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Nobody said: "Europe must end."
Nobody needed to.
You don’t announce strategy at that level of clarity.
You build architecture.
You create dependencies.
You make certain futures structurally impossible and certain alignments structurally inevitable.
You expand NATO to Russia’s border and produce the crisis that makes European rearmament necessary and American hardware the obvious solution.
You undermine the energy infrastructure that made European-Russian economic integration viable.
You build a financial system that makes European banks subject to Washington’s sanctions decisions.
You spend nearly eight decades making European security so dependent on American guarantees that European strategic thought atrophies, that an entire generation of European leaders grows up not knowing how to think about security without asking Washington first.
And then you don’t need to say: "Europe must end."
Because "Europe", as a genuinely autonomous pole of power, as a civilization capable of making its own strategic choices about its own continent’s future,
Has already ended.
Quietly. Without announcement. Through the accumulated weight of architecture that was built, piece by piece, to make it impossible.
GS Wiper retweeted
Κανένας Σαουδάραβας δεν θα έλεγε για Ιρανοαμερικανικό Άξονα, ούτε ο Ταϊβανέζος με τον Ιαπωνεζο για Αμερικανοκινεζικό Άξονα
Εμείς έχουμε χαρντκορ δημοκρατικους δικτάτορες Ευρωπαίους που έχουν γίνει πιο proxy απ' όλους τους proxy και λένε για ΑμερικανοΡωσικο Άξονα.
Τόσο μπροστά😭
Δεν νομίζω ότι θα υπάρχει κάτι πιο διασκεδαστικό από τις "δημοκρατικές" κραυγές του "δημοκρατικότατου" ΑμερικανοΡωσικού Άξονα αν ο Μακρόν κάνει αυτό που πρέπει και δεν παραδώσει την εξουσία στα χέρια των υπαλλήλων του Τραμπ και Πούτιν.
#StopUSA
Με λίγα λόγια, ο Αδέσποτος της lifo, είναι ο πίνατ που μάζεψε το Μαξίμου. Ζακυνθινός στην καταγωγή lifo.gr/authors/apo-ton-ades…
Η παρακμιακή ναυαρχίδα ποσταρει : lifo.gr/now/world/albania-mo…
Η ναυαρχίδα της παρακμής συνεχίζει: lifo.gr/now/world/germania-d…
Η αγαπημένη ναυαρχίδα της παρακμής ονόματι lifo,: lifo.gr/now/world/gallia-mol…
GS Wiper retweeted
Ένοχοι κρίθηκαν από το Μικτό Ορκωτό Δικαστήριο Καρδίτσας, οι πέντε από τους έξι μπάτσους-βασανιστές, για τον θάνατο του 26χρονου Βασίλη Μάγγου το 2020.
GS Wiper retweeted
Δ.ΚΟΥΤΣΟΥΜΠΑΣ: Κυρία Μπακογιάννη κάνετε ηχητική ρύπανση
-Εντάξει φεύγω
-Ωραία στο καλό ..
(Η ''απάντηση'' στο ''κλείστο το στόμα σου πουλάκι μου'' της Μπακογιάννη χθες στά Χανιά )
GS Wiper retweeted
Μετά τη Γαλλία, Βέλγιο και Ιταλία , ήρθε σειρά της Γερμανίας
Επεισόδια στο Αμβούργο, Κολωνία, Βερολίνο..
GS Wiper retweeted
Αυτα ειναι τα αποτοκα της 7ετιας 2.0
Άσε ρε που μιλάτε για δημοκρατία. Τα τζουτζεκια των καπιταλιστών, που σαν χαμαιλέοντες γίνονται σοσιαλδημοκράτες, φιλελεύθεροι, φασίστες, ανάλογα με την συγκυρία. Άσε ρε.
GS Wiper retweeted
Όπως είχε πει ο Χάγιεκ στη χιλιανή εφημερίδα Mercurio το 1981: "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism."
Εμπρός για της γενιάς μας τους Πινοσέτ! Στο όνομα πάντα του φιλελευθερισμού.
