Re: The Sun about the RMT guy sat in First Class

In message <czd2LKcn8EGd-pn2-ozUK9JZ3VU1M@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
<l.willms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Am Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:20:59 UTC, schrieb rail
<rail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> auf uk.railway :

The offensive in the West was to pay back France for Versailles
and to prevent her coming to the aid of Russia when the
German army marched east,

Then why didn't Hitler conclude a pact with the USSR against France
and England instead of concluding a pact with England and France
against the Russian Revolution?

Already explained


And what altruistic motive would have induced France to open a war
against Germany "coming to the aid of Russia"? France had shown its
real intentions in that regard by the "drôle de guerre" and then by
its swift defeat once Hitler decided to attack France.

We are not dealing with reality but with the conflicting perceptions of
reality by Hitler on the one hand, and the OKW on the other. The OKW were,
rightly, petrified of having to wage a two front war in Europe so the attack
on France was designed to placate such fears. Once France was subjugated
then Hitler could get on with his real objective of carving out lebensraum in
the Soviet Union.


which was always Hitler's war aim.

What he decided to take up later. The real aim is proclaimed in his
dirty book: "Germany must be a world power or it will not be".

Which then goes on to explain how he intended to achieve that by attacking Soviet Russia.


He had no interest in colonies in Africa.

I can't understand this desire to play down and belittle the
imperial desires and necessities of German imperialism and the Nazi
fascism in particular.

I'm not playong it down, I'm referring to the man's own words on the subject.


That made sense, maybe, at Munich 1938 with Chamberlain's pathetic
declaration of "peace in our time", but after having eperienced the
actual interimperialist war of 1939-1948,

Don't you mean 1937-1945? Where does 1948 come from?

and now six decades later in
a world with new conflicts and alignments -- entertaining still the
same pathetic self-delusion is incomprehensible to me.

BTW, I have in front of me a "Tornisterschrift des Oberkommandos de
Wehrmacht" (maybe "field booklet of the supreme military command")
titled "Kolonialpolitik heute" (Colonial Policy Today), published in
1941.

I renounce

I think you mean refuse, renounce is what you ought to do to marxism.

to translate from the pamphlet, but let me assure you
that it declares the aims of that war "the final liberation of Germany
and [their] necessary space in the world" and that the final victory
would bring back "our space on the seas". It deplores the loss of
Germany's "overseas complementary spaces" (i.e. the colonies), and
declares that the goal is for "Europe to bring its complementary
continent [Africa] in the same natural order to itself as other
continents have tried to do prematurely with their complementary
parts" (I understand this as a reference to the USA and its control
over South and Central America, as well as Japan's conquests in East
Asia).

It could just as easily refer to Asiatic Russia.


The pamphlet refers to Hitler's first public demand for restitution
of the German colonies on January 20, 1937, but it demanded not only
the restitution of the former colonies, but "more", a correction of
this "nonsensical one-sided distribution of those free spaces of the
world, which have to be available to the people need these as a
complement of their own to narrow national space."

That's referring to Russia again.


As example of the "new colonial policy" the pamphlet presents the
conquest of Ethiopia by fascist Italy in 1935/36 and the way Italy
administered their African colonies.

You still think that Chamberlain was right?


Not sure what you think Chamberlain had to do with the Italian conquest of
Abyssinia. On a wider scale I have never thought that Chamberlain was right.

--
Graeme Wall

This address not read, substitute trains for rail
Transport Miscellany at <www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail>
.

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