Poland 1944-45

Today is the seventy-fourth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War. In remembrance of the occasion, Takuan Seiyo sends a couple of video clips. The first one combines German, Polish, and Soviet material to produce a dramatic overview of the 1944 Warsaw uprising.

WARNING: This footage, although not graphic by today’s standards, contains images of corpses and scenes of urban warfare:

The second is a short clip of a Polish kid in Buchenwald whose smile will linger in memory:

Takuan adds:

Is there any wonder the Germans are driven to national suicide by manipulative leaders who, deep down, are terrified that the beast may raise its head again?

So far, understandable. What’s not is that they seem to think that the beast of Islam is preferable to even the prospect of a German beast rising again.

And also, that the long-ruling socialist (they all are, just different labels) oligarchy — all very smart, educated people — seems unaware of the simplest laws of thermodynamics, homeostatics etc., so that by pushing so hard in the multiculti direction they are actually encouraging the rebirth of German Nazism.

23 thoughts on “Poland 1944-45

  1. There is no more a possibility of a rebirth of German Nazism than there is a possibility that Sweden will make another try at conquering Russia.

    The `objective correlation of forces’ has shifted and it is manifestly impossible that Germany has any sort of grand, sweeping manifest destiny. Every German knows, and knows viscerally, that Germany blew whatever chance she once had of cutting a fine figure on the world stage over the course of two world wars, both of which she started.

    Now, the only possible happiness for Germany lies in keeping a low profile, working, earning money and spending it quietly, and cooperating assiduously with her neighbors. In a world where some powers are aggressive and reckless, not every decent nation can play so cautious a game, but Germany can play no other.

    Nazism is finished. Stick a fork in it and relax.

    • I think you are correct about the unlikeliness of a resurgent German Nazism, bur Germany isn’t the only home of Fascism. The new Nazis have gained a great deal of momentum in Europe, Africa, Asia and America by pretending to be a religion. Do I have to spell it out? They claim to be messengers of God. They intend to conquer the World, except for the “Joos”, who they have publicly promised to exterminate. As late as 2010 you could buy a copy of Mein Kampf in their bookstores.
      But many of us continue to treat them as victims. And they ARE victims! Not of our discrimination, but of their “Holy Books” which tell them about our iniquities, about the evil of the “Joos”, and of our intolerance of their habits and beliefs.
      And their praise of Adolph Hitler, the one European they think is almost one of them.
      Go online and look at the pictures of their links to Heinrich Himmler. Look who they fought for,and with, in WWII.
      And yet we keep admitting them to our country. As students. As refugees. As “cultural enrichers”.
      Are they all Nazis? No, but not all Germans were Nazis either.
      Western Europe may already be too far gone to save. Don’t let them take over here. If they are students, send them home.
      And most of all, FRACK HERE! FRACK NOW!

  2. @Takuan,

    Having a background in engineering, I take your point. I’d be interested in your take on something else that I think ties in to what you’re saying. I’ve been re-reading Isaiah Berlin’s rather famous lecture/essay on two concepts of liberty, which includes his argument about those who know what’s best for us believing that they have the ‘final solution’ (as Berlin put it) to the question of how human beings ought to live in this world. Isn’t this what the multi-cultists are doing – isn’t this the position they have taken? After reading what Berlin had to say on this all those years ago – aren’t the multi-cultists themselves the new Nazis?

    • “aren’t the multi-cultists themselves the new Nazis?”

      They always were. Read Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Fascism-History-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0141039507

      People like von Mises were pointing this out between 1920 and 1940. Communism, nazism, fascism — all forms of collectivism. If he was alive now, I think he’d included islam in that list.

      Collectivists have to claim that they know what is best for us. They are opposed to individualism and free choice.

  3. The concatenation of German guilt, angst, precision, and Muslim pique, ressentiment, mania. I’d be worried were it not for the assurances by the certifiably intelligent that I’m the problem.

  4. @Sam Grant

    You are wrong. I did not state and you should not expect that Nazism will return in Germany in the same form as in the past. Recall Marx’s statement that tragic history returns the second time as a farce.

    German Nazism has been reborn there, and has new, enthusiastic acolytes elsewhere, particularly among the unemployed youths of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Not only the skinheads but even the so-called “third position” parties throughout the West, though except for their anti-Semitism not Nazi in any way, consort with the German NPD, desperate for a broader, stronger front. There are over 17,000 “Goth,” “Volk” and other nouveau-amplified-noise-for–the-young groups in Europe alone, all playing to the dejection and disgust of their young audiences by featuring Nazi symbology, Nazi mysticism, themes of extreme nationalism, glorification of war etc.

