Ron Collins
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

I never learned about that part of WWII. Fascinating.

Myself, I have been fascinated by the endless and vastly complex history of that war since grade school. Of course, in the sixties when I was that age the politically correct version of the war went something like John Wayne and Audie Murphy more or less single-handedly saved the world from the Nazi menace and Jap imperialism at the same time, with some occasional quaint assistance from Trevor Howard and Richard Burton. In other news, there was some scattered fighting in Russia, or something…..

I only began much later in life to recognize that the entire war on both sides of the world, its precedent causes, its bizarre, unlikely, near-hostile and shifting alliances, and both its tactics and strategies in how it was fought by all belligerents, as well as its outcomes, ALL may only be comprehended in anything like a coherent way by first examining the staggering significance over two decades earlier, of the Russian revolutions (there were two of them, in the same year of 1917, following on the failed one in 1905). Probably over the long term even more significant to global events for a century to follow, was the “Russian” civil war, which began at nearly the precise moment in history that the First World War ended, and raged “Red” against ‘White” in dozens of countries across most of eastern and central Europe, as well as central Asia and Siberia and even Mongolia, for several years after the Treaty of Versailles.

Without a clear grasp of how Russia’s radical, violent and absolute transformation from an Eastern Orthodox monarchy and peerage state to a totalitarian secular party-state at the hands of the Bolsheviks, affected the entire world, the second world war cannot possibly make any sense whatsoever. The Soviet Union was absolutely that war’s center of historic gravity, and it is arguable that no part of that war east or west would ever have occurred at all, were it not for the emergence of the Soviet state, and the ways that this had upset the entire tenuous balance of power around the planet, a generation prior to it.

I could take several hours to defend that thesis for you, and like 9/10ths of the people I ever tried to have that conversation with, bore you to the point of needing therapy. But that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

To undertsand WWII, perhaps wipe the slate of everything you think you know absolutely clean, and begin all over again with (for example) the total destruction of the Russian Pacific fleet by Japanese naval forces in 1905, or the rising divisions within the post-dynastic Chinese republic (est 1911) once Russia had become a communist state and the Chinese experiment began to be deeply split between communist and nationalist ideologues; or the pathway from Spain’s defeat by the USA in 1899–1900, to the Rif rebellion of 1920–27 and Spain’s last desperate attempt to retain an overseas empire, to the abdication of its king in 1931, and the rise of a democratic-socialist republic, followed by the fascist rebellion and the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, which ended Spain’s being the second major European nation to attempt a socialist party-state, to the vast and enduring political ripples of the Spanish civil war all over Latin America from Argentina to Los Angeles, and the fact that it had been in Spain where German troops and Nazi agents had first met their Russian-Soviet counterparts on the field of battle, a conflict of ideologies and world views which continues to be the primary divisive factor all over South and Central America to this day.

For a side study, perhaps acquaint yourself with the fact that the USSR invaded Poland as a German ally two weeks after the Germans had in September 1939, and that even though Neville Chamberlain as Britain’s Prime Minister had declared war on Germany on the sole motive of its having invaded Poland, Great Britain never made the least effort in Poland’s behalf to liberate her throughout five and a half years of a war that had begun supposedly to do exactly that. (See also: Katyn Forest, 1939…..)

That ought to get you started.

In other news, the United States got involved for a while too. Mostly as an instrument of Stalin’s foreign policy objectives, but that is politically incorrect to point out, here in the United States of John Wayne…..

    Ron Collins

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    Facts don’t care about your faction