The Second World War was the largest and most tragic war in human history.
As the saying goes, if it is not three feet of ice, it is not a day's cold, and such a big war can never be launched by one or several careerists with a single thought.
In fact, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, Marshal Foch of France made it clear that this was not peace, but a 20-year truce.
In other words, the roots of World War II were planted 20 years ago when the treaty was signed.
Marshal Foch. Today, we will follow the trajectory of fascism in the Axis powers and see how the devil was raised.
Let's start with Italy, the worst of the three fascist states. It is hard to imagine that Italy, a country that fought at a worse level than France, could be the birthplace of fascism. However, everything is unexpected and often reasonable.
The history of Italy as a country dates back to the 19th century.
From the 40s to the 70s of the 19th century, countries around the world were undergoing a great change unseen in a century.
Germany, France, China, the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and Russia, all of the mainstream countries that would later dominate the world stage, have undergone earth-shaking changes in those 30 years.
The background of this century-old change was the completion of the first industrial revolution in Europe, and the nascent bourgeoisie demanded feudal royal power and wholeheartedly served the expansion of capital.
The core task is to unify the small and broken states, create a unified market, and open up overseas colonies.
And that century-old change also involved Italy.
Since the collapse of Rome, the Italian peninsula has been a mess for millennia.
Before the Centennial Change, the Italian peninsula was roughly like this: the south was ruled by the Kingdom of Naples, the central part was ruled by the Papal States, and the north was divided into three kingdoms: Venice, Lombardy, and Sardinia.
Among these countries, except for the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was an independent and sovereign state, several other countries had a foreign master behind them, Naples was backed by Spain, Papal States was backed by the French, and Venice and Lombardy were backed by Austrians.
At that time, the Kingdom of Sardinia produced a famous politician named Count Cavour, who was the founding father of Italy.
Count Cavour.
He teamed up with another famous Italian player named Garibaldi, and the operation of a big stick and radish unified Italy.
But this unification of Italy is a trick. Because at the same time, Germany was also completing the war of unification, and it was Bismarck's army that knocked Venice and the Papal States to the ground one by one.
And Cavour and Garibaldi took advantage of this opportunity to reserve a lot of rights for the old aristocracy through coercion and inducement, which reluctantly put Italy together.
Such reforms are very incomplete and can hardly provide shelter for the development of nascent capitalism.
And Italy, like Germany, is a latecomer country, and after they complete reunification, the colonies of all countries in the world have long been divided by the old countries such as Britain, ** and the territory under the sun?
Italy has no colonies to exploit, and there is no way to create a strong **centralization** to escort the development of capitalism, as Germany did through the iron-blooded war.
As a result, the economic development of this country has always been half-dead, so much so that it has been jokingly called a pseudo-power.
When it came time for Germany to start World War I, they wanted to repeat their old tricks and follow the Germans to seize the British and French colonies.
As a result, within two months of the start of the war, they declared neutrality when they saw that the limelight was not right, threw themselves on the side of the Entente, and turned their guns on their original allies, the Austrians.
As a result, it didn't come to pass, the puppet powers couldn't defeat ragdoll imperialism, and they were actually cleaned up by the Austrians.
So after the end of the First World War, Italy held the empty title of a victorious power. But if you fight like this, what qualifications do you have to serve on the table and share the meat?
As a result, just like China at that time, it was treated as a defeated country with the title of a victorious country.
The so-called cannon sounded **10,000 taels, don't care how the Italians fought, but this real gold** is really spent.
After paying so much for post-war Italy, it gained nothing, so that all industries were depressed, the people were poor, a large number of workers were laid off and unemployed, social contradictions were extremely prominent, and the common people were holding back a wave of resentment!
At its worst, nearly forty percent of the workers in Italy spontaneously organized armed forces to confront the ** army.
You must know that the people at the bottom are a rabble, they don't have too strong thinking ability, once they are hungry and cold, they are willing to believe any kind of extreme ideas, whether it is communism, fascism or nationalism.
The so-called rush to the doctor is talking about them.
Therefore, after the First World War, in addition to the widespread spread of communist ideas in Italy, Mussolini's ultra-nationalist ideology fascism was also widely welcomed by the general public.
