“Much of the current political legitimacy of today’s American government and its various European vassal-states is founded upon a particular narrative history of World War II, and challenging that account might have dire political consequences.”—Ron Unz

前言：
“当今美国政府及其欧洲附庸国的政治合法性，在很大程度上是建立在对第二次世界大战的特定历史叙述之上的，挑战这种叙述可能会带来可怕的政治后果。”——Ron Unz


Question 1: Hitler
Let’s start with Hitler. In the West it is universally accepted that:
Hitler started WW2
Hitler’s invasion of Poland was the first step in a broader campaign aimed at world domination
Is this interpretation of WW2 true or false? And, if it is false, then—in your opinion—what was Hitler trying to achieve in Poland and could WW2 have been avoided?

问题1：希特勒
让我们从希特勒开始。在西方，人们普遍认为:
希特勒发动了二战；
希特勒入侵波兰是他企图统治世界的第一步。
这种对二战的解释是对还是错?如果这是错的，那么在你看来，希特勒在波兰想要达到什么目的，二战是否可以避免?

Ron Unz—Until the last dozen years or so, my views on historical events had always been fairly conventional, formed from the classes I’d taken in college and the uniform media narrative I’d absorbed over the decades. This included my understanding of World War II, the greatest military conflict in human history, whose outcome had shaped our modern world.
But in the years after the 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War, I’d grown more and more suspicious of the honesty of our mainstream media, and begun to recognize that history books often merely represent a congealed version of such past media distortions. The growth of the Internet has unleashed a vast quantity of unorthodox ideas of all possible flavors and since 2000 I’dbeen working on a project to digitize the archives of our leading publications of the last 150 years, which gave me convenient access to information not easily available to anyone else.

Ron Unz：直到过去十几年左右，我对历史事件的看法一直相当传统，这是由我在大学里上的课和几十年来我吸收的千篇一律的媒体叙述形成的。这包括我对第二次世界大战的理解，这是人类历史上最大的军事冲突，其结果塑造了我们的现代世界。
但在9/11恐怖袭击和伊拉克战争之后的几年里，我越来越怀疑主流媒体的诚实，并开始认识到，历史书往往只是过去媒体扭曲事实的凝固版本。互联网的发展释放了大量各种各样的非正统思想，自2000年以来，我一直致力于一个项目，将过去150年的主要出版物的档案数字化，这让我方便地获得了其他人不容易获得的信息。

So as I later wrote:
Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.
As a consequence of all these developments, I published my original American Pravda article a decade ago, which contained that passage. In that article I emphasized that what our history books and media told us about the world and its past might often be just as dishonest and distorted as the notorious Pravda of the vanished USSR.

所以我后来写道:
除了我们自己的感官证据外，我们所知道的关于过去或今天的新闻几乎都来自于纸上的墨水或屏幕上的彩色像素，幸运的是，在过去的一二十年里，互联网的发展极大地扩大了我们在后一种类型中可以获得的信息的范围。即使这些非传统网络来源提供的绝大多数非正统说法是不正确的，至少现在有可能从大量的谎言中提取重要的真相。当然，过去十几年的事件迫使我彻底重新校准自己的现实认知。
由于所有这些发展，我在十年前发表了我在《真理报》上的原创文章，其中包含了这段话。在那篇文章中，我强调，我们的历史书和媒体告诉我们的关于世界及其过去的东西，可能经常和臭名昭著的苏联《真理报》一样不诚实和扭曲。链接：《我们的美国真理报》

At first, my focus had been on more recent historical events, but I soon began doing a great deal of reading and investigation into the history of World War II as well, gradually realizing that a large fraction of everything I’d always accepted about that war was completely incorrect.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised to discover this. After all, if our media could lie so blatantly about events in the here and now, why should we trust it on matters that had happened long ago and far away?
I eventually concluded that the true history of World War II was not only quite different from what most of us had always believed, but was largely inverted. Our mainstream history books had been telling the story upside-down and backwards.
With regard to Hitler and the outbreak of the war, I think an excellent starting point would be Origins of the Second World War, a classic work published in 1961 by renowned Oxford historian A.J.P. Taylor.