    There is no possibility of Nazism returning as the official ideology of the German or any other Western state, but that’s no longer relevant. Actually the state itself is scheduled for demolition (see my response to Nick below) and ruling us will be a strongly “anti-Nazi” global elite that has borrowed from the Nazis their fanaticism, heavy use of the most preposterous propaganda repeated often enough to be effective, “re-education“ of dissidents and severe punishment of the uneducable ones, and pervasive snooping on and use of storm troops against the indigenous population. The ideology of Nazism, without the methods, will be in the underground and the methods will be those of freedom fighters of yore. I see in this another tragedy and work therefore on the side of the opposition that rejects both the anti-Nazi fascism of the regime and the Nazi opposition to it.

    Throw into this pot a hundred million imported Muslims and you’ll see that the horizon in my crystal ball is rather occluded. I can see another period of darkness at noon and chaos, but cannot predict what will emerge from it.

    • Nothing will ’emerge from it’. When have you seen a cancer shrink ? Look at Pakistan vis-a-vis Christians.

  5. One belief , more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals – justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or emancipation of a nation or race or class, or even liberty itself, which demands the sacrifice of individuals for the freedom of society. This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another.

    Berlin, Isaiah (2012-12-31). The Proper Study Of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (pp. 237-238). Random House. Kindle Edition.

    Multiculturalism/Leftist tyranny in a nutshell?

    • “conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another”

      I’ve seen muslims insist that hinduism is a form of islam.

  6. @Nick
    In our tradition it was the role of the philosopher to prescribe how people ought to live in the world, but it was up to individuals whether to adopt such recommendations. With the rise of despotism, kings started forcing on the people what they’d read in the philosophers, and often it was wrong and stupid because the kings themselves were wrong and stupid. When we were lucky, we had philosopher kings like Marcus Aurelius, Matthias Corvinus or Jan Sobieski (six years of university study 1640-1646) who were themselves deep and upright enough to distill the best ideas and apply them toward good governance and good defense of their peoples.
    Our problem now is that from the 18th century on the French and the Germans started producing philosophers who were useless with respect to how to live a salutary life in a wholesome society, but were good with grand, solipsistic crackpot ideas. Thus Lenin, who was a philosopher king too – and as super-educated and brilliant as he was tyrannical– applied the twisted philosophy he’d absorbed toward destroying his people rather than giving them a better life. BTW, it was Lenin, before Berlin, who conceived the idea of a “Revolution from Above” — i.e. not arising spontaneously from the proletariat but led by a small cadre of activist intelligentsia revolutionaries. And this revolution, still guided by activist intelligentsia, continues to roil our society. Except now it’s in the anti-Nazi but still heavily fascist mold, continuing Lenin’s revolution via the mutated mullticulti “we are the world” feminist-GLBT-imported populations formula.

  7. WW2 began not on the 1st of September but on the 3rd with the British and French entrance in to a local conflict. Poles danced in the streets in Warsaw on the 1st of September in Berlin the mood was somber. Poland’s leaders wanted the war in the hope of extending Poland’s borders to the Oder river or beyond. This of course occured including the massive expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes. The price for Poland was high including years of communism and the loss of much of their territory to the east.

    • Thanks! That made my day. I needed a good laugh. This is the classic “Officer! This man has been repeatedly beating and bloodying my fist with his face.” Where do you find this stuff??

        • When you go to quality, conscientiously edited, specialist website such as this one, you have the occasion to learn something from people who know more on specific subjects than even Buchanan does. I respect the man and have learned from him in other areas, but on WW2, on Churchill, he’s flipped out of his mind. Among others, what he writes about Danzig, Germany and Poland is worthless garbage.

          Germany had as much right to Danzig as it had to the Sudeten. In both cases it used the pretext of a German population living in a Slavic country to “liberate” that territory. As to Danzig, it’s the Polish city of Gdansk, founded by Pomeranian Slavs and under Polish sovereignty since the 10th century. Like much of Poland, it had been under periodical German attacks since at least the 13th century. Sometimes the Germans invaded, killed and destroyed as Germans, and at other times as the Teutonic Knights. In 1772 -73, with Poland weakened, Prussia, Austria and Russia grabbed the country and divided it among themselves. Gdansk was grabbed by Prussia and renamed Danzig. Of course significant population replacement followed. The gradual replacement of Poles by Germans (by 1939 only 10% were Poles) caused the reasonable fixing of of the city’s status at Versailles as an independent city (with its own passports) under the purview of the League of Nations’ but in a partial affiliation with Poland. However, that was not enough for Hitler. Provocations against and persecution of the Poles started as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. And the first shot of WW2 were fired in a German action to annex Gdansk back into the German fold in which it had been between 1772/3 and 1920.

          poetcomic1 captured perfectly the WW2 genesis theory that you picked up from Buchanan.

