Today please remember the victims of the Katyn Massacre. In 1940, thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals were executed by the Soviet paramilitaries.
We will never let this be forgotten.
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Katyn Forest 1940April 13th, 2026 |
 42 comments to Katyn Forest 1940Leave a Reply |
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Yes indeed Perry – and I posted a short film of the Marxist murder of these Polish officers on my Facebook page, a tiny gesture.
The reaction of Britain and France to the Soviet aggression and mass murder is baffling – National Socialist (“Nazi”) Germany invaded Poland – and Britain and France, quite rightly, declared war. The Soviet Union also invaded Poland (and gave active assistance to Germany – war materials and so on) yet Britain and France did NOT declare war on the Soviet Union – the Soviets also invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Romania – no Declaration of War from Britain or France. Then the Soviets invaded Finland in the brutal Winter War – still no Declaration of War from Britain and France, and, all the while, the Soviet Union was giving Nazi Germany all the help it could – for example organizing strikes and sabotage in France.
“Paul, Britain and France were concentrating on defeating Germany” – if anyone comes out with that line, it-is-NOT-true. On the contrary – even though the vast majority of the German army and air force were in the east (Hitler left the west of Germany almost undefended) the British and French did nothing – they did NOT advance into the Rhineland (the industrial heart of Germany) they sat in their positions for eight months (September 1939 to May 1940) till the Germans were ready to attack (and overwhelm) them.
Whatever the war was about, it was NOT about helping Poland – as the brutal Soviet invasion was ignored, and there was no advance into Germany either. Poland, including the Polish soldiers murdered at Katyn, was betrayed.
It is almost (almost) as if the idea (NOT of the Prime Ministers of Britain and France – but of the officials and “experts” advising them), from the start, was to help the Soviet Union – hence not declaring war on the Soviet Union (which would, for example, have enabled pro Moscow union leaders in France to be rounded up so they could no longer organize strikes and sabotage), AND no real advance into Germany to take the Rhineland – as that would have led to the war ending “too quickly” – before the Marxists (including the Marxists in Britain and France) could take full advantage of it. I DO NOT KNOW – perhaps the whole thing was just mind blowing incompetence, “cock up” rather than conspiracy.
Perhaps people who are still alive will find out the truth in 2039 when the 100 year rule on files comes up – or perhaps the files (if there ever were any) have long been destroyed.
There is also the case of Japan in 1941 – what officials were whispering in the ears of Japanese policy makers, and what was the real motivation of those officials.
Japan had no chance at all of defeating the United States – the gap in industrial output between the two nations was just too great.
Yet Japan attacked the United States – thus bringing the United States into Second World War, this could only end in utter disaster for Japan.
And the United States did NOT even concentrate on defeating Japan – the Pacific war was (infamously) “fought on a shoestring budget” with, for example, the Philippines being left under, brutal, Japanese occupation for several years.
So where the American resources going?
They were going on the same cause as the British resources – rather than defending Singapore (with modern aircraft, anti tank guns and so on) and so on – the British concentrated on helping the Soviet Union – leaving their own solders (and the Indian and Australian, New Zealand forces – and so on) and the civilian populations of vast areas – to be killed or enslaved by Imperial Japan.
The vast majority of American resources were devoted to the same objective – the defeat of Germany and helping the Soviets.
“Paul the Nazis murdered millions of Jews” – I know that, my own father’s cousins were gassed. But this did not happen in the 1930s – to say the war was about helping the Jews is a LIE – as Paul Johnson made clear in his “A History of the Jews” President Roosevelt, in private, could not care less about the fate of the Jews (rejecting Prime Minister Churchill’s proposals to attack the Death Camps and Death Railways).
The Soviet Union had ALREADY murdered millions of people by 1939 – and anyone who says the British and American establishment “did not know” is speaking falsely – as the files of the old Russian Section of the State Department (files the New Dealers tried to destroy) make clear.
They did know – the British and French elite knew very well about the millions of dead in the Soviet Union, even my father (Harry Marks), a person with no special sources of information, knew all about it – which is why he resigned from the Communist Party.
Do not tell me that the Western establishment “did not know” about the mass murder in the Soviet Union – because they did know.
And they knew about the brutal Soviet invasion of Poland – and they did not care, any more than they cared about the other nations the Communists invaded.
And when Japan attacked the United States (an utterly baffling move – as it could only lead to the destruction of Imperial Japan, see above – the gap in industrial output between the two nations was vast), the response of the American establishment was to concentrate on Europe (the Soviet matter) – NOT to concentrate resources on defeating the power (Imperial Japan) that had attacked the United States.
Again I DO NOT KNOW – perhaps the whole thing was “cock-up” rather than conspiracy.
Some evidence for the “cock-up” rather than conspiracy thesis.
The one British aircraft carrier sent to the Far East before the Japanese attack, did not get there – because of mechanical failure (cock-up).
And the War Office said that tanks (there were some anti tank weapons – although there should have been more) were not needed in Malaya because “the Japanese can not drive tanks through swamps and dense jungle” – perhaps so, but there were all these ROADS the British had built – and the Japanese did drive their (not very good – there was nothing special about them) tanks down these roads.
