was a tremendous factor, I don;t know who claims otherwise. I mean, some sort of war was probably inevitable over the Balkans, but it didn't have to be a general European war, but Tirpitz' navy made Germany an inherent existential threat to the British Empire and that meant Britain could not just sit quietly by and offer financial and peripheral support to the would-be hegemon's enemies the way they had so often done in the past.
1
Naval rearmament was a very different thing, against Germany that would be read as defensive whereas air forces were seen at the time as mostly offensive in nature and army rearmament would very obviously be aimed directly at Germany. Once the UK was committed in WW1 staying off the continent wasn't really an option, without large-scale British help the Germans would have defeated both France and Russia and that would have been it. War had changed since 1805 when it was very difficult for Napoleon to control the countries he conquered which meant no victory of his was likely to be permanent.
1
They tried doing exactly that, the problem was that after the slaughter of the Western Front there just wasn't any popular support for Britain herself to get dragged into another war, and the Greeks and Italians proved incapable of winning the resulting war against the nationalist Turks on their own. The same was true for Operation Unthinkable - which in any case was a contingency plan in case Stalin made war unavoidable, not something they hoped to put into operation. As to the first, it does make you wonder what the world might look like today if Admiral de Robeck hadn't lost his nerve and had been willing to take the loss of a few worthless and obsolete pre-dreadnoughts in stride and push through to Constantinople in March, 1915.
1
@dylanmurphy9389 No, but it's the term pretty much every historian uses for them.
1
Meimme Wolf Watch the video. Helping Germany control the entire continent would not have been in the UK's interest. There's also the matter of the millions of people Hitler had murdered.
1
tried to negotiate peace? You mean like when Hitler pledged at Munich that if he got the Sudetenland he would respect the sovereignty of the rest of Czechoslovakia and have no more territorial demands in Europe? How'd that work out?
1
@Carl88-p5n Only a small slice of 1939 Poland had ever belonged to Germany. And Hitler was extremely idealistic. He could act with cold calculation when called for, but his ultimate aims were ideological and even romantic. A war with both the Western Allies and the USSR (hopefully, from Hitler's point of view, not at the same time, of course) was inevitable from the day he took power, unless he was removed from power before he could start one.
1
@whiskey_tango_foxtrot__ But those markets were controlled by the Allies, which means they'd dry up once Italy declared war on any of the Allies.
1
@matthewbadley5063 Peripheral. Britain has always wanted to control strategic naval bases around the periphery of Europe, but its territorial ambitions on the continent have been extremely limited since the days of the Tudors.
1
@matthewbadley5063 The Plantagenets had, at times, very large continental holdings, and the Tudors occasionally had thoughts of regaining at least part of that empire, although their dynastic and religious problems, as well as the relative strength and unity (at least compared to the Middle Ages) of the French monarchy, made that a pipe dream. The Tudor period is when the English monarchy transitioned to the balance of power policy that held for the next 400 years.
1
@Swift-mr5zi By "French aristocrats" do you mean the Normans who controlled England at that time? Because IIRC they first invaded Ireland around the 12th century.
1
@sirtalkalot3211 No one, not even Hitler, expected France to collapse like it did in 1940. Unlike in 1914, everyone expected a long total war, but like 1914, everybody expected their side would win.
1
@shorewall The pretext, but also the reason - not Poland itself, but Hitler's obvious desire and mania to keep bullying every other country in Europe until someone finally stood up to him. If Hitler had kept his word and been satisfied with the Sudetenland instead of continuing on to invade and carve up the rest of Czechoslovakia and then turn his eyes on Poland (which he expressly promised NOT to do at Munich), there would have been no WW2. But of course Hitler wouldn't have been Hitler if he had been willing to do that, and Churchill understood that very well, and that's why Europe got its second catastrophic war in 35 years.
1
Stalin was not the most trustworthy partner and the last thing the British and French wanted was a million-strong Soviet army perched on the Rhine.
1
@SVTDI Stalin wasn't offering them a million troops, he was offering to invade Germany with a million troops. One can understand how people in London and Paris thought that getting those million troops out of Central Europe might be a bigger problem than getting them in.
1
That's about like asking which is worse, liver or pancreatic cancer.