          • You make it sound so simple but iit was anything but uncomplicated.
            Versailes gavea huge swath of land
            from Germany to Poland, so that
            Germany was cut off from East Prussia. Hitler was negotiating for
            two years from 1937, to be allowed access to East Prussia. Over this period Russian Bolshevics and some
            Polish Army irregulars killed 58000
            peaceful Germans living in the Danzig Corridor and parts of East Prussia. Even the most Germanophobic commentator will surely concede that Hitler was only trying to stop the murders of his own people, which is reasonable. The Poles suddenly broke off negotiations in 1939 so Adolf was
            forced to choose between allowing
            his own people to be wiped out or
            protecting them.

          • That’s respond to s ducain. For some reason it isn’t possible to post a reply to what he wrote.

            1) That huge swath of land had majority of polish/cashubian population (81%), so his demands were nothing more than mere “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
            2) Although Czechoslovakia accepted the terms of the Munich Agreement, she was turned into German protactorate and you are accusing Polish government of distrusting Hitler’s intentions 😀
            2) Can you explain how Bolsheviks got to the Pomerania?
            3) Can you point to any proofs of state-approved crimes or plans thereof against german population of the territory in question.

  8. The essential characteristic of Nazism that the elites have striven to conceal from the general public (apparently successfully, for the most part) is its Socialism. The term “Nazi” is a contraction of the German words for “National Socialist”, and that term was strictly accurate. “Fascism” is a variant terminology based on the ancient Roman symbol of government authority. That symbol, both because of origin and implication, resonated with Hitler’s propaganda claims that National Socialism was the root of a nation’s “right” to Imperial ambitions.

    The meaning of “National Socialism” is not very difficult to extract. First, it is socialist, meaning that a select group of elites are to organize the economic output of society in accordance with collectivist principles. Some market activity is allowed, as long as the main customer is the government and the means of production is deemed acceptable to collectivist ideas of the good of society. The elite economic planners and social directors have recourse to unlimited “legal” measures to ensure that individual activities do not deviate from the established good of society, but strict control of all individual activity is not seen as an end in itself, only a means to ensure that social and economic development can be centrally planned for the collective good of “society” (which really just means what pleases the elite, though this is not formal theory so much as inevitable practice). The socialism of Nazi Germany was very tight, whereas the current level of socialism in Germany could be considered more medium or even on the loose side (of socialism) in some ways.

    The adjective “National” simply implied that the collective good being promoted through the use of socialism was theoretically that of the nation, rather than of the village, city, or whatever. Nazi Germany brought a strong element of racism to that, making the propagation and supremacy of the so-called Aryan race (loosely identifiable as the core genetic strain of the Germanic people) one of the essential interests of their nation which socialism was to promote. But nationalism of any sort always seems dangerous or discriminatory to people from other nations, whether the defining traits of a nation are racial, ideological, or merely geographic. The Jews would have been treated as enemies of the German nation regardless of whether or not Nazism had been based on an explicitly racist nationalism, because the Jews (like the gypsies and other outgroups selected for elimination) held themselves apart from nationalist interests. It is worth noting that it is primarily the nationalism of Germany that has been dramatically altered from the Nazi period. Germans are now highly international in their outlook, at least publicly (the scope of “social good” to which humans are capable of actually mentally committing is severely limited, on the order of a very small village, the difference between a community of a million or a billion is completely impossible for humans to intuitively apprehend, so the personal feelings of anyone are going to mostly prioritize the people they can personally name off the top of their head no matter what their formal declarations of public sentiment imply).

    This characteristic of internationalism brings me to the real point, which is International Communism. Again, the term is simple enough to understand. First, it is communist, which is a more totalitarian version of socialism in which the end goal is reduction of the population to a similarity of mental outlook and behavior sufficient to eventually permit a “classless” society in which there are no meaningful or even really noticeable distinctions between individuals. That this is completely impossible in practice by any means short of totally exterminating the human population tends to cause people looking at communism from the outside to discount it as a ‘serious’ element of Communism, but this is a mistake. The end goal of eliminating class differences by means of suppressing all individuality is a deeply felt impulse of the committed communist, though it is interpreted in highly divergent ways. Modern communists usually want to insist on “moral equivalence” of outwardly disparate actions, with “economic equality” being an essential step towards society valuing “everyone” (except those doing the directing) the same regardless of overtly different productive contributions.

