> Communists caused World War 2 and yet love to play the victim.
This is an unconventional position. What's your rationale?
This is an unconventional position. What's your rationale?
The Soviets gave the Germans a free hand to begin the war by splitting Poland via the Molotov pact. Without that agreement, and without the preceding years of Soviet resource shipments and technical exchanges, it is unclear if the European war would have happened.
It doesn't merit more response, you can just look at the reality of actual fascist states. Economic stagnation, the most extreme corruption and incompetence, and cruelty beyond imagination. True masterminds.
The US and Germany were both helping fight back against the communists in China and Spain. Everyone was basically on board with being against the communists, they just weren't on board with the extremes to which Japan and Germany were going. Japan was passing laws to suppress Marxist revolution in their country in the 1920s and Germany went to many extremes, routing out communists anywhere.
In Germany you even saw education being changed to fortify new students as anti-communist, because preventing communist revolution from taking over Germany was existential for them. The teachers knew what they were teaching, but they were afraid enough of communism that it seemed a reasonable defensive mechanism. There had already been examples of communist revolution upending countries, so it wasn't as if it was a fake threat or concern.
It was very real, and people who dismiss the pacts signed between Japan, Germany and Italy to cautify the fact that they explicitly saw communism as a threat, do so in ignorance. It's often argued that it was some kind of fake political front to justify their actions, but on close inspection that seems to absolutely not be the case. These people legitimately believed communism was an existential threat.
This is further evidenced in the years after WW2, where there were many more communist conflicts in other countries. Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, etc. If you put yourself in their shoes, simply imagining being any of these countries, would it be unreasonable to feel an existential threat? No. Just, flat out, logically, no.
So why did they end up invading all these other countries? What was that all about?
The communists love to control the resources and in terms of a total global communist revolution, you've heard things like domino theory and you could understand it in numerous ways. One is that, if you expand to control a tipping point of resources, then you can leverage those resources to dominate the rest of the world and enforce your revolution.
Japan and Germany wanted to route out communism in other countries, but they also wanted to leverage the resources. Germany working with Russia to take Poland was largely strategic, not a sign of actual good faith towards Russia. Both Japan and Germany explicitly intended as their end goal, to conquer Russia and destroy Comintern.
This is part of why Stalin dismantled the Comintern, to deflate Japanese and Germany aims while simultaneously fostering military support from the allies.
Another critical point to support my argument, is that even if you don't think communism was the primary issue, why the heck would Japan and Germany join forces, causing it to become a World War? You could certainly argue that it doesn't become a World War until that happens. After all, people often make the mistake of saying the war didn't even start until something random in Europe happened and they can never ever convincingly explain how that caused the war to spin out of control. It makes no sense, because it is BS.
The war was already raging in the Pacific long before anything began in Europe. So why were the things in the Pacific happening? The thing that unifies both of these conflicts is communism.
People often deflect and just say oh Hitler was a racist and it was just this and that. They never answer the question: so what about Japan?
If they were fascist, what is a fascist? Many things, but most fundamentally they are a reaction to the communist threat. Communism is underpinned by a philosophy that all action is social action, so every person must be an activist. This puts society out of order rapidly, because anyone not involved gets overrun if it gains traction.
So fascists develop psychological counter-strategies to communism. That's why the Nazi flag was red. That's why they emphasize race instead of class, to unify people rather than divide them. That's why they uplift beautiful art and collected precious artifacts that communists hate and try to destroy. Everything was an intentional counter-strategy to communist revolution. It's easy to look back on it and say it looks insane, because it is and it is patterned as the inverse of communist revolution which is also itself insane. They wanted to immunize their country as a cultural powerhouse to fend off communism for all time.
And if the revolution was going to take over sufficient resources to steamroll other countries, then Japan and Germany were reasoning that they would need to expand to counter it.
Comintern wanting total global communism was logically inept and wrong for them to do. Germany and Japan going nuts and killing a ton of people was wrong for them to do.
It wouldn't have happened if the communists had not created a global existential threat. Remember too, this is before the internet, before pervasive communications and such. People still largely got their news from word of mouth, newspapers and radio so I'm sure there was plenty of miscalculation to go around, but the slow verifiable things were undeniable and that's what they were reacting to.
The communists have been threatening to start World War 3 and that is also what the Trump administration is reacting to today. Between Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, both Russia and China have lost essential partners in rapid succession. We've been helping Ukraine target Russian oil infrastructure which has dual purpose, since it both weakens Russia and also demonstrates to China that not only is their Venezuelan and Iranian oil not secure, but not even the oil they get from Russia is reliable. China built the largest strategic oil reserve in the world which is something like double the rest of the entire world combined and they were going to use it to sanction proof themselves in the case of engaging with Taiwan. Now they are drawing it down, which reduces the chance of WW3.
It's revisionist history. Constructed arguments that quickly fall apart - like Yes Hitler was afraid of Bolsheviks but that doesn't explain why he invaded all the other countries France, Poland, Denmark, Norway... many more.
