Just came across this absolute trashfire of a book by an American prof. I know these revisionist takes about WWII are a dime a dozen… but this one seems particularly egregious in its claims that Stalin masterminded World War II and that the only reason for the USSR’s success was that the stupefied Allies fell for his dastardly plan.
This level of brazen stupidity and/or disingenuousness borders on incomprehensible.
Based on “in Asia,” they probably do mean the invasion of China. It’s still nonsense because Stalin had diplomatic involvement with Chinese nationalist and communist factions, but it was not a “World War” then and it wasn’t part of some grand design on Stalin’s part. Like, Japan was obviously an enemy of the Soviet Union, it had just invaded during the Russian Civil War, but if we’re going to say that that’s enough to unite the whole of WWII under Stalin, then why don’t we just say that the Russian Civil War was the start of WWII at that rate? Nothing means anything.
I don’t know, it just feels like question-begging. Yeah, Stalin was in power for a longer time-frame, but he didn’t want to fight these countries! It wasn’t a World War when it was Japan fucking over East Asia (and Stalin wasn’t being some kind of war monger by advising China!), it was Germany’s initiative to take over Europe and their collaboration with Japan to crush the communists that made it a World War. They are using sophistry to basically do apologetics for the Axis, who were universally the aggressors, and making it look like actually the Soviet Union was.
Germany had already taken over, in part or in whole, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Poland, but no, it’s when the USSR invades Poland after the Polish government had already collapsed and was about to hop the border, that’s the real key to it all and the fundamental aggression! I’m a very serious historian.
Edit: I wish that I could just not argue about WWII for the rest of my life, but people will never stop lying about the most basic facts of it.
I know that feel.
:doomer:
I’m not even a historian. Most of my knowledge comes from high school, video games, tabletop games, skimming Wikipedia, and reading white supremacist/neo-nazi brainworm shit (as examples of things NOT to say or that are definitely wrong). Yet every time I turn around, there’s some new trend that’s re-worded Holocaust denial, anticommunist contrarianism blaming the war on Marx, or downplaying crimes committed outside of Germany by other Axis members.
Like I’m a total idiot and then I see people unironically advocating for clean SS because they’re stupid dumbfuck libs that can’t filter nazi justifications.
Yeah, as a fellow idiot non-historian, it makes me sort of uncomfortable constantly wading into this shit bog, but I’m not pushing some wacky theory about how Bukharin was actually an Imperial Japanese collaborator or something, I’m literally just talking about how Mein Kampf is filled with discussions about conquering Eastern Europe and then they started conquering Eastern Europe and the Soviets knew they were preparing to invade, while these redditor fucks are claiming “nah, Stalin and Hitler were allies until Hitler bamboozled him”.