re: The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How Winston Churchill Ruined Europe

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This isn't about agreeing or disagreeing; this is about ignoring historical facts and inventing your own truths

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I’m not doing that. As I’ve gotten older I just question everything I’ve been taught.

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this is about ignoring historical facts and inventing your own truths to suit an agenda.

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Victor Davis Hanson had a pretty nice takedown of Cooper yesterday.

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It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.

The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East.

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Hitler further assumed the liquidation of Soviet-style Marxism was inseparable from the destruction of all the Jews in the East, whose wartime persecution began in Poland just days after the German invasion in September 1939 and well before any Allied response.

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Hitler ended the eight-month phony war after the destruction of Poland by invading Western Europe in April and May 1940, but not because he was frustrated that France and Britain had not taken up his initial peace offers. Instead, for all his hysterics and frustrations, he understood well that they had grasped the envisioned permanently subservient roles for both nations in a postwar Hitlerian world. And Germany knew that it had finally shocked naive European governments to their senses by the precivilizational brutality it displayed in Poland.

Instead, Hitler restarted the war in Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France because he wished to complete his pan-European conquests both before his long-planned and inevitable turn eastward against his erstwhile partner but existential enemy the Soviet Union, and before America inevitably entered the war on the side of the Allies.

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The Luftwaffe first indiscriminately bombed civilian targets in Poland to instill panic, terror, and mass death. It continued that tactic unapologetically in Holland by destroying the center of Rotterdam during the first two weeks of May 1940. And despite Hitler’s false claims that the Allies had started bombing civilians first, he soon honed his air strategy of incinerating civilians against Coventry and London.

In terms of soldiers lost versus civilians killed, Britain waged a less lethal war than most of the other belligerents, losing fewer soldiers than its two allies and killing far fewer of their enemies as well.

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In sum, Germany and its fascist allies started World War II, initiated the mass warring on civilians, and institutionalized genocide. And they felt empowered to do so not because of Allied aggression or terrorism, but because of initial Western European appeasement, American isolationism, and Russian collaboration. That is what enticed Hitler and the Axis powers into starting a war they soon had no chance of winning, once their formidable enemies sized up their true intentions and likewise embraced the prior Axis notion of total war.

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the beginning of WWII was Hitler feeling that a portion of Poland that was German in his mind with an important port in Danzig was more German that Polish and wanting to have another port and bring in people (who felt accordingly) that they were German/Prussian invaded with the support of Russia.

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And this was after he promised the French and British that he would stop with the Sudetenland in 1938 at the now infamous Munich Conference. Then he invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia (that never was part of the German Empire prior to 1939) before making demands of Poland.

But yeah. It was Churchill's fault that Europe went to war in 1939.

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He just said that some Jews were killed out of convenience instead of all of them due to logistics.

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too many swimming pools at Auschwitz to be a true genocide.

In fairness, he didn't mention the Jews but the Russian POWs from the German invasion of Russia. However, what he failed to also mention was the fact that the Germans absolutely planned to kill Russian POWs because they viewed the Slavs as sub-human. Then you had the infamous Commisar Order issued on June 6, 1941, that ordered the immediate execution of Soviet political officers taken prisoner during the invasion.

Out of the big player in the war, the US was far and away the most “moral”. Even with the bombings of Japan. I believe this, everyone believes this.

The big picture of this thread is being missed. The argument being looked into is that some think the larger war itself could have been avoided had certain actions been taken by the UK and its allies. The same argument claims that the larger atrocities of the Germans in theory might not have happened without the larger war. This is not provable for one, but it’s worth arguing about, and getting upset about it is ridiculous.

Arguing over who was the atrocity champion after the completion of the war is completely irrelevant to THIS narrow topic. ESPECIALLY considering that invoking the Holocaust is overwhelmingly the go to for why the Germans had to be totally defeated and why the war was justified, but completely ignoring that the Jews had nothing to do with us joining the war and were never discussed by anyone in the US command structure until the very end of it. The Holocaust is only used as a hindsight justification and it had zero to do with our involvement in real time.

No one enticed the European nations to join NATO. They all begged to get in for protection.
All had been previously conquered by the USSR and they knew Russia would eventually try to conquer them again.

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it's just that you're making arguments against things that Cooper didn't say. Cooper didn't say that the Holocaust was purely convenience.

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Hanson never said anything about this. I don't know what you're talking about.

It's not that you're wrong it's just that you're making arguments against things that Hanson didn't say.

Hanson refuted the following claims by Cooper

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On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners

It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.

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Who Was Responsible for Starting World War II?

As for Cooper’s claim that the Allies were to blame for starting a world war, nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler may have been frustrated that Britain and France declared war on him after his unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. But he had been warned by some advisers that the two allies would be finally forced to war, given that he had broken almost all his prewar promises to them about ceasing his serial territorial acquisitions.

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On Britain’s Supposed Warmongering

Britain was, in fact, the only one of the six major belligerents in World War II that went to war on the principle of a third-party nation’s territorial integrity, without either invading another country or being itself invaded. Britain was also the only major power that saw World War II through from the first day to the very last. And of the victorious Big Three, it alone foresaw well before the war that it would likely end any cataclysmic war strategically diminished, its empire gone, and without its centuries-long global stature.

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On Churchill, the Supposed Warmonger and Terrorist

Cooper describes Churchill as a supposed terrorist and warmonger. Yet in the dark days of late May and June 1940, to avoid factionalism among his new war cabinet, Churchill was willing to allow his colleagues temporarily to sound out peace possibilities through the intervention of Mussolini. But he darkly predicted that any ensuing humiliating Axis terms would likely shock even the more malleable and naive of his war cabinet.

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Who started a systematic campaign of terror bombing?

The Luftwaffe first indiscriminately bombed civilian targets in Poland to instill panic, terror, and mass death. It continued that tactic unapologetically in Holland by destroying the center of Rotterdam during the first two weeks of May 1940. And despite Hitler’s false claims that the Allies had started bombing civilians first, he soon honed his air strategy of incinerating civilians against Coventry and London.

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Hanson never said anything about this. I don't know what you're talking about.

It's not that you're wrong it's just that you're making arguments against things that Hanson didn't say.

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i'll apologize for making arguments against things Hanson didn't say. I haven't read all of that. I may have been making an argument against some of the more generalized arguments. again, i like both Cooper (based on his Tucker appearance) and Hansen (as i know him.)

i'm a few whiskeys deep and in no condition to refute the rest of your post, it's just that i think that most people can't reconcile "Churchill is an important amazing character of the 20th century century for all his faults ," and " Churchill has some assholish statements that do more than impugn his character when it comes to the beginning, middle, and conclusion of WWII.

mea culpa. it's Friday and i'm several shots of rye bourbon into the evening.

i'll repeat. I'm glad the allies won WWII. it's for the better of society today. all our heroes weren't perfect saints.

a board full of Trump supporters (which I am one of) should be able to recognize that nobody is asking for perfect.