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The John Batchelor Show

SAME 1939 GAME PLAN TODAY: SET ALL AGAINST ALL AND GRAB WHAT WE CAN. 3/8: 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

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

SAME 1939 GAME PLAN TODAY: SET ALL AGAINST ALL AND GRAB WHAT WE CAN.   3/8: Stalin's War: A New History of World War II, Sean McMeekin, with Kevin Stillwell as narrator. Published by Basic Books.  Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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.
1942 WC NORTH AMERICA

Transcript

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0:00.0

Wake up! The Jones is a redo in their garden! Love that porcelain paven and all that fencing.

0:05.4

I knew it. They've been with their landscaper to Jusen.

0:07.9

A mini-digger! No wonder she was so smug at Zumba! Right, I want a sunken seating area. She won't have that.

0:14.2

For materials, tool hire, timber and paving. Don't waste time. Duason's got the lot.

0:19.0

Like Teralis, porcelain paving from only 22 pounds per square metre.

0:22.4

Love it.

0:23.1

All trade prices exclude VAT at 20%.

0:25.9

So now you can keep up with the Joneses.

0:28.0

And the Evanses.

0:29.2

And the Bertels.

0:34.7

This is CBSI on the world.

0:36.8

I'm John Bachelor with Professor Sean McMeakin, whose wondrous and extremely rich new book.

0:43.4

Stalin's War tells the story of what we remember as the Second World War from the point of view of the Kremlin manipulating all sides, many different sides, through all of the machinations of September 1939 to the crisis

0:58.7

that becomes the Cold War in 1948. We're now in September 1940 when the tripartite pact is

1:06.0

signed in Berlin, including the Japanese, the Italians, and the Germans, not Russia. What's critical here

1:15.1

is how Russia regarded this non-inclusion, given that Stalin had some kind of relationship with

1:22.5

Berlin at this moment. We go now to November 12, 1940. Molotov, the gangster, who is now the representative of

1:31.9

Stalin to foreign governments, travels under what you'd have to say, operatic circumstances from

1:39.3

Moscow to Berlin. He's received with people singing the International and Sean Assures this, they played it

1:46.6

double time so that nobody in the area would be tempted to sing. There were still lots of

1:51.0

communists in Berlin in November of 1940. Ribbentrop, Hitler, Himmler, and Keitel, head of the army,

1:57.5

greet Molotov. What they're concerned about is the possibility that Moscow will

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