So the gauntlet is thrown down. . .
I was planning a productive morning at work, full of happy quiet billing hours with the stack of papers that came in the mail when I thought, heck, I got in a few minutes early. What harm can come from checking into PPOTBBS for a few minutes. And I find this.
My general criticism is that you take too micro of a view of world history and you focus on the substories on which history turns, rather than grasping the overarching ebbs and flows of history. By focusing on individual personalities and linchpin events you don't get a good feel for the forces pushing history in that direction.
For the Western people it all starts in 1066. The story for the next eight hundred years or so is of countries competing for resources, wealth, power and influence on an expanding world stage. Each rising power had to hit critical mass where their returns from expansion were enough to fuel more expansion. Those that lost critical mass went the way of the Spanish Empire. Those that didn't expand became regional trading centers at best. The lesson from this stage of history is that the most efficient form of government had a competetive advantage. The most efficient governments were those with the most free and open societies where men were free to reap the rewards of their risk and minorities were allowed to flourish and contribute to society rather than suffer discrimination. Hello English speaking world, sorry about that, Eastern Europe, you'll have your chance in a few hundred years.
In the East the story begins and ends with the Chinese Emperor banning the three masted sailing ship. At the beginingof the Age of Discovery the Asian empires more than rivaled the budding Western powers. Their equipment and navigation were more advanced and they had merchant and military fleets that might have been unsurpassed. But the Chinese were not sure that expansion was a good thing, and the constant need to expand to stay competetive was draining resources. So the solution was to ban the three masted sailing ship. The three mast ship was a technological leap and would eventually allow ships to circumnavigate the globe. A single mast ship was limited in range to the Asian coast. The great Asian powers turned inward and did not compete on the world stage for a milenia.
Back to the West where the action is taking place fast and furiously. Western Europe creates societies where risk taking was rewarded and where minorities who were persecuted in other parts of the world could come and contribute to their society and consequently takes control. The English, Germans, French, Swedes, etc. all squabble until the English pretty much take the dominant role with enough left over to satisfy the remaining European powers for the time being.
All is good, except Europe is getting smaller and smaller and the populations are growing and there are fewer and fewer resources, even with stuff coming in from the new world. Eventually the industrial revolution takes place and a new age of discovery and race for world domination takes place. The next hundred or so years is the story of man harnessing industrial power and learning to live with the consequences. It ain't necessarily pretty, but the Western powers tat were strong get stronger and the British Empire reaches its zenith.
So that brings us up to the late 1800s where I think your analysis needs some work. It starts with the issues that caused WWI and then WWII. I believe, as did Mr. Churchill, that WWI and WWII were not two separate wars, but were a new 40 Years War that was separated by a few years of false peace. And the roots of this conflict, which is the turning point of the world since 1066, lies in the problems of industrialized Western Europe, Mittleeurope, and the undeveloped East.
So by this time the English have knocked the door open on the Chinese and Japanese Empires, the Opium Wars have been fought and won by the West, and the first shots of WWI (and therefore WWII) have been shot in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 where Russia was defeated in its attempt to expand at Japan's expense, signaling the rising of the Eastern Powers and that Russia would have to look west, rather than east for its future.
All of this set the stage for the Balkanization of what we now call Eastern Europeand firece competition between the two factions that boiled down to the English and Germans. Both looked into the future and saw a world where there was only enough room for one faction, and the Germans struck first, calculating that the odds were against them and the passage of time would bleed their strength and the only hope they had was to sieze enough popultion and resources to maintain critical mass at the expense of the French and English faction.
And so we had WWI, where the western powers fecklesssly threw their best men, rank after rank, into machine gun fire, not even having enough sense to figure out whether the other side would run out of bullets before they ran out of men. Meanwhile, Bill fecklessly tossed his well dressed, highly trained men into battle after battle, not calculating how he was going to feed them or his population if things dragged on a bit. Eventually starvation did what battle couldn't, and the Germans eventually capitulated.
And this is where I think your world view needs some tweeking. The time between the wars is essential for understanding the second war and what came after it. By the late 19th Century, things had gotten bad enough for the masses that philosphies justifying taking from the rich and distributing to the poor became not only popular, but dominant political movements. By this we mean primarily Marxism,which was seized upon by those three brothers, Lennin, Trotsky and Stalin, as means to legitimize their claim to power. As onefaction rises, another must rise to compete with it, and so Hitler and the Fascists arrived, not as a competing philosophy, but as a different group of people who wanted their faction to control. And so forth and so on until you have a fully Nazified Germany and a fully Stallinized Soviet Onion.
And now you have three factions in Europe, the English/French Allies, the Germans and the Soviets. That's one too many. The Allies and Germans are natural enemies because they're pushing for expansion on each other's borders, but they are countries that can do business with each other. Except, Hitler wants the whole thing for himself, and the English/French faction has gotten weak and the Americans have retreated behind the Atlantic and started the America First Movement.
So Hitler looks around and sees that he's the odd guy out, he thinks he's the only one up to ruling a united Europe, so he starts pushing. Eventually the English and French figure they have an easy way to get rid of Hitler, and they suggest to Stalin that a little expansion on their part wouldn't be a bad thing. So we get Molotov Cocktails and the Winter War. The noble Finns teach the Russians how to fight while Hitler is learning the same thing in the Spanish Civil War. Eventually Hitler decides that if the West is bribing Stalin to fight him for them, he can cut a better deal with Stalin and take him out later, because he was a lesser threat.
Overnight the pact between Hitler and Stalin reshapes Europe and makes WWII inevitable. But now my law clerk is here and we need to do some real work so I have to stop here and come back to give the details on where you go wrong in the WWII era.
You notice that a lot of the events I describe above overlap. That is deliberate. The order isn't precise because lots of things are going on at the same time. Dates aren't as important as the general flow of history. I'm not even spell checking this, now, I'll come back and edit it later, so take your shots at my grammar and spelling now. :)
|
