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Putin On World War II
Due to decades of Hollywood propaganda many people in "western" countries believe that the U.S. did the most to defeat the Nazis during World War II.
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Nothing could be further from the truth.
The President of Russia Vladimir Putin has taken the opportunity of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II to describe the build-up to the war, the diplomatic and military considerations Russia took into account during that time, and the results of the allies' victory.
His essay was published in multiple languages on the Website of the Kremlin:
75th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and our Future.
The English version is also published in the National Interest magazine:
Vladimir Putin: The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II.
The part with the Russian view of the behavior of various nation in the late 1930s is most interesting. But this passage, related to the graphic above, is also very relevant:
The Soviet Union and the Red Army, no matter what anyone is trying to prove today, made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism.
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This is a report of February 1945 on reparation from Germany by the Allied Commission on Reparations headed by Ivan Maisky. The Commission's task was to define a formula according to which defeated Germany would have to pay for the damages sustained by the victor powers. The Commission concluded that “the number of soldier-days spent by Germany on the Soviet front is at least 10 times higher than on all other allied fronts. The Soviet front also had to handle four-fifths of German tanks and about two-thirds of German aircraft.” On the whole, the USSR accounted for about 75 percent of all military efforts undertaken by the Anti-Hitler Coalition. During the war period, the Red Army “ground up” 626 divisions of the Axis states, of which 508 were German.
On April 28, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his address to the American nation: “These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies – troops, planes, tanks, and guns – than all the other United Nations put together.” Winston Churchill in his message to Joseph Stalin of September 27, 1944, wrote that “it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine…”
Such an assessment has resonated throughout the world. Because these words are the great truth, which no one doubted then. Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives on the fronts, in German prisons, starved to death and were bombed, died in ghettos and furnaces of the Nazi death camps. The USSR lost one in seven of its citizens, the UK lost one in 127, and the USA lost one in 320.
As a German and former officer who has read quite a bit about the war I agree with the Russian view. It was the little acknowledged industrial power of the Soviet Union and the remarkable dedication of the Red Army soldiers that defeated the German Wehrmacht.
At the end of his essay Putin defends the veto power of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In his view it has prevented another clash on a global scale from happening since World War II ended. Putin rejects attempts to abolish that system.
I have found no major flaw with the historic facts in the essay and recommend to read it in full.
IMO, there’s an historical item that everyone opining on this thread ought to read: Henry Wallace’s 1942 speech, “The Price of Free World Victory” which is better known as “The Century of the Common Man.” It can be downloaded freely in rich text format at the link and is only 6 pages long. Like most important speeches promoting collectivism as a public good, this very powerful speech was swept under the rug and isn’t even mentioned in WW2 histories anymore. I was amazed, rocked out of my chair, when I discovered it in 1996, and prompted my deep inquiry into Mr. Henry Asgard Wallace. The following excerpt is about halfway through the speech; it may appear radical to today’s reader but it wasn’t considered so in 1942:
“The march of freedom of the past one hundred and fifty years has been a long-drawn-out people’s revolution. In this Great Revolution of the people, there were the American Revolution of 1775, The French Revolution of 1792, The Latin-American revolutions of the Bolivarian era, The German Revolution of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Each spoke for the common man in terms of blood on the battlefield. Some went to excess. But the significant thing is that the people groped their way to the light. More of them learned to think and work together.
“The people’s revolution aims at peace and not at violence, but if the rights of the common man are attacked, it unleashed the ferocity of a she-bear who has lost a cub. When the Nazi psychologists tell their master Hitler that we in the United States may be able to produce hundreds of thousands of planes, but that we have no will to fight, they are only fooling themselves and him. The truth is that when the rights of the American people are transgressed, as those rights have been transgressed, The American people will fight with a relentless fury which will drive the ancient Teutonic gods back cowering into their caves. The Götterdämmerung has come for Odin and his crew.
“The people are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the earth have hitherto enjoyed. No Nazi counter-revolution will stop it. The common man will smoke the Hitler stooges out into the open in the United States, in Latin America, and in India. He will destroy their influence. No Lavals, no Mussolinis will be tolerated in a Free World.
“The people, in their millennial and revolutionary march toward manifesting here on earth the dignity that is in every human soul, hold as their credo the Four Freedoms enunciated by President Roosevelt in his message to Congress on January 6, 1941. These four freedoms are the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand. We who live in the United States may think there is nothing very revolutionary about freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom from the fear of secret police. But when we begin to think about the significance of freedom from want for the average man, then we know that the revolution of the past one hundred and fifty years has not been completed, either here in the United States or in any other nation in the world. We know that this revolution can not stop until freedom from want has actually been attained….
“We failed in our job after World War Number One. We did not know how to go about it to build an enduring world-wide peace. We did not have the nerve to follow through and prevent Germany from rearming. We did not insist that she ‘learn war no more.’ We did not build a peace treaty on the fundamental doctrine of the people’s revolution. We did not strive whole-heartedly to create a world where there could be freedom from want for all peoples. But by our very errors we learned much, and after this war we shall be in position to utilize our knowledge in building a world which is economically, politically and, I hope, spiritually sound.
“Modern science, which is a by-product and an essential part of the people’s revolution, has made it technologically possible to see that all of the people of the world get enough to eat. Half in fun and half seriously, I said the other day to Madame Litvinov: ‘The object of this war is to make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.’ She replied: ‘Yes, even half a pint.’ The peace must mean a better standard of living for the common man, not merely in the United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China and Latin America — not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.” [My Emphasis]
As we know, “We did not build a peace treaty on the fundamental doctrine of the people’s revolution.” The postwar leaders had in mind Luce’s American Century and much more–they sought what Hitler sought–a way to keep consuming 60%+ of the world’s resources without any objections. Those desiring that outcome were people from FDR’s and Wallace’s party–they flipped the stated War Goals on their head just 7 years after “Four Freedoms” and six after the above speech without any publicity whatsoever. IMO, we still must implement the “fundamental doctrine of the people’s revolution” globally. And to those in the USA who think that doctrine was composed by Lenin, Mao, Fidel, or Che, they need to do some very deep soul searching for that doctrine was thought by a God-fearing Republican farmer from Iowa, whose only radicalness came from his adherence to the doctrine of Christian collectivity.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 22 2020 23:12 utc | 117
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