Distraction

Below I have ‘corrected’, rearranged and reposted the stream of anti-communist attacks by Steve dumped on the Pell thread in a particularly gross manner. It is particularly gross considering the previous effort on my part devoted to dealing with the WW2 policies of the USSR, and the assessment also made by other communists of my ilk and background of the 70% correctness of Stalin’s overall efforts to make revolution.

This dump of anti-communist bile is particularly notable at the time of the 30th anniversary of the Tiannanmen Square massacre by Deng and his anti- Mao capitalist roaders – that really did turn out to be fascists as Mao said they would. And also on the 75th D-day commemorations where the western imperialists scrambled to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Germany etc., (and perhaps liberating France as well).

The distraction of the trials remains a distraction whatever the guilt or innocence of all or any of the various accused.

A gigantic war was planned by very many powers that hated the USSR and wished to see it destroyed. That plan would inevitably cost tens of millions of lives. Yet Stalin is the constant baddie that must be focused on by Steve when all this does is hide the mass-murdering war planners and I do not speak of the Japanese. http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/28/the-forgotten-soviet-japanese-war-of-1939/

Nor do I speak of the Poles, Hungarians, Finns and all the other bordering countries who were well known to be actively plotting to destroy the USSR.

I am also not referring to the Germans or the Italians either as their hatred and goals are also very well understood by sensible people.

I am referring primarily to Britain, France and the U.S.A.!

‘But war is inexorable. It cannot be hidden under any guise. For no “axes,” “triangles” or “anti-Comintern pacts” can hide the fact that in this period Japan has seized a vast stretch of territory in China, that Italy has seized Abyssinia, that Germany has seized Austria and the Sudeten region, that Germany and Italy together have seized Spain — and all this in defiance of the interests of the non-aggressive states. The war remains a war; the military bloc of aggressors remains a military bloc; and the aggressors remain aggressors.

It is a distinguishing feature of the new imperialist war that it has not yet become a universal, a world war. The war is being waged by aggressor states, who in every way infringe upon the interests of the non-aggressive states, primarily Britain, France and the U.S.A., while the latter draw back and retreat, making concession after concession to the aggressors.

Thus we are witnessing an open re-division of the world and spheres of influence at the expense of the non-aggressive states, without the least attempt at resistance, and even with a certain connivance, on their part.
Incredible, but true.’

Steve claims to be a supporter of the Chinese Revolution, but actually he is still just a garden variety Trotskyite who can’t stand the fact that he is now a cruise missile something or other. Steve can’t move in any direction without condemning the terrible communists, that he insists despite our credentials, are really and fundamentally rotten anti-democrats. Yet his ‘democrats’ were planning mass murder on a gigantic scale.

Stephen Owens June 2, 2019 at 3:59 pm‘OK you are correct about the Chamberlain case and you might be right about the Pell case…’ Well why not leave it at that then? We won’t have long to wait till the 3 judges deliver their acquittal soon enough.

‘…but ‘there is the Moscow Show trial case and I’m sure you are wrong in the position that you have held for decades on that case. Lets recap that case.’

Let’s not; because for a start you have verballed me. I have long held the view that Stalin was just the best out of a fairly rough lot and that Trotsky in particular was utter rubbish as has been ALL the sects that has been spawned with any good words to say about the man. BUT I am pretty close to that exact view with respect to anything descending from Stalin and Mao AS WELL so it gets us…not very far!

Just because I have made some effort to come to grips with the Pell trial that is no excuse to start out on Stalin and the pact all over again.

My position that ‘organized western communists became almost wall to wall rubbish (and were pretty useless in WW2 as well as they flipped and flopped about with little real understanding or independent thought) is not and never was towing any party line. As it happens, the other night in Rundle Mall I ran into exactly the sort of views I am talking about. They were just down from the vegan activists that I am not well disposed to either. Fruitcake city! It was not long before the old CPA hack now greenie was praising Putin and Assad!! Yep I kid you not. Total fuckwittedness.

The well known view from all and even garden variety Maoists, is that Stalin was at best 70% correct in his work that ended 3 years before I was born. I have never paid much attention to the show trials and have only commented on them in an oblique manner. I have said that 5th column activities are a known part of the fascists tool box and played a role in other countries invaded by the Germans and that all such activities were crushed in the USSR (along with anybody that got in the way and yes a great many innocent people among them). That is why Stalin is so criticized by the political trend that I have descended from.

But instead of the Moscow trials, I have extensively studied and subsequently explained to Steve why the efforts of Stalin to prevent the war planned by the imperialist capitalist governments was sound strategy but Steve has not referred to my extensive work and has instead posted another content free comment as if he were saying something that refutes my extensive work, when clearly it does nothing to further the foolish position he apparently still holds and simply restates.

‘Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 9:23 am https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/German-Soviet_Boundary_and_Friendship_Treaty_28_September_1939
A friendship treaty with Nazi Germany is stupefying, as George Orwell commented at the time. Communists went from the greatest opponents of fascism to questioning whether the Gestapo really existed.’

Actually communists fought under a brilliant strategist and after huge effort won the second world war (D-day for example was just a welcome side show). I remind Steve again that WW2 was (prior to it breaking out and unfolding as it did) being planned by the capitalists as a war designed to destroy the USSR and their up and coming imperialist competitors!  Stalin systematically explained their efforts at the 18th congress and I have never seen a worthwhile refutation of his analysis.

The imperialists are the ones who were the real live capitalist monsters that were actively working to kill multi millions of people! That is the reality that most urgently requires widespread understanding and is being concealed yet again for another generation with these 75th D-day shows. The anti- communist focus is wrong, despite Orwell and Trots from Hitchens through to the most loony insisting that Stalin is the big issue. He is not and never could be when the people that pretend to be democrats were the ones actively planning mass murder and the destruction of the USSR!

That main point aside; somebody shot Kirov!

There is no reason, that I’m aware of, to suspect Stalin of the attack.

Stalin like every other revolutionary had enemies and as Lenin could tell us from experience, they often try to kill you.  Stalin was by the mid 1930s dealing with the looming reality of the biggest war of all time being planned by the capitalists as a present for the USSR.  His job was to make sure it did not happen and all this reflection on history and the trials still requires the perspective that must put 16,000,000 ahead of 16.  Stalin having gone through WW1 and the civil war and the revolutions and the exiles in Siberia , in the big picture sense, knew what was coming!

Steve says;
‘Nikolayev takes a pistol to the Smolny Institute. He is detected attempting to smuggle the gun in but instead of prison he is released and the pistol is given back to him. Later he tries again and gets past the guard of this one of the most secure buildings in the Soviet Union. He makes his way to the 3rd floor and finds 2 people in the corridor Kirov and Chekist Borislov. Niklayev shoots Kirov in the head. He and Borislov are taken into custody unfortunately theres an “accident” and Borisov dies in police custody. Nikolayev confesses and 104 prisoners (non Bolsheviks) are executed for their part in the crime. Then something strange happens. Stalin personally interrogates Nikolayev and discovers that Stalin’s opponents are to blame that the left opposition is in fact working for the Nazi’s. Upshot the trial of the 16. No witnesses by this time. Nikolayev has been executed. No evidence that the jew Trotsky is in the pay of Hitler as asserted during the trial, just confessions. Some of the confessions are clearly false. The accused confessed to meeting in a hotel which was demolished years before the meeting. The accused confessed to taking an international flight but when records are checked no plane lands that day. How you can be so righteous in you position re Pell but so ‘tow the party line’ in the case of the 16 is and always has been beyond me.’

I’m not happy with the word ‘righteous’ and I just don’t tow party lines very well.  I have proved to be an independent thinker that just happens to think very differently to Steve Owens.  Even though we are now united cruise missile enthusiasts, quite sure that war must be made on Assad and Putin, and that Kurd’s ought not try to take over Arab territory, and rather that they ought to continue to pursue a peaceful path forward to more democracy in Turkey.  They have a political partner that has a track record of taking on the anti- democrats that are well understood to have been in power in Turkey since WW2 at the least.

EGYPT is not making democratic progress and the reason is that the Islamist MB would be elected – were elected and so there was a coup by the anti- democrats supported by… Trots no less!!

Steve says, June 3, 2019 at 10:51 pm Most journalists covering the trial were convinced that the confessions were statements of truth. The Observer wrote: “It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The government’s case against the defendants (Zinoviev and Kamenev) is genuine.” (26) The New Statesman agreed: “It is their (Zinoviev and Kamenev) confession and decision to demand the death sentence for themselves that constitutes the mystery. If they had a hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We would be glad to hear the explanation.” (27) The defendants demanded the death penalty for themselves and this raises no questions in your mind?’

I could and would agree that these issues raise doubts and questions but they do not alter my view of the wisdom of Stalin’s strategy in dealing with the broad plan to destroy the USSR.  The pact is not what you think or propagandise against but rather something else signed after Japan was first fought and set back on it’s heals.  Stalin as a revolutionary with all his flaws had a lot on his plate but he made no error in making sure the war did NOT start as was planned by the people that ruled in the west.

‘Stephen Owens June 6, 2019 at 11:15 pm So Patrick humor me. You are 100% sure that Pell is innocent and 100% sure that Lindy was innocent and you reached these conclusions before their trials began.’

In the case of Pell I did not!  I did put effort into the matter long after his trial.

‘You are also convinced that Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with Hitler despite the complete lack of evidence that this was the case.’

I am not convinced that he was ‘conspiring with Hitler’ I am only convinced that he was working against Stalin and that his policies were a constant disaster particularly in opposition to collective security!

Look at how you have become utterly muddled over your current dilemmas precisely because you did not grasp this issue early in life.

NOW YOU SUPPORT-

No Fly Zone war against Baathist Iraq (retrospectively),

and united front war against Baathists and other fascists

and our ruling elites waging war against ISIS / Al Qaeda types

and NOW you demand that the US imperialist go to war against the Libyan tyrant,

but you still can’t see how bankrupt you are over Kuwait as but one clear example of a stupid double standard!

‘Don’t you think that now that you are giving attention to mistrials that you revisit your conclusion that the Moscow trials were fair and above board. Please don’t use silence as your defense after all these years of putting the case for the defendant’s guilt silence would be an embarrassment for you. (please if you do reply, stick to the topic).’

This ancient trial is your issue, not mine, but to the extent that you throw in anti-non aggression pact crap yet again as if you never got an answer from my POV and despite having had your views extensively dealt with is to the extent that people can see what you are really on about.

I do not have the expertise to comment at length on the trials.

‘Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 9:14 am Of course the Moscow show trials were shown to be fraudulent many years ago. Eric Blair aka George Orwell pointed this out at the time of the Hitler/Stalin border and friendship pact asking if Trotsky was in league with Hitler now would be the perfect time to produce the documentary evidence from the Nazi archives.’

I don’t think that any amount of work in this field is going to stop your anti-communist dead end, from being your basic stand that must be contrasted with the above type of analysis

‘When the Red army over ran Berlin that would have been the perfect time to produce the evidence from the Nazi archives. When the Soviet Union fell and archives became open to scholars that would have been the perfect time to produce the hard evidence but none was produced because none existed the whole Moscow show trials were a sham but we know this don’t we?’

Big efforts were being made to do utterly vicious Promethean Movement vandalism work within the USSR so some people (that a sizeable chunk of the population supported) were up to no good from a revolutionary communist POV.

I have other issues and priorities such as demonstrating just how stupid people can be when it comes to strategy and the Soviet non aggression pact in particular.

Obviously I am not as impressed by Orwell as either Hitchens was or you are, but it would be far better for you to deal with Hitchens’ revolutionary perspective on draining the swamp just to remind yourself that what you are up to is truly a total diversion!

Stephen Owens June 8, 2019 at 3:48 pm Orwell taking the piss out of the Moscow show trials by presenting the London show trials. ‘Mr Winston Churchill…Chamberlain and the rest of his gang are no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.’

Fancy Stalin trying to get the 18th congress to understand the connections of events as they looked in march 1939. Just before a certain event that was to cast a very big shadow got going in the east!

http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/28/the-forgotten-soviet-japanese-war-of-1939/

‘The fact that the fighting at Nomonhan coincided with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was no coincidence. While Stalin was openly negotiating with Britain and France for a purported anti-fascist alliance, and secretly negotiating with Hitler for their eventual alliance, he was being attacked by German’s ally and anti-Comintern partner, Japan. By the summer of 1939, it was clear that Europe was sliding toward war. Hitler was determined to move east, against Poland. Stalin’s nightmare, to be avoided at all costs, was a two-front war against Germany and Japan. His ideal outcome would be for the fascist/militarist capitalists (Germany, Italy, and Japan) to fight the bourgeois/democratic capitalists (Britain, France, and perhaps the United States), leaving the Soviet Union on the sidelines, the arbiter of Europe after the capitalists had exhausted themselves. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was Stalin’s attempt to achieve his optimal outcome. Not only did it pit Germany against Britain and France and leave the Soviet Union out of the fight – it gave Stalin the freedom to deal decisively with an isolated Japan, which he did at Nomonhan. This is not merely a hypothesis. The linkage between Nomonhan and the Nazi-Soviet Pact is clear even in the German diplomatic documents published in Washington and London in 1948. Recently revealed Soviet-era documents add confirming details.

Zhukov won his spurs at Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol – and thereby won Stalin’s confidence to entrust him with the high command in late 1941, just in time to avert disaster. Zhukov was able to halt the German onslaught and turn the tide at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941 (arguably the most decisive week of the Second World War) in part by deploying forces from the Soviet Far East. Many of these were the battle-tested troops he used to crush the Japanese at Nomonhan. The Soviet Far Eastern reserves – 15 infantry divisions, 3 cavalry divisions, 1,700 tanks, and 1.500 aircraft – were deployed westward in the autumn of 1941 when Moscow learned that Japan would not attack the Soviet Far East, because it had made an irrevocable decision for southward expansion that would lead to war with the United States.’

(Called the Nomonhan Incident by the Japanese and the Battle of Khalkhin Gol by the Russians).

Two-front war against Germany and Japan WAS avoided by Stalin! The British and the French (for what they were worth as it turned out despite having the largest army on paper) were dragged into fighting while resisting all the way till the Germans forced the fight on them.