The repeat of the same trick on current events with Iran/Venezuela/Cuba is very telling. I doubt anybody believes that US attacks Iran because of communism. But yes all the US conflicts are because of communism.
More likely explanation is that big business backs fascism to crush social causes. Fascism exists to save capitalism from the people.
These countries had real world evidence of it happening and back then times were hard. You had starvation, unemployment, mistreatment and really societies were still trying to find the balance in an industrializing age. This was ripe territory for the spread of Marxism and it was adapted differently to a country depending on what the main complaints were.
Simply look at the spread of communism to other countries even after World War 2. You need to pay close attention to that, because it's the same fear other countries had before WW2. This was a very real issue and simply falling back on some propagandistic argument that the role of communism was overblown because of X, Y and Z, ignores all the reasons the communist threat wasn't overblown.
I think people forget that back then, death was normal and constant. People were dying all the time from all manner of both horrific and normal things. Most countries wanted to achieve some kind of stability and countries invading other countries was much more common in the recent history to them in a way that threatened them or in other words was normalized.
If the US had relative stability, England had relative stability and Russia had relative stability, countries like Japan and Germany did not. The great depression and communism both combined with the trade protectionism to create an internal existential threat. Suddenly you had mass hunger and unemployment. Yes they wanted to expand, yes they wanted more room for their people, but a strong factor that drove it to be existential was communism. Several of these other countries had already appeased communism, like France.
Germany and the US had already been fighting against communism in Spain and China, so this was going on long before the European side of the war started and it was a demonstrated actual acted on concern with evidenced history. If communism was going to expand, then if Japan and Germany wanted to survive communism or generally an expanded Russia. Like, think back then. You had Britain which had its empire. Now imagine a Russia that had an expansive communist empire.
Germany and Japan both had a rough history with Russia trying to take their territory. If they were going to be able to survive in an environment with an expanded Russia with vast communist acquired resources in an industrializing world, they would have to expand and establish control of resources of their own.
I'm not saying that it was right or good or that Japan and Germany don't take any blame and they were simply defending themselves, because that's not the case. Everybody made mistakes, but back then miscalculations were common and life was harsh. We take the comfy relatively peaceful life today for granted, but life was an everyday natural disaster back then by comparison to today. If you look at how Japan and Germany both prioritized their threats, communism was at the very top. It was real, they acted on it and as humans they acted in ways that demonstrate it was their highest priority.
Many European countries had official communist political parties and in the stable countries they didn't have much sway, but in other countries suffering from economic ruin from every direction, communist parties were gaining a lot of traction. The timing for why Hitler was appointed was explicitly because the communist party was gaining too much influence and reached the point of being an existential threat.
Make sure that you know one specific thing. Communism was basically known for dissolving countries from the inside, destroying their culture, their history and their identity. This is why it's more than simply worker activism, it's an existential threat to your civilizational existence. Japan and Germany both had strong cultures with a lot to lose.
There is no version of history where the communists are innocent, kind and good and there is no version of history where Japan and Germany are innocent, kind and good. That said, communism was actual evil even if on its surface it aimed to help workers. They legitimized and normalized horrific murder and assassination in all kinds of countries.
Part of the economic disaster that hit Japan and Germany was because of trade protectionism that went to extremes, because countries were protecting their local trade out of fear of communist revolution and they relied more on external trade for their needs. Without vast natural resources to leverage they couldn't sufficiently provide for their people without open trade which was closing down.
If I was to point at the absolute fundamentals, I'd say the open trade in the 1800s that caused many countries to rely on external supply chains leading to mass urbanization and hollowing out their agriculture created countries that were far less self sufficient.
With millions migrating away from the farms and working the land, moving to the cities, many countries were less self sufficient and it created an extreme imbalance and vulnerabilities. World War I might not have happened without that.
The economic issues combined with World War I was ripe ground for social movements which in the past were not always existential. When Russia was taken over by communists, they began to weaponize communism around the world. Any country that was undergoing hardship was a prime target.
Japan and Germany both suffered greatly from the 1800s mass urbanization with a weakened agricultural sector and when trade began to shut down in the 1930s to protect local economies out of fear not doing so would create an opportunity for the communists, this crushed Japan and Germany.
It would be fair to say then that there was some wisdom to globalism, but there was also some ignorance and it was not well managed. Yet, had communism not been the threat it was, global trade may not have receded as aggressively as it did.
So Russian weaponized communism, in full understanding of what communism actually is and how it operates in brutal destructive ways to destroy a society, combined with international imbalances caused by poorly managed trade in a rapidly industrializing world is a pretty good summary of what I see as the real causes of World War 2.
I'm not accurate about everything and I've made mistakes even in this thread which I didn't notice until after the edit option was gone, but I do make an effort to identify mistakes when I find an inaccuracy. Broadly, I think all the critical things I've said here will hold up as I haven't found convincing counter-arguments. If high quality counter-arguments are presented, I'm not closed minded and will consider them.