World War Two
Published 7 Sep 2024In this issue of the Weimar Wire, we dive deep into the critical events of January 1930. Political violence in the streets, uncertainty over the nation’s very character and Nazis entering a governing coalition provide a veritable treasure trove of political intrigue, hidden aspirations, and grand schemes.
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September 8, 2024
Hitler’s Victory in Thüringen – Rise of Hitler 01
September 7, 2024
A Nation Divided, Part One
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Sep 2024Join us as we unfold the post-WW2 history of Korea that resulted in political escalation and eventually a military conflict in 1950. Stay tuned for the remaining parts of this mini-series!
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September 2, 2024
September 1, 2024
Can Chiang and Mao Unite China? – WW2 – Week 314 – August 31, 1945
World War Two
Published 31 Aug 2024Mao Zedong takes his first ever journey by plane to go and meet with Chiang Kai-Shek. They begin what will be several weeks of talks and negotiations. However, Chiang is not aware that Josef Stalin is lurking in the background. And the Soviet Red Army is lurking in Manchuria, having defeated the Japanese there, and are giving tacit support to the Chinese Communists, whose power base is very strong in the north. As for Japan, a motley collection of Allied fleets arrives in Tokyo Bay, for Japan’s surrender document is to be officially signed two days from now.
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July 21, 2024
Britain’s Weird Vietnam War
Real Time History
Published Mar 15, 2024Fall 1945: the Second World War is over, but there is fresh fighting in Vietnam. Now, former enemies become allies as British-Indian troops, French Commandos, and surrendered Japanese soldiers join in a rag-tag alliance against Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in Saigon. The outcome will shape Vietnam’s future for decades to come, in Great Britain’s weird Vietnam War.
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June 19, 2024
Why the US Lost the Tet Offensive Despite Beating the NVA
Real Time History
Published Feb 16, 2024After years of boots on the ground and bloody combat in Vietnam, US officials are publicly confident. The strategy of eliminating the Viet Cong is working. The North Vietnamese communist forces are on their last legs and victory is only a matter of time. Or so they say. But as 1968 and the traditional lunar new year festivities begin, US and South Vietnamese troops find themselves on the receiving end of a formidable North Vietnamese surprise attack: The Tet Offensive.
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June 18, 2024
June 16, 2024
Mao Tightens His Grip – WW2 – Week 303 – June 15th, 1945
World War Two
Published 15 Jun 2024After several weeks of the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong’s power has consolidated to the point that it is absolute. All pledge loyalty Mao, and his infallibility shall not be questioned. Meanwhile the war goes on in the field with Australian landings on Brunei, continuing fighting on Okinawa, and the last part of Europe — in the Netherlands — liberated from Axis control.
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May 30, 2024
The Bloody Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
World War Two
Published May 29, 2024In the final months of the war, Partisan leader Josip Tito and his forces complete their conquest of Yugoslavia. They destroy Draza Mihailovic’s Chetniks and Ante Pavelic’s Croatian Independent State and they outmanoeuvre King Peter. As Tito’s forces take revenge on their vanquished foes, Socialist Yugoslavia is born in a cradle of fire and blood.
02:08 Mihailovic’s Last Roll of the Dice
04:35 Tito Aligns himself with the Soviets
07:06 Albania
08:25 Tito begins state building
10:51 Hoxha purges his enemies
12:00 The Fall of Mihailović
13:08 The End of the Independent State of Croatia
14:54 The Events at Bleiburg
17:08 The Massacres
19:41 The Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
20:54 Conclusion
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April 6, 2024
Italian Communists, the French in Indochina, and the fate of Italy’s army – WW2 – OOTF 34
World War Two
Published 5 Apr 2024What happened to Italian soldiers overseas after the fall of Mussolini? What about the French soldiers left over in Indochina after the Japanese “occupation by invitation”? And, what did the Allies think of the Italian Communist movement and its partisan forces?
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March 17, 2024
QotD: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany never had a “long game” … but Stalin did
Though both the Germans and the Japanese had every intention of starting major wars, as everyone knows they seemingly put zero thought into what they’d do once they won. I know, I know, [Himmler] had his sweaty wet dreams about Wehrbauern on the vast Russian steppes, but all but the most rudimentary post-victory planning seems to have been beyond the Third Reich’s capacity — the Reich Resettlement Office, for instance, was tiny even when the war looked like it would be over by Christmas. The Japanese were, if anything, even dumber — they honestly seemed to believe they could run China, all of it, and even India Manchukuo-style.
The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.
Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt … but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so … well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.
As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well … and then the mission changed.
The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” […]. Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), [they] couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.
Being a “Communist”, though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade … all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.
Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook …
… which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?
Severian, “The Myth of German Efficiency”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-26.
February 22, 2024
The Malayan Emergency – Britain’s Jungle War v Communists
The History Chap
Published Nov 16, 2023Britain’s Victorious Jungle War Against the Communists
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February 16, 2024
Regional Power: North Korea
Army University Press
Published Feb 13, 2024This film examines the current political and military situation in North Korea. Subject matter experts discuss Korean history, DPRK current affairs, and KPA military doctrine. Topics include the rise of the Kim family to political leadership of the DPRK, its influence in the region, and how the U.S. works in partnership with the Republic of Korea.
January 27, 2024
QotD: McCarthy was right
It’s likely that just about everything you know about Joe McCarthy, his life, his political career and his work against the Soviet infiltration of American government is incorrect, the history having been almost without exception written by his staunch enemies, in turn building on the work of McCarthy’s contemporaries to delegitimise and destroy the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Even in the conservative circles, the memory of McCarthy is often treated as a bit of family embarrassment; in part the testament to how successful the left-wing narrative has been but also perhaps the faint memory that half of his own party (the so called liberal wing) despised him at the time and worked hand in hand with the Democrats to destroy him.
Yet McCarthy was right – not just in a general sense of clearly understanding that communism is not merely an alternative path to a brighter future but an evil and inhuman ideology at war with the liberal, democratic and Christian West, but also in focusing on the federal bureaucracy’s strangely ineffectual response to the presence in its ranks of many people, often in very senior and influential positions, suspected of working for the communist cause.
Contrary to the official version, it was never McCarthy’s role to unmask Red agents; a job more appropriately done by investigative agencies. In his legislative role overseeing federal bureaucracies, he made it his mission to inquire why so many individuals, whose loyalty has already been put under the question mark by numerous internal and external investigations, had no problems staying in sensitive jobs for years and moving unhindered from one agency to another. Those named by McCarthy (on the Democrat insistence) were not simply some random individuals with vaguely progressive sympathies; already at the time many of them have been identified as Soviet agents and security risks in the testimony of communist renegades (like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley) or through secret FBI surveillance. Others were suspects on the account of their associations with Eastern European or local communists and causes.
Over the following decades, most have been further incriminated from a variety of sources, including Soviet defectors and the deciphered Venona transcripts of secret Soviet intelligence cables, which mention some 400 individuals in the 1940s and 50s United States as active agents and contacts or abettors and helpers. The problem was not Reds under the beds, but Reds quite literally in positions of access to highly valued classified information or positions of influence over the shape of US policy, from the White House, through the State Department, to a host of other departments and agencies. All this is now beyond any dispute, but these weren’t mere idle speculations at the time either. Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, T.A. Bisson and dozens and dozens of others did conspire in small groups and networks to pass on classified information to the Soviets or steer the American foreign policy into the direction favourable to the communists (particularly in China during and after the war). And yet, despite all having serious question marks over them, they were allowed to work in government for years undisturbed. It was not because of some giant communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government but because of the bureaucratic inertia, old boys’ networks and the organisational reluctance to admit problems – but also because communist agents within protected and promoted each other. Time and time again mistakes got buried instead of rectified. McCarthy dared to shed the public spotlight on the continuing outrage and ask why. It was like a poor country cousin being invited to a formal dinner by his big city relatives and dropping a loud fart between the entree and the main.
But the story of McCarthy goes beyond these well-established historical facts to the campaign of character assassination and falsification of the record that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There is truly nothing new under the sun when the entrenched liberal establishment wants to protect its turf and fend off its enemies and as you read what McCarthy has been subjected to in relatively short period of 1950-54 you will no doubt experience a sense of deja vu from recent history: indiscriminate mud throwing in a hope that something sticks; blatant lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of evidence; politicians working hand in hand with public servants to coordinate the attacks; destroying and withholding of information and evidence (for example, the security information about the suspected individuals being physically transferred from the State Department to the Truman White House so that it could not be subpoenaed or otherwise accessed; a practice condemned by the Republicans and then continued by the Eisenhower White House); blackmailing witnesses or preventing them from testifying; biased media running the narrative (fake news is nothing new); whitewashing the accused and discrediting the accusers; incessant lawfare; trumped up charges and defamation. Coincidentally, McCarthy too was compared to Hitler while at the same time being accused of helping Russians. McCarthyism is not what McCarthy has done to his supposed victims; it’s what the left has done to him. It’s what it keeps doing to people who get in the way and threaten to disturb the business as usual.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “Before there was Trump, there was Joe McCarthy”, Daily Chrenk, 2019-09-30.






