A Centrist Position on The Second World War

Unnecessary conflict escalation leads to catastrophic disaster

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst Neoliberals, and Boomers more generally, because the post-war order is collapsing. This collapse was, of course, inevitable, but the fact that it is being accelerated by one Donald J. Trump is particularly infuriating for the “adults in the room.” Awhile back, I wrote a piece hypothesizing that we are entering a new era, and that the previous cycle, which began at the end of WWII, is ending. So, I’m not surprised to see this happening, and to be quite honest, I’m glad.

As we transition into this new Cycle of History, it’s important for us to re-examine the founding myths of the previous era. This means, dismantling the mythic narrative of WWII, which serves as the backbone of the “Boomer Truth Regime.” This does not mean taking the position that Hitler was right, although it does mean evaluating Hitler as a historical figure rather than a boogeyman.

My intention in this article is to stake out a new “Centrist” position on WWII, one in which the central lesson of the conflict is not “preemptive war is the only alternative to mass genocide,” but rather, "unnecessary conflict escalation will lead to catastrophic disaster.” Hopefully, this becomes the founding principle of the new world order.

The Case for Non-Intervention in the Polish-German War of 1939

Why was the Second World War fought? The Holocaust is often cited as a post-hoc justification for WWII. In other words, the war had to be fought to stop a genocide. But, this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, because the Holocaust didn’t happen until many years after the war had already started, the US was turning Jewish refugees away at Ellis Island, and the British blockade of Germany was preventing the Nazis from executing their plan of shipping all the Jews to Madagascar (yes, this was real). In other words, the war didn’t happen because of the Holocaust, but, I think it’s fair to say that the Holocaust happened because of the war. But we’ll get to that below.

If the war wasn’t fought over the Holocaust, why was it fought? It actually started over a border dispute in Eastern Europe. In 1919, the Allies made Germany sign the punitive Versailles Treaty, which parceled up land that had previously belonged to Germany amongst her neighbors. Almost immediately, everyone involved (besides France) recognized that this was unfair, and likely to lead to future conflict - not least of all because the land taken from Germany was, unsurprisingly, majority ethnic Germans. The newly formed countries, such as Poland, viewed these ethnic Germans as potential fifth columnists, and treated them as such. This caused the ethnic Germans to be resentful of these governments, and in many cases to become fifth columnists.

Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the Danzig Corridor of the newly formed Polish state. The Danzig Corridor was particularly ridiculous because it split Germany, creating the small, disconnected region of East Prussia:

The Germans wanted Danzig back, and the Poles did not want to give it up. This was an ongoing issue preceding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, but it was an issue Hitler was not willing to overlook. The British then offered a war guarantee to Poland in order to deter German aggression, but, as we will see below, it backfired massively.

One can certainly argue that territorial disputes don’t justify war, but one can’t deny that wars break out over territorial disputes all the time. In 2023, Azerbaijan invaded Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, displacing over 100,000 Armenian refugees. This was a relatively low-level conflict, but that’s mainly because no Great Powers chose to intervene. Juxtapose this to the conflict in Ukraine, where, largely because of intervention on the part of NATO, the conflict has dragged on for multiple years, tallied hundreds of thousands of casualties, and created millions of refugees.

The choice by the British Empire to intervene in the Polish-German border dispute is even more baffling when we consider that the official position of the British was that Danzig should be returned to Germany. From Pat Buchanan’s book, Hitler, Churchill, and the Unnecessary War:

The British cared nothing for Danzig, or, if they did, sympathized with the German case. Lord Halifax considered Danzig and the Corridor “an absurdity.” Indeed, of all the German claims to lost lands, the claim to Danzig was the strongest. It had always been a German city. It’s population was 95 percent German. Any plebiscite would have produced a 90 percent vote to return to the Fatherland. And Britain had no objection to Danzig’s return, as long as it came about peacefully through negotiation, not violently through military force. On Danzig, the basic British and German positions were almost identical. Both wanted its peaceful return to Germany.

