Thank you Mary C R Wilson , that was a very positive and assuring response. There clearly is hate and fear out and about. So let us fight hate with hope, fight fear with a positive attitude. On a personal level that might work, but there are still the political parties I am concerned about. They seem to lack the vision and the positive attitude to win people over. Well, this is from a German point of perspective in the aftermath of the Bavarian elections where all parties without a vision, who seemed only to react to events and were not able to outline positive ideas for the future, have lost and only one, the Green party, has gained, being the only party presenting a positive vision for the future (apart from right-wing AfD who basically claimed all is bad and all will go to shambles).

As for the Brexit: I really hope it will work out for the sake of all of us, since a lot is at stake, but no matter how the agreement will lturn out, it will cost both sides dearly.

All the best,

Stephan

Well, nice question and thank you Mary!

Vision requires great wo/men, great issues, harsh opponents, and a sense of right. At the moment, great people are revilled, great issues are hard to come by, opponents slither away when challenged, and the notion of right is ridiculed almost universally! Not much hope of a visionary cause then!

All we can manage now in the UK is utter nonsense causes about equality! Ooh, it's a bloody disgrace that Meghan is the first person of colour to be in the Royal family...mmm, I guess so????? That Winston Churchill was as bloody racist! Was he now? You surprise me. You mustn't clap at any of our events, it may offend those lacking the capacity. Sssssssh. Today, at Southampton University, we must mutilate that mural of first world war rememberance of dead students because there's no black people in it! Good lord, where does this nonsense end? It doesn't. Because if there is a great cause now, it is equality. My concern about it is equal to yours. My issue must be your issue. Otherwise you're racist, or sexist, or whatever other nasty label I can muster. Perhaps that makes you a fascist????

Nice to have a rant! Thank you....

Christopher NOCK

Dear Christopher Nock

as always your rant is most welcome and most enjoyed! One might be astouned as to how much of a good night's rest you enjoy after having had a heavy rant to clear the mind.

I understand where you are coming from. I could tackle each aspect one by one, like calling into question whether Mary really was the first black member of the royal family. I am thinking of Sophie-Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, married to King George III in 1761. Her ancestry dates back to Margarita de Castro y Sousa who was of African origin. Also as a historian I am no alien to people judging people of the past by today's standards and in doing so loosing it. Classical children's books from the 1950es probably most of the children in Germany are still growing up with (Astrid Lindgren, Ottfried Preussler) are now being cross-checked for apparent racist content. I am a bit at a loss of that as well.

One has to understand a person of its time. Neither Matin Luther nor Winston Churchill have lived in the 21st century. It lies in the nature of things that the age we live in bring up questions, questions that we raise evaluating the past. When gender-studies have been introduced, of course there was the question of "How about the role of women in the Third Reich?" When thinking of populism the thought of "How has it been in the past?" is not so far-fetched. But Luther and Churchill were children of their time and have to be understood as such. If they are being judged by today's standards it might be not because of interest in the historic events and historic characters, but for other reasons.

As for the majority of political parties and politicians in parlament and government, they clearly lack a plan. They do not seem to know where they are going. What they mostly do is react, react to single events. This is very bothersome.

Have a good one!

Stephan

I slept like a log!

And woke up in the fire place...

NOCK

Dear Stephan Glienke,

There is a saying "Without an understanding of the past, it is impossible to understand the future". I saw that one of the topics of your interest is World War II. It is here that I am very interested in clarifying one important event for me, which is not mentioned anywhere at all, but I have knew about it from the video by Valery Pyakin, who performs his author’s program “Question-Answer” on Mondays. This is a unique program that considers the explanation of historical events from the point of view of the General Theory of Control. Here, for example, the latest program for November 12, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y4hrbhSSfg , where an explanation of the reasons for the beginning of WW1 in terms of the General Management Theory is given. I was very surprised by the thesis that WW1 had been prepared since 1812, that is, 102 years before it began in 1914. The thesis that WW1 and WW2 were one and the same war, which took place in two phases, that WW2 was planned as far back as 1936, was even more surprising. Unfortunately, the only drawback is that this video broadcast in Russian, But, if you wish, you can see captions with translation in any language.