    This demand for absolute “economic equality” as a means to bring about “moral equivalence” means that Communism cannot in principle abide any market activity at all. Theoretical communists are generally not initially people who have experienced much economic hardship, they do not initially appreciate that mere redistribution of wealth from the productive to the unproductive can only last for so long before productivity ceases. Practical communists have experienced hardship, and consider the enslavement of the productive to the demands of the unproductive an obvious requirement. Eventually, redistribution of wealth without the direction of labor produces sufficient economic distress to ensure that theoretical communists either become practical communists or give up on communism. So the development of communism insures that eventually it will be accepted that “society” (again meaning the elite planners of society) must dictate what work each person should do, and have recourse to force against anyone who doesn’t work hard enough.

    The international character of International Communism produces no really significant difference in how the communist thinks about actual individuals from other nations, but it does produce an important difference in how ComIntern operates. Whereas the Nazis intended to simply conquer and militarily dominate an empire centered on their own nation, the International Communists have always aggressively sought to cultivate communist movements in other countries. This subject would take many volumes to discuss in detail, suffice it to say that, although the direct military threat Communism can pose to a nation from without is definitely comparable to what National Socialism produces, the greater danger is of Communist infiltration and subversion of the cultural institutions of the nation.

    It is worth noting that, by these measures, China has long since ceased to practice International Communism and has reverted to National Socialism in everything but name. The internationalism of Chinese Communism has always been severely lacking, and it has declined over time. The overt communism was abandoned decades ago as economically unfeasible, China currently practices a form of socialism much less strict than Nazi Germany and in many ways looser than that of Germany today. The racism of Chinese nationalism shouldn’t be underestimated, while it is less overt than that of the Nazis or even of the Japanese it is actually far more dangerous and deeply felt than either. But the geographical aspects of Chinese nationalism are possibly even more profound, at least comparative to other nations. Because the Chinese people are actually quite genetically heterogeneous, the “racism” has a much stronger geographic than genetic focus, in principle any population can become fully Chinese by living in China and intermarrying with the existing Chinese, though it may take a few generations for full assimilation.

    The generally undiagnosed National Socialism of China does have consequences for Europe, but mostly I bring it up as an example of how National Socialism is actually a less dangerous and extremist form of totalitarianism than International Communism, which is THE ideological framework currently dominating the political life of Europe and its nations. The fear of a rebirth of Nazism is a phantasm produced by the desire to avoid recognizing that Europe is already firmly in the grip of a far more deadly enemy.

    • “The Jews would have been treated as enemies of the German nation regardless of whether or not Nazism had been based on an explicitly racist nationalism, because the Jews (like the gypsies and other outgroups selected for elimination) held themselves apart from nationalist interests.”

      What absolute nonsense! From where do you get this fiction? German Jews fought with the rest of their countrymen during WWI and considered themselves to be “good Germans.”

      This was one reason why so many Jews did not escape Germany prior to the holocaust. They simply couldn’t believe that a country with which they identified themselves and for which they fought along with other Germans would turn on them and annihilate them.

      So many stayed until it was too late to leave and were tortured and killed.

      • WWI was not fought for a nationalistic ideology, it was fought out of terribly misguided real-politik run amok (this is why it was regarded as “the war to end all wars”, because everyone realized it was utterly pointless…except for Wilson).

          • Obviously, that the treatment of Jews in Germany during WWI has no relevance to issues of how a strongly nationalist ideology would demand they be treated regardless of whether that ideology were explicitly racist.

            It is worth noting that ordinary Germans who did not display any particular signs of “Aryan descent” were not rounded up and put into camps. The SS had to rely on records of Jewish descent and culturally based tests of Jewish upbringing precisely because the actual racial differences between German Jews and other Germans were insignificant.

  9. Someone ought to read a simple history book –even Wikipedia wiil do — and respond to above James Blond who has reconstructed fairly recent history based on Hitler’s speeches. The reconstruction of history is supreme evil because it puts blinders on humanity as it moves forward in time, sapping underestanding and therefore undermining probity. This is no more tolerable for reconstructing Poland in 1939 or peddling Holocaust denial theories than it is for reconstrucing the FDR administration — a baloon punctured politically in a recent Diana West book and economically in an earlier book by Amity Shlaes.

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