In other words, the British government wanted to illustrate the utility of their fancy new League of Nations by resolving the Danzig question diplomatically. But, the Weimar Republic did make diplomatic attempts to negotiate the return of the territory, they were refused by the Polish government under Jozef Pilsudski, who had come to power via a bloody coup in 1926. Hitler also attempted to negotiate the peaceful return of Danzig, under very generous conditions for Poland. At one point, he even offered a mutual defense pact to Poland against the Soviet Union. Pilsudski had led the Polish army against the Bolsheviks the Polish-Soviet war, and his Polish Nationalist coalition certainly had no love for the commies. But, the Polish Nationalists were loathe to surrender territory to the Germans, or to enter into an alliance where their country was seen as the junior partner.

It’s interesting to theorize what would have happened if Germany and Poland had reached an agreement, and formed a military alliance against the Soviet Union. Would they have ended up invading in a joint venture? Possibly. Hitler was pretty open about hating the Bolsheviks, and Communists more generally. Pilsudski and his successors (he died in 1935) also hated Bolsheviks, but Poland was in a more strategically delicate position, nestled as it was between two powerful neighbors. Perhaps having a “buffer state” between Germany and the USSR would have prevented any war from breaking out, or perhaps war was inevitable.

Either way, when talks broke down between Germany and Poland in March 1939, Britain issued a war guarantee. They promised Poland that, should Germany (and only Germany) invade Poland, the British government would immediately declare war on Germany. It was the intention of the British to deter Hitler from attacking Poland by threatening to intervene militarily. Not because they didn’t want Danzig returned to Germany, but because they wanted to force a diplomatic solution to the problem. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.

Given the explicit backing of the British Empire, the Poles believed (incorrectly) they were now immune to German hostilities. This stiffened the Polish resolve, and actually made peaceful territorial transfer much more difficult. Meanwhile Hitler, who was a figure animated most of all by anger over the humiliation of Germany after WWI, was provoked by what he saw as British meddling into a more bellicose stance. Hitler theorized (correctly) that Britain actually had no ability to project military power into Eastern Europe, and decided to call their bluff.

Be a fat, drunk retard? I bet he can

We can’t say for sure that war wouldn’t have broken out between Germany and Poland anyway, but the British War Guarantee insured that it did, as even drunk retard Winston Churchill in his 1948 book The Gathering Storm would admit:

And now Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand to guarantee the integrity of Poland - of that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State [Germany and Poland had jointly partitioned Czechoslovakia at Munich]

Moreover, how could we protect Poland and make good our guarantee? … Here was a decision taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.

The British war guarantee was completely worthless to the Polish. No British soldier (or French, or American) would ever set foot in Poland. The territorial integrity of Poland would not be preserved, it would be occupied by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes until the end of the war, at which time it would become a Soviet satellite state, and face brutal Communist oppression for the next 50 years.

Because, the Germans weren’t the only ones to invade Poland in September of 1939. Due to the British war guarantee, instead of Hitler making an anti-Communist alliance with the Poles, as he had originally intended, Hitler and Stalin came to an entante cordial where they agreed to the partition of Poland. But, for some reason, Britain didn’t declare war on the Soviet Union when they invaded Poland from the East, and in fact, would end up forming an alliance with them in 1941. Let’s talk about that.

Deal With The Devil

The Boomer Truth Regime paints WWII as “the Good War,” in which the forces of Liberal Democracy defeated the big bad Fascists. This ignores the rather large role (in fact, the primary role) played by the Soviet Union in the war. France spent the majority of the war occupied by Germany, Britain spent it launching random bombing campaigns against civilian targets across the channel. The majority of the war was fought, and ultimately won, in the East. It was the defense of Moscow, the battle of Stalingrad, and finally Kursk, that broke the Wehrmacht. Of the 18 million or so combat deaths in the European theater, almost 17 million occurred on the Eastern Front.

World War II was not a war between the Liberal Democracies and the Fascists, it was a war between the Fascists and the Communists, with the Liberals contributing to the side of the Communists. Was this a morally defensible action on the part of Western Democracies?