Now about the question itself. In his previous programs, Valery Pyakin said that Hitler was no any chance of winning the war with the Soviet Union. Even the leading German field marshals did not strongly advise doing this, but Hitler did not listen and started the war on June 22, 1941. Pyakin said that Hitler understood perfectly well that he would be defeated, and yet he decided to fight. Apparently Hitler knew something that all field marshals and generals could not have known. So: Hitler knew that in the Kremlin is the Fifth Column of the military, which is ready to surrender the country and is ready to substitute the army for the rout. There is an opinion (in particular, the colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation and the author of more than 20 books on WW2 Arsen Martirosyan) that the defense minister, Marshal Tymoshenko, and the chief of the General Staff, Zhukov are traitors. It was thanks to them that the Soviet Army suffered a severe catastrophe in the first days of the war. Here are some important details:

1. The doctrine of active defense was replaced by the doctrine of the counterstrike, which turned out to be a big mistake, which led to massive captivity.

2. All military intelligence was given to the General Staff at the request of Tymoshenko, which led to the fact that important intelligence reports were not delivered to Stalin about the state of real affairs on the eve of the war.

3. The day before the start of the war, orders were received to remove machine guns and ammunition from aircraft, and to drain fuel from tanks. Moreover, on June 18, 1941, Stalin ordered to bring all troops into full combat readiness, make a distance between planes and disguise them carefully.

4. The frontier troops (commanded by Lavrenty Beria) were put on full alert and sat in the trenches from 21.00 on June 21 in anticipation of the attack, but the Red Army in border military districts quietly slept and had nothing even to guess. For example, two full divisions in the Brest Fortress were completely destroyed by German aircraft in a dormant state, which is more than 30 thousand young soldiers.

5. In the early days of the war several million rifles and other military equipment were captured, as well as a lot of fuel, which the Germans then used for their tanks. And so on and so forth.

Now the question has arisen: if Marshal Timoschenko and Army General Zhukov are guilty of a catastrophe, isn’t it what only Hitler knew. Hitler had the only chance to defeat the Soviet Union - this with the help of the betrayal of the highest military and he ventured to use this chance. The first 10 days everything went according to plan. Russia lost many airplanes on the ground, lost hundreds of thousands of dead and several million prisoners who were then forced to die of starvation. Now I learned from Pyakin about the reasons why Napoleon began to attack Moscow, and not Petersburg. It turns out that Napoleon wanted to unleash a civil war in Russia with the help of forces that hated Tsar Alexander I, but Kutuzov understood Napoleon’s intention and thefore kept the army, although he left Moscow. Thus, in both wars, the main idea was to cause a crisis in the country after the invasion. Like Kutuzov, Stalin understood all this and concentrated all power in his hands on the creation of the State Defense Committee. It was after this that the German Generals (e.g. Halder, who regularly wrote his diary) realized that the war was lost. Why? Because the main hope for a military coup in the Kremlin failed and a protracted war of resources began which Hitler did not have. There was not even a winter uniform for the soldiers, since the calculation was a maximum of seven weeks. Now the main question arose: Why did Stalin not shoot Tymoshenko and Zhukov? And this is where the genius of Stalin came to light: Under the conditions of the beginning of the war, this could not be done, because it was necessary to fight, otherwise there would be panic in the troops as it was in the war of 1914, when soldiers raised officers on bayonets. Stalin made it clear to Tymoshenko and Zhukov that he does not raze them as traitors, but he will always be able to shoot them as people who fight badly in accordance with the laws of war. And after this event, they began to correctly fight under the strong control of state security agencies. Then Zhukov became a hero and took the Victory Parade on a white horse, and of course we remembered him like that. However, after the victory parade on June 24, 1941, Stalin made a toast to the Russian people in the Kremlin and reminded the military that the conspiracy of the military in the first days of the war was quite possible and could occur. The generals well understood this signal from Stalin. Subsequently Stalin was poisoned in March 1953 and kill. After that, the question of the collapse of the Soviet Union was only a matter of time when the traitor Khrushchev came to power, who was conspiring with Tymoshenko and Zhukov.