一开始，我关注的是最近的历史事件，但很快我也开始大量阅读和调查二战的历史，逐渐意识到我一直接受的关于那场战争的一切中有很大一部分是完全错误的。也许我会发现这一点不应该太惊讶。毕竟，如果我们的媒体可以如此明目张胆地对此时此地的事件撒谎，那么我们为什么要相信它对很久以前发生的事情的报道呢?
我最终得出结论，第二次世界大战的真实历史不仅与我们大多数人一直相信的完全不同，而且在很大程度上是颠倒的。我们的主流历史书一直把这个故事讲反了。关于希特勒和战争的爆发，我认为《第二次世界大战的起源》是一个很好的起点，这是牛津大学著名历史学家A·J·P·泰勒1961年出版的一部经典著作。

As I described his conclusions in 2019:
Hitler’s final demand, that 95% German Danzig be returned to Germany just as its inhabitants desired, was an absolutely reasonable one, and only a dreadful diplomatic blunder by the British had led the Poles to refuse the request, thereby provoking the war. The widespread later claim that Hitler sought to conquer the world was totally absurd, and the German leader had actually made every effort to avoid war with Britain or France. Indeed, he was generally quite friendly towards the Poles and had been hoping to enlist Poland as a German ally against the menace of Stalin’s Soviet unx.
The recent 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict that consumed so many tens of millions of lives naturally provoked numerous historical articles, and the resulting discussion led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years. I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received.

正如我在2019年所描述的那样:
希特勒的最后要求是，按照但泽居民的意愿，将95%的德国但泽归还给德国，这是一个绝对合理的要求，只是英国犯了一个可怕的外交错误，才导致波兰人拒绝了这一要求，从而引发了战争。后来流传甚广的关于希特勒试图征服世界的说法是完全荒谬的，这位德国领导人实际上已经尽一切努力避免与英国或法国开战。事实上，他总体上对波兰人非常友好，并一直希望能拉拢波兰成为德国的盟友，以对抗斯大林统治下的苏联的威胁。
……最近是那场夺去数千万人生命的冲突爆发70周年，自然引发了大量有关历史的文章，由此引发的讨论促使我翻出了我那本泰勒的小书，这是我近四十年来第一次重读这本书。我发现这本书就像我在大学宿舍里读到的那样高明和有说服力，那些热情洋溢的封面介绍暗示了这本书立即获得的一些好评。

The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it surely ranks as Taylor’s most famous work, and I can easily understand why it was still on my college required reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.
Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking study, I made a remarkable discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical acclaim, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

《华盛顿邮报》称赞作者是“英国最杰出的在世历史学家”，《世界政治》称其为“有力的论证，出色的写作，总是有说服力”，英国领先的左派杂志《新政治家》将其描述为“一部杰作:清晰，富有同情心，文笔优美”，而《泰晤士报文学增刊》则将其描述为“简单，具有破坏性，极具可读性，令人深感不安”。
作为一本国际畅销书，它无疑是泰勒最著名的作品之一，我很容易理解为什么在它最初出版近二十年后，它仍然在我的大学必读书目上。
然而，在重新审视泰勒的开创性研究时，我有了一个了不起的发现。尽管这本书在国际上大卖，受到评论界的好评，但它的发现很快在某些方面引起了极大的敌意。泰勒在牛津大学的讲座在四分之一个世纪里一直非常受欢迎，但这场争议的直接结果是，不久之后，这位“英国最杰出的在世历史学家”就被迅速从教职员工中除名了。在第一章的开头，泰勒就指出，他觉得很奇怪，在世界上最具灾难性的战争爆发20多年后，还没有出现认真分析这场战争爆发的严肃历史。也许他遭遇的报复让他更好地理解了这个谜团的一部分。

Numerous other leading scholars and journalists, both contemporaneous and more recent, have come to very similar conclusions, but they too often suffered severe retaliation for their honest historical assessments. For decades William Henry Chamberlin had been one of America’s most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists, but after he published America’s Second Crusade in 1950, he vanished from most mainstream publications. David Irving quite possibly ranks as the most internationally successful British historian of the last 100 years, with his seminal books on World War II receiving enormous critical praise and selling in the millions; but he was driven into personal bankruptcy and narrowly avoided spending the rest of his life in an Austrian prison. By the late 1930s Hitler had resurrected Germany, which had become newly prosperous under his rule, and he had also managed to reunite it with several separated German populations. As a result, he was widely recognized as one of the most successful and popular leaders in the world, and he hoped to finally settle the Polish border dispute, offering concessions far more generous than any of his democratically-elected Weimar predecessors had ever considered. But Poland’s dictatorship instead spent months rejecting his attempts at negotiations and also began brutal mistreatment of its German minority, finally forcing Hitler into declaring war.

