Mussolini’s role in starting WW2

Mussolini was Italy’s delegate to the 1919 Paris conference. That is where the Austrian Hapsburg and Ottoman empires were broken up, Germany lost many areas including Alsace Lorraine. The economist Keynes said at the time punishing Germany so much was going to lead to disaster. Mussolini left the conference because Britain reneged on its agreement to give Trieste to the Italians. Hitler may have had a sympathetic ear from Mussolini on lost territories.

Many of the countries in Eastern Europe were created out of whole cloth at this conference, that had never existed before. In many cases they had little information, for example the King of Serbia waved his hands around the map saying all of Yugoslavia was full of Serbs, and was believed. I’d recommend reading “The 1919 Paris Conference”, it will change a lot of your views about World War 2.

This also created another hotspot, Palestine was a region in the Ottoman empire. There was no Palestine state. At this conference they created Palestine and Transjordan, now Jordan. Sykes and Picot also created Syria. This is why the Jews say Jordan is Palestine, not commenting on that part. Often when an empire breaks up there is a war, that’s because there were no distinct boundaries and some will end up on the wrong side of the new border. This explains a lot of what is happening now in the Russia Ukraine war.

Poland received some parts of Germany, the war started when Hitler tried to get them back only 20 years later. Putin mentioned this in his recent interview. A large part of Germany’s expansion to the East was reclaiming parts of the Austro-Hapsburg empire. That was taken apart 20 years before. Austria and Germany came together to regain their territories.

Another factor was that Lenin and Stalin believed capitalism was collapsing at the end of World War 1. This was Marx’s prediction, that the European empires would be in a death spiral and be forced to attack each other for more wealth. Marx believed that capitalists would keep cutting wages so that eventually the workers could not afford to buy the goods in the factories they worked in. Without selling these goods the economy would collapse. This is now largely accepted in macroeconomics. Many said Marx was right in the 2008 economic collapse. People were sold houses from the factories that employed many of them. Then they couldn’t repay the loans.
When the collapse of capitalism was taking too long, Lenin and Stalin decided to push over the last remnants with communist insurgents. Germany was nearly a failed state, at one time they lost control of Munich to the communists.
A reaction to this was the rise of Nazism and Fascism as essentially anticommunistic. Nazis were thugs who fought in the streets against the communist insurgents, including one Adolf Hitler.
So anticommunism was always the raison d’ etre of Nazism and Fascism.

Attacking Russia was always the goal, to wipe out communism as the main danger. We believed this ourselves later with a 45 year cold war against the Soviet Union. So Hitler would always have attacked the communists, they were the only reason he became the leader.

Ukraine was partially taken over by the Austrians and Germans in World War 1. That led to Russia surrendering, making peace, then Russia was over by the communists. Lenin was sent to Russia by train to make trouble there, so that the war would be won more easily. A fatal error that led to a former message runner on the German front lines named Hitler rising up.

In World War 2, many Ukrainians fought with the Nazis against communism not from hating the Russians. This point is lost in the current war, Bandera was a hero against the communists.