The Holocaust is often cited as a post-hoc justification for the Second World War. After all, we had to fight Hitler, to prevent genocide. Never mind that the genocide happened anyway, it’s the thought that counts, I guess - just like the “defense” of Poland. But, as of 1939, the Nazi’s hadn’t actually committed a genocide yet. But, you know who had? The Soviets.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Holodomor, in the years 1932-33, the Soviet regime executed a deliberate starvation campaign in Ukraine. After the Soviets collectivized the farms, food production decreased, because Communism doesn’t work. But, rather than moderate his agricultural policy (as his predecessor Lenin actually did), Stalin decided to “punish” the “saboteurs” who had struck this counter-revolutionary blow to the Union. This meant a campaign of weaponized mass starvation against the Ukrainians as a people. Timothy Snyder, in his book Bloodlands, describes the situation in Ukraine:

The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. Ukraine in 1933 was full of orphans, and sometimes people took them in. Yet without food there was little that even the kindest of strangers could do for such children. The boys and girls lay about on sheets and blankets, eating their own excrement, waiting for death.

In one village near the Kharkiv region, several women did their best to look after children. As one of them recalled, they formed “something like an orphanage.” Their wards were in a pitiful condition: “The children had bulging stomachs; they were covered in wounds, in scabs; their bodies were bursting. We took them outside, we put them on sheets, and they moaned. One day the children suddenly fell silent, we turned around to see what was happening, and they were eating the smallest child, Petrus. They were tearing strips from him and eating them. And Petrus was doing the same, he was tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could. The other children put their lips to his wounds and drank his blood. We took the child away from the hungry mouths and we cried.”

The number killed in the Holodomor is most often quoted at 5 million (we have to ensure its lower than that magic 6 million number, after all), but Snyder considers that to be a low estimate. Soviet officials at the time privately estimated 5.5 million, but if we include ethnic Ukrainians who were killed in Soviet Russia and Kazakhstan as well, the number is closer to 6.6 million. Note that I’m not trying to diminish the Holocaust, just pointing out that, in 1939, the only genocide that had happened was the one perpetrated by our ally.

Now, one thing Hitler did do was orchestrate the assassination of his political rivals. In 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered SS hitmen to murder a number of high-profile political targets, and thus solidified his rule over Germany. The total number killed was 85. That’s a lot of assassinations, to be sure. That would make Hillary Clinton blush. But when it comes to eliminating political rivals, the award again has to go to Joseph Stalin.

With the assistance of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin would construct a vast conspiracy theory, in which so-called “Trotskyites” were secretly in the pay of the Capitalist forces of the West, and actively working to undermine the USSR and bring about its destruction. Party members accused of being part of the plot were rounded up, beaten, and tortured until they signed an absurd written confession. They were then forced to confess publicly in a show-trial, and then they were shot. By 1937, a total of fifty thousand people were murdered in purges of the armed forces, state institutions, and communist party.

Of course no survey of the horrors of Nazism would be complete without talking about racism - and anti-semitism more specifically. Of course, as we mentioned, in 1939, the Holocaust hadn’t happened yet. The Nazis did pass the Nuremberg Laws, which placed restrictions on Jews, Romani, and other non-Germans, reducing them to second class citizenship. Nobody is defending this. Although, as Hitler would point out at the time, the Nuremberg laws weren’t really any worse than the Jim Crow laws of the contemporary American South.

The Nazis did, however, commit a pogrom. In 1938, in response to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish terrorist, the state organized a pogrom against the Jewish community of Germany, which became known as Kristallnacht. Thousands of Jewish owned business were looted and burned. This is wrong. It’s not okay to loot and burn private businesses (unless you’re BLM, I guess). A total of 91 Jews were killed. This is no good. Killing people based on their ethnicity is wrong (arguably killing people for any reason is bad). But remember, during this same period, from 1937-38, the Soviet Union would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians because of their ethnicity.