The officials and “experts” may have been cretins rather than pro Soviet Union traitors – although some of them (hello Cambridge five – and all the rest) were pro Soviet traitors.
But either way – the Polish officers at Katyn were just as dead. Poland was still betrayed – either by treason, or by mind blowing stupidity in London and Paris.
@Paul Marks
Are you seriously suggesting that Britain and France should have declared war on the soviets as well as Germany?
I’m sure the fuhrer would have loved that!
When I was young I watched Prime Minister Edward Heath, President Nixon, President Pompidou – and so on, suck-up to Mao – the Marxist ruler of the People’s Republic of China.
I (a boy in Kettering, Northamptonshire – no special sources of information) knew that Mao had murdered millions of people (it turned out that he had murdered tens-of-millions) – and I was disgusted by these Western filth, these “Western conservative leaders” who were sucking up to one of the most evil men in history.
So do not tell me they “did not know” – of course they knew. Just as the establishment knew about the Soviet invasion of Poland (and the atrocities) and the Soviet invasion of so many other nations, and the murder of millions of people in the Soviet Union – they knew, they just did not care. “You can not make an omelette with breaking eggs” Mr and Mrs Webb (Lord and Lady P.) H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the “educated” officials and “experts” in London, Washington, Paris (and so on) would all agree that human sacrifices are needed to build the wonderful Collectivist future – the Polish officers at Katyn being one of these human sacrifices.
As for me – I should never have got involved in politics, I should have become a librarian and kept my mouth shut. The system of government is totally corrupted.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan gave me hope – but, sadly, it turned out (in the end) to be false hope – they meant well (they really did) – but it was too late.
Mark – how would Mr Hitler have “loved” the people (Communist union organizers and so on) he was relying on to sabotage France and other nations (people who did NOT work for him – they worked for Moscow) being rounded up, arrested and imprisoned, before they could undermine France and the other nations? That would have made his invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, France…. rather difficult.
And “are you seriously suggesting” that if two powers invade a nation (in this case Poland) you declare war on one of these powers (for invading Poland), but NOT the other one (the Soviet Union) – which is not “just” invading Poland, but is also already giving Nazi Germany all the help it can.
You had the facts presented to you, shoved in front of your nose – and your reaction was “are you seriously suggesting….”.
And, no doubt, you would have betrayed British forces (and the civilian populations) in the Far East as well – betraying them to enslavement and mass death under Imperial Japanese forces.
“Must help the Soviets – everything, and everyone, else is unimportant”.
@Paul Marks
So how would a war agaunst both stalin and hitler in 1940 have gone do you think?
Ok so in your scenario you get to lock up some subversive union leaders and Communist activists. Then what? How does Britain and France then roll into Berlin, let alone Moscow?
@Paul Marks
And when hitler turns on stalin – as was always his intention – who’s side are we on?
Just to comment on Paul’s puzzlement about the British failure to declare war on the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland – the British guarantee to Poland was explicitly (if secretly) limited to an attack by Germany. In the event of an attack by anyone else there would merely be consultations.
Mark – the war from 1939 was against Hitler and Stalin.
Did you miss what typed, several times, about what the Soviet Union was doing to help National Socialist Germany?
As for 1941 – “who’s side are we on”? Hopefully we are the side of the vast number of British and allied soldiers, and the civilian populations (millions of people), we left to be killed or enslaved by Imperial Japan in the far east. These people were betrayed – they were left to torture and death (denied the means to defend themselves), and all to help your precious Soviet Union.
By the way – both Hitler and Stalin were planning to attack the other (it was a matter of timing).
Martin – the industrial heartland of Germany was almost undefended in 1939 (as most German forces were sent to Poland) – yet we did not “roll in” to the Rhineland – in spite of NOT being at war with the Soviet Union. There was no effort to help Poland – or to defeat Germany.
I have already typed all the above – I resent having to type the same things again.
Lee Moore – you, and others, have raised this point before – but it violates basic logic.
If two powers invade a nation one either declares war on both of the powers – or neither of them.
Yes there has been more than 80 years of agitation propaganda (agitprop) to obscure this point, and many other important things, about the Second World War – but it remains true.
Is the British position to the murdered Poles – “you were not killed by Germans – so it does not matter”?
On a different track, one irony about the way the world remembers (or does not remember) the Katyn Massacre is that in 1943 (after the Nazi-Soviet pact had been memory-holed), the Nazis exhumed some of the bodies and published an official account of the massacre that was…true. One can read an article in English about the massacre in Signal, the Nazi propaganda magazine that was disseminated all over Nazi-occupied Europe, including the Channel Islands. It had all the things one would expect to see in such an article published by a country that was not engaged in its own programme of industrial murder; pathologists’ reports, witness statements and so on.
Of course most people on the Allied side did not believe a word of the German statements because of the Nazis’ own crimes. The Allied governments may have had a better idea of the truth, but if they did they found it prudent to pretend they didn’t – or to convince themselves that they didn’t. Given their situation, perhaps they had no choice.
