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The number of actual Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese fascists that ascended to power after WWII by leveraging the US's and UK's fear of communists is quit

The number of actual Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese fascists that ascended to power after WWII by leveraging the US's and UK's fear of communists is quite staggering. A quick review of the far-right regimes the US and UK supported throughout the Cold War backs this up. I think there's a case to be made that if Hitler wasn't specifically going after the UK's sphere of influence, and if Japan had not attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, the pro-fascist elements in each the US and UK might well have forestalled WWII entirely. Considering how the Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking went, it's unsettling to think that neither of those were cassus belli for what we understand to be the good guys during that war. All of that to say, banning the commemoration of Shaft is unsurprising in the extreme if you know anything about the frequent infernal deals that happened during the Cold War.

vkou 3y ago
To be fair to the US, the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking. Japan had the option of ceasing its war in China voluntarily, or running out of oil and ceasing it involuntarily. Or of invading US-controlled sources of oil in the Pacific. Which is not to say that fascists in the US were not trying their damned hardest to seize power. [1] Nobody was prosecuted for their involvement in the plot, of course. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
- refurb 3y ago
  This is a bizarre take. The Rape of Nanking was not the cause of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s expansionism was. The US was trying to contain Japan even before the Nanking massacre. The US didnt control the oil Japan was after, the Netherlands and the UK controlled it.
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The 'Business Plot' took place almost a decade earlier, the Rape of Nanking happened in the winter of 37/38 and was in a horrific way just one more step in the Japanese expansion strategy. Pearl Harbor happened almost to the day 4 years later, in December of 1941. The main reason it happened as far as I understand it is because the Japanese had their sight on resources in the Dutch East Indies (notably: oil) and the US had effectively blocked them from doing so. There were other reasons besides, but the Rape of Nanking had as far as I know nothing to do with it in a direct cause-and-effect relationship. So I think you are mixing up a bunch of unrelated historical facts to arrive at the wrong conclusion. Incidentally, the attack on Pearl Harbor was probably one of the biggest own goals in the whole of WWII, it was meant to dissuade the US and to force it further into isolationism, instead it galvanized the nation into becoming one of the major players at the end of WWII. It also sped up the development of atomic weapons, just two months before Pearl Harbor there was the beginnings of the Manhattan Project but it was still very low-key, after the declaration of war against Japan and Germany it all went into overdrive.
  - vkou 3y ago
    The facts are entirely related. FDR was keen on opposing fascism, but neither Congress, nor the US public had much interest in it. The atrocities in China galvanized support for anti-Japanese policies, which eventually terminated in the oil embargo, which precipitated Pearl Harbor. If Japan has only attacked the DEI, the US was unlikely to have sat around on its hands - and it would have had both a Pacific fleet, and the Phillipines to operate it from. Japan's imperial ambitions were unattainable from the moment that the oil embargo was in place.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      You are making a direct link between Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking: > the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking. The timing doesn't work, and no historian of that era that I'm aware of has made such a direct link, though, of course, like everything it is connected but only in the much larger scheme of things. Historians generally seem to agree on the fact that the Japanese invasion of French Indochina to try to embargo all imports (including US imports) into China is what led to the oil embargo. You're welcome to persist in your own view of history of course, but the fact that the Rape of Nanking preceded Pearl Harbor and the Oil Embargo that led up to it does not automatically mean that the one caused the other.
jacquesm 3y ago
Schaft. At the time NL was still reeling from WWII and the fear of communism, which has its roots in the failed attempt to call for a socialist revolution in NL in 1918 caused a ton of confusion about who, fresh after WWII the enemy was and had been. The Dutch resistance was extremely adept at covering their tracks, and what was hard to uncover for the German authorities was no less so for the Dutch authorities after the war. It took many years - decades in fact - just to sift through all of the documentation and to figure out who had played what role. Some of the worst war criminals in NL could either escape or died from natural causes before they could be brought to justice, in some cases they managed to stay ahead of the law until the 70's and 80s', for instance: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Menten https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Menten As well as members of our royal family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biesterfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biest... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Claus_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Claus_of_the_Netherland... So there was a ton of confusion all around and being a registered communist and a resistance hero made for a difficult mixture during the early years of the cold war. It took until Harry Mulisch in the 70's before the record was finally set straight. Keep in mind that during all of these years there was the CPN, the Communist Party Netherlands that very much wanted to remodel NL after the Russian communist model. Rumors about the CPN being funded persisted for a long time but no proof of this was ever presented. We had an absolutely fantastic person called Loe de Jong who pretty much spent his whole life on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands_During_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands... Another piece of information against which this should be seen is that there was a lot of friction in the country with respect to the way the various colonial wars were going, here clearly the Dutch were the aggressors and we were committing war crimes all over the place. So the Dutch authorities were a bit nervous about anything that looked like it might lead to an anti-war organization.
inglor_cz 3y ago
From a formerly Communist country, that fear was thoroughly justified, especially during the times when Stalin was alive. Stalinism is exactly as bad as Nazism, only Stalin was a bit more rational and also more patient than Hitler and didn't start WWIII.
- petsfed 3y ago
  I have joked often that the fact that still-colonial Britain and Stalin's Russia were the good guys tells you an awful lot about just how bad the Nazis really were A lot of the non-European support for Hitler really did come down to "well, he's not British, how bad can he really be?" And a lot of the Eurasian support for Hitler and Tojo came down to "they're not Stalin, how bad can they be?" What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning, and were certainly very bad even under Lenin. I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning, The fact that the party took power through a coup, and then fought a horrific, five-year existential civil war meant that no matter who was running it, the culture of paranoia, desire for control, and repression would have prevailed, no matter who was general secretary. It would have certainly been worse, or better under different people, but the party's culture was pretty fixed by the time the 30s rolled around. It took a generation of being fairly secure in their power for things to relax. > I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising. Was the White Terror significantly less brutal in its means? The Whites were a coalition of warlords that were quite happy to carry out pogroms, massacres, exterminations of jews, and other enemies of the counter-revolution.