The ‘appeasers’ and their supporters have hidden their real position of active and massive war mongering from most people in the west and while Stalin is not read nor understood they will get away with this. They will do so with the active collaboration of Trots who ought to know that their focus achieves this outcome for the apologists for the appeasement policies of the worlds dominant ruling class imperialists of that bygone era.

As we currently see right across the globe there is a dead end in this pseudoleft that is already apparent as issues like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Mali and on and on keep demonstrating.

My advise to Steve is to stop running away to hide in history but rather systematically deal with what is now a VERY big change in where in 2019 Steve stands from the bad old days in ISO land. You are NOT with the loons in Rundle Mall who think themselves left and support Putin and Assad.

Steve now critically supports the deployment of the US, British, French and other western forces to the MENA region!

Steve advocates draining the swamp theory as the strategy for democratic revolution not just in the MENA region but across the globe!

Just remember that if there is backsliding (and there often is by our ruling classes) that will not change what must be done to defeat the anti democrats and spread democracy.  The forceful overthrow of tyranny will be required as there is NO other way forward.

As we see in Hong Kong ‘the capitalist roaders will know no peace’ and democracy is the way forward for the communist revolution!  The ruling capitalists in their ‘communist party’ will not give up their dictatorship!  They will impose their terror until they are stopped by the coming revolution for a new new democracy.

It is right to rebel!

74 Responses to “Distraction”


  1. 1 patrickm

    Steve we do need to expose myths and the first myths we expose could well be your new ones about how empires get built and held onto! Steve you now have a classically stupid position that is laughable at face value. You have now – from persisting with a Trotskyist stand and your own peculiar and quite rabid form of anticommunism – of necessity twisted yourself into an openly right-wing joke.

    I am glad that at least you are not disputing that the Japanese had an ‘imperialist army of mass murder and enslavement’ but really you are in a very deep hole at this point and you can stop digging for your own sake or end up like the defenders of Putin.

    Steve previously thought that empires ‘on which the sun never set and the blood never dried’ were only obtained by making war and so the ruling classes of the largest of the worlds empires, made war as policy in the perfectly well understood Clausewitzian manner. Ruling classes had developed whole elites to run their empires from both within their ruling classes and from lower classes who rose through the class ranks. NOW with you, it’s all just liberal mush as if Steve is now working for the ABC.

    For Steve the imperial ruling classes were apparently bad eggs at the WW1 stage and again after WW2 but in the lead-up to WW2 were not engaged in their stock standard business of conceiving and making war for their imperialist ambitions.

    Yet Steve also accepts that they hated the USSR and had tried to strangle it at birth but that they had been exhausted by their rotten imperialist war making of WW1 that they created and sustained with not a communist power insight (genuine or otherwise) and what with the Great CAPITALIST Depression just couldn’t get directly back to the task at hand.

    So there Steve sits in a pile of dilemmas and in desperation manages to make sense of the world by blaming the communist leadership of the USSR for doing the wrong thing and not making war unassisted against Germany and Japan, Italy, Romania, Finland, Hungary etc Dishonorable Stalin won WW2 the wrong way!

    Steve knows the English and French ruling elites were maneuvering their imperialist great powers at the time just as they were prior to during and just after WW1. Nothing had changed! Germany was in contention with them at the time just as it was in WW1. Steve knows full well that imperialism means war and they ALL had options right up to the point when the die was cast and the war had become a world war. Even after being fully committed, imperialist treachery was not entirely unheard of either; though, as Stalin said, by that stage of history it was not as easy as in the past to just launch into war and public opinion for war was required so ‘issues’ had to first be established.

    The British, French and the US had not wanted the Russian revolution to succeed that is why they attacked the Reds and backed the Whites as did the Poles etc. That is why there was a hands off Russia movement that Steve is fully aware of and Steve knows that there were revolutionary stirrings and murmurings all over Europe at the end of WW1 and that the British and French imperialists could not keep up their attacks and put in enough troops to do what they wanted to do to the Russian revolution. But here I am telling Steve stuff that everyone BUT the last few clueless generations of liberals, pseudo-leftists and open rightists know.

    Germany went east into Czechoslovakia and the English and French expressed both their displeasure but also their helplessness and did not declare war and fight with the USSR to defend Czechoslovakia as Stalin had proposed. Instead Germany had acquired a great prize of other people that were disposable from any good imperialists point of view. Up to this point Stalin good and the British appeasers bad and definitely up to something that looked like encouraging the Nazis to make war in the direction spelt out by the Fuhrer in his infamous Mein Kampf.

    Once the non aggression pact was signed both the British and the French knew they had been outwitted in round 2. From their POV’s it could hardly have been worse; they were going to be shut out of eastern Europe.

    Germany did plenty during the “Phony war” period and not just in furiously rearming and building up their troop strength. They had to plan the war and get the right conditions for those plans to work. Germany still played diplomacy with the British and French (like the Russians much later -in the 21st C – did with Obama!) and then sprung on them and militarily crushed them and stunned themselves in the doing of it! Hitler became overconfident in my view; and I am not alone in thinking that.

    As I explained in the Dunkirk thread; the WW1 soldiers who were now running the show were now believers!

    The trenches had not got re dug and they were not once again bogged down fighting in France etc. They had overrun Denmark and kicked the British out of Norway. They then had swarmed across Belgium and the Netherlands and stunningly defeated the massive French forces and ‘Brexited’ the British out of Europe altogether.

    They had great relations with Portugal and Spain. Their stunning victories forced the more cautious Mussolini to join in and brought North Africa (in the grand old Roman imperialist tradition) once more into play.

    Germany had earlier peacefully swallowed Austria and having now sorted out a solid temporary arrangement for the entire area of eastern Europe where they had several allies could by this stage feel pretty smug. From their POV how good was that!

    If they had not blown the trapping and capture of the BEF and the loss of so much of the French navy their victories would have been total.

    The USSR ‘did nothing’ during the phony war because they were furiously rearming and buying as much time as possible AND attacking Finland and the Baltic states and sending troops to Bessarabia etc. Nothing phony about that period for the USSR they had a huge job re-integrating all the Czarist empire territories they had lost in the civil war period to people like the French imperialist soldiers Maxime Weygand and Charles de Gaulle etc.

    England and France had wanted Germany to go East but Hitler hadn’t. He had done a deal and turned on them and they understood that EVEN IF all these years later Steve doesn’t!

    The imperialists were not going to be humiliated with a peace offer after ‘Poland’ because it wasn’t just after Poland but in reality after the whole of eastern Europe had been settled – and with Britain and France totally excluded.

    For Hitler there was only the slight hiccup over Yugoslavia that cost only 200 German soldiers and then Greece and Crete tidied up the map of Europe with little old Britain off to the side as but what was a minor annoyance (in true Brexit style).

    Indeed after France fell the Vichy government did a very good job of going over to the side of the Germans and for example the French had to be fought in Syria with a cost of 500 Australian lives. Notably Churchill had to sink quite a few French war ships that refused to join with the British Navy! Of course there were a hand full of Free French and Poles etc but they were of almost zero consequence at that time. The Polish pilots however playing a notable role in the Battle of Britain!

    Just remember; Japan had attacked the USSR in 1938 and again in 39 and got belted by the Reds both times! They were consequently wary of having another go. But Hitler was I think of the view that they would attack again when the USSR was being mauled by his forces just as Italy had jumped in against France at the last stage of that fresh example of a long imperialist tradition. For Hitler (and virtually every other contemporary thinking through the issue that was the overwhelming logic but then the Japanese militarists blundered quite badly and their top Admiral could not stop the stupidity of the war that they ended up launching. Not the brightest war making I have ever seen but something must have made sense to them in the way that Steve’s views seem to make sense to Steve. When the German’s looked like winning in Russia instead of joining in on the ‘kill’ they attacked the sleeping giant instead! Go figure.

    Once something has been done in some manner it can often look, to the unthinking, like that is the only way it could have been done; or the opposite ‘whatever were they thinking’ and Steve is doing this type of thing with his pronouncements on the 2nd front delay.

    For Steve there is nothing to see in this ‘myth’; everybody just did their job the best they could except for uncle Joe who just made propaganda point scoring over an issue that could only have happened the way it did! Well no one can accuse Steve of not being consistently focused on defending the imperialists and spreading anti communist bile.

    When my ‘father was sheltering from bombs in Coventry those planes were fueled on Soviet aviation fuel.’ and when Irish houses were earlier burnt down in Ireland it was British soldiers that did it. I blame the British ruling elite for both! Was it not the British appeasers that sold out the Czech and Slovakian peoples as they had the Spanish? Was it not they who forced desperate measures on the Soviet Union, with the alternative being to wage war on two fronts without allies? You bet it was! Chamberlain was running the biggest empire still going! Chamberlain’s imperialism was a living breathing reality. He was in no way subserviently appeasing the latecomer imperialism of Nazi Germany that they had already fought to defeat only 20 years earlier!

    The filthy imperialists great game, that even Churchill came to warn had gone too far, then came fully unstuck!

    But they did NOT stop playing their great and filthy game. The US entry to WW2 was delayed! The 2nd Front was delayed!

    ‘Stalin publicly complained about the absence of a second front [even as early as] Nov 6th 1941’ long before the Atlantic wall was constructed and when the Germans were fully committed in the death struggle real war in the USSR.

    Stalin knew what a desperate situation the USSR faced. He knew what a 2nd front at that point meant. Steve could doubt himself just a little and recall what Mao was able to achieve with even a shattered force that survived from the long march. A desperate 2nd front could have relied on liberating the French masses to make war. Real war! Peoples war. Read Mao and wake up to yourself.

    Why are the US and the French ruling classes let off as well as the British? Why weren’t the Spanish people liberated from the Spanish fascists? Now that is a novel thought: but then what role had the imperialists played in ensuring that fascist regimes were in power in Spain and Portugal for that matter? Nothing to see there either folks move along, move along.

    ‘The second front stuff was just pure propaganda the reality was that the allies worked well together their leaders met, different roles were handed out and all parties did their roles. Yes more Soviet soldiers were killed …’

    I can imagine fighting an entirely different war even if Steve can’t.

    I can conceive of a far more expensive 2nd front and millions more troops deployed than the 3 that were sent in on June 6th 1944 exactly 11 months out from Germany’s total surrender.

    Ask yourself these questions: if there had never been a 2nd front launched, how long would it have taken the USSR to have been totally victorious anyway or
    could the USSR have surrounded an isolated Germany and if not interfered with by the western imperialists perhaps liberated Italy and then France?

    I’m not saying these would have been good ideas and I’m not even saying they would have even worked but only indicating that posing the more general question of could the war have been fought in a different manner must be answered with YES it could have!

    The 2nd front 11 months out from the devastatingly crushed end of the monster designed and built to go east was deliberate delay. For Steve to argue that this was the first real opportunity is breathtaking stupidity.

    Germany was in large part a tiger the British and French and US were delighted to imagine would destroy the hated workers revolutionary state of the USSR. The imperialist helped to construct it to do just that. Stalin spoiled their plans! Germany became a paper tiger.
    **********************
    Below is the stream of anti-communist distraction posted in the Pell thread.

    Stephen Owens
    June 2, 2019 at 3:59 pm Edit
    OK you are correct about the Chamberlain case and you might be right about the Pell case but there is another case and Im sure you are wrong in the position that you have held for decades and that is the Moscow Show trial case.
    Lets recap that case.
    Nikolayev takes a pistol to the Smolny Institute. He is detected attempting to smuggle the gun in but instead of prison he is released and the pistol is given back to him. Later he tries again and gets past the guard of this one of the most secure buildings in the Soviet Union. He makes his way to the 3rd floor and finds 2 people in the corridor Kirov and Chekist Borislov. Niklayev shoots Kirov in the head. He and Borislov are taken into custody unfortunately theres an “accident” and Borisov dies in police custody. Nikolayev confesses and 104 prisoners (non Bolsheviks) are executed for their part in the crime. Then something strange happens. Stalin personally interrogates Nikolayev and discovers that Stalin’s opponents are to blame that the left opposition is in fact working for the Nazi’s
    Upshot the trial of the 16 no witnesses by this time Nikolayev has been executed no evidence that the jew Trotsky is in the pay of Hitler as asserted during the trial just confessions. Some of the confessions are clearly false the accused confess to meeting in a hotel a hotel which was demolished years before the meeting. The accused confess to taking an international flight but when records are checked no plane lands that day.
    How you can be so righteous in you position re Pell but so tow the party line in the case of the 16 is and always has been beyond me.

    Stephen Owens
    June 3, 2019 at 10:51 pm Edit
    Most journalists covering the trial were convinced that the confessions were statements of truth. The Observer wrote: “It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The government’s case against the defendants (Zinoviev and Kamenev) is genuine.” (26) The New Statesman agreed: “It is their (Zinoviev and Kamenev) confession and decision to demand the death sentence for themselves that constitutes the mystery. If they had a hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We would be glad to hear the explanation.” (27)
    The defendants demanded the death penalty for themselves and this raises no questions in your mind?

    Stephen Owens
    June 6, 2019 at 11:15 pm Edit
    So Patrick humor me. You are 100% sure that Pell is innocent and 100% sure that Lindy was innocent and you reached these conclusions before their trials began. You are also convinced that Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with Hitler despite the complete lack of evidence that this was the case. Don’t you think that now that you are giving attention to mistrials that you revisit your conclusion that the Moscow trials were fair and above board.
    Please don’t use silence as your defense after all these years of putting the case for the defendants guilt silence would be an embarrassment for you. (please if you do reply stick to the topic)

    Stephen Owens
    June 8, 2019 at 9:14 am Edit
    Of course the Moscow show trials were shown to be fraudulent many years ago. Eric Blair aka George Orwell pointed this out at the time of the Hitler/Stalin border and friendship pact asking if Trotsky was in league with Hitler now would be the perfect time to produce the documentary evidence from the Nazi archives. When the Red army over ran Berlin that would have been the perfect time to produce the evidence from the Nazi archives. When the Soviet Union fell and archives became open to scholars that would have been the perfect time to produce the hard evidence but none was produced because none existed the whole Moscow show trials were a sham but we know this don’t we?

    Stephen Owens
    June 8, 2019 at 9:23 am Edit
    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/German-Soviet_Boundary_and_Friendship_Treaty_28_September_1939
    A friendship treaty with Nazi Germany it is stupefying as George Orwell commented at the time Communists went from the greatest opponents of fascism to questioning whether the Gestapo really existed.

    Stephen Owens
    June 8, 2019 at 3:48 pm Edit
    Orwell taking the piss out of the Moscow show trials by presenting the London show trials
    Mr Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organization which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, some times an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables. Eighty percent of the Beefeaters at the Tower are discovered to be agents of the Comintern. A high official of the Post Office admits brazenly to having embezzled postal orders to the tune of £5,000,000 and also to having committed lèse majeste by drawing moustaches on postage stamps. Lord Nuffield, after a seven-hour interrogation by Mr Norman Birkett, confesses that ever since 1920 he has been fomenting strikes in his own factories. Casual half-inch paras, in every issue of the newspapers announce that fifty more Churchillite sheep-stealers have been shot in Westmorland or that the proprietress of a village shop in the Cotswolds has been transported to Australia for sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting them back in the bottle. And meanwhile the Churchillites (or Churchillite-Harmsworthites as they are called after Lord Rothermere’s execution) never cease from proclaiming that it is they who are the real defenders of capitalism and that Chamberlain and the rest of his gang are no more than a set of Bolsheviks in disguise.

    Stephen Owens
    October 11, 2019 at 12:39 pm Edit
    Patrick you claim to be clear sighted when it comes to BS legal cases. I have been reading about the Lin Biao legal case so I would appreciate your opinion
    Lin was charged with the attempted assassination of Mao. Historically successful assassinations are by one person making close contact with the victim and using the weapon of choice here Im thinking Lincoln, Gandhi, Gandhi 2 (Rajiv) Kennedy, Kirov but Lin chooses to blow up bridge to stop train the hit train with artillery, flame throwers and airplanes. It doesnt have the simplicity of a John Wilkes Booth let alone a brilliant military mind of a Lin Biao. After the assassination Lin was to stage a coup. No big problem for Lin he is still Defense Minister and has initiated martial law previously so he knows what to do. I expect that he was sitting with his co-conspirators at some military HQ awaiting the news about the assassination. Well actually hes at his holiday home with his family but I guess that he has a plane handy to take him to coup HQ, turns out its a 25 mile drive to the airport but hey whats a little delay when any delay could cost you your life. OK assassination gone bad coup is cancelled just get in plane and escape north to the USSR but oops plane goes south and as soon as plane is in the air Zhou Enlai closes all airports in China. Lins plane returns to airport circles around but cant land its about midnight and ground staff wont turn landing lights on. OK back to plan escape to USSR, going well just about to cross Mongolian USSR border when plane turns around and flys south. At about 3am plane runs out of fuel and crashes. Latter investigation states that plane still had plenty of fuel and it must have because the pilot Pan Jingyin was awarded “Revolutionary martyr” status surely you dont get that just for running out of fuel.
    end

  2. 2 Stephen Owens

    16 Communists were arrested and tried on charges of murder and of leading a vast conspiracy against the Soviet Union in league with Nazi Germany. Many years have past and zero evidence has emerged that these communists were guilty of anything. You say that you never paid this trial much attention so OK Im prepared to believe that. You argue that Mao was critical of Stalin giving him a 70/30 good to bad ratio but I must point out that Mao was keen to put such events as the show trials into to 70% good category.

    I think that the western imperialists were keen to throttle the soviet baby in its cradle in 1917 but I dont think that was their position several decades latter as they entered trade arrangements diplomatic arrangements and yes even defense arrangements with the USSR. Firstly the Axis couldnt even coordinate a plan to attack the USSR. You are suggesting that the west had a plan of fomenting war against the USSR Im telling you that Germany Japan Spain and Italy didnt have a plan to destroy the USSR. Germany signs non aggression pact with USSR at time Japan is at war with USSR. Japan returns the favor and signs a non aggression pact with USSR at time of German war with USSR. Germany asks Franco to join war but Germany refuses Francos request that Spain enters if Germany forgives Spains debt and so Spain sits out war. Mussolini wasnt even told that Germany was going to launch operation Barbarossa. So the Axis have no coordinated plan about their supposed main goal that being the destruction of the USSR. Now all this keystone cop stuff is being deviously planned by evil geniuses in London Paris and Washington really? For Hitler to invade the USSR he needs Poland but thats exactly what the British and French wont give him. For Japan to invade the USSR they need oil and thats exactly what Washington places an embargo on. Yes London Paris and Washington do exactly the opposite of what they should do if they are maneuvering an Axis invasion of the USSR. You have my friend been duped by propaganda.
    PS do you really think that the machinations went so far that the French would give up France in a desperate effort to destroy the USSR?

  3. 3 Stephen Owens

    If the destruction of the USSR was the main game how do you explain this. The USA supplied food and trucks to the USSR via the pacific yes through waters controlled by Japan who carried out inspections but never interfered with US ship carrying essential goods to the USSR ships were American re flagged as Russian
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Route

  4. 4 Stephen Owens

    If you just reverse the positions in this clip you can see why a second front in 1941 is such a ridiculous idea I can understand why Stalin is calling for it, he is desperate but the idea is ludicrous that the small British army could mount a second front in 1941 how would it be resupplied how! Look at the Dieppe raid look at Market Garden both disasters both conducted under much much more favorable conditions look at ANZIO just look https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98zxWQIHD7Y

  5. 5 Stephen Owens

    If I may just explain in more detail why the second front had to happen in 1944.
    The second front is an American task because the UK just doesn’t have the troops. Now the invasion of France from England has to happen in June a by English standards good weather month. The Americans enter the war Dec 1941 and America after embracing isolationism was starting pretty close to zero so June 42 is out. Now we have a couple of guides. Hitler started from zero and built a military capable of invading France and he thought that he was ready after the Munich conference in 1938. So it took him to build a military that he was happy could invade France 5 years. Seeing that the Americans were trying something much harder than rolling tanks into the next country should we give the yanks any less time? That would put D Day in 1946. Hitler expressed his confidence that the Yanks would not arrive in Europe until the 1970’s funny now but thats what he thought. Now D Day was much more than just getting the US army across the Chanel. They had to get the US army across the Atlantic millions of men thousands of tanks planes artillery food for gods sake across u boat infested waters and the Germans were not defeated substantially in the Atlantic until May 1944. As I pointed out earlier air supremacy over France was not gained until 1944. I fear as did the planners that if they had gone earlier they would have been driven back into the sea a prospect that would have extended the war considerably. As I pointed out earlier D Day as it was was a closely run thing better a victory in 1944 than a route in 1943. In 1943 they wernt ready they knew it and they waited.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSHmZX_yd5g

  6. 6 patrickm

    ‘You are suggesting that the west had a plan of fomenting war against the USSR’ NO I am NOT!

    What I am telling you is that ALL of the independent players hated the USSR and independently did what they did in what these ruling elites believed to be in their own (class based) national interests. There was NO conspiracy but there was always plenty of general agreement and broad understandings and these types of issues are where ‘the devil is in the detail’.

    ‘…I don’t think that was their position several decades latter as they entered trade arrangements diplomatic arrangements and yes even defense arrangements with the USSR.’ Yet they would not unite with the USSR at Munich and defend Czechoslovakia! What an amazing prize the Nazis won without the loss of a single tank!

    Steve; you had no problem sorting though the duplicity as displayed by Putin in the last few years, so why on earth do you think that any of the above would be the way to think about the diplomacy of that long ago era? The current situation is just that -current- but class interests remain and so do the often conflicting national interests. Class society and it’s highest stage called capitalism was with the great depression after ww1 at issue with the emergence of this new phenomenon called the USSR. Working people across the world were in large numbers noticing what was and was not in their interests. Godless communism was not yet so tainted -except with the still religious- as it had arrived on the world scene years before it’s time dealing with feudalism for fuck sake! Here we are godless westerners in the 21st C and the issues can hardly be even thought about without Marx! The capitalists eventually came to power in every revolution but they are now in power and the best they can do is jabber on about creating plenty of jobs!

    Here we are, well into the 21st C and there is still no Australian republic. That is pathetic but not unsurprising as all things change even when on paper they look the same. It was more than just feudal trappings that were still dominant at the time of WW1 when the aristocracy had fully integrated with the bourgeois but was still often dominant; now these rotten trappings still cling on in a modified / modernized form and still often dominate the news but they are obviously not the same power structure as they were then!

    Indeed now we have a common man dominated 2 party dictatorship in Australia and an utterly farcical politics right across the world. Yet the system is still capitalist whatever feudal trappings remain or whatever commoner is on top of the current political heap.

    SO RETURN TO YOUR KNITTING.

    The ruling classes never stopped hating their avowed enemy. Communism remains the specter that haunts the owning classes very existence.

    ‘Firstly the Axis couldn’t even coordinate a plan to attack the USSR.’ That is because the Axis only existed in national interest form. Just like HIRISE right now! There was no PLAN nor could there have been given the times and the people involved. YOU have not grasped what the Axis was. It was just a name for 3 powers that were in contention with the already have powers and these powers were utterly vicious empires in this period. The Axis 3 had all come late to this violent feast. Germany and Italy only became countries very recently and Japan only opened to the world about the same time. It is that big picture that you are missing. The then constant and ubiquitous policies of world wide imperialism are what you are missing!

    The USSR was something altogether different but it had been an empire as well and had lots of former great power Russian chauvinism within it’s multi national makeup. The USSR came into being with all the warts that one could expect from a Czarist cesspit of backwardness.

    ‘I’m telling you that Germany Japan Spain and Italy didn’t have a plan to destroy the USSR.’ NO Steve it is me that is telling you they didn’t! There was no plan and that is quite obvious. Consider how Franco tweaked Hitlers nose. Franco was never going to jump into WW2 because just for a start he could hardly hold down his own population and was also utterly vulnerable to a US invasion. After all who was it that had stripped Spain of its empire? That’s right the USA! AND who was it that had let Franco come to power in the first place? NOT the USSR! Britain and France etc. The Spanish republic was very important strategically and was lost to the word’s democratic revolution! A revolution led by communists.

    There was never a ‘coordinated plan’ of the Axis powers that you imagine I think there was.

    You have had your theory of ‘Hitler to invade the USSR he needs Poland’ dealt with by me before. It just ain’t so! Poland was a very good potential ally for the Nazis, but ‘something even better came up’ or so the WW1 corporal thought.

    As for this ‘For Japan to invade the USSR they need oil’ ; clearly with respect to oil but generally, what the Japanese were thinking at different points altered and you have all your dates confused and your thinking assumes all powers were holding fixed positions instead of being fluid and thus negotiable but nevertheless all had rotten imperialist stands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note

    Japan went to war 1st with the USSR and then rethought the issues and turned elsewhere. At THAT point it could not get involved in war with the USSR and so scrupulously avoided doing so till the USSR declared war against them and began fighting them on a vast scale.

    Naturally when the war was underway the USA supplied stuff to the USSR and the Japanese were not able or going to do anything about that! They were in no position to fight on 2 fronts either!

    BTW If I must be 65% critical of Stalin to suit Steve then so be it – if – it would assist in getting Steve to move beyond the loony historical fixations to focus on the current fully capitalist world and what our reality actually requires from a proletarian POV. But it won’t!

    Steve is focused on anti communism and a consequent refusal to build a credible current political stand results.

    Hence we are still trying to work out just what sort of cruise missile something or other Steve actually is.

    I remain a cruise missile Marxist because I think the world requires democratic revolution; and that the revolution will require dealing with the democratization of the means of production. IMV humanity has a communist future and a complex revolution to work through. Steve is reduced to defending what is as what must be into the future.

    But right now there are no communists to worry about, so capitalism better get on with doing what it can and we will see what it does all by itself whatever the Chinese etc call themselves.

  7. 7 Stephen Owens

    Patrick you start this thread with
    “A gigantic war was planned by very many powers that hated the USSR and wished to see it destroyed. That plan would inevitably cost tens of millions of lives. … when all this does is hide the mass-murdering war planners and I do not speak of the Japanese. http://thediplomat.com/2012/08/28/the-forgotten-soviet-japanese-war-of-1939/

    Nor do I speak of the Poles, Hungarians, Finns and all the other bordering countries who were well known to be actively plotting to destroy the USSR.
    I am also not referring to the Germans or the Italians either as their hatred and goals are also very well understood by sensible people.

    I am referring primarily to Britain, France and the U.S.A.!”

    Then you end the thread with

    ‘You are suggesting that the west had a plan of fomenting war against the USSR’ NO I am NOT!

    I give up as you see no contradiction in stating that a gigantic war was being planned with the aim of destroying the USSR and conversely that you are not suggesting that the west had a plan to foment war against the USSR
    The west either had a plan or it didnt you cant start with a plan June 17 and hold the opposite position June 22 without someone noticing.

  8. 8 patrickm

    Just to help you over your mental block; a general plan does not equal a specific plan. The ‘west’ did not have a specific plan the imperialist powers ALL had general intent because imperialism means war.

    It is not a fluke that WW1 started nor that workers had to make a revolution to put a stop to it. Capitalists were running vast empires and enslaving other ‘colonial’ peoples as a matter of everyday business or have you forgotten? This is 101 stuff.

    There is no contradiction between the general activities of the ruling class warmongers directed at contending with their imperialist rivals and their general plans directed at smashing the proletarian revolution that had broken out in the week link imperialism out of THEIR WW1. Ask yourself if the imperialists had a plan for WW1 or did a general position result in a gigantic war?

    Remember proletarian revolution was a very bad example to workers across their imperialist globe. The world belonged to them and they intended to keep it. But that is not how it worked out now is it!

    If you want to try to be as thick as 2 planks you will find it very easy. Your problem is that you will have to agree with Stalin and admit that the imperialists were up to no good, and you just can’t bring yourself to accept that anymore than you can work out what sort of cruise missile ethusiast you are.

