SAME 1939 GAME PLAN TODAY: SET ALL AGAINST ALL AND GRAB WHAT WE CANL 7/8: 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
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2025
⏱️ 9 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 QQEBEC
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchelor. John McMeekin is the author of the new book Stalin's War. |
| 0:08.4 | He's a professor at Bard College. |
| 0:10.6 | Stalin has needleed, hectared, used the rhetoric of Second Front for years. Well, here it comes. |
| 0:18.7 | 1944. We know it is D-Day. However, there are many details inside |
| 0:24.6 | this before D-Day actually happens. It's important to explore them all. And it has to do with the |
| 0:31.0 | lend lease. First protocol, second protocol, third protocol. It's not just the dollar figure, which is enormous. |
| 0:39.6 | It's the ability of the Soviets to plunder the United States, |
| 0:45.5 | whole Ford factories, |
| 0:48.3 | suitcases of what we call intellectual property. |
| 0:51.9 | At that time, they would have called them blueprints. |
| 0:55.1 | Being guarded by NKVD men with submachine guns as they're transferred unopened boxes to the Soviet Union. |
| 1:03.1 | Sean, I had the image while I'm reading your very careful and shocking explication |
| 1:08.0 | of not just 70,000 tons of sugar in the first protocol, but those boxes |
| 1:12.8 | of plans in the third protocol extended. I had this image that all of this equipment, all of these |
| 1:19.5 | blueprints, all of the technology, all of the pieces of the Ford plant went to some warehouse |
| 1:26.2 | in the Soviet Union and was never touched. Just |
| 1:28.8 | a winter outside, Stalin was doing it because this is the highwayman from the Tiflis massacre. |
| 1:36.8 | Grab as much as you can and think about it afterwards. So, did Hopkins know this was happening? |
| 1:42.9 | Did FDR know this was happening? Did FDR know this was happening? |
| 1:45.4 | Did Stentinius, a friend of Hopkins, |
| 1:48.6 | who will later become the Secretary of State for Truman, for heaven's sakes, |
| 1:51.9 | but did Stentinius know that they were plundering American technology? |
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