During the Great Terror of 1937-38, the Soviet regime would apply the same tactics used to purge political rivals from the institutions to purge “socially undesirables” more generally. The Great Terror began with the liquidation of the “kulaks,” a Bolshevik term for a class of prosperous farmers, the threshold for inclusion in which would be continually revised down until it included basically any landholding peasant. During the years 1937-38, a total of 378,326 “kulaks” would be murdered by the NKVD, and another 389,070 shipped to slave labor camps in Siberia.

But the Great Terror wasn’t focused only on so-called “class enemies.” There was an ethnic component as well. By this time, Stalin had moved away from more traditional Marxism-Leninism to what he termed “National Bolshevism.” In other words, all animals were equal, but some animals were more equal than others. And those animals were the Russians. All other ethnicities were suspect, but particularly Poles.

In addition to the Kulaks mentioned above, over 140,000 ethnic Poles were arrested by the NKVD in the 1930s, ostensibly for suspicion of “espionage” on behalf of the Polish government. But, these were not Polish spies, they were just random Polish civilians, who happened to live in Soviet-controlled Belarus or Ukraine. Of those arrested, 111,091 were executed.

I’m listing all of these crimes out, not to engage in some sort of Ben Shapiro “whaddaboutism,” but to present an honest question. Put yourself in the shoes of the British Empire. The two regimes described above both invade Poland in September of 1939. You only declare war against one of them, and you end up allying yourself with the other. Which one do you choose?

On Preventing the Holocaust

But, none of the above arguments are really effective at piercing the emotional veil the Holocaust invokes. Since the Holocaust was the only genocide perpetrated by a right-wing government in the 20th century, it gets amplified and used as a bludgeon against any right-of-center movement in the West. Many rightoids fall into this rhetorical trap, because they instinctually want to downplay the Holocaust as a response. This is the wrong move. Not only because the Holocaust did happen, but also because it makes you seem like a Nazi sympathizer, which is not a particularly good look.

The more effective argument is to talk about how the Holocaust could have been prevented. This is actually easy to do. After all, the war was not fought because of the Holocaust, but rather, the Holocaust was perpetrated because of the war.

Let’s start with the basic fact that there were hardly any Jews living in actual Nazi Germany. From the preface of Snyder’s book:

Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and about one quarter of one percent by the beginning of the Second World War. During the first six years of Hitler’s rule, German Jews were allowed (in humiliating and impoverishing circumstances) to emigrate. Most of the German Jews who saw Hitler win elections in 1933 died of natural causes.

Timothy Snyder is not a Holocaust revisionist, by the way. In fact, he was one of the “experts” trotted out to dutifully castigate Darryl Cooper after his infamous Tucker Carlson interview. As the title would imply, his book Bloodlands is about mass deaths at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets. But, most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were living in Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, or Ukraine. If the war had not happened, they would never have fallen into the hands of Nazi Germany.

Note also that most of Germany’s Jewish population (75%) had emigrated prior to the outbreak of WWII. Hitler’s original solution to the “Jewish Question” was forced emigration. Now, this is certainly not ideal for a German Jew. Especially if the Nazis are confiscating all your valuables on the way out. But, it’s preferable to the gas chamber. Prior to the war, the Nazi plan involved deporting Jews to … Madagascar.

Madagascar, in other words, was a “solution” for a Jewish “problem” that had not yet really arisen. Grand deportation schemes made a kind of sense in 1938, when leading Nazis could still delude themselves that Poland might become a German satellite and join in an invasion of the Soviet Union. More than three million Jews lived in Poland, and Polish authorities had also investigated Madagascar as a site for their resettlement. Although Polish leaders envisioned no policies toward their national minorities (five million Ukrainians, three million Jews, one million Belarusians) that were remotely comparable to Soviet realities or Nazi plans, they did wish to reduce the size of the Jewish population by voluntary emigration. After the death of Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski in 1935, his successors had taken on the position of the Polish nationalist right on this particular question, and had established a ruling party that was open only to ethnic Poles. In the late 1930s, the Polish state supported the aims of the right-wing or Revisionist Zionists in Poland, who wished to create a very large State of Israel in the British Mandate of Palestine - if necessary, by means of violence.

