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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

> HEISENBERG: [...] I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination. If that is the case it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether STALIN will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

[...]

> WIRTZ: It seems to me that the political situation for STALIN has changed completely now.

> WEIZSÄCKER: I hope so. STALIN certainly has not got it yet. If the Americans and the British were good Imperialists they would attack STALIN with the thing tomorrow, but they won't do that, they will use it as a political weapon. Of course that is good, but the result will be a peace which will last until the Russians have it, and then there is bound to be war.

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Weizacker wasn't alone in that opinion:

  [John] Von Neumann was, at the time, a strong supporter of "preventive war." Confident even during World War II that the Russian spy network had obtained many of the details of the atom bomb design, Von Neumann knew that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. He predicted that were Russia allowed to build a nuclear arsenal, a war against the U.S. would be inevitable. He therefore recommended that the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, destroying its enemy and becoming a dominant world power, so as to avoid a more destructive nuclear war later on. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when," he would say. An oft-quoted remark of his is, "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...

Von Neumann deserves tremendous recognition but not for his sense of diplomacy.

For his smarts, but not for his wisdom.

Imagine that. He probably had the calculations in a 4x4 grid matching the possibilities already

I think he might be on to something ;)

Wow, this Weizsacker fellow predicted the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Conference pretty much?

Sounds like it was this individual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4...

His brother was president of Germany from 1984 to 1994. It's quite an illustrious family [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weizs%C3%A4cker_family

> KORSCHING: "I would rather take Swedish nationality than stay in GERMANY and wait for the next war. On the other hand I would not make any effort to become British. If there is nothing more to be made out of GERMANY, one should at anyrate get away from RUSSIA."

The context here is that the German scientists thought it likely that Germany would be completely taken over by Russia (because the Western advance has stalled).

They were speaking after the end of the war, and Germany had been partitioned already into occupation zones. Potsdam was signed just before this conversation?

No. The conversation was on the eve of the Potsdam conference

Could you spell out what specifically you find significant about this quote?

Maybe it is note that situation has not changed since then and how Merkel has failed with her foreign politics with Russia and how Germany is paying now because of it. Or maybe it is proof how insightful this is.

He's a Nazi that worked on uranium enrichment saying he wants to stay away from the country his bomb would've presumably been used to ethnically cleanse with unprecedented efficiency. What "situation" are you hoping will change?

Yeah, if anything united Nazis and western allies, was their anti-USSR hating [1]. Which was the common ground for the western financial and infrastructure support and tolerance for Hitler before the war.

[1] Which was not about the situation in USSR itself (they could not care less, they supported worse attrocities before and after the war), but about losing their colonial and geopolitical influence, and about their own workers being "tempted" into socialism and demanding more rights, unions, and such.

If anything united Nazis and Soviets it was their anti-democracy hating. Which was the ground for Soviets providing material support to Germany, training to German officers, etc.

Right?

No, the ground was stalling for time to prepare for war, with a German Nazi establishment who was openly anti-communist and anti-USSR.

The "anti-democracy" communists did more to get rid of Nazis and fascism than all of Europe and US combined (the latter, especially, came late to the party, with token gestures like Normandy, and have since used movie after movie to instill in popular culture the idea they "won the war"). And had a much bigger toll.

Please don’t spread historical revisionism, the Soviets were perfectly fine with Nazism until it has turned against them. They teamed up with Nazi Germany to invade Poland together and even held talks to formally join the Axis, ffs.

And if it weren’t for the monumental material support in form of the US-provided lend-lease arrangement, the Nazis would’ve conquered the Soviet Union and carried out a genocide that’d have dwarfed the Holocaust.

It's a prescient statement with regard to the cold war.

I recently listened to the Hardcore History about atomic weapons and I hadn't realized how right as WWII ended everyone was ready to wage nuclear war against Stalin immediately.

Knowing that US was supplying USSR with weapons,airplanes, trucks and helping build entire factories right up until the end of the war and then wanted to nuke the same ally is really buffling. One one hand can be said, yes they wanted USSR to bleed fighting Germany (or do the harder fighting part) on the other hand it's just confusing and possibly different fractions within US government wanting different things.

There’s nothing baffling about it. An Enemy of my enemy is my ally. But when the business is done… keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Both FDR and Churchill are on record as saying variants of "it is permissible to walk with the devil if it gets you to the other side of the bridge" about the alliance with Stalin.

