Here’s a question kick around:
At the end of the day, if you had to choose a post-WWII Europe governed by the Nazis or dominated by Communism under Stalin, which would you choose?
The ‘gut’ response that we’ve been programmed since childhood to give is ‘well, I’m certainly not choosing Hitler,’ but here are a few things to mull over before you actually answer, some serious, some less so.
1) The total number of people killed by Stalin through his purges, warfare, gulags, POW executions etc. ranges from 3 to 60 million. If you blame Hitler for every death in WWII, then obviously even the 60 million compares favorably to the Nazis. However, if you take a second world war as an inevitable outcome of the Paris Peace Process in 1919 and the Great Depression (which I do), then you have to inevitably argue that the war deaths in WW2 would have occurred WITH OR WITHOUT the Nazis in power. This is, of course, theory-crafting, but, at the end of the day, if we merely hold the Nazis accountable for, say, 4-7 million Holocaust-related deaths (unforgivable to be sure, but not tens of millions of people), then Stalin beats them in terms of brutality by a staggering number.
2) Regardless of all the fighting that went on in WWII, eastern Europe was still controlled by a dictator, just not a fascist one. Poland’s sovereignty, the original pretext for the declarations of war, was rendered forfeit anyway. Whereas the eastern European countries seized under Nazi invasion would have been nominally capitalist, they were reduced to pauper states under socialism, and the stagnation of their economies is still evident today.
3) The Nazis had better uniforms, spoke a more evil-sounding language (you have to admit that German sounds brutal), and were easily the most interesting and diabolical bad guys in history. The communists, as it turned out, were kind of bungling dopes. I mean, am I the only person who sighed loudly upon hearing that Indiana Jones’ main antagonists in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull were Russians? It didn’t exactly pan out well either, did it? Let’s face it, if we’re going to be squaring off in a Cold War with one group of evil guys or another, I’d rather take the ones who do evil in style and don’t come off looking like complete amateurs every time they threaten you.
So, yeah, what do you think? I mean, after World War 2 we ended up in a 45 year cold war regardless. Even if the Nazis had ‘won’ WWII (IE defeated Russia, taken England in a cross channel invasion) there never, ever would have been an invasion on the U.S (you’re talking about the same logistical nightmare that would have prevented the U.S. from invading Europe if England had fallen. No staging ground in England means no D-Day, and the Nazis couldn’t have pulled it off in reverse). Therefore, you probably would have seen a similar cold war develop between the two superpowers after the dust had settled even if the Nazis had been victorious. To a degree, history would have remained largely the same, albeit with different antagonists glaring at each other from across the Atlantic.
As it actually happened, after all the carnage in WWII there were still bad guys in power, and they still held half of Europe. The Russians weren’t really good at what they did though: everywhere they went was ruined by their occupation, and even without a major catalyst like a war, they still couldn’t hold their empire together in 1989.
So, if you were FORCED to choose, who would you take, the Nazis or the Communists? We saw what we got with one… having been there, would you take a different route if given the opportunity to pick your foe?
Subtext: I am NOT a neo-Nazi, or Nazi sympathizer, or anything of the sort. It just struck me tonight that the Nazis made far better opponents than did the Russians, and since we’d have likely been stuck being on the brink of war with one or the other for half a century, it might be interesting to have a choice as to who you’d prefer to be dealing with.
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Fascism was a reaction to the growing Communist threat in Europe… good, bad, or otherwise, the Nazi party was a Fascist movement. There were also similar movements in other European countries – even the US. In fact, the Spanish civil war was a proxy war against Communism, and many Americans found themselves in League with the Fascists.
If Hitler hadn’t been such a lunatic (possibly evil, if you believe in such a thing), Europe would have quickly united against Communism, Russia would have been defeated, and we’d have all entered a world of amazing prosperity and friendship that would have been the total opposite of the Cold War.
Communists…
china is communist and they make all sorts of neat stuff for us. just imagine if europe was communist, they’d make all sorts of stuff like swedish meatballs and pizza and expensive leather boots.
communism was a social experiment that altermatly failed, but te natizs were just nasty.
id go with communism
im sorry, but your facts are BS
flip a coin
I would choose the Nazis only because of the German people. The Russians in many ways are like the Chinese in that they are Xenophobic and Isolationists. China had the Great Wall. Russia had the Iron Curtain both were designed to keep the World at bay. Hitler was a nut case. No doubt about it but there might have been circumstances for his insanity. Hitler was an artist but he also was a house painter to support himself when his art didn’t sell those days they used Lead based paints and we all know what that does. Towards the end of the war he also used Meth Amphetamine to keep awake which was invented by the Japanese during WW2 and then would crash using morphine so maybe some of his insanity was self inflicted and not inherited. Gen. Patton was in favor of rearming the germans to fight the commies. and My Father who serve with the 82 Airborne Division during that war couldn’t stand the russian soldiers and called them rapists and Murderers. there are actually accounts of airborne units engaging in combat with there so called Russian allies
Interesting the presuppositions in your question – that it is only addressed to Americans safely across the Atlantic. Some of us actually live in Europe.
Actually the are both the same system. Nazi stands for the National Socialistic German Worker’s Party. The USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics. In both systems it is the government that decides everything. That is why there were all of the book burnings in Nazi Germany. The State decided what you could and could not read. What you could and could not watch or listen to and so on. The same held for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union never reached a state of communism. True communism can be seen working in the Catholic church. Just look at the monasteries and cloisters. “Each according to his needs. Each according to his abilities”. So in that sense I would have to go with communism. The only problem is that communism works on a small scale. Why would anybody want to work twice as hard and get half as much as someone else, but then again I wouldn’t like the government telling me everything I can and can not do.
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