    Still, at least you understand that Putin is busy killing the revolutionaries of Syria alongside Assad and you understand that a democratic revolution in the ME will bring islamists to power and Erdogan is exactly the type of islamist that can and will destroy the islamofascists that the pseudoleft mistake every islamist for.

    No going back for you now, the boats have all been burnt!

  9. 9 Stephen Owens

    This CIA piece says that the US the UK warned the Soviet Union about Hitlers intention to invade.
    All part of “their general plans directed at smashing the proletarian revolution” and yes I think that imperialist have both specific and general plans as does pretty well everyone hardly an insight.
    https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2011-featured-story-archive/german-invasion-of-the-soviet-union.html

  10. 10 patrickm

    Just because this is no great insight at all it requires from YOU Steve, an explanation of what the imperialists were up to BEFORE they were excluded from eastern Europe. After they were at war with Germany it is in their interest to tell the hated communists that a German attack was coming! So you must understand that your above post is pointless. The US at this point had also rolled the die and Roosevelt was determined to go to war with the Nazis despite all the prominent America First thinking.

    Your position now IMV reduces to this;
    a) the imperialists after the incredible unplanned gore of WW1 tried to smash the revolution early but could back the white terror only so far and thus ruthlessly take vast territories from the newborn worker’s state and then had to end round one in the face of a home front hands of Russia movement with only limited victories and territories that these warmongers then got straight back to work within. Prometheian work is well understood by you.

    b) the imperialists apparently changed their spots BUT for no strategic reason (policy backflips happen for a reason ie demonstrable strategic failure as shown on 9/11).

    c) The British French and US independently made concessions to their imperialist rivals despite their far greater combined power but without wishing to see their rivals weakened as a result of any machinations and only then (in a most unproductive manner) declared war on their thus strengthened adversaries. Then sat on their duff till attacked. Why not double-cross adversaries? Why are these players so unlike imperialists?

    At least you are not disputing that it was their WW1. Back to the real world you can work out what to do about current imperialist gangster regimes like the Chinese and Nth Korean’s without confusing them with communists Russians like Putin were all ‘reds’ once upon a time!

  11. 11 Stephen Owens

    Most poignantly, perhaps, were the Polish women who gathered on the opposite bank of one frontier river on 15 June, cupping their hands around their mouths to shout warnings, in broken Russian, to the Soviet guards facing them.

    “Soviets, Soviets, the war is coming!” they were recorded as saying. “Soviets, the war will start in one week!”
    We must find these Polish women and discover which Imperialism they were working for.
    If my point that the British/US warnings were to late to be indicative then my British point of ‘we will fight them on the beaches’ still stands. Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offer and we there for have the Battle of Britain which was counter productive to the idea that the UK wanted Germany to go East. The Luftwaffe suffered losses that it could not afford let lone the bombing of Berlin.
    OK heres a go when Joseph noticed 4 million Wehrmacht troops massing on the boarder he wrote to Hitler saying whats up with this dude? Hitler wrote back saying that he was moving his precious troops out of the range of British bombers (no joke he said it) so theres your answer Churchill fought on rather than made terms because by fighting on he gave Hitler plausible deniability about his real intentions. Obviously the Polish women I mentioned above only confirmed Stalin’s belief that the warnings were a rouse, why would Polish women warn the Soviets? We must find out which imperial power they were fronting for.
    The myth is busted!

  12. 12 Stephen Owens

    If the English wanted peace with Germany all they had to do was to pick Halifax not Churchill as PM. France was about to fall Churchill had overseen the loss of Norway Chamberlain contacted the Labor Party about a government of National Unity to which the Labor party said yes please but not with you as PM so conservatives had to chose Churchill ‘never surrender’ of Halifax (In 1936 Halifax visited Nazi Germany for the first time. Halifax’s friend, Henry (Chips) Channon, reported: “He told me he liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit. He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic.”)
    So if your specific or general aim is the destruction of proletarian revolution then Halifax is your man why that beastly Churchill might even warn the Russians that Adolf is coming.

  13. 13 Stephen Owens

    If and I say if with heavy heart if you only read one article on this matter then let it be an article by the relatively unknown young author one B. Johnson https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11157482/The-day-Churchill-saved-Britain-from-the-Nazis.html

  14. 14 patrickm

    Johnson at least gets it. ‘May 28 1940 …He had been prime minister for less than three weeks, and it was far from clear who were his real allies round the table’. Steve simply does not get it!

    Steve; you are unable to spot the person who had come to be PM because of a shift that had taken place in the dominant thinking. Churchill was -in the period of the late 1930ies when they were being implemented- opposed to the dirty appeasement policies! He was telling them all that this was not going to be such a good plan.

    ‘we will fight them on the beaches’ was consequently Churchill BECAUSE he rejected Hitler’s peace offer, and we therefor have the Battle of Britain which was… consequential.

    Churchill knew the British were by then at war as the BEF were trapped and this meeting is smack in the middle of ‎’26 May to 4 June 1940′ You Steve have just lost the plot entirely.

    Churchill fought on and the Polish women warned and the rotten appeasers got up to their usual imperialist treachery in the grand old tradition.

    Steve is busted!

    BUT Churchill was also one of the British imperialists that still had other tricks up his sleeve like not working with the US to get an early 2nd front and say liberating Spain! The US could have put millions of men ashore in Spain and Stalin would not have objected.

    Such an early war would have taxed the Germans far more than what was done 11 months from their total defeat at the hands of the Soviets. But it would also have been a heavy duty peoples style war across Spain and France. Franco would have been removed and democracy brought early to Spain and Portugal and all their colonies etc etc Nothing revolutionary and democratic like that was done now was it.

    It was Churchill’s great achievement to swing the numbers when he did.

    WW2 was not set in stone from even the period of the Spanish civil war when the capitalists did what they did and quite a few workers did another thing all together.

  15. 15 patrickm

    Yet another article explaining why G W Bush liberated the Iraqi masses and brought democratic elections to Iraq. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/bush-war-iraq-190318150236739.html

    Oh how criminal were the US to rid the region of SH.

    Everyone can see that Obama’s policy in Syria was a far better method for the Syrian people to achieve their democratic revolution.

    GWBush was responsible for letting ISIL out of the box that the good tyrant SH had them all locked up in I suppose. Oh dear.

    When people can’t even work out what is happening in their own time they probably ought not go back to events before they were born.

  16. 16 Steve Owens

    So far Pat you have told some amusing stories such as the British storming French beaches in 1941 yes the same beaches that they scraped their army from in 1940. Now you want an invasion of Spain. There were 2 monumental errors in WW2 one was the unprovoked attack on the neutral USSR and the other was an unprovoked attack on the neutral USA but a third would have been an invasion of ‘neutral’ Spain “In May 2013 files were released showing MI6 spent the present-day equivalent of more than $200 million bribing senior Spanish military officers, ship owners and other agents to keep Spain out of the war.[24]”
    The error of attacking Spain would be determined by when it was done. too early and you lose Gibraltar then you cant supply Malta you cant supply your armies in Italy or your army in North Africa Germany could set up naval bases in Spain that could give it the edge in the battle of the Atlantic but by all means if you think bringing Spain into the conflict then go ahead but I think that the $200 million spent to keep Spain out of the war was money well spent.
    Hitler made a mistake of not doing everything he could to bring Spain into the war but you want to correct his mistake for him.

  17. 17 patrickm

    ‘So far Pat you have told some amusing stories such as the British storming French beaches in 1941 yes the same beaches that they scraped their army from in 1940. ‘

    That is a simple fabrication. Point to this or withdraw.

    You are very confused.

    Money for bribing some of the Spanish elite may well have been completely wasted. Just because a policy was implemented is not proof that it was sound or that had you another goal it would also be just as sound.

    That is so obvious when the goal is could there have been a 2nd front launched earlier or not?

    You throwing dust is just that.

    Your real answer is that yes there could have been a 2nd front earlier.

    Yes, there could have been 2 weak fascist powers destroyed and the Germans dragged into a long-range fight that they were unsuitably set up for while already involved in a death struggle with the USSR! You ought to know this but instead, you pretend that this is not even worth considering and that the 2nd front was not late at all and that all powers were doing the best they could! I don’t think so!

    You say ‘Hitler made a mistake of not doing everything he could to bring Spain into the war but you want to correct his mistake for him.’ Now think that through for a minute. The US and the British fought in Nth Africa and won.

    ‘By the beginning of March, the British Eighth Army—advancing westward along the North African coast—had reached the Tunisian border. Rommel and von Arnim found themselves in an Allied “two army” pincer. They were outflanked, outmanned and outgunned. The British Eighth Army bypassed the Axis defence on the Mareth Line in late March and First Army in central Tunisia launched their main offensive in mid-April to squeeze the Axis forces until their resistance in Africa collapsed. The Axis forces surrendered on 13 May 1943 yielding over 275,000 prisoners of war. The last Axis force to surrender in North Africa was the 1st Italian Army.[55] This huge loss of experienced troops greatly reduced the military capacity of the Axis powers, although the largest percentage of Axis troops escaped Tunisia. This defeat in Africa led to all Italian colonies in Africa being captured.’

    Then they moved on.

    At this point, they could do what you obviously advocate that is attack Sicily and then on into Italy as they did or they could have taken Sicily and then perhaps let the Italian government negotiate themselves out of the war.

    What if they had left the Italians alone and gone after Spain?

    Obviously they had the strength to do it!

    So instead of losing Gibraltar as you say, they would have dragged the Germans into a long-range fight that they could not win because they did not have the heavy lift capacity for it nor the fuel supplies and the longer runs under open skies would make them vulnerable to the US air attacks.

    You lack imagination if you think that the troops that were carted to Italy and then the 3 mill to britain could not have more easily been carted to Spain and set loose. They could have.

    Remember ‘Husky began on the night of 9–10 July 1943, and ended on 17 August.’ After that, they had that big forward base so you can drop the stuff about Malta. Obviously, it was possible to do Spain at the same time and not build up in Britain.

    The argument is about how long was a 2nd front delayed if at all.

    I say it was and you say it was not. I say the US could have not only controlled Sicily but put millions of men ashore in Spain and still dominated the air war and the naval war and the logistics required to win such a war easily especially if holding back on a direct attack on Italy. I cite here Mcarthur as having the policy of hitting them where they ain’t. And further, point out that the mountains into and out of France were a huge problem BUT particularly for the long-range Germans! The US already had to come as far as Britain and Italy anyway. The US could also recruit a lot of Mexicans for a Spanish liberation. You just lack imagination.

    Stalin would have had no objection to Franco etc being removed and democracy brought to Spain! Remember by this late stage a 2nd front was on the way and troop levels were building all the time in Blighty, when they could have been brought on shore just as well in Spain and put into the fight much earlier on the very front you say was not possible when they were fighting in Italy where they did not have to be!

    The Italians were stuffed from before the fall of Sicily. The Germans had to find it easier to intervene in Italy. Also, remember that the revolutionary manpower resources of France and Spain were not really tapped in the same manner as they could have been when the 2nd front was so delayed as it was.

    But Steve your comments have now reached the stage of weird.

    In the middle of the Dunkirk rescue of the men of the BEF a strong stand of Churchill’s within his just formed war cabinet draws a comment from Steve. The British were then, in stock standard manner, being sounded out via Musolini on the Germans behalf. The NOW real war was going not just very badly but catastrophically. The issue of negotiating a settlement naturally comes up and Churchill will NOT negotiate with Hitler. Churchill says his ministers (apparently most veterans of WW1) ought prepare to fight and themselves die if they have to. Apparently this is some sort of smoking gun for Steve and ‘the myth’ that the British, French and the USA were imperialists that wanted events to have turned out differently is supposed to be ‘busted’.

    Why would Steve go on about some brave Polish women that warned some Soviet border guards? I feel quite sure that this happened in a few places along such a vast front. But so what? At least the Soviet’s (because of Stalin or not) were now only going to be fighting on this one front though they still didn’t know that for sure. The Japanese still had not shown in what direction they would next launch forth with their armies of enslavement and mass murder! The Japanese had been bloodied by the Soviets but at least we know that Hitler still thought they would join him in the attack. But, despite this being in hindsight the better option, they didn’t take it. I would have thought we can all be very glad of that; and glad despite what happened in the alternative.

    Obviously the Battle of Britain was a genuine massive test of strength and the Germans thankfully failed that test and so could not then invade and occupy the UK and so gave up on the plan; good oh, well understood.

    Some British imperialists had wanted Germany to go East without they themselves being involved in a desperate war and this test of strength forced on them. That common imperialist desire / want had however been utterly thwarted by the Pact.

    NOW after France had fallen and WW1 not re-run on the fields of Flanders a bit of rethinking had to be done (by everyone) but because the British Empire was essentially fighting on all alone, especially a rethink by them. Germany at least at that time looked like the master of Europe. The british imperialists still had the British Navy (and obviously most people still don’t know what that means) and they had significant technical advantages in airplanes and radar as well; but most importantly of all they ultimately had the favorably disposed might of the US imperialists at their back. Yet with all that, the Empire only just scraped through because of a bit of luck and some German bungling and only then once WW2 had become a peoples war.

    Now obviously Stalin noticed the build up for the German led attack and Hitler had to tell lies that Stalin was not going to be bluffed by as his forward deployment of Soviet troops indicated. But these troops were still overrun by what both Steve and myself consider the then best tactical army in the world. Despite all efforts to halt the attacks it was also a very close run thing that the USSR was not lost, at least up to and including Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad.

    But what then even if it had been? There were still the Urals and Siberia and still the Caucuses and the ‘stans’, the partisan warfare etc. No matter WHAT, communists had no choice but to fight on because this was a war of total annihilation for them. The issue was death or victory. ‘First they came for the communists.’ That is what they always had done. Imperialists could hardly be favorably disposed to communists who are first and foremost democrats and so when communists won WW2 we then -as still a recognizable world movement- led the dismantling of the old imperialist world of colonies. That was until the peaceful evolution started being preached by the revisionists and a strange form of not very dynamic state capitalism was restored or resorted to by the ‘enemy within’.

