Wokism and History. Part Three: “The Commissariat” Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/wokism-and-history-part-three-the-commissariat/
Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about Blitzkrieg and needed improvement, Soviet Russia in comparison seemed inept.
That impression was solidified by the so-called “Winter War” of November 30, 1939–March 13, 1940, when the Soviets invaded neutral Finland. Although technically a victory, Russia lost nearly 500,000 dead, wounded, missing, and captured, compared to 75,000 causalities of the so-called losing Finns. Hitler concluded that his new ally Stalin’s Russia was a paper tiger, a view enhanced by the vast and continual improvement in German war-making for much of 1940–41 with the victories in Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa.
Germans assumed that the Russian officer corps was largely to blame for these embarrassments, especially given that during the 1937–38 Stalin purges, some 30,000 officers were executed on the pretext of anti-Stalin, anti-communist sympathies.
Among them was over 75 percent of Soviet generals and admirals—at precisely the time Stalin was vastly expanding and modernizing his armed forces and in dire need of competent officers.
Given these exempla, Hitler turned on his ally on June 22, 1941, and foolishly invaded the vast Soviet Union. The initial three-pronged attack was stunning, and nearly knocked out the Soviet Union in the first three months of the invasion, inflicting somewhere between 4-5 million casualties, with perhaps over 2 million immediate dead. Hitler was at first convinced that Stalin had wrecked his military and Moscow would be in German hands by early September.
What followed December 1941—Hitlerian strategic blunders, German overextended logistics and manpower shortages, vast resupplies of Anglo-American Lend-Lease war material to Russia, intact Russian industrial production beyond the Urals, and improving Soviet generalship—had doomed Germans to defeat by late 1943.
By 1943 Stalin had reversed course, reviving the Russian Orthodox Church to lend religious zeal to the war, and increasingly turning over the day-to-day decision making, both tactical and strategic, to an array of talented Soviet generals, most famously Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, and Konstantin Rokossovsky. Both Konev and Rokossovsky had been purged between 1936–38 but were by 1941–42 “rehabilitated.” In short, once the Soviet Union de facto ended the commissariat/ideological control of the military and allowed it to function more on the basis of military efficacy, the Soviets began to take advantage of inherent German weaknesses.
Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of a decade between 1966–76 was similar. Lethal cancel cultural, ostracizing, Trotskyization, and exile led to millions of deaths and destroyed the economy that functioned on irrational ideological premises rather than market realities. Crazy Red Guard factions went wild, with unhinged accusations of counter-revolution impurity, as they destroyed the intelligentsia.
The Army was rendered incompetent. Its 1979 invasion of Vietnam, despite the decades-long exhaustion of the communist Vietnamese military and the decisions of the Soviet Union not to intervene, was lackluster, costly, and generally felt to be indicative of the damage done to the military from the prior decade.
The current People’s Liberation Army may be a communist tool, but it does not run on the premises of the Cultural Revolution.
From all these examples, we should learn that the woke revolution, while not yet so violent as what occurred in Corcyra, Germany, Russia, and China has the potential to become savage and destroy the meritocratic basis of the United States.
We saw a glimpse of that violence from June to October 2020 in blue states. Our major cities are crumbling due to woke notions of district attorneys, defunding the police enthusiasts, homelessness experts, and corrupt ideological bureaucracies.
The U.S. military should be wary: recruitments are plunging and will get worse. Ideological indoctrination governs promotions and recruitment. Military contracting and weapons procurement are often corrupt. Four-star officers are fused with the military-industrial borg.
The net result is something like the flight from Afghanistan, the Chinese balloon caper, the Pentagon mega-leak, and the Baghdad Bob lies that emanate from the Pentagon that things are just fine.
You won’t be fired for losing to terrorists a $1-billion embassy, a $300-million air base, $50 billion in U.S. hardware, and thousands of lives over 20 years. But you might be demoted for not sufficiently conducting a unicorn hunt for “white rage” and “white supremacy” in your battalion, and insufficiently mastering the proper transgendered pronouns.
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