GS Wiper retweeted
Δεν υπάρχει πιο εξευτελισμένος πολιτικός από τον Πιερρακάκη. Ακόμη κι ο Κυρανάκης είναι λιγότερο άθλιος. Δεν έχει εμφανιστεί στη Βουλή να μιλήσει για το νομοσχέδιο που φέρνει ως ΥΠΟΙΚ υπέρ των servicers και κατά των δανειοληπτών. Με τον Πιερρακάκη η ελληνική πολιτική έπιασε πάτο.
GS Wiper retweeted
They will say: "Colonialism ended. It’s in the past. Move on."
The wealth extracted during colonialism did not end when colonialism ended.
It moved. It compounded.
It became the capital base of the modern Western economies.
It became the university endowments and the banking systems and the infrastructure and the head start that turns into the ongoing gap between the countries that extracted and the countries that were extracted from.
The past is not past in the way that phrase requires.
The past is the present’s foundation.
And asking people to "move on" from a foundation that is still structurally determining their circumstances is not a call for reconciliation.
It’s a request to stop noticing.
GS Wiper retweeted
The Korean War is rarely taught honestly.
It is taught as a response to "North Korean aggression."
It was also the moment the United States came into direct military confrontation with a China it had just "lost" and was not prepared to accept as a permanent fact.
When American-led UN forces pushed toward the Yalu River, toward the Chinese border, and China entered the war, what followed was one of the most brutal reversals in American military history.
The "frozen Chosin." Changjin Lake. The retreat. The casualties.
A China that had just emerged from a century of foreign humiliation, fighting with an army that had been at war continuously for over a decade and was equipped largely with captured weapons, stopped the American advance and pushed it back.
The war ended roughly where it started.
The "loss" of China, it turned out, could not be reversed by force.
That lesson was available in 1953.
The decades of encirclement, containment, and strategic hostility that followed suggest it was not fully absorbed.
ALT Chinese People's Volunteers crossing the Yalu River into Korea, October 1950. Their intervention would transform the course of the Korean War and force American-led forces into a major retreat.
GS Wiper retweeted
🧵 Σε αντίθεση με τους αναθεωρητές της ιστορίας, που ισχυρίζονται οτι «οι Γερμανοί αποχώρησαν μόνοι τους από την πόλη χωρίς ενόχληση», η αλήθεια δεν παραγράφεται!
Τη Θεσσαλονίκη απελευθέρωσε το ΕΑΜ & ο ηρωικός ΕΛΑΣ.✊🚩
GS Wiper retweeted
In the early 1950s, many in the West dreamed of a military coup in Moscow. Around that same time, an anti-communist and anti-Soviet Russian-language magazine called Satirikon began publication in Munich. It was published under the auspices of the US intelligence services, written and illustrated by former Vlasovites, and was intended for Soviet Army servicemen in Germany.
Cover of the magazine "Satirikon" from February 1952. Soviet military personnel, carrying red banners, are kicking Beria, Stalin, and Malenkov.
GS Wiper retweeted
Part 3:
And the Americans
The American generals do not fit that pattern, and that is the strongest evidence for my argument. Marshall wanted to land in 1942. Eisenhower put the chance of a successful landing at one in two, and of building up to six divisions in France at about one in five, and still thought the day SLEDGEHAMMER was cancelled might be remembered as the "blackest day in history." In his handwritten draft of 15 July for his negotiators' instructions, Roosevelt told them to urge SLEDGEHAMMER and to have it "executed whether or not Russian collapse becomes imminent."
If the men responsible for the American army thought the operation worth trying at those odds, the obstacle was not physical. It was the standard.
Then Roosevelt chose North Africa. Marshall explained it later: "We failed to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained." American troops had to fight Germans somewhere in 1942, and Africa was cheaper than France. The United States went on to fight the war with about ninety divisions, against planning estimates of two hundred or more: a bet that someone else would absorb the bulk of the German army. Someone did.
What it cost
The Soviet Union lost about 27 million people in the war, including 8,668,400 soldiers dead and missing by the official Russian count. The Stalingrad operations alone cost the Red Army more than 1.1 million casualties. Through the end of 1944, by the most careful German count, about 2.7 million German soldiers died fighting the Soviet Union and about 340,000 fighting the West.