It took at least until the 1970s for the fact that the Bolsheviks rather than the Nazis carried out the killings to penetrate into Western accounts of the war. And we’ve found it embarrassing to talk about ever since.
When I mentioned more than 80 years of agitprop about WWII I was not exaggerating – it is pushed in every school, and there are television programmes (on some station or other) every day.
The propaganda is intense and constant – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.
It is almost as if the establishment are concerned that, without the constant conditioning, people might start to think.
There does seem to be more than an honest interest in history in all this content – there does seem to be a political agenda (a modern political agenda) at work.
For example, WWII is now (and has been since at least the 1960s) presented as a struggle against “racism” – but at the time (during the war) it was NOT presented as that – not at all.
Also, again at least from the 1960s, the war is presented as being about the mass murder of Jewish people by the German National Socialists and their allies – but, at the time, it was not presented as that. President Roosevelt, privately, could not have cared less about the mass murder of Jewish people – see Paul Johnson “A History of the Jews”, indeed President Roosevelt even cited, as truth, the lying National Socialist statistics about Jewish domination of the professions in Germany in 1933 – professions that Jewish people did NOT really dominate in Germany in 1933, the Nazi statistics cited by “FDR” were LIES.
So if the war was not about Poland (no Declaration of War against the Soviets – and no help to the Poles against the Germans, not even an advance into the Rhineland – which was very thinly defended in 1939 – most German land and air forces being in the east) and it was not about “helping the Jews” (no help was given to the Jews, Winston Churchill’s suggestions were turned down flat – and with seeming contempt by both the American and British establishment) and all the other lies that are now trotted out…..
It is all very odd – but we are not supposed to think about it.
Natalie – I do not what most people believed, but the establishment knew very well that the Soviets had murdered millions of people even before the war – it was not that they did not know, it was that they did not care. They did not care about the Polish people either – and, yes, they knew what had happened to the Polish people when the Marxist Soviet Union invaded.
As for the Germans – Admiral Canaris (head of German military intelligence) sent word to allied intelligence about the German attack plan in the West for 1940, where the Germans would attack. But this information was not passed on – almost as if certain people in the Western intelligence services wanted Germany to act as an “Ice Breaker” (destroy France and Britain) so the Soviet Union could dominate after the war.
This plan went horribly wrong in 1941 when National Socialist Germany attacked the Soviet Union BEFORE the Red Army attacked – catching the Soviet forces in exposed “attack” positions – had the Soviet forces been in defensive positions things would have gone very badly for the Germans, as the Soviet forces massively outnumbered them in both men and tanks (and, in 1941, many of the Soviet tanks were better than the German tanks) – it was because they were in exposed “attack” positions that the Soviets lost millions of men, they were preparing for their own attack.
Admiral Canaris also helped convince Franco in Spain to NOT allow the Germans to take Gibraltar.
Had Franco allowed the Germans to do that the war would have been over in 1940 – as Britain could not really fully supply its forces in the Middle East by sailing ships all the way round Africa, so if the Gibraltar “choke point” had been given to the Germans – the British position in the Middle East would have collapsed.
Who people are officially working for is not always who they are really siding with – at least not in the world of intelligence services.
And I wonder who certain officials in Japan were really serving – their “advice” (to attack the United States) being an utter disaster for Japan (committed to a war it could not possibly win – the United States having many times their industrial strength) – yet perfect for the Soviet Union as the United States got into the war and then concentrated on “Europe” (on helping the Soviet cause) – it did not concentrate on quickly defeating the Japanese (Nimitz and so on were given a small fraction of American resources).
Still, perhaps it was just mind blowing stupidity in Tokyo.
After all the war in China cost Japan far more than it gained from the war – yet, in the 1930s, Japan persisted with this mad policy year-after-year. And any Japanese politician or military commander who suggested the policy was insane – was murdered.
Even mild doubt or a question “why are we doing this?” could (and did) get Japanese people, and of very high rank, murdered.
No one was allowed to question whether the China policy was in the interests of Japan.
To people who really do not know….
From Gibraltar you can see North Africa – not as a vague blur, you can see it clearly (I have been to Gibraltar).
Anti ship weapons on both sides of that channel – and it is closed, that is why Gibraltar was so important.
If the area had come under German control, Britain would have had to come-to-terms (as the British position in the Middle East would have collapsed – you could not really send EVERYTHING all the way round Africa, although some forces and supply DID go all the way round Africa) – de facto, lost-the-war.
Franco decided not to let in the Germans, or take the area himself – British intelligence did have an operation of convincing Spanish officials to not let in the Germans, but the intervention of Admiral Canaris (head of German military intelligence) was vital.
Canaris did not see himself as a traitor – on the contrary he loved Germany, but he had become opposed to the National Socialist regime.
He later paid with his life.
It is a difficult decision – what do you do when the government of your nation is going the wrong way – really the wrong way.
In the First World War General Falkenhayn thought (correctly) that the German decision to go to war was folly – but he did his duty and slaughtered the French at Verdun and the British on the Somme.
But he still thought German war aims were wrong – for example the policy of destroying Russia, even sending in Marxist agents (such as “Lenin” – a fake name of this Russian aristocrat, and traitor) to help with this task.
He ended up being sent to the Middle East – to get him out of the way, and when he got there he stopped the Ottoman Islamic mass murder of Christians and Jews (if only he had arrived earlier).
I was once told that Falkenhayn starved after the war – due to the collapse of the German economy, I hope that is not true.
@Paul Marks
“My precious soviet union”!
Your ability to jump (superman style, over of a towering skysraper) to conclusions based on a few words you dislike and then launch a veritable tidal wave of verbiage is one of the things that make this site so entertaining.
The Katyn massacre is famous (more or less). Less known is the brutal Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940. There the Soviet communists murdered or deported to Siberia thousands of leaders, military and civil, and the intelligentsia – any one who could potentially oppose the Soviet communist regime.
Same thing in other East European countries the Soviets occupied in 1944-45 after driving off the Nazis.
In Romania, for example, they “executed” (i.e. murdered) some 60,000 Romanians after the war ended. Romania had been an ally of Hitler in WW2, and the Russians said they were doing “de-nazification”. Some of those executions were surely justified as such, but the Russians murdered, systematically, everyone who could oppose the communist puppet regime they installed there.
Same thing in all other East European countries they occupied.
Natalie:
As i remarked in a previous decade (i forget which) and perhaps in another forum:
When it comes to the Holodomor, Goebbels was more trustworthy than the NY Times.
Jacob:
The Occupation Museum in Riga is well worth visiting, if you are not too easily depressed by that sort of things.
Stalin’s strategy was to let the western powers fight their way to exhaustion and then invade Europe when they would put up limited resistance (he did the same in the east when Japan could no longer fight effectively when he invaded Manchuria and Sakhalin Island). His intention was always to do so.
One “problem” he had was that Poland formed an effective barrier between Germany and the USSR. Had he tried to invade through an intact Poland, then the Poles would have delayed him long enough for the Germans to have mobilised and organised their defences. Once they faced each oither across a common border, then that obstacle was removed.
If you look at the BT series of Russian tanks, they had the ability to remove their tracks and run on tyres on the road. Since Russia had virtually no paved or sealed roads outside the towns, then this is a curious design feature for a country with no roads. But, since wear and tear on tracks is a major limitation on tank availability, that feature was perfect for fast travel on the well paved roads of western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_tank
Vladimir Bogdanovitch Rezun writing under the pen name Victor Suvorov wrote a detailed description of the Soviet plans in a book called Icebreaker and available here:
https://ia601309.us.archive.org/20/items/historyDEEPWEB/Icebreaker.%20WHO%20STARTED%20THE%20SECOND%20WORLD%20WAR_%20-%20Suvorov%2C%20Viktor.pdf
You can Pooh Pooh the document but it is extremely detailed and points to Stalins intentions.
Incidentally, the characterisation of the National Socialist German Workers Party as “right wing” came from British communists. Up until 22nd June 1941, when Germany and the United Soviet SOCIALIST Republic were allies, they agitated against the war on Germany (under the directions of Moscow). From 23rd June 1941, they were rabidly anti Nazi and, as the Nazis were fighting the left wing communists, they naturally must have been right wing, no? Realistically, except for details in the … shall we say … method of execution of their policies, there was no functional difference between the regimes.
I’d suggest all of you would enjoy reading Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin. Admittedly it’s a bit of a polemic – by the end of it I felt that Harry Hopkins should have been shot for treason given the lengths he went to in fulfilling Stalin’s every Lend Lease request, which in some cases came at the expense of US and Allied forces – and unlike Britain there was no demand for re-payment in any respect.
On this specific subject it’s pretty clear that Churchill for one knew the Nazis were telling the truth about Katyn, but by 1943 felt unable to disengage from the USSR, and in any case Roosevelt/Hopkins never would have and they held the industrial whip hand.
Also, it turns out that Britain and France came very close to being at war with the USSR in 1940:
– forces were being readied to land in Finland and fight for the Finns.
– Both Britain and France were planning to bomb the oil fields in Romania from their Middle Eastern bases to deny them to the USSR, which at that stage controlled them. Britain had already sent recon flights into Soviet-controlled airspace as part of the planning. Ironically the French suggested May as the strike month.
– Finally, Stalin found himself offside with everybody – even Roosevelt’s America – over all his Baltic invasions.
McMeekin argues that the reason Stalin unexpectedly signed a peace treaty with the Finns in early 1940, rather than taking over the whole nation, was to avoid this growing isolation, and that it worked – in combination with the Nazis move West suddenly taking attention away from Finland and company.
A combination then of guile and luck, but McMeekin argues that if not for that, Britain and France would have been at war with the USSR by June 1940, if not on the same scale as Barbarossa.
Further information on Katyn, look up Vasily Mikhailovitch Blokhin, Stalin chief executioner, who killed 7000 Poles, one every 3 minutes, in 28 nights. The greatest mass murder by an individual in human history.
I seem to recall that almost the ENTIRE British “spook services” was made up of soviet / communist sympathizers, both eager, “fashion-following” volunteers and ” “recruited” via blackmail.
Just what proportion of the “intellectual elite” was as camp as a row of tents in those “salad days?
During WW2, SOE ran a LOT of operations in occupied Europe. Several were totally compromised; most spectacularly that in Holland. In that one, CAPTURED SOE operatives transmitted what the Abwehr dictated. The unfortunate operators managed, on a number of occasions, to slip the secr4et word indicating compromise int this traffic. NOBODY in Britain took any notice and a steady stream of replacement agents sere delivered straight into German hands and the circus rolled on.
In Jugoslavia, the two serious “resistance forces”, The “loyalists” and Tito’s communist “Partisans”. spent at least as much time killing each other as they did annoying the Germans. Guess which group got the lion’s share of the RAF air-drops?
If two powers invade a nation one must either declare war on both of those powers or neither of them. It is radically illogical to declare war on one of the invading powers – but not the other one. One declares war on both – or neither.
That is basic logic – just as A is A and 1+1=2 are matters of basic reasoning.
I still believe that even decades of conditioning (brainwashing – indoctrination) can not totally obscure that point.
Humans are more than flesh machines (the view of Hobbes, Hume and Bentham) – human personhood (the “I”, the free will moral agent – what used to be called the soul) exists – humans are human beings.
And if (if) that is so, it may still be incredibly difficult to cut through the indoctrination (many decades of indoctrination) with the truth of basic reasoning – but it is not impossible.
In the present situation, getting people to understand that A is A, and that 1+1=2, is a revolutionary act – a moral revolutionary act.
@Paul Marks
Now please explain to us how we know the world is banana shaped
Mark – you have abandoned reason, and treat it with contempt.
But I believe, I have to try and believe, that deep down – you are still a human being, and that there is a chance that at some point (perhaps long after I am dead) you will repent and examine these matters rationally.
Bruce Genter – yes, and when anti Communist resistance fighters in Yugoslavia blow up a bridge or tunnel, the BBC would report that the Communist partisans (their sworn enemies) had done it.
How many people in the establishment were pro Marxist or at least “Fellow Travelers”? Even after all this time it is hard to know for sure – but certainly the “Cambridge Five” were just the tip of the iceberg. And France was worse.
As for Britain – it was not just the hidden traitors who were the problem, quote open traitors were treated as “cultural icons”.
H.G. Wells was open in his desire to kill vast numbers of people – but was given every honour, his fellow Fabian G.B. Shaw wanted every person to have to prove themselves before a government board – or be executed. Yet the establishment took him to their breast.
Mr and Mrs Webb went around openly supporting the Soviet Union (which was murdering millions of people – and anyone who claims “they did not know” is not telling the truth) – yet they were given high positions, and a peerage – Lord and Lady P.
They also wrote reports which became policy.
The “Minority Report” on the Poor Law – ignoring the insights of the Majority Report which was written by people who had spent their lives actually helping the poor (rather than dreaming of Collectivism), and designed to INCREASE the number of people dependent on the state over time – which it has. In short Cloward and Piven in America in the 1960s (with their plan to increase poverty and dependence over time – to “undermine capitalism”) were just following in the footsteps of the Fabians of the early 1900s – who had the same intention and the same tactics.
And, less well known, the Mr and Mrs Webb (“Lord and Lady” P) report that condemned my own relatives (my father’s cousins in the Netherlands) to death – the report that said that said that Jewish immigration to the Holy Land (but NOT Islamic immigration from Egypt and so on) should be restricted.
That was the work of the “Lord and Lady”.
Thanks to those who contributed to mark the evil of the Soviets, and the victims of Katyn. There are accounts of Communist sabotage in Britain pre-22nd June 1941, the late Lt-Cdr John Moffat, the Scots Swordfish pilot who attacked the Bismarck (and was credited with a hit) in his book I Sank The Bismarck wrote about the concerns he and his fellow pilots had about Communist sabotage, something like putting sand in aviation fuel or petrol to sabotage the war effort, it was a thing in the UK, and I wonder if it is how Roy Chadwick died in a plane crash after WW2.
Mr Ed – it was even more of a thing in France. Although British security was badly infiltrated – hence the death of the Polish leader, when we were supposed to be in the war to save the Polish people.
The “anti Communist” establishment members were also sometimes not really anti Communist – for example we are told that Bertrand Russell was “anti Communist” – and some words critical of “Lenin” are quoted, but Bertrand Russell was really PRO Collectivism – he wanted to take over all the means of production, he accepted the FALSE assumptions of socialist economics – just as Wittgenstein and the rest of them (the Apostles Club at Cambridge, the Bloomsbury set in London, and all the rest) did.
J.M. Keynes is presented as “a liberal” – but even in the 1920s he was going on about how the state should control investment, and just about everything else. And this “great economist” did not even understand that prices (including wages – which are prices) must be set by supply and demand – not union “picket lines” or government edicts (unless you want mass unemployment).
Then there is the infamous introduction to the German edition of 1936 “General Theory….” – where the mask fully comes off, and Keynes shows he wants state control, not liberty.
Some “liberal”.
And it is not “just” state control – they also accepted the doctrine that the interests of “the capitalists” were in conflict with “the workers” and that British wealth was based on “exploitation and oppression”.
