Anti-Democratic America

[Brett Knowlton]

>Charles: It was a necessary evil to give the Soviets ( Stalin was one
person; the war was won by millions of people) time to prepare for the war.
That too is a rational statement today as well as in 1938. Before that
pact, the Soviets tried mightily to get the other bourgeois nations besides
Germany to sign a Pact with the Soviets. The other bourgeois nations
wouldn't do it, because they wanted Germany to attack the Soviet Union to
destroy it. 
>
>Also, as usual, 20/20/ hindsight gives a distorted "overknowledge" of what
was rational in some past historical period.  At the time of the Pact, the
Nazis had not carried out anywhere near their world historic crimes such as
the Holocaust or killing 20 million Soviets. At the time of the
German-Soviet Pact ,Hitler was not known to be the Hitler we know today.
Henry Ford and the Crown Prince of England  and many others in the West ,
were Nazi sympathisers and supporters. Given the historic crimes of English
and American Imperialism, one imperialist country looked about as bad as
another. Signing a pact with one was merely an effort to divide one's
overwhelmingly stronger enemies. Only 20 years earlier, during the Russian
Civil War , all of those countries had surrounded and attacked the young
Soviet Union. There was  no reason to see the Germans as that much worse
than the French, English or Americans. 

Come on, Charles.  The Nazi/Soviet Pact also allowed Stalin to conquer
Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Eastern Poland without having to worry about
German interference.  The Soviets also invaded Finland.  The Soviets
behaved like imperialists themselves, at least in this respect.  Were these
also necessary evils?

This was not a purely defensive move by a beleaguered nation.

Furthermore, the Soviets won the war against Fascism because they were
attacked.  You claim Stalin did this to "prepare for war," but there is no
reason to believe Stalin ever planned to fight Hitler, at least none that
I'm aware of.  By all accounts the Russians were taken by surprise by the
German invasion.

Brett