The decision's cost can be traced division by division. The German armor resting in France in 1942 did not stay there. The 6th Panzer Division, rebuilt in Brittany, went east in November and led the attempt to break through to the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in December. The 7th Panzer Division went east that winter. The SS Panzer Corps, which spent the second half of 1942 in France, retook Kharkov in March 1943.
A battle in France would have consumed those divisions there.
Instead they were rested, refitted and sent to kill Soviet soldiers. Even North Africa, where the Allies landed against the Vichy French far from the main German army, drew German air power from Stalingrad: TORCH and the collapse in Egypt together pulled about a hundred bombers from the East, most of them from the Stalingrad front, and some 320 transport aircraft went to the Mediterranean in the same weeks the Stalingrad airlift began.
When they finally came
By the time the West did come, the question had changed. In 1942 London and Washington feared the Red Army would collapse. By 1943 they had begun to worry that it would win without them. The final report of the Quebec conference in August 1943 made the bomber offensive a prerequisite for the invasion, "barring an independent and complete Russian victory before OVERLORD can be mounted." At the same conference, the minutes record, Roosevelt wanted troops "ready to get to Berlin as soon as did the Russians."
In November, on his way to Tehran, the minutes have him telling the Joint Chiefs that "there would definitely be a race for Berlin." An American estimate carried to Quebec put it plainly: "Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one."
Maisky had seen it coming. In the absence of a second front, he wrote in 1943, the Red Army would "stand a good chance of entering Berlin first and thereby having a decisive influence on the terms of peace." When the Red Army was dying, the West waited. When it began to win, the West hurried.
GS Wiper retweeted
Chapter 2.
On 1 July 1943, Britain's ambassador in Moscow reminded Churchill that Stalin had twice been led to expect a landing in France. Then he wrote: "Our weakness lies not in our inability to open this second front but in our having let him believe we were going to."
Not inability.
In Chapter 1 I showed the West had the ships, the men, the aircraft and the weather to land in France in 1942. This chapter asks why it didn't. The answer isn't in the landing craft. It's in how London and Washington saw the two wars in Europe, and which country they thought was the real enemy.
On 30 March 1941 Hitler told his generals what kind of war they would fight in the East: "a clash of two ideologies," and "a war of extermination."
He never said that about Britain. In July 1940, with France beaten, he stood in the Reichstag and made Britain what he called an "appeal to reason." He wanted terms. For Hitler, Britain was a rival to be brought to the table. Russia was a country to be emptied.
That was not rhetoric. On 2 May 1941 German state secretaries planning the occupation of the Soviet Union recorded that, when the army fed itself from the land, tens of millions of people would "undoubtedly" starve. On 6 June the high command issued the Commissar Order, which told the army to shoot Soviet political officers on capture. Of about 5.7 million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner, some 3.3 million died in German hands; of British and American prisoners, fewer than one in twenty died. In March 1943 German-led police and SS troops drove the people of the Belarusian village of Khatyn into a barn, set it on fire and shot those who broke out, 149 of them. In France the worst such crime was Oradour-sur-Glane, in June 1944. In Belarus there were hundreds of villages like Khatyn.
So there were two wars in Europe: in the West, a war between rival powers; in the East, a war of annihilation. My argument is that the Western Allies fought the war they were in, and that this, more than landing craft, explains why they did not land in France in 1942.
Who was the enemy
Before 1941, Britain's governing class left no doubt about how it saw Soviet Russia. From 1918 to 1920 British forces held Murmansk and Archangel and supplied the White armies, and by 1919 they were fighting the Red Army; the most energetic champion of the intervention was the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill. At Munich in September 1938 Britain and France settled the fate of Czechoslovakia with Hitler and Mussolini; the Soviet Union, which had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, was not invited.
In August 1939, with war weeks away, Britain and France finally sent a military mission to Moscow to talk about an alliance against Germany.
They sent it by slow passenger steamer, and its British head, Admiral Drax, had no written authority to sign anything. It was not a mission sent to succeed.