These are “anti” Communists?
Not really different in the United States – if you were looking for people who really believed in liberty you were not likely to find them in Harvard, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League.
William F. Buckley often said how isolated, as a conservative, he was at Yale – where (even back then) the teaching was largely leftist indoctrination – hence his book “God and Man at Yale”, and yet this was the place the Agency was recruiting from. These days Yale is a lunatic playpen (students from wealthy families screaming their support of Hassan Piker and other Communist freaks) – but just because in the old days the students at Yale wore suits and spoke nicely, did not mean they were good people.
True the Agency was never as bad as MI6 (let alone the truly awful French intelligence agencies) – but it certainly was not reliably pro liberty. There is “the wall” – the memorial to the officers who died, but how many are on that wall because of the treachery of other officers? Including not just direct treachery – but bad-policy, due to agents-of-influence.
Yes James Jesus Angleton became paranoid – but he was not wrong about there being a serious problem.
And Angleton was a good officer – he played a key role in saving Italy in the late 1940s, and the only agent the Agency had in Cuba who was not really a double agent working for the Marxist DGI, was (against the rules) being run by Angleton.
All that being said – the present Director of the Agency is a good man.
One of only two Directors in my life time who was any good – the other being William Casey back in the 1980s.
Sabotage during WW2?
Here in the Penal Colonies, the soviet-OWNED trade unions staged a number of major rolling strikes early in WW2. The idea was to disrupt the allied war effort in North Africa. As the war spread and intensified, with US troops and equipment starting to pour into the country, the “actions” ramped up to include open destruction / major damage to aircraft and other equipment being unloaded in Australian ports. Think: brand-mew aircraft being “incorrectly” hoisted off ships so that the airframe suffered catastrophic damage. ALL of this because Hitler, being a “fellow” socialists and having a “non-aggression pact” with the soviets, was an ally of the fraternal socialists.
After Operation Barbarossa started, the mood and the messages changed, a bit.
During the war, there was a steady flow of actual communist party members being sent to Moscow; I actually met one many years ago. These “missions” continued into the 1950s. It eventually got a bit too obvious; Petrov Affair and all that, and went back “underground” but it did NOT go away. In the 1950s, the Oz Labor Party “split”, mainly because of this heavy infiltration. Then with the murderous Mao on a rapid ascendancy, a LOT of pinkos became avid Maoists, and remain so, today, safely ensconced in their ivory towers or Pubic Serpent cubicles.
Moscow started to regain a foothold with its “nuclear disarmament” dog and pony show, then picked up on the “environment”, setting up a two-pronged operation; GREENPEACE.
Amusingly, Hitler was an avid “woodland fairy” type, even as his minions were merrily stripping the resources of neighbouring countries. “Lebensraum” came at a high price for the original locals.
Yes indeed Bruce Gentner – but the media, and the history books, present “the capitalists” (such as the owner of Renault – whose company was stolen after the war and who died in dubious circumstances) as being pro German during the war – which they were NOT, and union collaboration from 1939 to 1941 is covered up.
Even the non Communist resistance groups in Yugoslavia and Greece are falsely presented, by lying Hollywood films, as collaborators with the Germans – whilst the Communist partisans are presented as noble, in spite of (or because of) the civilians they slaughtered in Greece and other nations.
I am told that Hollywood is finally dying – I hope that is true.
As for the Nazi origins of the “Green” movement (now controlled by Marxists – of the modern mutated variety) – yes that origin has been firmly shoved down the Memory Hole – although their hatred of Jews (sorry “Zionists”) give it away, with a few Kapo style “Jews” (such as “Zack”) actively helping in the task of pushing the line that Jews are “exploiters and oppressors”.
Ironically the Frankfurt School type of Marxism, now called “Critical Theory” “DEI” or “EDI” (“Diversity and Inclusion” “Gaza Genocide” parroted by that Fellow Traveler “Sir Ed” Davey of the “Liberal Democrats” – basically Hobson, also a “liberal”, reborn), which is one of the leading forces pushing hatred of Jews today (the “exploitation and oppression” tap dance), was founded (well mostly founded), many years ago, by people from once Jewish families.
As for Mao – do not forget the fake “conservatives” who acted like groupies for him (for Mao – perhaps the largest scale mass murderer in human history) – people such as President Nixon and the, far more sickening, Prime Minister Edward Heath.
The intellectual and moral collapse of the Western establishment did not start recently – it goes back a very long way.
Do people such as “Sir Ed” believe in “Critical Theory” (“DEI”. “EDI”, “Gaza Genocide” Marxism? Of course NOT – they do not really believe in anything, they just go along with whatever fad or fashion they are told is popular.
,@Paul Marks
So had it been your decision in 1939 you would have declared war on Germany AND the soviets.
Yes, Stalin was hitler’s greedy, grasping ally and provided him with resources in the hope he would bog down in the west.
Stalin was mistrustful of Britain and France (as we were of him) but formally declaring war with them both. How would that have helped Poland which had been overun?
How would it have helped Britain and France?
Who would it have helped?
As others have pointed out, attacking the soviets in 1939/40 was considered and rejected
Please explain how I have abandoned reason. Please explain how I have treated it with contempt.
