councilor.org
| Source | Brad De Long |
| Date | 99/06/07/13:24 |
| No, people are educated. And people who are open-minded enough to be willing to mark their beliefs to market occasionally are sometimes convinced. After all, if you have not changed your mind on anything since the 1970s you are dead, whether you realize it or not... Long-term violent and starvation deaths (say, between 1945 and 1990) had the Stalin regime collapsed in the summer of 1942, and had the U.S. and Britain then made a separate peace with the Nazis--settling for Nazi abandonment of the alliance with Japan and withdrawal from and the demilitarization of France, Benelux, and Scandinavia in exchange for giving Hitler a free hand in the east, say--would have been, I think: 80 million more dead in the Soviet Union (according to a conversation I had with Daniel Goldhagen) as the Nazis turn retired soldiers into large-scale landholders engaged in capital-intensive agriculture in the New Eastern Territories... 25 million more dead in pre-1939 Poland as part of the same process... 10 million more dead in the pacification of Yugoslavia and the crushing of the various Yugoslavian resistance movements... 2 million extra as non-Polish and non-Russian Jews and Gypsies are exterminated... Call it 120 million. And that's assuming that Hitler would have stopped there. A Nazi descent on Africa would have added at least another 50 million to the total... We *all* owe an enormous debt to the Red Army and to the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union for their unbelievable sacrifices and courage during World War II. On the other hand, I don't think that we owe this debt to *Stalin*. After all, a Stalin who had not signed the Nazi-Soviet pact but who had instead joined Britain and France in a guarantee of the integrity of Poland might have kept Hitler from starting World War II at all (my guess: a probability of about 1/3). And if Hitler had started World War II in spite of a Soviet guarantee of Poland--or if Stalin had double-crossed Hitler in September of 1939 and joined the Anglo-French alliance--then it seems likely that World War II would have been much shorter (my guess: a probability of 2/3--and if Tukhachevsky had purged Stalin first in 1936 and avoided the decimation of the command structures and cadres of the Red Army, my guess is that the probability is very close to one). As it was, it was a very near-run thing. I suspect that, if Hitler had just kept his mouth shut and not declared war on the U.S. in December 1941, the U.S. would have kept deliveries of lend-lease supplies at a tiny trickle as it focused on overwhelming Japan, and Russia and Britain would have lost World War II in Europe... Brad DeLong |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho