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When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.
As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.
I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
I have an effortpost somewhere in my notebook brewing, ever since I finished Tooze's Wages of Destruction on the topic of all the different frames that one can use to examine WWII in Europe. There are at least seven framings I can think of that I can make a full argument out of, and completely justify the beginning of the war. WWII was, in some ways, vastly overdetermined.
WWII was primarily a replay of WWI with a little shuffling around the edges. The core conflict was once again Germany-Austria-Hungary vs England/France/Russia/USA, with Italy going from a liability for Britain to a liability for Germany and Japan getting involved. This was known even before the war started, Ferdinand Foch famously called the treaty of Versailles a twenty year ceasefire as it was signed. The flow of conflict runs directly through Versailles, much of Germany's chaos and depression resulted from the aftermath of WWI, and the conflicts with the western Allies began with conflicts over reparations and the removal of formerly German territory into creations of Versailles like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
WWII was primarily a result of the early Cold War, a symptom of the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, which began before WWII and continued after; Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn. The Cold War didn't start in 1945 Berlin, it started in 1917 at the latest. The first Red Scares in the US and the rest of the West happened long before Hitler rose to power. Hitler could not have achieved what he achieved, could not have been half as destructive as he was, without the support he garnered from both sides of the Cold War. Without Stalin's material support in the years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa, Hitler never could have achieved the Blitzkrieg victories in the West. Stalin and his crew were ideological Leninists, and believed in the science of history, that Capitalist imperialist powers must go to war, they can't help it, the competition over economic markets is too powerful a motive. Threatened by the capitalist western powers, Stalin supported And the western Allies significantly aided the rise of fascism diplomatically, seeing it as a counter to Communist revolutionary fervor in Germany, Spain, and Italy; believing that Hitler would naturally fight the Communists because, you know, he kept saying he was going to fight Bolshevism and invade Russia.
WWII was primarily an economic conflict. Germany could not sustain its economy without the resources it did not have access to within its own territory, and England and France were constantly threatening to cut Germany off. Germany had to go to war to secure economic resources to support its economy, and England had to go to war to defend its economic predominance. Balance of payments tells us more about the leadup to the war than any amount of studying battlefield choices.
WWII was a "don't be racist" contest with golf scoring, and Germany and Japan lost. It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily. Japan stormed into Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor, and they threw out the hated white colonial governments, and then instantly proceeded to behave so much worse that many of the freedom fighters who had been fighting against the European colonial overlords flipped to working with the European colonial overlords. The Japanese could have been recruiting Vietnamese auxilaries to fight against the British and Americans, instead they were unable to exploit Indochina to its greatest extent because of local resistance. If the Nazis had aligned with the Banderites at the start of the war, instead of imprisoning Bandera for most of the war before springing him near the end of the war in a last desperate shot; if the Nazis had aligned with Poland to invade Russia together instead of destroying Poland; if the Nazis had at least made vaguely credible motions in the direction of a future Free Russian state rather than making their exterminationist intent obvious; if the Nazis had utilized their Jewish population properly instead of destroying them in a tremendous waste of human capital. The British Empire and the United States were racist governments at the time, but they were less racist than their enemies and that was enough. Stalin killed millions of Jews, too, but he didn't make explicit his intent to exterminate the populations his armies sought to subdue, putting their backs to the wall. The only way to square the circle is to assume that Hitler actually did believe all that racial superiority stuff, otherwise his actions are inexplicably illogical.
And so on and so forth.
It is possible to draw so many different framings for WWII, that are all perfectly cohesive, and are perfectly adequate explanations for why the war took place. And part of the upshot of this is that the guilt for the war is overdetermined. It's possible to say everyone is at fault. The British are at fault and Stalin is at fault and the Germans are at fault. It was the inevitable result of the avarice of Clemanceau at Versailles, and it was the contingent result of decisions made regarding Czechoslovakia and Poland. There's a ton of different ways to slice it up, but the nature of guilt for the deaths of millions is that they can all slice up a share of guilt that is more than enough for one lifetime.