You do rather have this habit.
Perhaps (perhaps) it will help people understand if the position is reversed.
The same situation – Germany and the Soviet Union invade Poland, but Britain and France decide to Declare War on the Soviet Union – but NOT Germany.
I think Mark would find that decision illogical – the reverse decision violates logic in the same way.
If two powers invade a nation – you either declare war on both of these aggressor powers, or you declare war on nether of these aggressor powers – you do not declare war on one of them, and pretend the other has not done the same thing.
As for our “time line” – no effort was made to help Poland, indeed even though most German land and air forces were in the east, leaving the industrial heartland of Germany almost undefended, the British and French did nothing for eight months (September 1939 to May 1940) after they declared war – throwing every opportunity away, and disregarding (not even passing on to British and French military commanders) the German plans for the offensive of May 1940 (where-and-when the Germans planned to attack in the West) – plans they were given – due to the actions of Admiral Canaris head of German military intelligence (the rival and enemy of the National Socialist S.D. headed by Heydrich).
One does not have to be a “paranoid old spook” to think this is all a bit odd – not just the utterly illogical declaring war on one invader, but the other invader, but also doing nothing about the one invader (Germany) one had declared war on.
The Polish political and military leadership were baffled – they could not understand why the British and French were not advancing into the Rhineland.
Every decision seemed (seemed – it may just be an incredible series of cock-ups rather than a conspiracy) to be designed to help a certain power – NOT Poland, the Soviet Union.
I have already covered the, also utterly baffling, actions of Imperial Japan.
Again none of the actions of Japan helped Japan – and there was no possibility (at all) that these actions would help Japan, every Japanese decision seemed (again seemed – again we could be dealing with an incredible series of cock-ups that just LOOK like a conspiracy) to be designed to help the Soviet Union – and destroy the Japanese Empire.
First by getting involved in a war in China – a war that started years before World War II, and a war that cost Japan vastly more than it gained from that war, then by the (suicidal) decision to go to war with the United States – which the Americans responded to by sending most of their resources to “Europe” – not the Pacific.
As for “how would declaring war on the Soviets have helped” – well if you go for the option of declaring war on BOTH of the powers that had invaded Poland (the only other logical option being to declare war on NEITHER of the invading powers – the decision to declare war on one invader, but not the other invader being utterly insane – or worse, so it is BOTH or NEITHER – any other decision violates basic logic – see above) then at least you get to round up and put in prison the pro Soviet elements in Britain and France.
Just as Oswald Mosley and other pro National Socialist Germany people were rounded up and put in prison.
Rounding up the pro Soviet elements in Britain and France would have been a massive gain – hopefully the political parties and trade unions they controlled (or semi controlled) would have been destroyed.
That would have been very important – both for the war effort (it might well have saved France in 1940), and for the post war world.
As it was, the horrific damage that the war did to Britain was followed by more horrific damage inflicted by the forces that won the election after the war – it is THAT damage (the POST war damage) that is crippling this nation now.
Various Japanese military and political leaders pointed out, at various times, that the war in China was insane – and that the other decisions were also insane.
Japanese military and political leaders who pointed this out – were normally murdered.
After a while, after lots of murders, other people who might have spoken out – “got the message”.
@Paul Marks
Stop fixating on your version of logic like its some sort of irrefutable slam dunk.
It is not.
Hitler and Stalin had secretly carved up Poland beforehand and the soviets moving into the eastern half was a fait acomplis about which we could have done very little.
27 days I believe and it was all over.
Was there a thought out plan – allocated divisions, specific objectives, logistics etc etc – to invade germany that first month that could have been seamlessly executed? If not, what sort if shambles would it have been. If May and June 1940 is anything to go by!
If you have no plan, and are doing it on the fly, just moving a large army a hundred miles or whatever could be chaotic in itself – through hostile territory don’t forget. How many forces do you need to delay an essentially unplanned large scale movement, and what can unco-operative civilians do to hinder.
Within a month, German divisions would have been available to move back west with the luftwaffe overhead.
Besides, would it have been necessary? In terms of population and resources, Britain, France and their empires had a distinct advantage. Germany lacked key resources for any sort of prolonged war, as the fuhrer was painfully aware.
Why attack – and repeat the industrial scale slaughter. Let them attack.
They did and how it went is history, but that should not detract from just what an insanely risky gamble the attack through the ardennes was and how it could so easily have ended in tears.
Germany didn’t so much win in 1940 as France gave up (the reaons are many and complex). The vast bulk of it’s territory remained to be fought over and it’s empire was still there. But germany got beyond its wildest dreams.
This is the France, that could have taken the ruhr in the first month? (Would any british ground forces have been available)
And we would have been formally at war with the soviets too.
That is a very interesting what if!
Would the French have declared war on Stalin or would it have just been us?
And then, there was “Richard Sorge”.
A WW1 German Army veteran; ostensibly a German asset / citizen, operating in Japan.
In reality. a long-term communist and deep soviet operative.
