Do You Want Total War?
70 Years Since the End of WW2
Last week Russia celebrated the 70th anniversary of “V Day” over Nazi Germany with a traditional huge military parade in Moscow.
Military parade in Moscow on May 9, celebrating the victory over Nazi Germany
Photo credit: RT
However, this year the celebrations were marred by the fact that many Western political leaders decided to stay away from Moscow in protest over the Ukraine situation. As Eric Margolis remarks, this snub seems quite churlish, especially if one considers that Russia made the biggest sacrifices by far in WW2 (Margolis’ article has all the grisly details, the most striking of which is the fact roughly 27 million Russians lost their lives between 1941 and 1945. Russia accounted for nearly 80% of all allied war casualties). Moreover, without Russia’s participation in the war, Hitler may well have ended up winning it. Eventually the political and economic system the Nazis had erected would have crashed and burned anyway, but without the expansion of the war to a second front, it would have been very difficult and costly to dislodge the Germans from the territories they had conquered.
To be sure, Hitler and Stalin – the dictators leading two of the most bloodthirsty and murderous governments in the history of the world – were allies before Hitler decided to unilaterally call the alliance off by invading Russia. When Hitler’s Wehrmacht began to attack Russia, Stalin at first simply couldn’t believe it. He allegedlyliterally denied that the reports of Hitler’s invasion were true. Hitler’s armies were already closing in on Moscow, when the other members of the Soviet Politburo arrived at Stalin’s dacha one day, in which he had hidden himself away for two weeks, refusing to communicate with anyone.
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