The war showed where the West's energy went. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the French army advanced a few miles into the Saar and went back, and for eight months the Western front was quiet. But that winter, when the Soviet Union went to war with Finland, Britain and France prepared an expeditionary force to send to Finland against the Red Army, and their staffs drew up plans to bomb the Soviet oil fields at Baku. At war with Germany and doing almost nothing about it, they were preparing a second war against the Soviet Union. The Finnish peace in March ended the first plan; the plans for Baku were still being discussed when the Germans attacked in the West in May.
That May, with the British army trapped at Dunkirk, the War Cabinet debated whether to ask Mussolini to sound out Hitler's terms. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was for it; Churchill was against it, and won. Churchill deserves his due: he wanted Hitler destroyed, and he never wavered. But destroying Hitler is not the same as treating Germany as a mortal enemy.
The West said it couldn't invade France in 1942. Britain's War Cabinet wrote down the real condition: no landing "unless the Germans are demoralized by failure against Russia." I checked the ships, the divisions, the tides and the weather. They could have !
Part 1 of 8...🧵
The Official Story
In August 1942 Winston Churchill flew to Moscow to tell Stalin there would be no Second Front that year. The German Sixth Army was less than two weeks from the Volga. Stalin listened, and then, by the American envoy Averell Harriman’s account, told the British prime minister that " you can’t win wars if you aren’t willing to take risks and you mustn’t be so afraid of the Germans. "
Churchill’s answer was the one the West has given ever since. It could not be done. Not in 1942, and, as it turned out, not in 1943 either. For eighty years that has been the standard account in British and American histories, and most readers have never heard it seriously questioned.
I am going to question it. But first I want to set it out the way its defenders would, in their own words and with their own reasons, because the case against a landing was made by serious men and it deserves to be stated at its strongest before it is taken apart.
The promise
The story begins with a promise. At the White House on 30 May 1942 Roosevelt asked General Marshall whether things were clear enough to tell Stalin that a second front was being prepared. Marshall said they were, and the President authorized Molotov " to inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a second front this year." On 11 June the two governments announced that " full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942. "
Marshall himself had felt the sentence was too strong and asked that 1942 not be mentioned. In London, Churchill quietly handed Molotov an aide-mémoire that said " we can therefore give no promise in the matter. " The Soviet people read the communiqué. They did not read the aide-mémoire.
The plans
There were plans, and they were American. In April 1942 Marshall carried to London a memorandum that Roosevelt had approved. Its main operation, ROUNDUP, was a landing between Boulogne and Le Havre in the spring of 1943 with 48 divisions, 18 of them British, and 5,800 combat aircraft. Its emergency variant, SLEDGEHAMMER, was a smaller landing in the autumn of 1942, to be made if the Soviet front was collapsing or the German army in the West showed signs of breaking.
The British accepted the memorandum in principle and resisted it in practice. General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, judged Marshall’s plans " fraught with the gravest dangers. " In his diary he mocked the American plan for stopping at the beach. It " does not go beyond just landing on the far coast!! " he wrote, and it did not say " whether we are to play baccarat or chemin de fer at Le Touquet, or possibly bathe at Paris Plage."
The verdict
By July the verdict was in. On 8 July Churchill told Roosevelt that " no responsible British general, admiral or air marshal is prepared to recommend SLEDGEHAMMER as a practicable operation in 1942. " The British Chiefs of Staff put it more bluntly among themselves: " If we were free agents, we could not recommend that the operation should be mounted. "
The Americans fought back.
Eisenhower’s staff rewrote SLEDGEHAMMER as a landing on the Cotentin peninsula to take Cherbourg, and Marshall, King and Hopkins argued for it in London from 20 to 22 July. They lost. Marshall and King recorded that SLEDGEHAMMER was " not to be undertaken as a scheduled operation," and between 25 and 30 July the Allies chose to land in French North Africa instead. Years later the US Army’s own official historians concluded that " the stated British objections to SLEDGEHAMMER had a great deal of force," given "the heavy odds against successful landings in France in 1942."