This sort of ruthless pragmatism is sadly missing from today's politics. Recently people are more focused on imposing their will on the others instead of compromising, however unsavory the other side may be.

I find this statement one of the most astonishing things said on HN that I can remember.

The entire history of US foreign relations in South and Central America and the Middle East (at least!) is dominated with compromises similar to this.

It's difficult to know where to start a list!

Indeed the entire cold war (and I mean the previous one) was defined by this kind of questionable compromise. There was much talk of freedom and democracy while turning around to support brutal dictatorships, religious extremists and endless civil wars in order to defeat a supposedly more important enemy.

This is exactly why I'm so sceptical of the eagerness, even enthusiasm, of those who want to launch us straight into the next cold war, again to the mood music of ethical sounding objectives you cannot possibly oppose.

Please do start, meddling in those regions is well known to anybody interested in the topic (and currently helps greatly pro-putin crowds to rationalize and justify their views), but compromise ?

Perceived non-aligned folks were murdered if possible, often with CIA folks standing just behind the corner (Allende, Che etc.). You can't really say that putting into office fascist murderous dictator like Pinochet instead of Allende was a compromise in any way.

No need to limit it to the USA. The United States is not exceptional in this regard. Pragmatism has been a feature of the exercise of power for millennia.

I agree, but I'm guessing parent might have been thinking of domestic politics, which has become more a lot more polarised and zero-sum.

Yup. I'm excited that my comment is someone's most astonishing on HN though. That's quite an accomplishment!

I would be curious of the start of your list in the Americas, as I don't feel like making compromises with our adversaries is actually a common approach there.

Here's one: the US cooperating with Saudi-Arabia and other gulf states despite them being responsible for the largest terrorist attack(s) on US soil and funding terrorists, the big bad guy since 9/11, the reason why a generation of soldiers has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, killing nearly a million people.

Do you know where the Americas are?

I suspect that GP believes that US-supported strongmen and right wing dictators in Latin America were US adversaries, rather than useful, crafted actors for US interests in their countries, who were managed and supported until and unless they markedly diverged from US interests.

If you’re swimming in a sea of US-standard media and patriotic narratives, I suppose it’s easier to believe the former rather than the latter.

> I suspect that GP believes that US-supported strongmen and right wing dictators in Latin America were US adversaries, rather than useful, crafted actors for US interests in their countries, who were managed and supported until and unless they markedly diverged from US interests.

I'm not sure how you'd get that from my comment (I'm not from the US, so I think you are reading an awful lot into what I said there!).

Either way, both those narratives fit the realpolitik the OP seemed to be calling for.

>The entire history of US foreign relations in South and Central America and the Middle East (at least!) is dominated with compromises similar to this.

If you meant the support and establishment of dictatorships and banana republics there, those aren't compromises in the sense of "working with the devil they hate", like they had to do in WWII with Stalin.

These are working joyly with "our kind of guys".

The main difference being that Stalin was an opponent and against the US interests, whereas those guys like Pinochet were always about the US interests, even groomed and build up especially to support them.

Like when the US pretends like Saudi Arabia didn't sponsor terrorist attacks and so continue to sell them weapons and buy oil?

> Recently people are more focused on imposing their will on the others instead of compromising, however unsavory the other side may be.

How can you believe this when unsavoury compromise is the relationship of most of the world with the US?

Stalins tactics were outrageous and included having resisting regions and towns being "pacified" by german troops before the red army would take them. This is the guy who wanted to share Europe with his buddy Adolf.

Infamously Warsaw:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising

It was purely a functional alliance - no more. I don't think anyone had any preconceived notions that it was anything other than a marriage of convenience.

Keep in mind that Stalin himself professed and acted on the belief that coexistence with capitalism was impossible and thought that conflict with the West was inevitable within 15 years of WWII. We're all lucky that he died before then and the cooler head of Khrushchev prevailed.

"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible" - Harry Truman

Geopolitical realism has always involved turning on your allies as soon as they become the primary threat to your power; or even better to induce two rival competitors to fight each other[0]

See Mearsheimer and political realism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_bleed

"If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."

Not baffling if you know anything about the history of the US or the USSR.

The weapon part of the US contribution is way overrated.

The Soviets produced 157k airplanes, the US only gave them 11k (7%).

US gave 7k tanks, Soviets produced 87,500 (8%).