    In WW2 about 16months after Barbarossa was launched the still quite desperate war slowly began to turn and then essentially kept strategically turning in the direction that Stalin had planned. The USSR had been furiously re-structured to be capable of achieving victory prior to the war breaking out. As Stalin had said almost 10 years before Barbarossa they were 50 years behind and they had 10 years to make it up or go under. Raw resources were able to be made into more high quality materials of war and arm more soldiers exactly as planned. Stalin’s long term plan for the survival of the USSR and thus the turn to an armed response to capitalist aggression and advance so broader victory for the proletarian revolution had, despite all the setbacks and at the terrible cost that had been expected, proved sound. Not long after that China had stood up as well and Korea and Vietnam and then what do you know everything turned into their opposite. All turned to shit as predicted in the analysis of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

    Stalin’s 5 constants of war had shown up as fundamental to victory and blitzkrieg as just a tactical issue that could be overcome, learnt from and adopted. Communists developed sound theory that defeated fascists and then in the grand efforts after the war smashed a lot of old fashioned imperialism and the colonial world was swept away. Some of this is not well understood these days. But the old imperialisms are not coming back and the new aggressor regimes like Oligarch Russia and Capitalist Roader China (that are obvious gangster societies) will not prosper in the way that old style imperialisms did in the 19th C. They have no bright future and as Hong Kong just demonstrated the tyrants are hated by the masses. They will simply stay in power as long as their systems hold together. Revolution is still required if proletarian interests are back on the table and they wil be if the ‘market’ system runs the way it has and overproduces in a global crises.

    What the various factions of the Eglish imperialist ruling classes wanted prior to WW2 and what they mostly became convinced they HAD to do as events unfolded are separate issues. When the facts change then so do the subsequent policy options. There was a losing element of that rotten English ruling elite that still wanted peace with Germany but they had lost the argument when the British empire was being thrown out of Europe and the BEF was still in grave danger of being captured.

    The context of adversarial imperialism’s contending in the usual manner is absent from the latest version of Steve’s desperate attempt to make sense of the diplomacy of the WW1-WW2 era. Why this quite standard reality of the time is now dispensed with is not clear to me. All that we have to go on (according to Steve at least it seems to me) is that all right thinking people must reject Stalin’s analysis.

    Yet the ‘democracies’ the ‘west’ were much more powerful militarily and economically than were the aggressive up-comming have-not imperialisms that were then termed the Axis powers so we have to concede this point to Stalin and thus we are obliged to come to grips with just why they backed down to the Aggressors.

    Stalin gave us his reasoning and it must be at least conceded as plausible.

    Either way (according to Steve ‘..if your specific or general aim is the destruction of proletarian revolution..’) then you must continue with the policies that has already landed you so far with the BEF trapped and desperate for the navy to pull as many off the beaches as they could manage. I don’t think so!

    I think I would swing in behind the other imperialist leadership that had long ago thought the Appeasers wrong headed. But the British remained led by imperialists and the Spanish and Portugese remaied under fascist dictators for another three decades!

  18. 18 Stephen Owens

    ‘So far Pat you have told some amusing stories such as the British storming French beaches in 1941 yes the same beaches that they scraped their army from in 1940. ‘

    That is a simple fabrication. Point to this or withdraw.
    Pat if you read back your own stuff you will see that you agree with Stalin that a second front can be launched by the British in 1941 seeing that they didnt have the capacity to take a harbor they would have to storm the beaches yes the same beaches that they scraped their army from one year previous.

  19. 19 patrickm

    I have never advocated ‘the British storming French beaches in 1941’ and you know this so you ought to withdraw your what is now a simple untruth.

  20. 20 patrickm

    BTW why wasn’t Italy a 2nd front? Why was it a sideshow? It was. Why are you excusing the US and British ruling elites from even demanding total cooperation from fascist Spain and Portugal? Why lie about French beaches when all can see I have speculated about the obvious 2nd front opportunities that you could not even see when led right up to.

    Horse, water, drink I suppose.

  21. 21 Stephen Owens

    Well just explain how the British can initiate a second front in 1941 without storming French beaches, attack Spain?

  22. 22 patrickm

    This is what you have got from me;
    ‘The US entry to WW2 was delayed! The 2nd Front was delayed!

    ‘Stalin publicly complained about the absence of a second front [even as early as] Nov 6th 1941’ long before the Atlantic wall was constructed and when the Germans were fully committed in the death struggle real war in the USSR.

    A desperate 2nd front could have relied most on liberating the French masses to make war. Real war! Peoples war. Read Mao and wake up to yourself. Stalin knew what a desperate situation the USSR faced. He knew what a 2nd front at that point meant. Steve could doubt himself just a little and recall what Mao was able to achieve with even a shattered force that survived from the long march.

    Why are the US and the French ruling classes let off as well as the British? Why weren’t the Spanish people liberated from the Spanish fascists? Now that is a novel thought: but then what role had the imperialists played in ensuring that fascist regimes were in power in Spain and Portugal for that matter? Nothing to see there either folks move along, move along.’

    NOTHING about French beaches in 1941 but what we are taking about is you excusing the imperialists from their delay of the 2nd front not from 1941 or even 42 but from 43 till launched on June 6th 44 only 11 months from the total defeat.

    The obvious delay is just that.

    And the fascists were left in control of Spain and Portugal are what I am pointing out.

    When I have shown that they had the power and the opportunity why are you still bullshitting that a 2nd front was not possible earlier than launched that would have lifted some of the load off the USSR and placed it on the imperialist run countries?

  23. 23 patrickm

    Just to be perfectly clear the British empire and the US beat the Germans and the Italians in Nth Africa and could have done that just as well while liberating the Spanish people and then the Portugeuse. An imperialist style excuse for not doing so was for sparing ‘themselves’ and making the USSR take the casualties.

    You have zero excuse for not accepting that this 2nd front could have been launched more than 1 year earlier than their scramble for Berlin.

  24. 24 Stephen Owens

    Patrick put your ideology aside and look at the facts. There is no way a second front can succeed until the Luftwaffe is broken and this happens in July 1943 Luftwaffe fighter loses peak. On the Eastern front Germany loses 201 planes and in the Western and Mediterranean fronts Germany loses 581 fighter planes as a Russian historian wrote the USSR broke the back of the Wehrmacht and the western allies broke the neck of the Luftwaffe. Air supremacy wasnt achieved until 1944 Hitler refused to invade England without air supremacy why do you expect Eisenhower to be a bigger idiot than Hitler?
    In France 1944 the German joke goes if you see black planes in the sky thats the British, if you see silver planes in the sky thats the Americans and if the sky is clear thats the Luftwaffe

  25. 25 patrickm

    … the Luftwaffe is broken and this happens in July 1943 Luftwaffe fighter loses peak.’
    then you cling to the following
    ‘Air supremacy wasn’t achieved until 1944 Hitler refused to invade England without air supremacy why do you expect Eisenhower to be a bigger idiot than Hitler?’

    So you have a serious problem!

    Eisenhower invaded Italy and that is that.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_campaign_(World_War_II)#cite_note-36
    So he did this no matter what you think and he could have invaded the Iberian peninsular even easier if they had chosen that route. He could have landed all those 3 million troops without taking them to Britain a year earlier. You just can’t accept that this was even open as a possibility when you already know that they were in Italy. Clear skies in Spain and plenty of scope for the Sea bees to build forward air bases etc

    A choice was made and the fascist regime’s were preserved! Democarcy could have come to the Iberian peninsular 30 years sooner than it did!

    Get real steve politics was in comand!

  26. 26 Stephen Owens

    Peak Luftwaffe loses occurred July 1943 but air superiority wasnt achieved until Big Week

    The turn in the Luftwaffe’s fortunes came during Big Week in which the U.S. Eighth Air Force flying from bases in Britain, and Fifteenth Air Force flying from bases in Southern Italy, carried out raids against German aviation industry throughout Europe. The new commander of the US Eighth Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle’s major influence on the European air war occurred early in 1944 when he changed the policy requiring escorting American fighters to remain with the bombers at all times. With his permission, initially performed with P-38s and P-47s with both previous types being steadily replaced with the long-ranged P-51s as the spring of 1944 wore on, American fighter pilots on bomber defense missions would primarily be flying far ahead of the bombers’ combat box formations in air supremacy mode, literally “clearing the skies” of any Luftwaffe fighter opposition heading towards the target. This strategy fatally disabled the twin-engined Zerstörergeschwader heavy fighter wings and their replacement, single-engined Sturmgruppen of heavily armed Fw 190As, clearing each force of bomber destroyers in their turn from Germany’s skies throughout most of 1944. As part of this game-changing strategy, especially after the bombers had hit their targets, the USAAF’s fighters were then free to strafe German airfields and transport while returning to base, contributing significantly to the achievement of air superiority by Allied air forces over Europe. During the Big Week bomber campaign of late February 1944 which started to introduce the new fighter tactics, American medium and heavy bombers together dropped roughly 10,000 tons of bombs and seriously disrupted German fighter production. During Big Week, the Eighth Air Force lost 97 B-17s. Coupled with B-24 losses the figure totaled 137 initially and 20 more scrapped due to damage.[92] The Fifteenth Air Force lost 90 aircraft and American fighter losses stood at 28. The Luftwaffe losses were high amongst their twin-engined Zerstörer units which suffered heavy losses and decimated the Bf 110 and Me 410 Gruppen.[93] More worrying for the Jagdwaffe was the loss of 17 per-cent of its pilots; nearly 100 were killed.[94] The tide had turned, and air superiority had passed to the Western Allies.

    P-51D 374th Fighter Squadron. This is an early D-model, without the fin strake; 75 gallon (284 litre) drop tanks are on the wing racks.
    When long-range fighter support became widely available by May 1944, the Luftwaffe’s defensive effort was severely damaged. The P-51D Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts with extended range were now able to escort the bombers to and from the target. The Luftwaffe now did not have opportunity to attack the unprotected fleets. The resulting air battles diminished the strength of the Jagdwaffe.

    U.S. and RAF fighters undertook many fighter sweeps, and the boundaries of the front line steadily moved eastward. They engaged many Luftwaffe training aircraft, and the helpless Jagdflieger of tomorrow were shot down in droves. Pilot training had become shorter in order to fill the front line Gruppen, which often had more aircraft than pilots. German aircraft production reached its peak in August 1944, finally equaling the Soviet and American output, but the production came too late to alter the outcome of the air war. The Luftwaffe had plenty of aircraft but a critical shortage of experienced fighter pilots.[95]

  27. 27 patrickm

    Consider this
    ‘Forces of the British Eighth Army, still under Montgomery, landed in the ‘toe’ of Italy on 3 September 1943 in Operation Baytown, the day the Italian government agreed to an armistice with the Allies. The armistice was publicly announced on 8 September by two broadcasts, first by General Eisenhower and then by a proclamation by Marshal Badoglio. Although the German forces prepared to defend without Italian assistance, only two of their divisions opposite the Eighth Army and one at Salerno were not tied up disarming the Royal Italian Army.’
    IMV Spain was a much better opportunity but then again I am not an anti-communist imperialist warmonger, like the ones that bled the USSR that you justify!

  28. 28 Stephen Owens

    After the war, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel said: “Instead of attacking Russia, we should have strangled the British Empire by closing the Mediterranean. The first step in the operation would have been the conquest of Gibraltar. That was another great opportunity we missed.”[17] If that had succeeded, Hermann Göring proposed that Germany would “… offer Britain the right to resume peaceful traffic through the Mediterranean if she came to terms with Germany and joined us in a war against Russia”.[16]

    As the war progressed and the tide turned against the Axis, the Germans planned for the event of an Allied attack through Spain. There were three successive plans, progressively less aggressive as German capability waned:

    Operation Isabella
    Main article: Operation Isabella
    This was planned in April 1941 as a reaction to a proposed British landing on the Iberian peninsula near Gibraltar. German troops would advance into Spain to support Franco and expel the British wherever they landed.

    Operation Ilona or Gisella
    Ilona was a scaled down version of Isabella, subsequently renamed Gisella. Devised in May 1942, to be invoked whether or not Spain stayed neutral. Ten German divisions would advance to Barcelona and, if necessary, towards Salamanca to support the Spanish army in fighting another proposed Allied landing either from the Mediterranean or Atlantic coasts.

    Operation Nurnberg
    Devised in June 1943, Nurnberg was purely a defensive operation in the Pyrenees along both sides of the Spanish-French border in the event of Allied landings in the Iberian peninsula, which were to repel an Allied advance from Spain into France.

  29. 29 patrickm

    Well the Germans took it seriously didn’t they! But the best laid plans of mice and men…

    and naturally
    ‘offer Britain the right to resume peaceful traffic through the Mediterranean if she came to terms with Germany and joined us in a war against Russia”.’
    … eliminate the communists.

    NOTE that;
    ‘There were three successive plans, progressively less aggressive as German capability waned’ but if the imperialists had wanted to take the maximum pressure off the USSR they would have taken more heat themselves! And Italy was already effectivly out. So the war could have been different and you had never thought about this direction.

    That is the real point. There was indeed options and you have only now discovered them.

  30. 30 Stephen Owens

    Why didnt allied troops in Italy push on into Germany oh I dont know maybe it was this
    An intended quick push inland at Anzio became bogged down in driving rains, German air raids and command hesitation, prompting Churchill to complain, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.” Where the mountains receded, there were still muddy rolling hills, flooded rivers and washed-out roads to hamper the Allied advance and assist the German defenders.

    Under the resourceful Commander Kesselring, German forces set up several defensive lines across the narrow Italian peninsula. The southernmost of these, the Gustav Line, ran just behind Monte Cassino. Despite Allied air superiority across Italy, it took Allied soldiers four grueling battles over several months to break through heavily fortified Monte Cassino and the Gustav Line. The Allied breakout in May 1944 exposed Kesselring’s main forces to a potential trap by advancing Allied armies from Anzio and Cassino. However, in a controversial and little-understood decision, U.S. General Mark Clark (1896-1984) contravened his orders by moving northwest to capture Rome instead of cutting off the German soldiers retreating from Cassino. His decision allowed a sizable German army to escape and possibly squandered an opportunity for a quick resolution of the grinding Italian Campaign.

