re: Van Susteren claims Holocuast preceded the Second World War[W261]
That may be an overstatement. The Nazis certainly had other goals, like dominating the European continent and perhaps even the entire planet, but annihilating Jews, especially within Europe, was a major element of their policy agenda.
There is no indication - absolutely none at all - that Germany's treatment of the Jews was the reason (or even a reason) that France and England declared war on Germany, or that such was the reason we entered the war.
The Allied invasion of France certainly did shorten the war, and the tide had definitely turned against the Nazis by June 1944, but I'd say it's difficult to predict how things would have turned out if there had been no invasion.
Y'know, after being brainwashed for all my life on how America kicked ass in Europe, it was surprising to find out how titanic the struggle was on the Eastern Front - what was going on on the Western Front was - relatively speaking - a sideshow. If you look at the numbers, even if Hitler had pulled every division from the Western Front before we invaded and sent them all over to fight the Soviets, the Soviets' numbers were still overwhelming. Numbers alone don't make the difference, of course - but the Soviets' logistics were much shorter and in better shape, and they had the best medium tank of the war in the T-34.
In other words, even before Normandy, barring some miraculous event, Hitler's war was lost. It was only a matter of time.
I'd say the war didn't really start until Great Britain and France declared war on Germany following the Nazi invasion of Poland in Sept 1939. Many say the invasion itself was the start of the war, but if the British and French had not acted, there may never have been a war in the West.
There would have been a war in the West anyway. Hitler was very influenced by WWI, and the failure of the Schlieffen Plan (which called for defeating France before taking on Russia). Germany had always felt surrounded, encircled by those who might be enemies, and if you'll think about it, there's more than a little truth to that. So in order to defeat Russia, he had to defeat France first so he wouldn't have to worry about a two-front war.
This is my point in starting this thread. Van Susteren knows the history of the war; she knows it very well. It's part of her job at Fux to maintain intense interest among those in her audience who believe there is a religious war going on all over the world between Christianity and Islam. And of course to paint Obama as a modern-day Neville Chamberlain, the horrible appeaser. The irony there is that it was of course the Right, here in the US and in Europe, who saw Hitler as someone we could "do business with," and who were content to tolerate just about anything from the Nazi government given its fierce opposition to Soviet communism.
In other words, you're saying that she's not ignorant, but that she's lying through her teeth. If that's true, I'm sad - I used to have a good deal of respect for her. The rest of your paragraph is true.
The US declared war on Germany only after Hitler declared war on us following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt may have had difficulty getting a declaration against Germany through Congress otherwise.
Also true. The German minority in America at the time was quite significant and influential.
I'm only an amateur grammarian, but I think "
stepped in" is a so-called
phrasal verb, sort of an idiom.
>>The "to" in
"to take down Hitler" is a subordinating conjunction.
I think "to" is used here as an infinitive particle, and so "to take down" is a verbal noun, not a verb.
Ow. I'll stay out of that exchange. My command of the English language isn't gooder than yours.
But I'll say this - it wasn't until I learned a bit of Tagalog that I began to realize how incredibly (and stupidly) unwieldy our language really is. Imagine a language that is mostly gender-neutral (you can say "this belongs to that man" but there is no "his" or "hers"), wherein one can learn all the rules of proper pronunciation in five minutes flat, and there are far fewer "exceptions to the rule" as there are in English.
