Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The Third Reich Was Unsustainable

For a very long time now, I have known that Wilson was a bad dude, and the United States should never have gotten into the first World War.  It's simple really, once you realize that our precious little demo-republic isn't all it's cracked up to be, and that the subsequent destruction of the the area suggests the Austro-Hungarian empire was doing a pretty good job of keeping various ethnicities living together in peace.
But folks will still raise the specter of Hitler as this great evil, which we had a moral imperative to fight in World War II. 
So, the title alludes to the first thing I want to point out.  Hitler got a reputation for some sort of evil brilliance, but it wasn't brilliance; it was audacity.  But consider, invading land is not the same as keeping it occupied, and if Mein Kampf is anything to go by, this nut intended to occupy an awful lot of it.  The Reich would have fallen from internal resistance and structural defect.  Germany was in a logistical nightmare to boot- supplies dwindle quickly under such conditions.

Now, obviously, someone is going to want to point to the mass murders and suggest they mean the U.S. should have engaged regardless.  I am more and more inclined to disagree, because the U.S. was supporting another mass murderer at the time- Stalin.  Stalin actually killed more people than the Nazis did.  So, there is plenty of reason to believe that fewer people overall would have died if the U.S. had not engaged at all. 

Okay, so the bombing of Pearl Harbor did require some response.  I am not a total pacifist, but I think you can claim self-defense, whether it be as a person or a nation, when your land is actually under threat, and this threat was ended rather quickly.

I suppose there are complications to this- how was the holocaust effected by American involvement in the war?  My guess is not much.  The camps weren't shut down until after the war, and the war stopped mainly because Germany ran out of supplies and soldiers.  Hitler just wasn't the evil genius people make him out to be. 

And it is also worth noting that in this war, as in most, the U.S. did not achieve stated objectives.  Freedom didn't happen; rather Eastern Europe went communist, and Western Europe went socialist.  I am sure some objectives were achieve, but they would be the leader's objectives, not the objectives sold to the people. 

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