    German Forces Surrender: 1945
    As General Clark’s Fifth U.S. Army moved into Rome on June 4, 1944, the D-Day landings in Normandy, scheduled for June 6, took priority over the Italian Campaign. Six Allied divisions were removed from Italy to support landings in southern France. Further Allied advances in Italy were slow and hampered by heavy autumn rains. The Allied High Command ordered that priority be given to pinning down as many German divisions as possible for the duration of the war, rather than pressing the Italian offensive further. Allied soldiers had pushed across the Po Valley in northern Italy when German forces in Italy finally surrendered on May 2, 1945, two days after the collapse of Berlin.

    The Allied campaign in Italy, launched with some optimism after the Allied victory in North Africa in 1943, turned into a brutal, protracted, and costly slog. American casualties at Anzio alone were 59,000. The difficult combat at places like Monte Cassino pushed many soldiers to their breaking point. After the Italian fascist regime fell from power and was replaced by a new government friendly to the Allies, the battle for Italy became an extended bloodletting between tenacious Allied troops and steadfast German forces. It ended only when the war in Europe ended. By then, more than 300,000 U.S. and British troops who fought in Italy had been killed or were wounded or missing. German casualties totaled around 434,000.

  31. 31 patrickm

    ‘Why didnt allied troops in Italy push on into Germany oh I dont know maybe it was this’…..
    Another complete distortion. I have not said they should have or could have especially given the number of troops that were deployed. The war in Italy ended when the war in Germany ended. The point I was making was that a giant struggle against the Germans was underway in the USSR and they did not get a heavy lift help when it could have been done. It would have cost more naturally but would have spared millions of Soviet peoples and that is what the imperialists could not bother with any more than Obama could care about rag heads!

    All you are doing is proving that alternatives were on offer.

  32. 32 Stephen Owens

    Oh at least 30 years ago I read Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War You have read this yes? It left me with a pretty cynical view of all the participants in WW2. Bill Kleinig lent me a copy. According to Kolko everyone was well governed by their immediate self interests.

  33. 33 Stephen Owens

    “The point I was making was that a giant struggle against the Germans was underway in the USSR and they did not get a heavy lift help when it could have been done. It would have cost more naturally but would have spared millions of Soviet peoples” sorry but I got to call BS on this. Soviet Union casualties that couldnt fight again dead, badly wounded and prisoners
    1941 3 mill
    1942 3.1 mill
    1943 2 mill
    1944 1.6 mill
    1945 0.8 mill
    there you see the big losses happened well before a second front could be launched. So theres no sparing of millions the millions were sacrificed when inexplicably the Red Army pushed millions into Poland just prior to Barbarossa the most supportive interpretation Ive come across is that Stalin was trying a show of force to discourage invasion but the reality is that the German high command couldnt believe their luck and wanted to attack before the Soviets realised what a mistake they had made.

  34. 34 patrickm

    Again you just do not get it!!

    ‘Soviet Union casualties
    that couldnt fight again
    dead, badly wounded
    and prisoners
    1941 3 mill
    1942 3.1 mill
    1943 2 mill
    1944 1.6 mill
    1945 0.8 mill’
    BUT I AM TALKING ABOUT Soviet citizens, not just the soldiers! So to your 10.5 million fighters of all kinds, you can add twice as many again as non combatants killed!

    It is commonly understood that the USSR lost about 27 milion dead in WW2. So then there are all the others and I have no idea how they spread out. It is just not important. What is important is that the attack through Spain was contemplated by the Germans and ‘plans’ varied with their current capability but they were never required and I for one think that they ought to have been, rather than the delay of the 2nd front that came so close to the actual end of the war.

    But what is the point in all this? You are not trying to get at the truth at all. You never build on an agreed understanding and never even attempt to get to one; you never actually try to genuinely sort an issue out. Instead, you just squirm from one dopy position to another.

    Where are you at right now from this discussion? You have NOT openly conceded even 1 point yet I have clobbered you from every angle.

    This is bizarre.

    AN
    ‘…inexplicably the Red Army pushed millions into Poland just prior to Barbarossa…’ shoots your other positions down. These troops might have failed in their mission but what is clear is that they were pushed forward for a defence to a coming war! Let us concede that Stalin was not as astute in the new arts of bliztkrieg as was Gudarian and his mates. Big deal. Neither was anyone else. They all got the shit kicked out of them till strategy took centre stage and the peoples of the USSR became the main players in defeating fascism with the Stalin plan.

    inexplicably ? inexplicably ??

  35. 35 Stephen Owens

    One argument is about the timing of the second front. I have argued that an amphibious landing of a large army needed certain elements to be in place. Weather and air superiority along with victory in the battle of the Atlantic. Other second front ideas such as up through the Iberian peninsular or through the Balkans were considered but rejected and I have made it plain why the Spanish option was discounted. I have put forward evidence and argument. As to soviet citizens killed I imagine that it would mirror the military deaths as citizen deaths are more likely as the enemy advances. As the enemy retreats the citizens of those areas are already dead. Plus latter in the war the Luftwaffe was degraded and couldnt bomb cities any more because they just didnt have the planes. The Soviets won the war because Stalin had gone to great lengths to prepare well especially the training of what 14 million reservists so ultimate credit goes to him but his mistakes in the first year in particular almost cost the the anti fascist forces the war. Hitler lost the war because he underestimated his opponents and disregarded the logistical problem of invading a continent. He thought that the Americans wouldnt be able to put an army into Europe until 1970 yes you read that right 1970.

  36. 36 patrickm

    If people didn’t try to think differently about these big issues we would never have made the required breakthroughs that are what communists were once renowned for. So I ‘let a hundred flowers…’ and all that. From my POV there is a place for thinking out loud and especially for those of us who are genuinely wanting to get to a deeper understanding of such a complex topic as grand strategy. However there still has to be a focus and method to any study. You have to seek agreement on what it is you are enquiring into and what has been established so far etc

    I have an interest in this subject and this period in particular and can agree that people ought to question what is the general thinking in their society or their milieu on plenty of topics and war fighting issues provides ample scope for those so inclined.

    But look what happened over the whys and wherefores of the Syrian revolution when good will and an open honest and above board attitude disappeared. What happened was that people like Arthur, Barry and Dave became totally useless. They simply could not contribute in a respectful and systematic manner. Arthur even became an open and deliberate wrecker when his views were objected to and systematically exposed by me. Now the war in the former Syria is almost unmentionable for them as they continue in their own playpen in almost total silence on the topic.

    Now the sign is just as clear for you Steve as ever it was for them
    – WRONG WAY GO BACK!

    ‘So far Pat you have told some amusing stories such as the British storming French beaches in 1941 yes the same beaches that they scraped their army from in 1940. ‘
    That is a simple fabrication. Point to this or withdraw.

    You have neither pointed to anything nor withdrawn.

    The search function on words like 1941, storming, beaches, 2nd front etc demonstrates that you have no facts to back up your assertion.

    So I will now just call you on this and move on.

    Your overall stand was to scoff at the notion that a 2nd front could have reasonably been launched much sooner than it was, (say 1 year or 18months sooner than it actually was) yet we know that Operation Torch was launched into French Morocco and then after the fighting in Nth Africa was over Sicily was launched and then into Italy.

    Naturally, the German’s had alternative plans to deal with any Spanish 2nd front plan if it were chosen by the US and their junior partners the British empire. These German plans became less realistic as the Eastern front destroyed their men and material day by day. But the Iberian peninsular had very good weather and was easy pickings for the Allies compared to the more distant Italy that WAS chosen and then the delayed 2nd front 11months out from total German defeat.

    You now know more about this topic and quite apparently you are less inclined to scoff at my speculations of what could have been done as an alternative to what was done.

    I do not accept the excuses of the imperialists that they had to wait to 6/june1944 and let the Spanish and the Portugeuse remain under fascist rule for all those subsequent decades. I do not think that my speculation of a surprise attack into Spain and a subsequent peaceful surrender of Portugal is something to be scoffed at and proclaimed as offering up a great benefit to Hitler at all.

    Now that you understand the possibilities better and can see how much more difficult the Germans would have found it to get down to Spain compared to Normandy you can perhaps understand why the USSR felt that it was being left to bleed. The amphibious landing in the Iberian Peninsular would have soon had control of a very solid number of ports and the battle of the Atlantic was already substantially won that much further south to have already permitted Torch and so on into Italy anyway.

    Weather was good and air superiority that much further south was already required for what was done in the alternative as was sufficient control of the sea routes for supply.

    These points are dead ends and obviously so.

    A political choice was made not to do this type of 2nd front and you have probably guessed that if it were up to Stalin the opposite choice would have been made. Stalin would never have let these 2 fascist countries remain fascists at the end of WW2 the US and the British did; just as they butchered the Greeks and robbed them of their democracy.

    You have indeed ‘made it plain why the Spanish option was discounted’ by the imperialists even as you have come to see why their excuses are just that. You now know that such a war was not just a stupid notion or a godsend for Hitler.

    If you think it over there are so many options that were open to war planners to draw the Germans way down and into another logistical and air-cover less trap as they continued to fall further and further behind in the air just as happened to them in Nth Africa that you now must ask yourself why didn’t these bastards liberate that territory.

    Some people would try to argue that it was against the law for them to liberate the peninsular as they tried to tell us it was to liberate the people of Iraq! Not you. You know better than that. You know that if they went to war down there then the German’s would have more quickly lost the air war and the logistics war that they were already loosing.

    2nd front delay obviously cost Soviet lives and like the delay in going into Syria this was of no concern to the US ruling elite.

    You are correct that ‘The Soviets won the war because Stalin had gone to great lengths to prepare well especially the training of what 14 million reservists so ultimate credit goes to him’
    But you fail to note that the mistakes of the French in being totally smashed and the BEF in being completely routed ‘in the first year in particular almost cost the anti fascist forces the war.’

    Instead, you note ‘but his mistakes in the first year in particular almost cost the anti fascist forces the war.’ I get your basic prejudice but really when everyone was rolled up by Gudarian and co early on it’s a bit rich to drop Stalin in it for any special mention.

    ‘Hitler lost the war because he underestimated’ the USSR as a system. He believed it was a rotten house that would collapse if they kicked in the door, and he said so.

    You now ought to know that it is reasonable to believe that the 2nd front was unreasonably delayed and that the imperialist countries war planners didn’t have to land in Normandy first at all and that they spared their own troops more and cared less about Soviet casualties till they scrambled into the fight in the run to get to Berlin lest the Soviets grab the lot.

    At any rate you can now grasp why some of us might think like that rather than take their ruling class word that the communists are just ‘myth-making’ about WW2.

    The Asiatic Marxist proved to be a better strategist than either the aggressor imperialists with their open contempt for democracy or the already have empires imperialists with their phony democracy and appeasing or otherwise Clausewitzian ‘diplomacy’.

    Communists work towards ridding the world of those that control the means of production let alone those that build and run empires. But we are not fools that won’t unite and engage in acts of collective security.

  37. 37 Stephen Owens

    OK I see that you want me to retract my “verballing” of you OK happy to go with the facts as we know them Stalin called for a second front in 1941 you agreed that a second front could have been mounted but you did not mention or mean storming the beaches of France. You argue that Operation Torch showed that Overlord was possible. Im not so sure. Torch was a smaller operation against mainly Vichy troops on less well defended beaches. Operation Torch was useful in that it gave the US troops some experience of combat. As to the allies leaving Spain alone well as I pointed out there was not much to be gained by forcing Spain into the war. Churchill was borderline fascist he had no interest in attacking these type of countries. The Americans were happy for Vichy to remain the French government post war and Churchill supported nazi collaborators into power in Greece these guys wernt going to attack Spain on the basis that they objected to Franco.
    We clearly have different aims I write because Im interested in History and WW2 was the most significant event in world history and there are a lot of myths about it. I just give you another myth. Everyone knows that the Polish cavalry charged German tanks jesus Arthur cited the exact story in a previous discussion but it was pure Nazi propaganda to ridicule the Poles. This myth still arises when quite well educated people discuss WW2
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty

  38. 38 Stephen Owens

    Operation Torch lasted what 3 days? Much more pertinent was the battle that followed when the US met the German army
    The Battle of Kasserine Pass was a battle of the Tunisia Campaign of World War II that took place in February 1943. Kasserine Pass is a 2-mile-wide (3.2 km) gap in the Grand Dorsal chain of the Atlas Mountains in west central Tunisia.

    The Axis forces, led by Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, were primarily from the Afrika Korps Assault Group, elements of the Italian Centauro Armoured Division and two Panzer divisions detached from the 5th Panzer Army, while the Allied forces consisted of the U.S. II Corps (Major General Lloyd Fredendall),[5] the British 6th Armoured Division (Major-General Charles Keightley) and other parts of the First Army (Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson).

    The battle was the first major engagement between American and Axis forces in World War II in Africa. Inexperienced and poorly led American troops suffered many casualties and were quickly pushed back over 50 miles (80 km) from their positions west of Faïd Pass.[5] This result confirmed a prediction of Winston Churchill, who had strongly advocated that the invasion of France as laid out in the proposed 1942 plan Operation Roundup be delayed until the Allies could support such an ambitious undertaking, which would give the American troops time to get up to speed with the realities of war against the experienced and well-equipped Italians and Germans.

    After the early defeat, elements of the U.S. II Corps, with British reinforcements, rallied and held the exits through mountain passes in western Tunisia, defeating the Axis offensive. As a result of the battle, the U.S. Army instituted sweeping changes of unit organization and replaced commanders[5] and some types of equipment.

  39. 39 Stephen Owens

    I also want to engage with anyone interested in Soviet history from a communist perspective
    Lets look at an episode.
    Do you love Konstantin Rokossovsky I love Konstantin Rokossovsky He was clearly a great general. When the post war victory parade was held in Moscow 2 Generals were allowed to enter the parade on white horses. One was Zhukov and the other was Rokossovky but you have to ask yourself where was Rokossovsky before the war. Well before the war he was in prison being tortured. (He never spoke about his imprisonment but other prisoners say he was tortured and his daughter stated that he always carried a pistol telling her that if ever arrested again he wouldnt go alive) His wife and daughter were sent to internal exile unable to hold a job because no one would hire the family of a traitor. Now clearly Rossokovsky was not a traitor but what does it say about socialist justice that innocent people can be arrested and tortured. Now if Rossokovsky was innocent what about others what about Tukhachevsky leader of the Red Army was he innocent? Who would know, well not you or me but Zhukov would know. What did Zhukov say? Once Stalin was dead Zhukov lead a campaign for Tukhachevsky’s complete rehabilitation because he was totally innocent. How can communists remain willfully ignorant of such information?