1
@thorshammer7883 And unfortunately you never will see any numbers, because no one was keeping meticulous records like the SS kept. The true number of Japan's victims will almost certainly never be known.
1
@thorshammer7883 Probably somewhere between 5 million and 20 million people dead. The Chinese government claims that China alone lost 20 million people, but that includes military casualties. How many of those were deliberate murders is probably impossible to determine.
1
@Gareth_86 "The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building!" But seriously, you're looking at it from an ethical perspective, not pragmatic realpolitik perspective. Britain (and France) conquering the better part of 2 1/2 other continents didn't threaten the balance of power in Europe, Germany conquering France and Russia wouldn't just threaten it but end it.
1
@shorewall It's not clear that the bomb gave the US enough leverage to do that. The number actually on hand was very low and the ability to produce more limited, Stalin knew that thanks to his spies in the US/UK atomic program, and both the distance flown over hostile territory and the much better state of Soviet air defenses would have made strategic bombing of the USSR much, much more difficult than that of Japan.
1
The difference is that Britain's empire was, apart from its back yard, Ireland, outside of Europe, while Germany and Britain's previous enemies were trying to make Europe their own empire. In moral terms that might be racist and hypocritical, but in terms of power politics, the distinction was very real. Britain's empire in India was no threat to Germany in 1914 or 1939, while Germany reducing France and/or Russia to vassalage was a tremendous threat to Britain.
1
The strategy no longer makes any sense. Britain has no world empire and is not a great power.
1
@freeman8914 6MWE, amirite?
1
What is your source for the first quote?
1
That's something I think TIK, whose analysis is otherwise excellent, consistently fails to recognize. For Britain, for France, even for Stalin, war and foreign policy were inextricably tied to rational, if not always ethical, political goals. For the German generals and many other Germans, that was true as well. But Nazism was a romantic movement, one that placed itself in diametric opposition to Enlightenment rationalism - that's the reason for all those torchlit rallies and book-burnings and blood banners and all the SS occult weirdness. For them, while rational goals still mattered, ultimately war was a spiritual exercise, a way to both attain and demonstrate the dominance of the Aryan race, to purify the blood and purge the nation of weakness. You cannot understand Hitler by analyzing him solely as a rational actor, because the heart of his ideology was a rejection of pure rationality. And Hitler had another motive as well: like many Germans but even more so, he was extremely bitter about the defeat in WW1 which he could never accept as a legitimate loss of the war by Germany. Hitler had to have a rematch against Britain and France in order to prove that Germany would have won the first time but for the "stab in the back" by Jews and communists. No matter how well off Germany might be materially after the new conflict, if it didn't accomplish that - humiliate the Western Allies and show the spiritual and military superiority of Germany beyond all doubt - it would not satisfy him personally. Many of his generals understood that in 1938 and that was why they saw him as a dangerous madman who would bring ruin on Germany. And Churchill understood it as well.
1
"Just business" is riffing on Michael Corleone in the godfather - where he tells Sonny that shooting two men in the head at point-blank range over dinner was nothing personal, just business. (But the "Moe Greene special" - that was personal.)
1
There was a lot more to it than that. German naval buildup and the modernization of Russia (and consequent fear among the German General Staff) had a lot to do with it as well. Britain strongly urged the Serbian government to accede to the Austro-Hungarian demands and avoid war.
1
"Apart from the holocaust" - But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? In a more serious vein, Hitler made it excruciatingly clear in his writings and his speeches that his policy was extremely personal, driven by a racist theory that demanded the enslavement or outright annihilation of competing races (primarily Jews and Slavs), not just a few modest territorial adjustments. The Holocaust we got, horrific as it was, was only a foreshadowing of the far greater horrors that would have followed a German victory.
1
@shorewall If it looked like the Soviets were going to win, probably try to set up some sort of deal with the German generals to intervene on Germany's behalf if they staged a coup and got rid of the Nazis. The main reason such a coup never happened IRL is that Hitler appeared to be very successful until 1942.
1
Yes, but that was because it didn't expect France to collapse the way it did in 1940. In 1939, the rational expectation was that along with the total naval blockade of Germany, even less challenged than it was in 1914-1918, the French and British armies, which were greatly superior to Germany's on paper, would ultimately prevail - especially given that few probably expected the Nazi-Soviet pact to last all that long.
1