许多其他著名的学者和记者，无论是同时代的还是近代的，都得出了非常相似的结论，但他们往往因为诚实的历史评估而遭到严重的报复。几十年来，威廉·亨利·张伯伦（William Henry Chamberlin）一直是美国最受尊敬的外交政策记者之一，但在1950年出版《美国第二次十字军东征》后，他从大多数主流出版物中消失了。大卫·欧文(David Irving)很可能是过去100年来在国际上最成功的英国历史学家，他关于第二次世界大战的开创性著作获得了评论界的广泛赞誉，销量达数百万册;但他被迫个人破产，险些在奥地利监狱度过余生。
到20世纪30年代末，希特勒复兴了德国，在他的统治下，德国重新繁荣起来，他还设法将几个分散的德国人口重新统一起来。结果，他被广泛认为是世界上最成功和最受欢迎的领导人之一，他希望最终解决与波兰的边界争端，提出了比他民主选举的魏玛前任所考虑的要慷慨得多的让步。但波兰的独裁政权却花了几个月的时间拒绝他的谈判尝试，并开始残酷对待德国少数民族，最终迫使希特勒宣战。

And as I discussed in 2019, provoking that war may have been the deliberate goal of certain powerful figures.
Perhaps the most obvious of these is the question of the true origins of the war, which laid waste to much of Europe, killed perhaps fifty or sixty million, and gave rise to the subsequent Cold War era in which Communist regimes controlled half of the entire Eurasian world-continent. Taylor, Irving, and numerous others have thoroughly debunked the ridiculous mythology that the cause lay in Hitler’s mad desire for world conquest, but if the German dictator clearly bore only minor responsibility, was there indeed any true culprit? Or did this massively-destructive world war come about in somewhat similar fashion to its predecessor, which our conventional histories treat as mostly due to a collection of blunders, misunderstandings, and thoughtless escalations?

正如我在2019年所讨论的那样，挑起这场战争可能是某些有权势人物的蓄意目标。
也许其中最明显的问题是战争的真正起源问题，这场战争摧毁了欧洲的大部分地区，杀死了大约五六千万人，并引发了随后的冷战时代，共产主义政权控制了整个欧亚大陆的一半。
泰勒、欧文和其他许多人已经彻底揭穿了希特勒疯狂地想要征服世界的荒谬神话，但如果德国独裁者显然只承担了轻微的责任，那么真的有真正的罪魁祸首吗?还是说，这场具有巨大破坏性的世界大战的爆发方式与它的前身有些相似，我们的传统历史认为，那次（第一次世界）战争主要是由一系列失误、误解和轻率的升级造成的?

During the 1930s, John T. Flynn was one of America’s most influential progressive journalists, and although he had begun as a strong supporter of Roosevelt and his New Deal, he gradually became a sharp critic, concluding that FDR’s various governmental schemes had failed to revive the American economy. Then in 1937 a new economic collapse spiked unemployment back to the same levels as when the president had first entered office, confirming Flynn in his harsh verdict. And as I wrote last year:
Indeed, Flynn alleges that by late 1937, FDR had turned towards an aggressive foreign policy aimed at involving the country in a major foreign war, primarily because he believed that this was the only route out of his desperate economic and political box, a stratagem not unknown among national leaders throughout history.

在20世纪30年代，约翰·T·弗林(John T. Flynn)是美国最有影响力的进步派记者之一，尽管他一开始是罗斯福及其新政的坚定支持者，但他逐渐成为了尖锐的批评者，认为罗斯福的各种政府计划未能重振美国经济。然后在1937年，一场新的经济崩溃使失业率飙升至总统刚上任时的水平，证实了弗林的严厉批判。正如我去年写的:
事实上，弗林声称，到1937年底，罗斯福已经转向了一种侵略性的外交政策，旨在使国家卷入一场重大的对外战争，主要是因为他相信这是摆脱他绝望的经济和政治困境的唯一途径，这种策略在历史上的国家领导人中并不陌生。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