The Revisionist Zionists Synder mentions were led by Zeev Jabotinsky. He’s an interesting character, because Jabotinsky kind of agreed with some of Hitler’s criticisms of the Jewish Diaspora. He believed that the stereotype of the Jews as conniving, mercantile, and cosmopolitan stemmed from their lack of a homeland. He wanted to set up a state of Israel in order to implement a Jewish version of “Blood and Soil,” which he felt would rehabilitate his people.

He was also an early predictor of the Holocaust, as he witnessed rising anti-Semitism in Poland, he warned the Jewish community of the need to emigrate. In 1936, he came up with an “evacuation plan” calling for the removal of millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe to Palestine. He even convinced the governments of Poland, Hungary, and Romania to agree to his proposals. His plan was, however, rejected by the Labor Zionists at the Zionist Organization. Despite this, Jabotinsky personally oversaw the smuggling of over 20,000 Eastern European Jews past the British blockade into Mandatory Palestine in the years leading up to WWII.

A real one

Once the war began, however, the British blockade of German shipping prevented the deportation of any Jews from German occupied territory, whether to Madagascar, Palestine, or anywhere else. Even then, Hitler tried to pawn his Jews off on the Soviet Union (before he broke the non-aggression pact), but Stalin declined. It was only in 1942, as the military situation was looking increasingly negative, that the “Final Solution” was formulated. As Adam Tooze, in his book Wages of Destruction, points out

This genocidal plan commanded such wide-ranging support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, following Germany’s experience in World War I, was obvious to all: the need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary at the expense of the populations of the Soviet Union.

As we have discussed, the “bread-basket of the Ukraine” played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any other military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in the German grain stocks.

Tooze’s book is very interesting, if somewhat dry in places, because he traces the economic incentives that led ultimately to the Holocaust. He is still solidly in the camp of the Boomer Truth Regime, but his book is worth a read because it sheds light on the actual thought process going on within the Nazi government, rather than the traditional cartoonish super-villain framing.

And that’s fine, because remember, this article is not intended as a defense of Nazi atrocities. But, we have to ask ourselves if the Holocaust was inevitable, or if a different course of action on the part of the West could have led to a preferable outcome.

As Darryl Cooper told Scott Horton in a recent interview, if a crazy meth-addict is holding his family hostage, obviously he is the one who is ultimately responsible for his own actions. But, it is the job of the police to attempt to de-escalate the situation, not to ratchet up tension. Hitler obviously had a warped view of reality, but he believed that the aggressive posturing of the British Empire (as well as the Roosevelt administration) was a Jewish plot to instigate a war against the German people. Nowhere was this more clear than in his address to the German parliament in 1939.

I want to be a prophet once more today: if international finance Jewry in Europe and beyond should succeed once more in plunging the peoples of the world into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

We can’t know what an alternate timeline where Poland and Germany were able to negotiate a peaceful return of the Danzig might have looked like. Perhaps Germany (with the aid of Poland) may have attacked the USSR anyway. Hitler certainly made plenty of indications that this was his wish. But, perhaps his bruised ego would have been assuaged with the reconstitution of the pre-war German borders. Perhaps Nazi Germany would have followed a similar path to the Soviet Union: Like Stalin, Hitler would have eventually died. The Reich would have slowly moderated, as the USSR did from Khrushchev through Gorbachev. Perhaps National Socialism would have demonstrated itself to be an unworkable economic theory, and the Nazi state would have collapsed in on itself the way the Communist economy did in the late 80s.

It’s impossible to prove these counterfactuals. But, what we can say is that the Second World War was the worst calamity to befall humanity in recorded history. Rather than looking at this event and saying “Well, that worked out great. Let’s use it as a blueprint for solving every subsequent conflict from now on.” we should look at it and say “Wow, that was a catastrophe. Let’s never do that again!" It’s time to start treating WWII as history, rather than a Marvel movie.