SAME 1939 GAME PLAN TODAY: SET ALL AGAINST ALL AND GRAB WHAT WE CAN. 1/8: Stalin's War: A New History of World War II, Sean McMeekin, with Kevin Stillwell as narrator. Published by Basic Books. Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 4 May 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/392db86e-7d65-4c5d-b2a9-b781d5ee7250?shareToken=99d9180db57c2304848bc11f23ff97dc
World War II: Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war:
Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary.
McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army.
1941 CANADA, ATKANTIC CHARTER
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I welcome Professor Sean McMeekin, Bard College. |
| 0:05.0 | Sean is an author of many historical narratives over the 20th century timeline. |
| 0:11.7 | And here to four, I've talked to the professor about his explication of the events of July |
| 0:18.9 | 1914, prior to the First War, the Great War it was called. |
| 0:23.6 | Now we turn to a byproduct of the catastrophe of the Great War, which is the 1930s and |
| 0:31.6 | 1940s, the period where all of Europe was transformed into fear and loathing of two very powerful |
| 0:40.2 | dictators, monsters, Adolf Hitler in Germany, but before that, Joseph Stalin, Jugashvili |
| 0:47.5 | in the Soviet Union. The new book is Stalin's war, a new history of World War II. It begins with an explanation of Stalin's |
| 0:58.5 | viewpoint of the world. He inherited through machinations and scalduggery and backstabbing. |
| 1:05.6 | He inherited the control of the Communist Party, the apparatus in Moscow, upon Lenin's death. |
| 1:14.6 | What he did with that was derive one theory of the world, I learned from the professor, |
| 1:20.6 | and it was inherited from Stalin himself, from Lenin himself. |
| 1:25.6 | But we begin with who Joseph Stalin is, what you need to know about his personality, how he |
| 1:31.9 | first came to Lenin's attention as a man who was an up-and-comer revolutionary. |
| 1:38.3 | Professor, congratulations. |
| 1:40.2 | The book is massive. |
| 1:41.2 | It's an enormous amount of detail, but there's stories within stories. |
| 1:44.5 | And we begin with, how did Vladimir Lenin, Ulyanov, first learn of Joseph Stalin, the bandit? |
| 1:51.6 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:53.4 | Good evening, John. And thank you so much for having me on once again. |
| 1:58.0 | Well, Stalin, it's true, really first came to Lenin's attention after the notorious Tiflis |
| 2:03.7 | heist conducted essentially in broad daylight of a kind of a bank transfer, transport, |
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