  40. 40 Stephen Owens

    Surely Im allowed to post a clip that shows exactly what I said in my previous post Here is Zhukov and Rokossovsky riding in on white horses to lead the victory parade
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCWVM5bUZmE&t=6s

  41. 41 Stephen Owens

    Ah yet another of my errors Rokossovsky is on the black horse.

  42. 42 Stephen Owens

    I got to tell you man this Spain thing is problematic. A few years earlier at the end of the civil war Franco’s army was over a million strong so there are that number of trained experienced fascist troops available. During WW2 Franco set the number at 750,000 soldiers 35,000 air force and 25,000 Navy. Now the army alone is 3 times the size of the 6th army trapped at Stalingrad. Are we really suggesting that to help those at Stalingrad (Zhukovs troops not those of Paulus) that we facilitate their entry into the war. My Mao is a bit rusty but Im sure he didnt say ‘make sure you make your enemies unite’

  43. 43 patrickm

    OK I see that you want me to retract my “verballing” of you OK happy to go with the facts as we know them Stalin called for a second front in 1941 you agreed that a second front could have been mounted but you did not mention or mean storming the beaches of France.

    ‘You argue that Operation Torch showed that Overlord was possible.’
    No I don’t.

    I say that you had not considered the up side of attacking the clear skied Spain with so many opportunities available and so many difficulties for the Germans COMPARED to what was chosen and that was the Italian campaign (and no Iberian Peninsular war ever). The Italy front could also have been opened a bit later anyway.

    You have thought this view stupid or even comical with ‘not much to be gained by forcing Spain into the war.’ and then you pointed out why the imperialists would not take the pressure off of the USSR and bring on such a serious fight. That only highlights my point.

    If I were correct about bringing on an air dominance war as early as possible by dragging the Germans down into Spain and as soon as the Sea Bees built all the new bases in Portugal and Spain that this dominance would have also worked against the U Boats that would have had to have ranged further south thus the whole effort would have greatly extended the Germans and also speed up the delivery of the 3 million plus troops onto the ground of Europe rather that have them holliday in Britain first.

    With the protective guns of the Navy to cover any landings and also air cover from well supplied bases in French and then very quickly Spanish Morroco, YOUR valid point about the missing German air force would soon bear fruit.

    Instead they… ‘supported nazi collaborators into power in Greece these guys wernt going to attack Spain on the basis that they objected to Franco.’

    You point out that a lot of myths still survive even among well educated people and I’m not going to dispute that now am I. But that reality does not help us advance out broader thinking on who was or was not the best of what was on offer.

    You think The Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia was more pertinent than Torch and then Sicily and then Italy.

    ‘The battle was the first major engagement … This result confirmed a prediction of Winston Churchill, who had strongly advocated that the invasion of France as laid out in the proposed 1942 plan Operation Roundup be delayed until the Allies could support such an ambitious undertaking, which would give the American troops time to get up to speed with the realities of war against the experienced and well-equipped Italians and Germans.’

    Yet
    ‘After the early defeat, elements of the U.S. II Corps, with British reinforcements, rallied and held the exits through mountain passes in western Tunisia, defeating the Axis offensive. As a result of the battle, the U.S. Army instituted sweeping changes of unit organization and replaced commanders[5] and some types of equipment.’

    So they learnt more fighting than sitting in Blighty; and my point stands.

    The imperialist leaders chose not to fight much more when they really could have! You thought that they were all just doing the best they could and were not out to freeload on the USSR while they bled and you have said so. This to me is so clearly wrong that a 2nd front 11month from total defeat at the doors of the bunker is dirty on the face of that time frame alone.

    Communists are not ‘willfully ignorant of such information’ as you wish to make the main point in all you bring forward. That is the whole point of giving a % grading to Stalin. What we are saying is that your emphasis is incorrect. We are clearly saying that Stalin was the best on offer and Mao was even better in China. I think that history is pointing at the revisionists as an obvious bunch of counterrevolutionaries. You have stated that it would have been better if some hero had put a bullet in uncles Joe and Mao’s respective heads. That is a big gap to cross and remain a supporter of the Soviet effort in WW2 that you now praise uncle Joe for his preparation for and perhaps some leadership of.

    If you were less slippery we would know better what you had changed your mind on, but I repeat I have seen no worthwhile refutation of Stalin’s analysis as explained to his own 18th congress. The actions that he took as a direct result of that analysis made good sense to me.

    So you still think ‘this Spain thing is problematic.’ If Spain had ‘750,000 soldiers 35,000 air force and 25,000 Navy.’ then the western allies would have had a lot more prisoners to deal with even sooner than they did all those extra Italians and so forth. I am suggesting that to help Zhukovs troops at Stalingrad, German troops get dragged into a bigger version of their unwinnable Nth African war. That war came from going to the aid of Italy.

    By attacking an even weaker fascism in Spain the logistic problems would have begun for them again and so on to the quicker lack of air cover. They could not keap up the supply effort and that is as simple as that. The exact same problems as the fight in Italy only further from the Germans and closer to the US ‘arsenal of democracy’.

    Your ‘Mao is a bit rusty’ and yes …’he didn’t say ‘make sure you make your enemies unite’’ but you forget that Italy WAS chosen. It didn’t have to be and Spain was a far better choice IMV.

    Don’t you even have a reasonable doubt in your mind that 11mths out from total defeat of a completely shattered Germany at the doors of the fuhrer’s bunker was NOT launching a 2nd front as soon as possible?

    Don’t you think that taking so few casualties (as they did) was an indication that Stalin’s complaint has more than just a little substance to it?

  44. 44 Stephen Owens

    I dont think that I have ever advocated putting a bullet in Stalins head. I did speculate about some “hero” putting a bullet in Maos head but I think that if you get my meaning it was in the context of great men being cut down at the pinnacle of their achievement like Lincoln and Gandhi. An old history teacher of mine used to speculate that these men were “lucky” in that they didnt have to sort out the mess and died a heroes death.
    Its sort of funny being chided by a follower of Stalin about an off hand reference I made to assassination.
    I mean I could have been referencing the Great Leap Famine much like the Bengal famine of 1943 which claimed they say 3 million. Churchill refused famine relief I guess if his successor was inclined to provide famine relief then a bullet in Churchills head 1943 wouldnt be a bad idea.
    I was reading yesterday that Zhukov used to keep a suitcase with spare underwear with him in 1947 because he feared arrest without a change of underwear.

  45. 45 Stephen Owens

    As to do I have doubts about D Day coming with only 11 months to go well when I look at Anzio and Roundup and Diepe and Market Garden and I look at how close D Day came to failure and how the advance was slowed by lack of supplies and how hard the Red Ball express was strained I think that the second front shortened the war and if it had failed in 43 there would be no second front and the war would have gone till say 46. Maybe they did hold back for bad reasons but I see no evidence for that and I am quite prepared to be swayed by evidence nothing else really counts.

  46. 46 Stephen Owens

    “We are clearly saying that Stalin was the best on offer…” This is wrong Trotsky clearly had a better grasp of reality than did Stalin. When Trotsky was in USSR he campaigned for rapid industrialisation which Stalin opposed. When Trotsky was defeated Stalin became a convert to rapid industrialisation. When Stalin thought that a KMT CPC merger was a good idea Trotsky thought not. The CPC handed over membership lists that the KMT used to eliminate Communists. When Hitler was on the rise Trotsky argued for co operation with social democrats Stalin argued that Nazis were equally as bad as SDP even to the point where KPD joined in Nazi campaign called Red referendum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Prussian_Landtag_referendum
    In Spain Trotsky argued for anti colonial policy of CP to be implemented and sweeping land reform to mobilize Spain’s 1 million landless peasants but Stalin in his search for collective security partners put halt to “radicalism” in case it scared the horses. Trotsky opposed the arrest and execution of thousands of party members in USSR A party killing many of its own members disgusting. Trotsky opposed the attempts at getting collective security agreements which he correctly saw as not worth the paper they would be written on.
    On every major issue that they differed on Trotsky’s position was superior. Stalin wasnt a good leader he lurched from one extreme position to another ie 1930 arguing Hitler no worse than “Social Fascists” to 1936 position of uniting with everyone who wasnt an actual fascist. He murdered many talented communists which is one reason why when he died the leadership group were such dolts and he murdered Trotsky at the time both the worlds leading revolutionary thinker and an impoverished stateless refugee wow what a threat.

  47. 47 Stephen Owens

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utlg3Zjyyuc if you delete it I will just post it again

  48. 48 Stephen Owens

    What you have no answer to my July 3rd post? Stalin is the personification of the revolution in retreat. 1917 is the high watermark worker control of industry, free association, free speech, participatory democracy then theres 3 years of civil war and they had one man management, terror, no freedom of association assembly or speech and terror was applied to not only opponents of the revolution but also to the ranks of its supporters. Then there is retreat on the theoretical front in the form of Socialism in one country and then terror is extended to party members. Now many of these things can be defended on the basis that they were necessary at the time to defend the revolution but part of the degeneration is seen in that reverses suddenly became advances much like the Japanese army who had no word for retreat so they had to call it an advance towards the rear. To many Communists have deluded themselves that a retreat is an advance towards the rear. If you ever want to be relevant again you have to examine your ideas root and branch. “Stalin was the best on offer…” Jesus wept.

  49. 49 Stephen Owens

    Thought that you might like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzTy4rBVDJ8

  50. 50 Stephen Owens

    Having looked into it a bit I think that there is a case for an earlier second front purely on military grounds. The soviet winter campaign of 1941-2 came close to defeating the Nazi army and victory would have shortened the war by several years. The soviet counter offensive after the march on Moscow had been halted almost encircled army group center. So during those months a British attack somewhere in Europe could have stopped Hitler re enforcing army group center from the West and might have handed the Soviets a victory. Ill do some more reading and see what could have been done.

  51. 51 Stephen Owens

    On reflection the UK could probably do little in the way of diversionary attack. At the time of the Red Armies counter attack Dec 41 – Jan 42 the UK was in a sorry state yes the Blitz was over (just) but its army was losing to the Germans in North Africa and the far East army was about to surrender at Singapore. Ark Royal had been sunk as had Prince of Wales and Repulse. What the British could and did do was to deliver supplies, in 1941 that meant 750 tanks, 800 fighter planes, 1,400 vehicles and 100,000 tons of general supplies. Not too shoddy for a country that is ‘secretly’ hoping for a German victory.

  52. 52 Stephen Owens

    Pat in going for Italy the allies first established air superiority. They had this sooner in the Mediterranean than was achieved over north west Europe
    https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Chronicles/renner.pdf

  53. 53 patrickm

    The ‘appeasers’ and their supporters have hidden their real position of active and massive war mongering from most people in the west and while Stalin is not read nor understood they will get away with this. They will do so with the active collaboration of Trots who ought to know that their focus achieves this outcome for the apologists for the appeasement policies of the worlds dominant ruling class imperialists of that bygone era.

    As we currently see right across the globe there is a dead end in this pseudoleft that is already apparent as issues like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Mali and on and on keep demonstrating.

    My advise to Steve is to stop running away to hide in history but rather systematically deal with what is now a VERY big change in where in 2019 Steve stands from the bad old days in ISO land. You are NOT with the loons in Rundle Mall who think themselves left and support Putin and Assad.

    Steve now critically supports the deployment of the US, British, French and other western forces to the MENA region!

    Steve advocates draining the swamp theory as the strategy for democratic revolution not just in the MENA region but across the globe!

    Just remember that if there is backsliding (and there often is by our ruling classes) that will not change what must be done to defeat the anti democrats and spread democracy. The forceful overthrow of tyranny will be required as there is NO other way forward.

    As we see in Hong Kong ‘the capitalist roaders will know no peace’ and democracy is the way forward for the communist revolution! The ruling capitalists in their ‘communist party’ will not give up their dictatorship! They will impose their terror until they are stopped by the coming revolution for a new form of ‘new democracy’.

    It is right to rebel!

    Steve has returned yet again to repetition on this very theme.

  54. 54 Stephen Owens

    I think that we agree that people want democracy and nations want countries/autonomy/rights within a country.
    We also agree that the USA can impose democracy on countries as they did in Italy, Germany and Japan.
    How ever our disagreement comes with doing this on the cheap. Re modelling Europe as a prosperous post war collection of democracies was mind bogglingly expensive.
    Iraq was just mind boggling. The pro war group said that the invasion would be a cakewalk, that causalities would be counted in the hundreds and that the Iraq war would be self funding. Now all this turned out to be delusional but you bought and apparently still believe the delusion.
    It’s just impossible to argue with the deluded they are just always correct no counter evidence ever dents their argument.
    You think that Iraq was a success you believe that the struggles for democracy in Syria and Afghanistan are ongoing.
    Syria is over Assad won
    Afghanistan is over the Taliban won.
    As George Orwell said in response to people who said that no one wins wars. He argued that if the enemy holds a victory parade down your main street you can be pretty sure that they won.

  55. 55 Stephen Owens

    You can always point to my inconsistencies I am in a process of working stuff out.
    But if we look at the current problem what do we see.
    NATO is spoiling for a fight. It claims innocence but really running your alliance up to the targets borders is hardly innocence. It would like a fight but it would prefer that Ukraine do the fighting.
    Putin may feel that he is backed into a corner so far that he has to fight back which would be awful.
    Ukraine should defend its borders thats what a Nation state exists to do.
    The big question is will Putin be OK in backing down?

  56. 56 patrickm

    Your above post is bonkers!

  57. 57 patrickm

    1/ Ukraine is not a nation-state! That is exactly what Russian fascist aggression relies on for persisting with its ongoing war to take further territory from the multinational government of Ukraine.

