Note: This post was recovered from the Sh.org archive.Username: usseloDate: 2019-12-17 07:28:50Reaction Score: 9
The thread starts off asking us to consider who did what, when, and how the parties' motives might be reinterpreted in the light of their militarisation being earlier than we are usually taught.
If you accept the mainstream timeline for German planning as 1940 (Eg Operation Barbarossa - The History of Nazi Germany’s Invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II - Charles River Editors - I can't bring myself to link to nonsense of this quality), then earlier Soviet militarisation does seem proactive rather than reactive.
However, if we do decide to use 'who militarised first' as an indicator for blame, we should probably give the evidence a look-over to make sure we have our timeline correct.
So, I've seen it said that everyone living east of Poland could imagine what was coming their way when Mein Kampf was published. Which means 1925. And that they could move from imagination to anticipation when its (alleged) author was himself 'published' as a political leader. Which means 1933.
Can we substantiate a model that has plans for a military attack on the East 'crystallising' around 1933? The British formally learned on 28 February 1934 that the plan to invade the East was the 'main plan' with a preliminary western invasion. They learned the details of Barbarossa (its extraordinary three-pronged approach, details of its integration of mass air and ground firepower, etc) on the afternoon of 5 March 1934.
Given the number of Soviet spies that were subsequently discovered to have been working at various levels with British institutions, it is hard to believe that Soviet planners had to wait long before learning the details themselves.
Can we go back further than 1933?
There is evidence that Britain's military had been very involved with developing and testing Blitzkrieg in partnership with the Versailles-limited Germans from around 1920. Given that the Soviets were training and testing mobile warfare with the German military on Soviet-controlled territory at the same time, it's hard to imagine they had no understanding that there might be hidden motives and hidden potential outcomes beneath the politics of their 'partners'.
We know - or can know if we turn off the smartphone, hit up some old books and collate what we read - that the Germans approached the British in 1920 with a message along the lines of: "Either help us crush the Bolsheviks now or we will 'find' an 'Iron Man' to do it ourselves."
Two things spring out of that request:
The first is that -
as codis pointed out - Hitler was a Reichswehr project (just as Stalin may well have been), reporting to Captain Karl Mayr. His training and development is quite well documented in the public realm. Other aspects less so, though you can see some shapes moving in the mist if you let your peripheral vision work for you. Regardless, given that there are intelligence organisations whose job it is to acquire data and apply their intelligence to it, it is naive to believe anyone in power was unaware of the project. Or why it was begun.
The second is that although we sometimes say the Second World War was a continuation of the first, it might be more accurate to say the second world was a continuation of The Winter War AKA Churchill's Private War. Although that doesn't mean anything to most people in the West, it did mean something to many people in the East. As a result of it, their imaginations were much more able to conceive that, having seemingly given up on that war by the end of 1920, the West might re-think, re-build, and come back again. And now be more willing to accept assistance from a re-armed Germany.
If we know this, we can conceive that Eastern intelligence organisations picked up on the 'Iron Man' project, recognised its timing, its patterns (creation of controlled opposition in public spaces, development of political persona) and dilligently worked to understand its objectives and schedule, its means and methods. And there was much more activity than just 'Iron Man' to bolster their appreciation of Western political inclinations.
So if we put ourselves in the shoes of Eastern or Western intelligence looking at public but not well-publicised events immediately after the West's defeat in the Winter War, we can see 1920 as the year from which it became reasonable for the East to expect a 'phase-change' in Western planning and operations against the Bolsheviks. Remembering that the two parties had already been fighting on Eastern territory for the previous two years.
I've framed this in terms of the Soviets anticipating invasion
from the West rather than the Soviets planning invasion
of the West. The Western response to that is that the Soviets
were already engaged in a political invasion of the West via the Comintern. Also, that they would not stop when asked, leaving Western military response as the only option to protect the peoples' democracies from choosing Bolshevism.
You could say that our mainstream understanding of what was going on prior to the war has been 'landscaped'. Meaning: rendered down to a simple picture. Being simple, you only have to highlight one or two factors - militarisation dates, for example - to produce quite a different-looking picture. That's not so easy when the picture has many more components. Which it seems to have, as I have tried to show above.
In addition to previous experience and bitter political differences, we can consider other motives for the East to anticipate an attack:
1. Access to resources. Not much I can say about that: who's got what that's worth taking depends on the participants' values - including ours as spectator-analysts peering at the past.
2.
Per Aply1985: The occult possibilities. Ie, that all of this is really about other things. So, for example, strange forces, and/or reinstating a modern version of an earlier civilisational model. Or, the model I currently have, that the planet has been devastated by comet/meteorite swarms, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), etc and that we are in Valhalla, being managed over the long-term to develop a solution prior the next occurrence.
Now, of course, I accept that comet catastrophes may be a fake, as von Braun apparently said. But... once you start to think about these wars possibly being part of a much bigger picture, you find the emotional side of being propagandised passes you by. You still encounter it, but it runs right off.
For example, two of my older female relatives complain about Putin taking over the world. I don't know him myself and nor do I know if they are right or not. However, when I hear them, I mentally repeat whatever they just said - except that I add a German accent. Just in my own head, you understand. Then I say it again, this time substituting the word 'Putin' with the words: 'Die Juden'. I sometimes switch back and forth to check how it sounds. And it sounds like I imagine ordinary German hausfrauen of the 1930s to have sounded. Different kitchen, different decade, different foe.
As I said: the emotions drain away, but I marvel at their not knowing how they sound.
As an analogy, perhaps the 'mudflood' and 'cultural layer' in our physical world also have analogues in many people's minds. People are 'mudflooded', their thinking skills buried beneath 'cultural layer'. The resulting mental landscaping shares similar qualities, regardless of the colour or quality of an individual mind's mud. It presents familiar narrative landscapes designed to inspire acceptance and admiration for its 'correctness', its perfect design. All built on, well, what?
When you do start to dig out your personal mudflood, you find the earlier landscaping had been covering more interesting structures. I don't care to dig out those relatives' cultural layers. Who knows what distress it would cause. I'll just go on digging out my own mud and suggest that recognising one's own mental landscape may be mudflooded is supremely important for all of us.
