The Russians did a much better job of lining Nazis up against a wall, immediately after the war.
But over the long term, both occupying forces took the easy road over the revolutionary road. Propping the old fascists back up into positions of power was easier than rebuilding the industrial state from scratch in a western-liberal or eastern-socialist model. Perhaps you can argue that the looming Cold War forced their hands. If FDR and Stalin had survived to shake hands at Potsdam and Camp David, maybe things would have been different. If the Korean Peninsula hadn’t collapsed into Civil War, maybe we’d have had a global alliance focused on economic modernization instead of an Iron Curtain and knives in the dark for the next 50 years.
But FDR’s brain popped. Stalin turned inward in paranoia and fumbled the USSR into Khruschev’s hands. Churchill was run out on a rail for being a conniving reactionary little shit. And the Nazis crawled in through the open wounds of the dying post-war alliance to infect both the East and the West for generations to come.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The Russians did a much better job of lining Nazis up against a wall, immediately after the war.
But over the long term, both occupying forces took the easy road over the revolutionary road. Propping the old fascists back up into positions of power was easier than rebuilding the industrial state from scratch in a western-liberal or eastern-socialist model. Perhaps you can argue that the looming Cold War forced their hands. If FDR and Stalin had survived to shake hands at Potsdam and Camp David, maybe things would have been different. If the Korean Peninsula hadn’t collapsed into Civil War, maybe we’d have had a global alliance focused on economic modernization instead of an Iron Curtain and knives in the dark for the next 50 years.
But FDR’s brain popped. Stalin turned inward in paranoia and fumbled the USSR into Khruschev’s hands. Churchill was run out on a rail for being a conniving reactionary little shit. And the Nazis crawled in through the open wounds of the dying post-war alliance to infect both the East and the West for generations to come.