Hitler offers Britain 'peace or destruction' (1940)
upi.com
upi.com
> [Churchill] may think the outcome will be the annihilation of Germany, but it will [be] the destruction of a great world empire
In the end both occurred: Britain proper having received neither peace nor destruction; Germany was annihilated, partitioned into the BRD and DDR; and the great world empire was destroyed, the UK reduced to playing Airstrip One to one of the former colonies.
rewarded by Marshall plan making it one of the wealthiest countries on the continent. Not many people know there was an alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan hopefully this one will be implemented after ru falls.
Grain from Ukraine and the oil fields of Baku, were needed. Once baku was not seized in 41 instead of Moscow the Nazis pretty much lost the war.Zhukov outlined that's what he would have done. Although it's a long way from Poland to past the caucuses.
I believe he was either bluffing or fooling himself on the gasoline point. Or had they captured sufficient reserves to make this a true statement?
> "I asked from Poland something no other German statesman could have dared. I asked for the return of the old German provinces, then only with a plebiscite. If Churchill and the warmongers felt half the responsibility toward Europe that I did they never would have started the war.
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After alleging that the Germans had obtained possession of documents proving the "machinations of the warmongers" aimed at the spread of war...
It seems strange that Putin should be claiming he is running an Anti-fascist[0] Special Military Operation when he is channeling (if yet more hypocritically) Hitler himself.
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[0] I skimmed the stadium rally; this was a serious talking point! If they could've, Pavlichenko and Tsoi would've been spinning in their graves. In retrospect, PropAnal could've flagged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E as psychological preparation for Operation Z.
I will note there is a qualitative (boolean!) difference between telling everyone you're going to conduct an injust invasion, then invading; and telling everyone you're defo not conducting an unjust invasion, then...
unfortunately the last link has rotted; it was supposed to link to a quote from Hitler's diary where he views failure to capture middle-eastern oil fields as implying his eventual loss.
> A curious point developed. German morale in the higher grades was worse than in the lower. ...
This unusual situation arose from the fact that the National Socialist propaganda machinery was still working on the masses of the troops. The political officers still made speeches. The troops were given pep talks, ...
In contrast with common troops, the officers had the professional skill to understand the advantages possessed by the Allied armies. The officers knew enough about global and continental strategy, about the immediate strategy of the Western front, about economic factors and so on, to see that the situation was genuinely bad. Furthermore, the officer class had been less indoctrinated in the first place...
A common Landser, tough and ready in a whole division full of well fed, well armed men, could not be expected to undergo despair because freight-car loadings hundreds of miles away had dropped to zero. He might see that the Luftwaffe was less in evidence; he might grumble about mail, or about having to use horse transport, but as long as he could see that his own unit was getting on all right, it was hard to persuade him that defeat was around the corner. In World War I, the German troops at the time of surrender were much better off than most of them thought they were; in World War II, they thought they were better off than they actually were. The Germans may not have been in perfect shape, but they were incomparably better off than the starving scarecrows with whom Generalissimo Chiang was trying to hold back the Japanese in West Hunan or the Americans who had fought despair, fever and Japanese—all three at once—on Bataan.
[0] at least if we believe Linebarger, a US Propagandist by profession. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...
I have read that strategic bombing was ineffective, done mainly for propaganda purposes. Having seen the OR tools that came out of that war, or were published a decade later, I would not be surprised to learn that they had in fact been doing (at least rudimentary) min-cut analyses for target selection, and that alleged ineffectiveness (of the mathematics or of the kilotons) is itself propaganda.
That's only strange if you expect honesty from him. Despite everything, fascism still sounds like a massive negative to everybody today, so he appeals to that as justification, regardless of whether there's any basis for it. On top of that, he hopes the memory of the Russian WW2 fight against the Nazis will invigorate the Russian people to support his war. The fact that his war has more in common with Hitler's aggression than with the defense against it is of course an inconvenient fact he wants to ignore, deny, and bury under his war rhetoric.
cf https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein...
*Centrists, actually just seem to be people who are pro the status quo.
"What do we want? Gradual change!"
"When do we want it? In due course!"
But, he did had a lot of support at that point.
We can see this in the political arena today.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k...
Googling doesn't seem to return much for "demo-plutocratic", is there a more precise german word for what he was attacking here?
Wikipedia suggests plutocracy was a common insult against both the UK and Jews (as 'The World Plutocracy')
> Capitalism was also attacked as morally inferior to German values[3] and as failing to provide for the German people.[3] Great Britain was attacked as a plutocracy. A few months after the invasion of Poland, Goebbels released his "England’s Guilt" speech that blamed the war on Imperial Britain's "capitalist democracy" and warmongers, denouncing England for having the richest men on earth while their people get little of this wealth.[107] In that speech, Goebbels claimed that "English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism" in order to retain its imperial status and harmful economic policies.
> This was portrayed as Jewish, so as to attack both Communism and plutocracy, describing Jews as being behind both.[49] Anti-capitalist propaganda, attacking "interest slavery", used the association of Jews with money-lenders.[11]
> Nazi propaganda and officials such as Robert Ley describe Germany as a "proletarian nation"[108] as opposed to the plutocratic England, a political divide that Goebbels described as "England is a capitalist democracy" and "Germany is a socialist people's state."[109]
> Initially the Nazis wanted to have alliance with United Kingdom, however after the war started they were denounced as "the Jew among the Aryan peoples" and as plutocrats, fighting for money.[110] Another major theme was the difference between British "plutocracy" and Nazi Germany. German newspapers and newsreels often pictured photos and footage of British unemployed and slums together with unfavorable commentary about the differences in living standards of the working class of Nazi Germany vs that of the working class living under British "plutocracy". Simultaneously, propaganda presented them as tools of the Communists. A German parody stamp, of one depicting King George and Queen Elizabeth, replaced the queen with Stalin and added a hammer and sickle, and stars of David. The Parole der Woche's weekly wall newspaper declared that the United States and Britain had agreed to let Stalin take Europe.[111] Using propaganda to present the Jews as being behind both helped juggle the issues of opposing "plutocracy" and Communism at once.[112]
After the invasion of the Soviet Union, propaganda resumed, quickly linking the attack with British forces, which simplified the task of attacking both Communism and "plutocracy" at once.[49]
demo-plutocratic ~= western neoliberalism
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> A German parody stamp, ...
Ze Demo-Plutokraten kan't memen!