The main contribution by the US was support vehicles like jeeps and trucks and fuel. Neither the aircraft or tanks were very notable beyond the very early years.

The Soviets largely did it on the own armour/aircraft wise. Which was why Hitler was so obsessed with invading in the first place. He knew unless they rushed to invade Russia could unleash it's massive capacity for production that'd they'd be impossible to invade on their own, or at a minimum be way harder to beat.

> The main contribution by the US was support vehicles like jeeps and trucks and fuel

Obviously, these are all absolutely critical. As is the aluminum, high-octane avgas, etc that the Soviets obtained via Lend-Lease

As the Ukraine-Russia war illustrates, supply chain (support vehicles) are critical.

you overlook that those weapons were supplied at critical times, when the Soviet war machine had not ramped up yet. entire offensives were led with nearly only lend-lease kit.

Also small compared to what the British got. But what matters more is how critical they were : the Nazis culminated in view of the Kremlin (also, notably, a couple of days before Pearl Harbor and the US officially joined the war).

Western nations were also uncharacteristically tolerant of Hitler's militarization while he opposed the communists. Then they signed a non-aggression pact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

Only that right after WW2, nuking the Soviets wouldn't have helped. The Red Army had Berlin, had shorter, and well established, supply lines, and the numbers. Nuking Moscow had caused WW3 right after WW2 ended, the Soviets woupd have ended up controlling Germany, and propably other countries. Because a hand full of small nukes wouldn't have been that decisive.

The are reasons Operation Unthinkable wasn't launched. But one has to admit, the anti-communist propaganda that united people from Patton, McCarthy all the way to former Wehrmacht Generals, still has long lasting effects even today.

If History proved something is that Patton and McCarthy were right.

Come again? You mean the self-grandizing, almost sacked twice, never really promoted anti-semite Patton? And the lying about flight ime to get decorations, life desteoying, actually sacked and rediculed McCarthy?

But I'll bite, how exactly were those two individuals right about anything? Can ypu share some specific details?

Fun fact: hardcore xenophobic narratives in China has been using the term Anlgo-Saxons (昂撒), in recent years.

German Angelsächsisch (literal translation is Anglo Saxon) is typically used in German as an umbrella term for the English speaking world, so Britain-USA-commonwealth is covered by it. While it is used sometimes to “other” the English speaking world it does not lend itself as easily as other terms for xenophobia because three German regions are actually called Saxony (Lower Saxony and (upper) saxony, saxony-Anhalt. Xenophobic speech in German would often refer to “der Engländer”, or “der Amerikaner” (the Englishman, the American)

In German "angelsächsisch" often goes with "Kapitalismus" opposing "Rheinischer Kapitalismus". It is used when comparing free-market economies with social market economies. Germans think about London being a financial hub or not everyone in the US having health insurance, when using "angelsächsisch". They do not think about races being superior.

In case of the US, it even brings it closer to Europe because the term groups Great Britain and the US to compare them to mainland Europe (mostly France + Germany).

ChatGPT told me:

> Yes, Nazi propaganda did often refer to the Allies, particularly the UK and the US, using terms such as “Anglo-American” or “Anglo-Saxon” in a pejorative sense. This language reflected the Nazis’ racist ideology, in which they posited a hierarchy of races with Aryans at the top and viewed others, including Anglo-Saxons, as lesser or enemies. This also served to foster animosity and dehumanize the Allies among the German populace. However, such language was not universally used by all within the Nazi regime, and the terminology often varied depending on the context and specific propaganda objectives at the time.

ChatGPT is wrong here, IMO.

In general, the Brits were the "Tommys" or "Briten" or "Engländer", the Americans the "Amerikaner" or just "Amis", the Soviets were "Bolschewiken" or just "Russen".

Anglo-Saxon ("angelsächsisch") doesn't have a Nazi connotation, wasn't used in an exceptional way and isn't more dehumanizing than using "the brits", "the americans" or "the germans". "Amerikaner", "Briten" and "Russen" are also still in normal use.

Also: Nazi Germany did not see the Brits as "racially inferior". Most were also seen as "aryan".

Russian propaganda as well.

It's a fairly common term in many languages. It just means "English speaking nations". It's similar to "caucasian" meaning white (who cares any more that they crossed the Caucasus? but the term sticks).

Yeah. I guess most of the Chinese propagandists received training imported from Russia.

Why wouldn't they ?

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