>>> rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au 11/01/00 12:17PM >>>
G'day Charles,
>This also applies to the non-aggression pact that the Soviets signed with
>>Germany before the war.
I'm not saying there weren't sensible reasons for the pact, but I reckon someone in the SU must have leafed through Mein Kampf, or read about Cristalnacht in the papers. The Nazis were already demonstrably the worst thing going in Western Europe. Trotsky got their number in a 1933 article in Harpers Magazine, too.
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CB: The worst that the Nazis did is not in Mein Kampf. Yes , the Nazis may have been demonstrably the worse in Europe, but it probably not clear that they were any worse than George Bush is from Al Gore. Henry Ford was a patron. He had a picture of Hitler on his wall in his office. The King of England to be was pro-Nazi. It is just not true that it was anticipated in the 30's that the Nazis would murder 6 million Jews, even though it was known that they were anti-Semitic. There is a big difference between our understanding of the Nazis with historical hindsight and the understanding of them before the WWII. There was no reason to think of them as worse than one of the combatant nations in WWI (which was pretty bad, but everybody was tainted with the same brush from WWI).
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>It is only with hindsight, that we know the extent of the Nazi horrors.
We didn't know the full extent, no. But we knew plenty.
>German fascism was not necessarily worse than Francoism from the
>standpoint of >the 1930's.
Don't think Stalin minded Franco too much at all really. He didn't try very hard to fight the bastard - too busy shooting up the POUM and rifling the Spanish treasury ... but none of us in the west is, I suppose, in the position to criticise anyone when it comes to the Spanish war ... well, 'cept for mebbe 60000 comrades who deserve more remembering than they get.
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CB: Oh sure, the SU is responsible for all the failures of revolutions anywhere in the world at the time ( but none of the successes). Oh yea, that would have been just great. "Bolshevik terrorist hordes strong arm revolution in Spain !" , a perfect excuse for the "Allies" to invade the SU like they did in 1919. And then , it would have been from the Left, "The Comintern is running all the revolutions around the world"
Anyway, yes or no ? Fascism in Germany was one or two orders of magnitude worse than in Spain. Otherwise, how come Franco was allowed to hangout in Spain until the 1970's ?
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>The distinction between Germany and the other capitalist countries was not
>as >sharp as it was after the war, and which we can see with hindsight.
I know I'm gonna sound a bit DeLongish here, but I passionately disagree about this. Plenty of writers in papers and mags had the Nazis' number, Churchill saw 'em for what they were and said so often enough, and there were thousands of erstwhile German residents telling anyone who'd listen (but perhaps there, too, we should not be too high'n'mighty - as 'who'd listen' wasn't a lot ... ). Anyway, we knew plenty by 1938 - not just plenty, but enough. The distinction WAS BIG!
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CB: But Chamberlain was in charge, and England and France refused to sign non-aggression ( maybe alliance ) pacts as the Soviets repeatedly sought with them.
Neither Churchill nor anyone else predicted the order of magnitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the Nazis did.
"We" did not know enough to predict the Holocaust. Show me someone in a bourgeois country who predicted the Holocaust in 1938.