    2/ Naturally enough all fighting democrats must agree that Ukraine must defend itself from this blatantly anti-democratic Russian aggression. (Pacifist types can make their case as best they can but I have no interest in that argument for obvious reasons). It is what I would call -quite obviously- the current and gross example of a fascist opportunistic ongoing military campaign. It is led by the same political force that went to war in an informal and undeclared fashion with a coalition that I called the HIRISE group in order to preserve its own influence in what used to be Syria but is now only the current frozen enclaves that remain at war.

    3/ The best way to defend is to unite with the democratic countries of NATO and others. Build a bigger armed force as an ongoing activity and continue to equip it and train it to the highest standards that can be achieved, while not conceding at any point to the aggression that Putin already launched in 2014. (All this is just as applicable to Georgia and others BTW).

    4/ Just as the Ukraine anti-democrats got into bother less than a decade later so have the Belarus thugs. Putin is already acting to prevent democracy from making any headway in Belarus. The peoples of the world are deeply desirous of democracy and economic progress but they are being tremendously terrorised and made to wave their flags of support for those that terrorise them. Everywhere Putin turns he continues to dig his anti-democratic hole, but the peoples of the world still resist.

    Putin in overextending his forces will eventually -in the course of this very protracted struggle- get into even more push and shove situations against people like Erdogan who has, is now and will continue to, best him. The fascists are fundamentally paper tigers think Iran or Nth Korea or Hong Kong, or Myanmar and on and on it goes! Mao said these tigers change from real tigers to paper tigers, and when it came to the biggest of them all in WW2 that most assuredly did happen.

    5/ For now the real tiger has much blood to spill in this protracted revolutionary war for democracy so the expansion of NATO is a very important part of the general development of an anti-fascist group of nations able to take on the enemy that is spread right across the world and for various reasons on the move!

    6/ Australia must unite much more firmly with the democracies and I welcome the small moves that have been made by this current government. I think that an ALP government would weaken Australia.

  58. 58 Stephen Owens

    “1/ Ukraine is not a nation-state! That is exactly what Russian fascist aggression relies on for persisting with its ongoing war to take further territory from the multinational government of Ukraine.”
    Where are you getting this from, have I said that Ukraine is not a nation state? Do I agree with Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are one people? I doubt that even Putin believes this nonsense
    “2/ Naturally enough all fighting democrats must agree that Ukraine must defend itself from this blatantly anti-democratic Russian aggression.” Well of course Ukraine should defend its sovereignty
    “3/ The best way to defend is to unite with the democratic countries of NATO and others.” But that is not whats going on. NATO is not uniting with Ukraine NATO is sending them weapons and then only some in NATO are doing that.
    This is the way I see it. NATO has been quite provocative positioning military assets on Russian borders NATO is not unaware of what it is doing it has been pursuing a deliberate policy of stripping away buffer states without giving Russia any assurance that this process is not aimed at them, how could they this policy is aimed at them.
    My point is that war serves no purpose for Putin what are his war aims?
    So what is he up to? Well I think that he raised the temperature to get concessions but he has failed NATO has called his bluff. For him a war would be a disaster he hasnt enough troops to take all of Ukraine so he can only take another slice but why? Another slice of Ukraine is pretty useless plus it pits him against Ukraine while NATO sits back and watches.
    Just tell me what his war aim is?
    No one starts a war unless they know what they want and think they can take it or think that their situation is so bad that they should come out swinging. I put Putin in neither camp and look he is currently in China enjoying the Olympics.
    Australia is irrelevant.

  59. 59 patrickm

    February 1, 2022 at 1:06 pm Ukraine should defend its borders thats what a Nation state exists to do.

    You called Ukraine ‘a Nation state’ and I am pointing out to you that it is not! Got it? That reality is what Putin is making use of to hive off the portions that he feels like the Russian dominated country of Russia (actually a giant former empire) is entitled to.

  60. 60 Stephen Owens

    Im not clear what your point is heres a definition of Nation State
    “nation state
    a sovereign state of which most of the citizens or subjects are united also by factors which define a nation, such as language or common descent.”
    I am saying that Ukraine fits this definition
    If you are arguing that Ukraine is not a nation then what is it?

  61. 61 patrickm

    It is a country! A country that wants its independence!

  62. 62 patrickm

    patrickm
    March 2, 2014 at 2:53 am Edit

    Never a dull moment with Putin’s Russia.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/world/europe/aleksei-navalny.html?_r=0

    If Ukrainians handle this patiently and move forward in small steps then Putin will gradually be isolated and be left looking like the thug that he is because this can’t just be about Crimea. The national divisions that have been in the Ukraine from the start are still there – but there are less Putin supporters now on both sides of his border and that will be the case when he faces elections again in 4 years time.

    IF the Ukrainian revolutionaries deliver more democracy and direct more efforts at solving the economic issues and they keep control of their hot heads, that’s an eternity in the current context; he is 61 now and I am confident that he will try to retain power for another 6 year term when he is 65 and if the trend continues he would have to rig the election to ‘win’. But what the world will look like by then well… What he requires is drama now. He wants an excuse and if he can’t get one he will create one.

    For now this is the most important type of map
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/01/24/this-is-the-one-map-you-need-to-understand-ukraines-crisis/

    When it comes to the middle to long game the Crimea is only the first bite and the invasion of the ⅓ plus of Ukraine that Putin wants ‘back’ in the fold and in his tender care – for the sake of all Russians no less – is still to unfold. But come it will as the one area makes little sense by itself -you only have to look at the map to get the bigger picture that Putin will want to deal with.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/world/europe/crimeas-bloody-past-is-a-key-to-its-present.html?&action=click&contentCollection=Europe&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article

    At some point, after laying claim to be the protector of all the Russian peoples’ in territories that the current Russian state borders, Putin will no doubt make the inevitable ‘I have no further territorial ambitions’ speech. But as GWB once remarked of Putin in deadpan delivery ‘with some leaders you never know if they are telling you the truth but with Vlad, you always know’.

  63. 63 Stephen Owens

    You seem to be having some confusion I called Ukraine a Nation state and you have “corrected” me by saying its not a nation state its a country so I thought that I would provide you with a definition.
    “You may be wondering about the difference between a ‘country’ and a ‘State.’ A country is simply another word for State. The United States can be referred to as either a ‘country’ or a ‘State.’ People use the terms interchangeably. However, in political science, and especially in the area of international relations, the term ‘State’ is used as it is more precise and less ambiguous, as ‘country’ can refer to other things, such as a rural environment.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

    Ukraine is clearly a country a nation and a nation state as these terms are interchangeable
    Its just like Australia we are a country we are a nation and we are a nation state. There are subtle differences but generally the words can be interchanged.
    I guess that you could remove all the people and Australia would still be a country you could have a nation that lacks a country like the Kurds but if its a nation state it indicates that there are people and they have a government that meets the internationally recognised criteria that constitutes a nation state

  64. 64 Stephen Owens

    Just answer one question. What are Putin’s war aims?

  65. 65 patrickm

    The war started in 2014 and you are only now asking ‘What are Putin’s war aims?’ I presume you also accept his ‘en passant’ capture of Belarus as already having been achieved. But you have avoided any reference to that aspect of the fascist military maneuvering currently underway on such a grand scale. For example a 5,000-word joint communique with the Chinese fascists is of more than just passing interest to me. The Russians are not even permitted to compete at the Olympics and Putin turns up and that is the result!

    Putin may well be ‘bluffing’ but that would have zero chance of resolving the war that he started in 2014. So my bet is more war-making and probably sooner rather than later.

    I’m still shaking my head at your February 6, 2022 at 12:13 am post. How you lose the plot to the extent that you do is a mystery to me.

  66. 66 patrickm

    perhaps these types of ongoing-war aims
    Stephen Owens
    January 20, 2022 at 7:06 pm Edit

    Oh I forgot to mention that Putin could bring Moldova and Transnistria into play. I think that there are still Russian troops stationed there. Grab territory along the Ukrainian southern border there by linking up the Donetsk Peoples Republic – Crimea – Transnistria. That’s doable.
    The advantage would be that all the pro Russian areas in Ukraine and Moldova would have a land link plus Crimea could access water.

  67. 67 Stephen Owens

    Im asking you what YOU think his war aims are. Bluffing is not a war aim. ‘en passant’ is not a war aim. I did scrape the bottom of the barrel and suggest a land grab in southern Ukraine but maybe sarcasm doesnt translate that well.
    Just stop dodging and answer the question.
    What do you think his war aims are?
    If you cant think of any then just say so.

  68. 68 patrickm

    I have already done so -above- yet you don’t even notice. You instead think a country can exist without people so I guess the head of state could be a Kenyan Giraffe. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are examples of countries that do not satisfactorily resolve their national issues. Tibet and Ireland might give you clues as well. But as you know already Lenin prior to WW1 nominated Stalin as the leading Marxist theoretician on the national question. To the best of my (very limited knowledge Trotsky never demurred on this point but you can correct me if you know better). This was long before Stalin became his or your bogey man. ‘Marxism and the National Question.’ fully explains the issue that is going right over your head the more I try to explain it to you! Yet you already said that the country of Ukraine was divided and has a big Russian sector in the east. Fucked if I know how to further explain the obvious to you. You seem satified with definitions written in crayon.

  69. 69 patrickm

    “‘en passant’ is not a war aim.’

    So you think that ensconcing columns of Russian armour and air assets and many thousands of Troops into Belarus as part of its reincorporation into the greater Russian enterprise is not a war aim?

    I wonder what a war aim would look like. Anyway, Putin has assured the world that he has no intention of invading and we have that master of international politics Macron on the job. Trudeau was unfortunately otherwise engaged. So all is well till… at least Sunday!

    Oh, and how good was today’s photo op. Olaf the happy snowman is after a bit of gas heating!

  70. 70 Stephen Owens

    Stalin was an expert on the National question no argument there but is it relevant to the issue at hand or did you introduce him as a distraction? Putin’s role in Belarus is important but is it a Ukrainian war aim or did you raise it as a distraction?
    It seems to me that your are struggling to articulate what Putin’s war aims are in Ukraine and therefore you bring up Macron, Trudeau, Kenyan giraffes, Chinese fascists and the Olympics.
    I will just restate the question. What are Putin’s war aims in regard to Ukraine?

  71. 71 Stephen Owens

    Just to answer a question yes Trotsky did very much demur. He didn’t think that Stalin had written the works on the national question. He based this on the fact that most of the Marxist writing on this subject was written in German which Stalin didn’t speak. Trotsky thought that the work was mainly that of Bukharin who was close to Stalin and thought of by many as the leading intellect within the party.
    Bukharin was close to Stalin. They used to live in the same building. When Stalin’s wife killed herself in their apartment Bukharin offered to exchange apartments so that Stalin would not have to be constantly reminded of this. Some have suggested that Stalin tried to save Bukharin’s life by sending him to Paris to collect documents but really to give him the opportunity just not to return but as Bukharin’s wife pointed out Bukharin could not bring himself to believe that Stalin would have him killed. When Bukharin was on death row he wrote to Stalin addressed him with his most intimate name Kobar and was still asking what purpose would his death fulfil.

  72. 72 Stephen Owens

    If you look up Bukharin’s bio on Wikipedia it says
    “…while in Vienna in 1913, he helped the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin write an article, “Marxism and the National Question,” at Lenin’s request.”

  73. 73 Stephen Owens

    Back to the issue at hand. What are Putin’s war aims?

  74. 74 patrickm

    The following is being moved to the thread that it belongs. Note the dates.

    Stephen Owens January 30, 2022 at 10:02 am

    So can you answer me this. When Germany invaded Poland was it correct to issue Germany with an ultimatum and on failing to withdraw troops was it correct to declare war?

    patrickm January 30, 2022 at 11:27 am

    The imperialist British etc plan to destroy the revolutionary USSR was in tatters with the surprise non-aggression pact. So given the new context rather obviously yes.

    Stephen Owens January 30, 2022 at 6:48 pm

    You need to just step back from the propaganda and take another look. Britain was in an alliance with the Czar. He was over throne by the Provisional government. Britain was in an alliance with the Provisional government which was over throne by the Bolsheviks. Britain was not in an alliance with them so it supported the Whites in their attempt to restore the Czar and restore the alliance.
    Once the Bolshevik’s had established themselves as the only people even likely to hold power the attitude of the British government changed the blockade was ended and Anglo Soviet trade agreement was signed diplomatic recognition was granted then cancelled and then granted again I think in 1927.
    Britain did have an evil plan to overthrow the Bolsheviks in 1918 but this was a dead letter by 1921 and only useful for propaganda purposes rather than serious analysis.

    Stephen Owens February 5, 2022 at 8:58 am

    Stalinists are gymnasts. Here you are saying that it was correct for Britain and France to declare war but the Stalinists at the time were very critical of Britain and France for starting this new Imperialist war. As George Orwell pointed out at the time Stalinists overnight went from ferocious critics of fascism to people who questioned whether the Gestapo really existed.
    Stalinists supported the Border and Friendship treaty between Germany and the USSR always claiming that it contained no secret agreements which was a feat when you realise that it did contain secret agreements.

    Stephen Owens January 30, 2022 at 12:24 pm

    Several attempts to post this on HIRSE all fail luckily Im now saving stuff.

    But this is the problem. You argue that it was correct to declare war on Nazi Germany in 1939 but that was not the position of the Communist movement at the time. The International Communist movement declared it to be an imperialist war and opposed involvement.

    The British plan to destroy the USSR is a myth.

    If the British had a plan to destroy the USSR then the M-R pact was playing into their hands. They would have said sorry Poland theres nothing we can do (which was pretty much the case)The M-R pact gave the Nazis a gateway to invade the USSR.

    If the USSR had been the real target then the Winter war would have given the British the perfect opportunity to effect their plan. Ally itself with Finland and Germany to defend a democracy from Soviet aggression.
    British bad intent exists but in this case it makes no sense, why declare war when one more step in appeasement would work just fine.
    My opinion is that the British were following their 500 year long policy of balance of power politics in mainland Europe.

    The British ruling class hated the USSR no argument there but the USSR didnt pose much risk to British interests because the USSR just didnt pose a risk to the international order.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV1h_XotlLo

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