SAME 1939 GAME PLAN TODAY: SET ALL AGAINST ALL AND GRAB WHAT WE CAN 6/8: 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
⏱️ 8 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.
1944 WC AND ALEXANDER
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Professor Sean McMeakin. |
| 0:07.3 | His new book is Stalin's War, A New History of World War II. |
| 0:10.4 | Stalin's setting the imperialist states against each other, tear each other up, and I'll gobble up territory. |
| 0:16.1 | Except Stalin was out of equipment, weapons, food, in order to continue the fight. |
| 0:22.1 | So he came to depend almost like a child on the arsenal of democracy. |
| 0:31.2 | The arsenal of democracy run by FDR and the American people. |
| 0:35.8 | However, we come to troubles, especially early 1942-43, in which |
| 0:43.5 | FDR and Churchill make a deal, although it was Eisenhower who did it, with the French commander |
| 0:51.5 | of the North African forces, a a man who switches side goes from being |
| 0:55.5 | a fascist sympathizer to an american sympathizer his name was darlan it's an obscure detail of history |
| 1:02.2 | but it did bother fdr i learned from the professor a lot so we come to january nineteen forty |
| 1:08.3 | three the casablanca Conference in North Africa. |
| 1:12.0 | Stalin does not attend. |
| 1:13.7 | Churchill's there. |
| 1:14.8 | Roosevelt's there. |
| 1:16.3 | Sean, why does FDR announce unconditional surrender? |
| 1:21.9 | Well, it's a great question, John. |
| 1:23.5 | And the Darlon deal and the kind of almost political stench surrounding, it definitely has something to do with this in part because Roosevelt was used to the kind of the conservative Southern Democrats and the Republicans attacking him for various things from the quote unquote right. But he's getting it from the left now, too. They're all saying he's sort of soft that he's put some deal with this fascist vish regime regime that he's soft and this is a little bit of an |
| 1:45.8 | obsession for rosa because of course it plays in with his own complex that really the u.s is not |
| 1:51.5 | doing enough to really fight the germans i mean after all it was a little strange to begin with |
| 1:55.5 | that he had declared germany first as the priority this back in arcadia december 41 after |
| 2:00.0 | pearl harbor and then on top of that they declared the number one priority inside of germany first was aid to as the priority is back in Arcadia, December 41, after Pearl Harbor. |
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