Me on WWII
The original plans of the Japanese and Germans respectively were:

1. Get a ‘near-abroad’ empire much like the US had and still has in the Americas to compete with them and with the British and Dutch, who had Asian lands and were killing them economically. None of the ‘Hirohito in the White House’ nonsense the Americans were fed as other Americans were herded into concentration camps solely because of their ethnicity including a sickly, bedridden little boy called Noriyuki (later Pat) Morita and George ‘Sulu’ Takei and still others were shipped off to be slaughtered in places like Pelelieu for... what exactly? A trading relationship with the Japanese Empire would have been no more reprehensible than the one today with mainland China (Mao, the biggest mass murderer in human history?).

2. Rule Europe (the Russians would have destroyed them anyway) with Africa and Asia ruled by fellow northern Europeans the British and the Americas likewise controlled by fellow ethnic northern Europeans the Americans. (As both were more or less doing at the time and the Americans still do in the Western Hemisphere.) The Germans knew they had no big surface navy, marines, long-range planes or missiles to conquer the US and so made no plans to do so. IIRC the declaration of war was thanks to the Roosevelt-goaded Japanese attack on the military bases in Hawaii (FDR moved the Pacific Fleet headquarters from San Diego on purpose and sacked the admiral in charge who objected), specifically, like World War I, thanks to the alliance the Germans had with Japan. Italy was at war with the US as well but no threat.

The answer: let the Nazis and Communists destroy each other.

[Germany’s treaty with Japan did not require the declaration of war on the US; it was simply another case of Hitler being irrational, going against the original plan I’ve just described.]

BTW the wise America Firsters (including former liberal John Flynn), like me, were not pacifists and supported a strong military for its true mission, defence of the homeland in case the worst happened.

Sending Americans to die for any other reason, to serve any foreign government, even the British, was unconscionable. (Those who volunteered to fight for the British — the RAF’s Eagle Squadron and the American RCAF pilots — are another matter. Their choice, their honour.) As was siding with Stalin — he and Lenin killed far more people than Hitler. Orthodox Christians BTW — catholics — for being Orthodox. FDR and Churchill handed over half of Catholic Europe to that butcher. As you know WWII was not fought to help the Jews but only to help Churchill and Stalin wipe out Germany as a competitor. The British turned down giving help to the German resistance (including career soldiers like Canaris and Rommel and old German nobles, including Bavarian Catholics, nothing to do with Nazism) which wanted a conditional surrender.

Labels: history, peace, politics, Russia