When I get a large number of new subscribers, I always like to encourage them to subscribe to the CSPI mailing list to stay updated on what we’re doing, and also to subscribe to our podcast (here’s the Apple link, but you can get it wherever).
I usually don’t announce new podcast episodes on my personal Substack because I’m sure many or most of you also get the CSPI Substack, but I’ll make an exception this time for the new followers and because I highly recommend it.
This week, I talk to Sean McMeekin, a professor of history at Bard College and author of Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. If you’re going to read one book on World War II (and you should read more than one!), this should be it. Professor McMeekin and I discuss three main myths.
1) The idea that there was a clear moral case for helping the Soviet Union over Germany. In fact, Stalin had killed and arrested orders of magnitude more people by 1941. Although Germany would later shrink the gap during the Second World War, it remains true that we have every reason to question the moral calculations made by American and British leaders at the time.
2) American and British decision making was based exclusively on national interests or morality rather than being in many cases largely manipulated by communist ideologues and Soviet agents of influence.
3) There was nothing Churchill or Roosevelt could have done to save countries that went communist during or after the war like Yugoslavia, Poland, and China.
World War II remains central to how Americans understand themselves and our role in the world. Moreover, it’s endlessly fascinating, involving interactions between fundamentally different systems and having spanned across most of the planet from North Africa and England to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The conflict resulted in American global hegemony, ended the British Empire, expanded the frontiers of communism, and led to the creation of the nations of Germany and Japan, and ultimately, China, as we now understand them.
Our conversation closes with a discussions of scholarly reactions to his book and how the myths of World War II should affect how we think about American foreign policy today.
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I haven't read Stalin's War yet (though I have read a couple of McMeekin's books), so I am only going by other people's summaries for the time being. A couple of counter-points that I'd be interested in hearing McMeekin address:
* (1) is correct as of June 1941, but it is incorrect in retrospect. It is highly likely to near certain that a Nazi victory would have been far worse for near everyone east of the Oder to the Sea of Japan than half a century of Communist rule. While I am not much interested in questions of morality as pertains to history, insofar as the argument that McMeekin is making is partly a moral one, this merits a response.
* (2) is outright questionable. A Nazi Germany that controlled all of continental Europe up to the Urals (in reality, probably Siberia and the Soviet Far East too, while it's true that stopping at the Urals was a German rhetorical talking point, in practice there would have been scant reason not to finish the job when they got there since resistance at that point would have been minimal, there's very little population and industry east of the Urals) would have been a vastly more formidable competitor to the Anglo-Americans for world hegemony than a demographically crippled USSR laboring under an absurdly inefficient economic system and substantially reliant on foreign technological imports. Had the Germans defeated the USSR decisively in 1942, there would have been no way that the Western Allies could have ended up defeating it militarily; even had the Germans won in 1943, Western Allied victory would have been entirely dependent on racing to the Bomb and getting there at least a couple of years ahead of the Germans (possibly, but unlikely). Insofar as Anglo-American national interests preclude the emergence of powerful competitors, which in the case of a Nazi Germany hegemon in Eurasia would have posed a vastly greater challenge to them than the USSR, then it seems clear that siding with the USSR tallied perfectly with their national interests (certainly in retrospect, arguably pretty obviously from the perspective of Allied leaders at the time too). They got to squash the more powerful competitor, with 95% of the blood price being paid by the secondary competitor. In that sense, it was an almost absurdly "profitable" exchange.
Most of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe would have done better under National Socialist rule, but the Eastern Slavs would have had Hell to Pay had the Germans won. The death toll and total dehumanization across Russia under German rule would have made the Shoah look like a picnic. It would have been worse than Spartans lording over Helots and on an infinitely larger scale.
Stalin's mass killings were due to political expediency and what he deemed economic necessity, i.e. Stalin had no particular hatred for any race or group. He was ruthless against any group that he deemed dangerous and threatening. So, Stalin's crimes were temporaneous, whereas Hitler's crimes were rooted in deep-seated ideology. Because of the racial ideology of National Socialism, some groups had little to fear under German rule. Germans admired Anglos and Nordics. They respected Latins. They tolerated the Romanians and Magyars and even some Slavs. But they had sinister designs on Russians and Eastern Slavs. Soviets acted like beastly brutes as they swept westward, pillaging and raping, but it was more an act of revenge than deep-seated hatred. Once the war ended and things normalized, Russians regarded Germans as fellow brothers and sisters. National Socialists would have never extended such recognition to the Russians who would have either been killed en masse or enslaved permanently. This is why Stalinism was preferable to National Socialism. If Hitler only ruled over Western Europe, National Socialism would have done less harm... except to Jews. National Socialism was never as totalitarian as Communism. Also, as it combined capitalism and socialism, it was less radical and more flexible in the socio-economic field. But when Germans conquered the East and ruled over people they deemed as untermensch, things got really dark.
Also, the fact that Eastern Europe is saner today than Western Europe, maybe communism wasn't all that bad and maybe capitalism wasn't all that good. Communist systems were more nationalist, culturally conservative, and emphasized humanism. Capitalist systems became globalist, culturally decadent, and elevated vain idolatry.
Also, capitalism proved to be more dangerous in some ways because Jews thrive more with capitalism than with communism. Though initially Jews played a big role in Bolshevism, they eventually lost out in a system that favored equality over hierarchy. Jews, with their higher IQ, thrive under capitalism and gain dominance, like in the US. They are 2% of the population but control most key industries and institutions. Also, if communism pressured Jews to favor national unity and ideological allegiance over narrow tribalism in the Soviet Union, the freedom in the West allowed Jews to play up their ethnic-supremacist interests while suppressing goy interests. In the US, Jewish supremacists berate whites as 'white supremacists' and demand that whites suppress their own identity/interests and serve Jewish-Zionist-supremacist ones.