Remember that Japan and the soviets had an actual “non-aggression pact” until the soviets changed their minds and let loose a massive armoured strike to the east, AFTER the first Nuke strike on Japan. The soviets snaffled up most of Korea and out into “the islands”. Throughout the war, the soviets “sheltered”, trained and equipped Kim Il Sung’s military in preparation of this move, to make it look like a genuine “liberation” action. Remember the Airliner shot down by soviet interceptors over those islands? Most people do not.
Paul:
One factor deterring the French from invading Germany in 1939 was the Siegfried Line. It was not nearly as good as the Maginot Line, but the French thought it was better than it was.
If the French had got through it and into the Ruhr, it is likely the German Army would have overthrown Hitler and made peace, but we will never know.
As for Malaya, it is quite true that the equipment sent to the USSR in 1941 might have saved Malaya. But the USSR was at war then, and Malaya was not. It was seen as important to keep the USSR in the war against Germany.
The defence of Malaya was indeed a fiasco. Men and equipment were sent only when it was too late for them to be of any use. Many were ordered to surrender when they had only just disembarked. What is truly odd is that General Percival had been based in Malaya in the 1930s and had written a memorandum about the defence of the colony. He analysed what might go wrong, and when he was actually put in command in 1941, proceeded to make every mistake he had foreseen might happen. A decent defence of Malaya could have worn down the much smaller Japanese invading force, but it simply did not happen.
JohnK – the Siegfried line did indeed exist, but it not well manned. As for the French military – the same problem as the British military….
The intelligence that came from Germany and was passed to the British and French intelligence services – was not passed on to the French and British commanders – even the May 1940 attack in the Ardennes came as a surprise to the British and French military, in spite of the attack plan being passed to the allied intelligence services months before.
Malaya – General Percival was indeed not good, but then neither were the other officers, there was a sorry lack of professionalism – something that had been seen in the First World War where, contrary to the propaganda, such things as the 1915 campaign to take Constantinople (and thus both link up with the Russians -= and encircle the Central Powers, cut them off from the Middle East) was perfectly “doable” – had the British armed forces been competent, which I am sorry to say they were NOT (see both Colonel Barker’s writings on this matter – and the more recent historical work of Brigadier Mallison).
The Soviet Union….
If it would have been wrong to declare war on the Soviet Union in 1939 for invading Poland (and other nations) – but NOT to have declared war on Germany – then the reverse is also true, it would have been wrong to declare war on Germany (for invading Poland) and NOT declared war the Soviet Union.
From a very cynical point of view one can argue that declaring war on the Soviet Union, but not Germany, might have had some benefits for Britain and France (rounding up the left – breaking their parties and unions), but to declare war on Germany, for invading Poland, but not to declare war on the Soviet Union, which had also invaded Poland, was barking mad.
How did declaring war on Germany benefit Britain or France – especially as neither gave real help to Poland, not even advancing into the Rhineland (which they could have done – as most German land and air forces were in the east).
The lack of professionalism could be seen in 1914.
After the failure of the Schlieffen Plan there was a chance to cut the Germans off, the war could indeed have been “over by Christmas” and some French officers (including some of high rank) begged the high command to move fast – but neither the top British or French understood the need for speed, and the chance was thrown away.
Four years of blood followed.
Imperial Russia?
Two Russian armies were thrown at the Germans (and the word “thrown” is correct – there was no real preparation) – in the hopes that the Germans would panic and detach forces from their Western offensive – which they did, the Germans did indeed panic and send forces east (one reason the Schlieffen Plan failed) although the German forces did not actually get to the east before the Battle of Tannenberg over.
It is not true that the Russians walked blindly into a trap – Russian scouts are not blind, and they reported to General Samsonov that the 2nd Army was heading into a trap.
General Samsonov reported this to the Russian High Command – but General Jelinsky (spelling alert) replied as followers….
“General Samsonov will not be allowed to play the coward – the advance will continue”.
So Samsonov marched his army into the German trap – and then shot himself.
It was all very Russian.
It does not appear to be true that the General Rennenkampf of the 1st Army refused to help Samsonov and his 2nd Army due to them getting into a fight in 1905 (during the war with Japan) – Rennenkampf and the 1st Army appear to have been a bit uncertain (“lost” would be unkind – they knew were they were, sort-of), and there were marshes and other problems.
Meanwhile one of the leading Russian cavalry commanders (the Khan of N….) found he was too old to get on his horse, and when he was helped on the horse he could not stay on (due to piles and other health problems).
I was told that his pistol was taken away so he could not kill himself, but I do not know if that is true. It is certainly true that he burst into tears – not out of fear (he was not a coward), but out of frustration and shame (age hits us all like this – the “indignities of old age”).
Russia did not want war – and was totally unprepared for it.
By the way the Russian policy of vodka prohibition during the First World War was due to a Russian noble, whose son had drank himself to death, begging Nicholas to ban booze and (of course) threatening to kill himself if Nicholas did not do so. People in senior positions were often either screaming at him, or begging him (or both) to do XYZ – such as mobilize in 1914) and threatening to kill themselves if Nicholas did not do as they demanded.
Nicholas really hated being Czar (and I can understand why) – and was utterly unsuited for the position.