In his January 5, 1938 New Republic column, he alxed his disbelieving readers to the looming prospect of a large naval military build-up and warfare on the horizon after a top Roosevelt adviser had privately boasted to him that a large bout of “military Keynesianism” and a major war would cure the country’s seemingly insurmountable economic problems. At that time, war with Japan, possibly over Latin American interests, seemed the intended goal, but developing events in Europe soon persuaded FDR that fomenting a general war against Germany was the best course of action. Memoirs and other historical documents obtained by later researchers seem to generally support Flynn’s accusations by indicating that Roosevelt ordered his diplomats to exert enormous pressure upon both the British and Polish governments to avoid any negotiated settlement with Germany, thereby leading to the outbreak of World War II in 1939.

在1938年1月5日的《新共和》专栏中，罗斯福的一位高级顾问私下向他吹嘘，一场大规模的“军事凯恩斯主义”和一场大规模战争将治愈这个国家看似无法克服的经济问题，他提醒那些不相信的读者，一场大规模的海军军事集结和战争即将来临。
当时，与日本的战争，可能是为了拉丁美洲的利益，似乎是预期的目标，但欧洲事态的发展很快使罗斯福相信，煽动对德全面战争是最好的行动方针。后来的研究人员获得的回忆录和其他历史文件似乎普遍支持弗林的指控，表明罗斯福命令他的外交官对英国和波兰政府施加巨大压力，以避免与德国谈判解决问题，从而导致1939年第二次世界大战爆发。

The last point is an important one since the confidential opinions of those closest to important historical events should be accorded considerable evidentiary weight. In a recent article John Wear mustered the numerous contemporaneous assessments that implicated FDR as a pivotal figure in orchestrating the world war by his constant pressure upon the British political leadership, a policy that he privately even admitted could mean his impeachment if revealed. Among other testimony, we have the statements of the Polish and British ambassadors to Washington and the American ambassador to London, who also passed along the concurring opinion of Prime Minister Chamberlain himself. Indeed, the German capture and publication of secret Polish diplomatic documents in 1939 had already revealed much of this information, and William Henry Chamberlin confirmed their authenticity in his 1950 book. But since the mainstream media never reported any of this information, these facts remain little known even today.

最后一点很重要，因为最接近重要历史事件的人的秘密意见应该具有相当大的证据份量。在最近的一篇文章中，约翰·威尔(John Wear)收集了许多当时的评估，这些评估暗示罗斯福是策划世界大战的关键人物，因为他不断向英国政治领导层施压，他甚至私下承认，如果这项政策被曝光，他可能会被弹劾。在其他证词中，我们有波兰和英国驻华盛顿大使以及美国驻伦敦大使的声明，他还转达了张伯伦首相本人的同意意见。事实上，德国在1939年捕获并公布的波兰秘密外交文件已经揭示了这些信息的大部分，威廉·亨利·张伯伦在他1950年的书中证实了它们的真实性。但由于主流媒体从未报道过这些信息，这些事实直到今天仍然鲜为人知。

Question 2: The London “Blitz”
Germany launched the “Blitz” on England in order to terrorize the British people into submission. Do you agree with this or were there other factors involved which have been omitted in western history textbooks? (Like Churchill’s bombing of Berlin?)
Ron Unz—Once again, this standard account of World War II is largely the opposite of the truth. In that era, the aerial bombardment of urban centers far behind military lines was illegal and considered a war crime, with Hitler having absolutely no intention of attacking Britain’s cities in that way.
Indeed, the German leader had always had favorable views toward Britain and also believed that the preservation of the British Empire was in Germany’s strategic interest since its collapse would create a geopolitical vacuum that might be filled by a rival power.
After Germany attacked Poland, Britain and France declared war. The Polish army was defeated in just a few weeks, and Hitler then offered to withdraw his forces from the Polish territories they had occupied and make peace, but the two Western powers vowed to continue the war until Germany was crushed. Little fighting occurred until spring of 1940 when the Germans finally attacked and defeated the huge French army, seizing Paris and knocking France out of the war.

