Ag_EQ12 said:
How would Americans have been better off off if Nazi Germany had defeated the Soviet Union? When we stormed the beaches at Normandy there were about 3 times as many German divisions on the Eastern front as there were on the Western front. Simply put, it is extremely unlikely the US and UK could have defeated Nazi Germany on their own.
nazism was a cult of personality and a nationalistic german ideology. no one but germans were ever going to sell their souls for Nazism. It posed no long term threat to the US.
Communism/socialism is an insidious, pervasive, dangerous fantasy, maintained by the poor everywhere. it remains a present day threat to our way of life and has been since day 1. frankly, communism has actually laid the foundation for the destruction of our entire society and, today, it appears likely to bring a coming new dark ages. nazism was never a legit threat to do that.
Communism/socialism IS corruption, and antithetical to meritocracy, benevolence, everything good our country stood for, and human progress everywhere. Its a fool's errand and it has basically taken over the entire world, except, ironically, maybe russia and poland and a few eastern European countries that remember what it was really like.
the nazis had no spies in our manhattan project. they had no real prospects for the atom bomb. they had no significant counter intel success, and posed no legit air or sea power supremacy threat.
we BURIED them. we produced more ships than they did planes. more planes than they did trucks. more trucks than they did boots. they had no chance against us at all.
in hindsight, we should have let hitler kill off stalin, and destroy communism. we could save our efforts against them and spend much fewer resources farting around in africa and the mideast and kicking japan's ass. we would have saved hundreds of thousands of american lives, including all of my great-uncles.
let germany destroy communism forever. after the exhausted wehrmacht did that, use our air/sea/nuclear domination to force them into concessions, give them a little lebensraum in the east, put a more friendly french and eastern russian government back in place to ringfence them, instead of that ******* degaul. make them chill out on the whole genocide thing, AND DONE.
hitler would not have outlasted a successful Barbarossa by more than a few years anyway. Too many dead sons for that. we could have pushed himmler out, and guys like goering or doenitz were not ideologues. they would have been easily managed.
a cold war against an ideological nazi non entity, that just focused on keeping our non-socialist allies in france/italy/england/eastern russia balanced against german power, and keeping the mideast out of their orbit is a recipe for INCREDIBLE long term stability, economic success, and benevolent western european democracies going. we would have had a strong western european culture, with all the benevolence, idealism, and progress that entails, instead of the mess we have had in real history.
instead, we squandered everything, oversaw what is looking now like the destruction of the greatest civilization in history, and we are all basically turning into a bunch of corrupt socialists now.
we would almost certainly have been much better off.
PS - this is not a criticism of our greatest generation and their choices and sacrifices. the premise of this thread is the benefit of hindsight.
though FDR was a socialist and his views were counterproductive, churchill was right - they HAD to address the immediate threat first. the most immediate threat was germany. the requirement to mobilize public support to defeat germany made it politically impossible to pivot to defeat the REAL enemy, the soviet union.
in a machiavellian ideal world, we would have joined up with some moderate german leaders, helped them depose hitler, and teamed up with germany to finish off the soviets in 1942-3. churchill knew this. so did patton.
But that is pure political fantasy. public opinion would never have allowed it. the propaganda required to start the war would never have allowed us to finish it properly in that fashion.