vkou 3y ago

To be fair to the US, the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking. Japan had the option of ceasing its war in China voluntarily, or running out of oil and ceasing it involuntarily. Or of invading US-controlled sources of oil in the Pacific. Which is not to say that fascists in the US were not trying their damned hardest to seize power. [1] Nobody was prosecuted for their involvement in the plot, of course. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

refurb 3y ago
This is a bizarre take. The Rape of Nanking was not the cause of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s expansionism was. The US was trying to contain Japan even before the Nanking massacre. The US didnt control the oil Japan was after, the Netherlands and the UK controlled it.
suction 3y ago
[dead]
jacquesm 3y ago
The 'Business Plot' took place almost a decade earlier, the Rape of Nanking happened in the winter of 37/38 and was in a horrific way just one more step in the Japanese expansion strategy. Pearl Harbor happened almost to the day 4 years later, in December of 1941. The main reason it happened as far as I understand it is because the Japanese had their sight on resources in the Dutch East Indies (notably: oil) and the US had effectively blocked them from doing so. There were other reasons besides, but the Rape of Nanking had as far as I know nothing to do with it in a direct cause-and-effect relationship. So I think you are mixing up a bunch of unrelated historical facts to arrive at the wrong conclusion. Incidentally, the attack on Pearl Harbor was probably one of the biggest own goals in the whole of WWII, it was meant to dissuade the US and to force it further into isolationism, instead it galvanized the nation into becoming one of the major players at the end of WWII. It also sped up the development of atomic weapons, just two months before Pearl Harbor there was the beginnings of the Manhattan Project but it was still very low-key, after the declaration of war against Japan and Germany it all went into overdrive.
- vkou 3y ago
  The facts are entirely related. FDR was keen on opposing fascism, but neither Congress, nor the US public had much interest in it. The atrocities in China galvanized support for anti-Japanese policies, which eventually terminated in the oil embargo, which precipitated Pearl Harbor. If Japan has only attacked the DEI, the US was unlikely to have sat around on its hands - and it would have had both a Pacific fleet, and the Phillipines to operate it from. Japan's imperial ambitions were unattainable from the moment that the oil embargo was in place.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    You are making a direct link between Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking: > the reason Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor was because the US backed it into a corner over the Rape of Nanking. The timing doesn't work, and no historian of that era that I'm aware of has made such a direct link, though, of course, like everything it is connected but only in the much larger scheme of things. Historians generally seem to agree on the fact that the Japanese invasion of French Indochina to try to embargo all imports (including US imports) into China is what led to the oil embargo. You're welcome to persist in your own view of history of course, but the fact that the Rape of Nanking preceded Pearl Harbor and the Oil Embargo that led up to it does not automatically mean that the one caused the other.

jacquesm 3y ago

Schaft. At the time NL was still reeling from WWII and the fear of communism, which has its roots in the failed attempt to call for a socialist revolution in NL in 1918 caused a ton of confusion about who, fresh after WWII the enemy was and had been. The Dutch resistance was extremely adept at covering their tracks, and what was hard to uncover for the German authorities was no less so for the Dutch authorities after the war. It took many years - decades in fact - just to sift through all of the documentation and to figure out who had played what role. Some of the worst war criminals in NL could either escape or died from natural causes before they could be brought to justice, in some cases they managed to stay ahead of the law until the 70's and 80s', for instance: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Menten https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Menten As well as members of our royal family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biesterfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biest... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Claus_of_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Claus_of_the_Netherland... So there was a ton of confusion all around and being a registered communist and a resistance hero made for a difficult mixture during the early years of the cold war. It took until Harry Mulisch in the 70's before the record was finally set straight. Keep in mind that during all of these years there was the CPN, the Communist Party Netherlands that very much wanted to remodel NL after the Russian communist model. Rumors about the CPN being funded persisted for a long time but no proof of this was ever presented. We had an absolutely fantastic person called Loe de Jong who pretty much spent his whole life on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands_During_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_the_Netherlands... Another piece of information against which this should be seen is that there was a lot of friction in the country with respect to the way the various colonial wars were going, here clearly the Dutch were the aggressors and we were committing war crimes all over the place. So the Dutch authorities were a bit nervous about anything that looked like it might lead to an anti-war organization.

inglor_cz 3y ago

From a formerly Communist country, that fear was thoroughly justified, especially during the times when Stalin was alive. Stalinism is exactly as bad as Nazism, only Stalin was a bit more rational and also more patient than Hitler and didn't start WWIII.

petsfed 3y ago
I have joked often that the fact that still-colonial Britain and Stalin's Russia were the good guys tells you an awful lot about just how bad the Nazis really were A lot of the non-European support for Hitler really did come down to "well, he's not British, how bad can he really be?" And a lot of the Eurasian support for Hitler and Tojo came down to "they're not Stalin, how bad can they be?" What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning, and were certainly very bad even under Lenin. I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising.
- vkou 3y ago
  > What's interesting is that the brutality and Machiavellian political infighting of Stalin's era were sort of present from the beginning in Lenin's Bolsheviks (arguably down to the name), and I'm honestly not convinced that things would've been better if someone like Trotsky had come to power after Lenin's death instead. The stage was set for brutal oppression and criminal negligence almost from the beginning, The fact that the party took power through a coup, and then fought a horrific, five-year existential civil war meant that no matter who was running it, the culture of paranoia, desire for control, and repression would have prevailed, no matter who was general secretary. It would have certainly been worse, or better under different people, but the party's culture was pretty fixed by the time the 30s rolled around. It took a generation of being fairly secure in their power for things to relax. > I don't believe the Reds won the Russian Civil war so much as the Whites' incompetence lost the war before the Reds' brutality caused a mass uprising. Was the White Terror significantly less brutal in its means? The Whites were a coalition of warlords that were quite happy to carry out pogroms, massacres, exterminations of jews, and other enemies of the counter-revolution.