Re: Finland

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:14 AM 9/12/00 +0300, you wrote:
> Finland did not have the happy choice of neutrality during the war, nor
> did it have the option of "containing" either the Nazis or the Soviet
> Union, as did the British and French prior to September 1939.

Of course, until after the disaster of the Munich pact (Sept. 1938) or so,
the "democratic" leaders of the West mostly had the attitude of "let's you
and him fight" toward the Nazis and the USSR. Less charitably, they used a
tacit alliance with Hitler to "contain" the USSR, a precursor of various US
alliances with gorillas like Pinochet to contain popular rebellion and
Soviet influence. Just as many upper-crust Brits favored the Nazis (so that
the faction around Rudolf Hess thought that it was possible to create an
Aryan alliance with the UK even in 1941), the Reagan administration linked
up with the World Anti-Communist League, a collection of neo-Nazi cranks
and the like.

Brad mentions the "socialist" pact with the Nazis (the Hitler-Stalin pact).
Though I'm no fan of Stalin, it should be stressed that this pact was
clearly an effort to defend the USSR in an era when the West wanted the
Nazis to attack. In some ways, it's like voting for the "lesser of two
evils" writ large.  (Not that Stalin was good at defense: he purged his
military leadership about the same time.) The West's tacit alliance with
Hitler was more profound and lasted longer than the Hitler-Stalin pact:
they preferred the capitalist Hitler to the "socialist" alternative, which
still had a superficial tinge of Bolshevism at the time (if only in the
popular mind). Of course, it was the German big business deal with the
devil that helped put the Nazis in power, while as Yoshie pointed out, the
West's "neutrality" in the Spanish Civil War was tilted heavily in Franco's
and Hitler's favor.

Of course, at the time almost no-one knew how bad Hitler was. On top of
that, the Nazis clearly got worse as World War II progressed, moving from
autobahns to ovens.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine