I mean, if you want to get deep into the historical back-catalog, a lot of what Germany was doing on their Eastern front had been encouraged by anti-communists in the West. Hitler was encouraged by antisemitic fanatics like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh in the US and Henry Hamilton Beamish and Lord Halifax in the UK. He received enormous private support and subsequent overseas investment in his Fascist party and state war machine from western investors, largely in an effort to contain Eastern European Soviet organizations.
The British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism. They signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn’t threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea… i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a “free hand” (British diplomat’s words not mine) for Hitler to go east.
And we’d be foolish to confine the fascist sentiment entirely to Central Europe.
I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism… My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
~ Cecil John Rhodes, British mining magnate, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and founder of Rhodesia
The only real difference between someone like Rhodes and Hitler was Hitler waged this violence against Europeans for his Lebensraum, while Rhodes turned his attention to South Africa.
Them too, but that’s really is a distinction without a difference. Thank you for pushing back on eurocentrism.
(I mean, unless you’re claiming Germany [and Italy] started the war in Europe in direct respone to their ally’s invasion?)
I mean, if you want to get deep into the historical back-catalog, a lot of what Germany was doing on their Eastern front had been encouraged by anti-communists in the West. Hitler was encouraged by antisemitic fanatics like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh in the US and Henry Hamilton Beamish and Lord Halifax in the UK. He received enormous private support and subsequent overseas investment in his Fascist party and state war machine from western investors, largely in an effort to contain Eastern European Soviet organizations.
The British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism. They signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn’t threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea… i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a “free hand” (British diplomat’s words not mine) for Hitler to go east.
And we’d be foolish to confine the fascist sentiment entirely to Central Europe.
~ Cecil John Rhodes, British mining magnate, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and founder of Rhodesia
The only real difference between someone like Rhodes and Hitler was Hitler waged this violence against Europeans for his Lebensraum, while Rhodes turned his attention to South Africa.
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