That all being said, while I love some of Daryl's, he's long been pushing credibility with increasingly edgy contrarian takes, and when you play the oh my aren't I an edgy boy game, it's dangerous to dance this close to power. Tucker Carlson was reported to have significant influence, it is a reasonable attack surface to look at who he has on his show. Daryl himself has been retweeted by JD Vance. These aren't random folks engaging in a touch of edgy trolling on the motte or 4chan, of course this bullshit is going to stir up a kerfuffle. Kulak has not, yet, been a Twitter Main Character for his pas-de-deux with Hitler apologism, because he hasn't yet presented a valid attack surface against mainstream right wing politicians.
The concept behind Operation Barbarossa hinged on the assumption that the Red Army can be decisively defeated before the autumn rainy season - that is, in a matter of weeks. In that context, it doesn't matter much if the average Ukrainian, Cossack, Chechen, Kalmyk etc. can be won over for the National Socialist cause or not. In the Pacific, the situation was the same i.e. that the US Navy was to be defeated decisively in short order according to Japanese planning (such as it was) so that the Americans have no other option but to sue for peace, because the US population won't want to fight another big war. The sentiments of the average Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay etc. don't matter one iota in that context. (Was there even any meaningful combat in WW2 in Indochina anyway? Between the Japanese and the Allies, that is?)
And that didn't work out, so in the second phase of the war not making the decision to throw away the military and productive value of Poland, the Ukraine, etc would have been really valuable, might have made all the difference. Germany perpetually faced piss-poor productivity from its foreign nationals in armaments factories, largely because they were treated so poorly. Slave labor is less productive than free labor, especially when the slaves are pretty sure they're to-be-executed. Much of Tooze's work covers how the "armaments miracle" was the result of easing (in certain cases) the racist brutality of the Nazi slave labor system. Improve German armaments manufacturing earlier, and it could be the difference.
My understanding is that the plan was to deal a blow to the US Navy that would leave it reeling, seize as much territory as possible to push the defensive ring far from the Japanese homeland as possible, then bleed the Americans for every mile on the way back to Japan, while utilizing the resources controlled as a result of the earlier conquests to fuel the Japanese war machine.
I'll admit my argument is more shaky here, as it is quite likely that once the US got into bombing range of Japan, and certainly once the atom bomb arrived, there was no likelihood of Japanese victory. The possibility of inflicting damage on Japan itself without penetrating the entire defensive front obviates some of the value of the extended defensive ring.
Nevertheless, I'd still argue that significant Japanese resources were wasted on efforts that would not have needed to be made if they had chosen differently.
This raises some questions: when was the most recent time a conqueror seriously benefited from free labor?
My first thought was Alsace-Lorraine. But apparently the economic richness is hindsight bias; Germany originally took it on nationalist and military planning grounds. France took it back for similar reasons. I assume Hitler was eager to tap its manpower and natural resources, but I couldn’t confirm what was actually extracted. Does Wages break down how many rifles, airframes, etc. were sourced from which territories?
Anyway, I think we have to go back further. Plenty of colonization had economic motives, but I’m reluctant to count cases where the free labor was all imported. Not sure about the later colonial banana republics, either. Maybe administrations like the Raj are a better fit.
My point is that free labor is hard to get. Back when the only income was feudal dues, maybe you could reasonably expect a ceded province to improve cash flow. But that was based on the unfree nature of serfdom and the limits of human capital. Add mobility, and your free labor becomes no labor. Raise complexity, and serf labor won’t get you a new airplane.
The states which won WWII benefited from free labor because they weren’t relying on conquered territory. As soon as you start conquering, I think all the good options are off the table.
Depends how we define "Conquest."
If we count the takeover and integration of territory regardless of violence, we'd be talking about Hong Kong going back to China, right?
Before that, we have South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam, though they would have labeled that as liberation rather than conquest, and they did not benefit solely or immediately.
The USSR did not conquer most of the Eastern Bloc in the sense of integrating them into their territory, but they had effective control over their labor and benefitted from it, though you could also quibble with "free" under Communism.
This is why I think the idea of prc violently taking Taiwan is unlikely. They can't take TSMC, within a few years tsmc would be irrelevant, if it even survived the war. They must non violently absorb Taiwan to benefit.
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At the oldest possible candidate, the Japanese conquest of Korea. There’s almost certainly Soviet examples in the late forties or early fifties, as well, I just don’t know them.
As a borderline example in the 21st century, the junta in Myanmar had been making use of forced labor in territories conquered from the rebels to produce cash resources which financed the war machine.
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