How Much Does the Present Resemble the Unpreparedness Before WWII

[rangerrebew]

How Much Does the Present Resemble the Unpreparedness Before WWII
By Julian Spencer-Churchill
September 26, 2024
 
How Much Does the Present Resemble the Tragic Years of Unpreparedness Before Hitler’s World War?
In a 1933 speech, lamenting the rise of Hitler, British member of parliament Winston Churchill  complained that “Not one of the lessons of the past has been learned, not one of them has been applied, and the situation is comparably more dangerous.” A year earlier, he identified the pillars of peace as the strength of the French Army and the prevalent anti-war sentiment but warned that all of this could be undone if no one intervened against German rearmament. In 2024, with persistent threats of escalation by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his war in Ukraine, and associated Chinese intimidation of Taiwan and Iranian menacing of the Straits of Hormuz, an observer can be forgiven if they sense a similarity in the unpreparedness of the democracies to the events of the 1930s. There are important differences. Whereas France and Russia were the primary states concerned and militarily prepared for a resurgent Germany in the 1930s, today only the U.S. is ensuring that it is making the necessary investment in its navy, nuclear deterrent, aircraft and missiles, commensurate with China’s naval threat. The rarity of conscription, low levels of defense spending, and the prevalent political complacency across Europe, Canada, and even in Taiwan, has given Russia and China a greater than the two-year lead enjoyed by Hitler in his rearmament.

There is a similarity in the humiliation endured by the Germans in the 1930s and the Russians since 1991, who embellish a revisionist myth of never having been militarily beaten, and of being treated cruelly by the victors. For example, Point 4 of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points suggested a multilateral reduction in armaments, on which basis Germany agreed to the Armistice that ended the First World War, but was dropped from the Treaty of Versailles. Putin’s exploitation of nationalism is a well-known dysfunction of new and unstable democracies, as was observed in the wars of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. Both Hitler and Putin engaged in the “culture wars” of their time, largely blaming foreign influences as a way of suppressing domestic dissent. Whereas Hitler’s energies were spent infiltrating and then suppressing organized labor, Putin is concerned about the globalist sympathies of Russia’s urban under-35 age cohort with liberalism and feminism, and who are demonstrably disinterested in being conscripted for the war in Ukraine. Some of these grievances were significantly exaggerated: by 1932, Germany had received twice as much in international loans as it had paid in reparations, which were entirely canceled shortly after Hitler’s accession. Moscow’s grievances are equally disingenuously built on leveraging the self-determination of Russians abandoned by the break-up of the USSR, in order to justify territorial revanchism.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/26/how_much_does_the_present_resemble_the_unpreparedness_before_wwii_1061004.html

[Smokin Joe]

The Donbass is no Sudetenland. Ukraine is no Czechoslovakia.

But the youth of the US does not have the skill set for heavy manufaccturing that the labor force of the 1930s had, with over 8.3 million farms then , and only 1.9 million today. Considering farming was more labor intensive then, there were at least five times as many farmers, and large families were the order of the day, as the kids worked the fields with their parents, also acquiring mechanical skills.  That's just part of that picture, as most then repaired and maintained what they had in the way of equipment, and those who had automobiles did much the same,something rendered difficult now by the relative complexity of vehicles (that complexity being a byproduct of emission controls).
We have exported much of our heavy manufacturing, commonly due to environmental regulations, and have severely curtailed mining our own resources as well, instead opting to become dependent on foreign supplies and manufacturing to place emissions outside the direct purview of our own regulatory agencies.

In doing so, we have made a potential adversary into a manufacturing superpower, unfettered by the regulatory morass we impose domestically, and driven by a central Party apparatus that amounts to totalitarian control.

In the wake of that, our own organic industry has languished, and the skills, work ethic, and ability to produce have suffered.  While there are notable exceptions, they are the exceptions and not the rule. Mechanization can only do so much to compensate for the dearth of facilities: every production line has its limits, no matter how efficient.

While the manufacturing of the 1930s suffered from the Depression, the facilities had not been demolished, and often were acquired by more successful enterprises in a consolidation typical of market contractions. As events transpired in Europe, however, manufacturing here gained a war footing in anticipation of the coming conflict; that we would become a supplier of war materiel to the powers which survived the Nazi onslaught. No doubt, the end run around the Maginot line and disregard for Belgian neutrality came as a surprise to 'civilized' folks who had anticipated "Peace in our time", but then, war is about conquest or reprisal, not being civilized.
We became the de facto "Arsenal of Democracy" but we had a head start on our own entry into the war which gave time to anticipate our own needs.
Now, we are part and parcel of that same scenario, in what may amount to a fulfillment of George S Patton Jr's expected conflict at the end of the Axis defeat, delayed some 80 years, and with more at stake because of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, something not yet deployed while Patton lived.
But our population is sadly physically out of shape, dependent on medication for a wide variety of reasons (not all psychological), and often ill-equipped to deal with the realities of armed conflict--something nothing can prepare one for, really, just dealt with after the experience. Morally and spiritually, we do not have the grounding in a solid moral basis for many of our youth. Discovering God in a foxhole might be an effective conversion, but it's stronger to have made that discovery before going in. He takes all who turn to him in their hour of need, into His arms or under His wing.

However, it might be even better to have established the moral fiber needed to avoid the rare sort of incidents that make headlines in the Leftmedia back home; incidents used to paint all honorable troops with the blood of innocents.

I believe these shortcomings can be overcome, that those who will need to rise to the defense of our Nation will do so, of whatever age, provided we have the sort of leadership that will not cave, will not sell us out, and will not waver in the coming storm.
And for that reason, I pray we make wise choices as a nation in the near future.