So the question is: if all this is true, it means that the people are not ready to hear this truth, are they? As a WW2 historian, you would be interested in answering this question: Why did Hitler decide to attack the Soviet Union? By the way, in the Western press, Zhukov is praised as a brilliant commander, despite the fact that in reality there was another real commander who did not lose a single battle, whom Stalin highly valued and called by name and patronymic as "Suvorov of the Red Army" - this is the legendary Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky. However, the West knows nothing about this real hero. This is certainly not fair.

Dear Gennady Fedulov

that has been a very extensive post that might well make a separate thread, because you might remember: the initial topic of this one was whether political parties can still provide an "Utopie", a positive vision of the future, or whether it is all being dominated by a negative attitude of fear and angst and only a sum of reactions to single events and issues instead of an overall programm.

Anyhow, you have raised multiple questions and it would be rude not to address them. First off: my focus is on German post-war history, renazification, German rechtsstaat, social protest and anti-Nazi movement as aspect of the evolution of post-war democracy in Germany. One aspect is of course biographies and take in the pre-democracy history. My dealings with the war-period was limited to society and air-war strategy and its effects on German society.

Anyhow, as for the aforementioned Valery Pyakin I will not be able to contribute much, since he is unbeknownst to me and as you have already suspected: I am short of Russian. That does pose some obstacles when dealing with his programm. One of his main topics, as far as I can make it out, is conspiracy and what you have described does fit that pattern quite well. Who did what and when at the Kremlin I do not know. It is no specialty of mine, so I do not see fit to reply to that. Anyhow, it is a well-known fact, that there were many factions involved and striving for power and Stalin was not always the all-dominating power he is being perceived as today. He had to first rid himself of all opposition or opponents in striving for and securing his power. The rest I will have to leave for those who have worked on the field. (My colleague Richard Overy has worked and published on it quite a bit, so I highly recommend his works.) If, however, there lies some truth in what Pyakin claims, I wonder how Hitler could have known of people at the Kremlin working in his favor if none of his officers and agents knew? He might not have known at all, but have started the war anyhow. (You get a headache if you try to read logic in anything he was doing. Sometimes it just was not there.)

It is also true, that in "the west" the western front and the achievements of the western allies are dominating the general perception of WWII.The war on the eastern front has been mostly neglected. Fairly unjustified. More people have been killed in the East, largest battles been fought in the East and so forth, and lest not forget: more gruesome crimes have been committed against soldiers and civilians than anywhere else. Norman Davies has therefore rightfully complained about WWII often being perceived as having taken place in Western Europe mainly and won by Western Allies. Unfortuately in his book "Europe at War" he too sets the focus on the Western front, but still ...

What else is there? When have the wars been planned? As for WWI, I don't see how it had been planned since the early 19th century. But we may presume there had been a general notion since the end of the 19th century, that a great war was about to happen. You did not know when and where, but general expectation was: something is coming! (I highly recommend Christopher Clark: "Sleepwalkers") You might see the Schlieffen-Plan as indicator for that. WWII however, has been planned in advance. During the mid 1930es civilians in Germany have been trained for evacuation, fire extinguishing, how to take out bombs, where to look for shelter in an upcoming air-raid, how to wear gas-masks and so forth. The military already have prepared for it during the late Weimar Republic, just as well as the industry have researched machines for agricultural traktors that were also meant to be used for tanks in an upcoming war. As far as the idea of considering WWI and WWII as elements of a single war goes - one might consider both as essential elements of an overall period of crisis.

Immanuel Wallerstein uses the suiting term "Age of Extremes" and speaks of the short 20th century, from 1914-1989. (The term might have been brought up by Iván T. Berend, but it became well-known by Wallerstein). The idea is to have the 19th century being prolonged to 1914, since up til then Europe was being dominated by the ancient régime, the monarchies, which ended by the first modern war. Well, the Civil War in the US was pretty much the first modern war in that respect, but for Europe and of course when speaking of the quality (machinery, technology, death-toll) WWI was unprecedented.

Anyhow, I suppose I have covered quite a deal of the questions you have raised. I fall a bit short on USSR and Russia, but I do not dare to dwell too much on a topic I have not as familiar with and am therefor less qualified than any Russian author.

All the best,

St.