问题2:伦敦“闪电战”
德国对英国发动了“闪电战”，目的是恐吓英国人民使其屈服。你是否同意这一点，或者是否有其他因素被西方历史教科书遗漏了?就像丘吉尔轰炸柏林那样?
Ron Unz——再一次，这种关于第二次世界大战的标准描述在很大程度上与事实相反。在那个时代，对远离军事防线的城市中心进行空中轰炸是非法的，被认为是战争罪行，希特勒绝对无意以这种方式攻击英国的城市。
事实上，这位德国领导人一直对英国抱有好感，他也认为维持大英帝国符合德国的战略利益，因为大英帝国的崩溃会造成一个地缘政治真空，而这个真空可能会被一个竞争对手填补。德国进攻波兰后，英国和法国宣战。波兰军队在短短几周内就被打败了，希特勒随后提出从他们占领的波兰领土上撤军并讲和，但这两个西方大国发誓要继续战争，直到击溃德国。直到1940年春天，德国人终于进攻并击败了庞大的法国军队，占领了巴黎，使法国退出了战争。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


The British forces were evacuated at Dunkirk and there’s quite a lot of evidence that Hitler deliberately allowed them to escape as a face-saving gesture rather than ordering them captured. He followed his victory in France by offering extremely generous terms to the British government, making no demands against them and instead proposing a German alliance, including military support for protecting the security of their worldwide empire. Hitler naturally believed that they would accept such an attractive offer and end the war, which he assumed was essentially over. Several of the top British leaders seemed eager to make peace on Hitler’s generous terms, and according to the evidence found by renowned British historian David Irving, Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself seemed willing to do so before changing his mind and pulling back. Churchill had spent decades seeking to become Prime Minister, and Irving plausibly argues he realized that losing a disastrous war within weeks of finally achieving that position would have rendered him a laughingstock in the history books.

英国军队在敦刻尔克撤退，有很多证据表明，希特勒故意让他们逃跑，以保全面子，而不是下令俘虏他们。在法国取得胜利后，他向英国政府提出了极其慷慨的条件，没有对他们提出任何要求，而是提议与德国结盟，包括提供军事支持，以保护其全球帝国的安全。希特勒自然相信他们会接受这样一个有吸引力的提议，结束战争，他认为战争基本上已经结束了。
几位英国高层领导人似乎急于按照希特勒的慷慨条件媾和，根据英国著名历史学家大卫·欧文(David Irving)发现的证据，英国首相温斯顿·丘吉尔(Winston Churchill)本人似乎也愿意这样做，但后来他改变了主意，退出了谈判。丘吉尔花了几十年的时间才成为英国首相，欧文似乎有理由认为，他意识到，在最终获得首相职位的几周内，输掉一场灾难性的战争，将使他成为历史书中的笑柄。

But given Britain’s military defeat on the Continent and the very generous terms Hitler was offering, Churchill faced a huge problem in persuading his country to continue a war that was widely regarded as lost. Therefore, he began ordering a series of bombing raids against the German capital, an illegal war crime, hoping to provoke a German response. This led Hitler to repeatedly warn that if they continued bombing his cities, he would be forced to retaliate in kind, and he finally did so. Since the British public was unaware that their own government had initiated the campaign of urban bombing, they regarded those retaliatory German aerial attacks as monstrous, unprovoked war crimes, and just as Churchill had hoped, they became fully committed to continuing the war against Germany.
Irving and others explain all these important facts in their books, and a riveting Irving lecture summarizing his information is still available on Bitchute after having been purged from Youtube.

但考虑到英国在欧洲大陆的军事失败和希特勒提供的非常慷慨的条件，丘吉尔面临着一个巨大的问题，即如何说服他的国家继续这场被普遍认为是失败的战争。因此，他开始下令对德国首都进行一系列的轰炸，这是一种非法的战争罪行，希望能引起德国的反应。
这导致希特勒一再警告说，如果他们继续轰炸他的城市，他将被迫以牙还牙，他最终这样做了。由于英国公众不知道是他们自己的政府发起了轰炸城市的行动，他们认为德国的报复性空袭是可怕的、无端的战争罪行，正如丘吉尔所希望的那样，他们完全致力于继续对德作战。
欧文和其他人在他们的书中解释了所有这些重要的事实，在被Youtube清除后，Bitchute上仍然可以看到欧文总结他的信息的引人入胜的演讲。
（未完待续）
第二篇预告：《问题二，伦敦闪击战和销声匿迹的著名学者》