Mussolini. Mussolini was keenly aware of this, and by inciting the people at the bottom to organize a broad united front, by emphasizing personal authority, he created a vanguard (the Black Shirts) with a strong atmosphere to lead these people.
In the end, after a contest, Mussolini defeated workers' communism and capitalist liberalism by virtue of the advantage of centralization.
By staging a coup d'état, he succeeded in seizing power in Italy in 1923.
But he would certainly not be able to overturn the sky on his own, but his success has provided a model for another demon.
In the same year that Mussolini seized power, his future brother Hitler also launched a beer hall riot in Germany.
It's just that Hitler didn't have Mussolini's luck, and this *** operation was easily suppressed by the Weimar Republic.
**I once commented on these two people, saying that these two people are both rivers and lakes**, but Mussolini's level is obviously higher and he is a power artist.
At that time, Hitler and Mussolini faced the same environment.
In the five years from 1918 to 1923, the three defeated countries of Germany, Italy, and Austria were all in trouble.
This environment provided ample soil for the development of fascism, and if Hitler had the power of Mussolini, he would never have been stupid enough to start a beer hall riot.
What he should do is to incite these disgruntled masses and cultivate his own forces, instead of directly facing the ** before he is fledgling.
History has a window period, and if you miss it, you will pay a price. Hitler's blind move led to a ten-year delay in his assumption of power.
Hitler. After 1924, the United States came up with a Dawes plan in order to do things in Europe.
This Dawes plan is basically the Marshall PlanVersion 0 aims to revitalize the German economy by providing capital and markets. The economy is good, the people have something to eat, who wants to believe them?
But the reason why the United States supports Germany is because it likes that Germany can fight, and Italy behaves so badly on the battlefield that it has no value to be used.
Therefore, the Dawes plan did not benefit Italy, otherwise Mussolini would have to be killed.
With Dawes's support, the Germans lived a good life for another five years. Until the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929, the Americans could not protect themselves, and Germany, which was highly dependent on American capital and markets, became the most ugly one of the European countries to die.
After the outbreak of the Great Depression, Hitler, who had been practicing fascist magic for five years, had already mastered Mussolini's style of play, and when the window of the times opened again, he began to rise at an incredible speed in Germany.
In 1933, the crisis reached an unmanageable level, and Hitler's power was at its peak.
Hindenburg, who represented the interests of the Junker aristocracy, reluctantly gave up the throne to Hitler.
However, it is okay for Mussolini and Hitler to incite people, but they are not good at doing practical things in the economy.
However, we all know that after Hitler came to power, he quickly revitalized the German economy.
In fact, just like today's debt economy, borrowing money for consumption, as long as there is consumption, there will be a market, and if the consumer market is revitalized, all walks of life will flourish.
But at that time, the people were empty, and no one dared to spend money indiscriminately!
As a result, Germany under Hitler's leadership played the biggest customer in the German market.
This customer dares to borrow and spend! So what is the borrowed money for?
The answer is: build large infrastructure and build guns and artillery.
But the problem is, sooner or later, you have to pay it back, how will you pay back the money you borrowed in the future? Is it money printed?
Of course, you can do this, but the result of this is inflation in the market.
Inflation is discouraged from people's enthusiasm, and the market economy will have to be killed by you in the future.
So Hitler had no choice but to use these guns to rob other people's resources and use those resources to pay off his debts.
After paying off the debt, he will continue to borrow, continue to stimulate consumption, and then continue to rob.
At that time, both Germany and Italy were playing this trick, which meant that it was a doomed thing for them to go to war.
They can only survive by winning a lot, but if they encounter a big defeat, they will be over.
But how can there be a country in the world that always wins and is undefeated, and always walks by the river and always gets their shoes wet.
Unlike Germany and Italy, the two defeated countries in World War I, Japan was the victor in World War I.
It stands to reason that it should live a more nourishing life, but it is not. In 1905, Japan, with the support of Britain and the United States, fought a Russo-Japanese War with Russia, which ended in Japan's victory.
At that time, in order to win the war, Japan owed a lot of debts to Europe, Britain and the United States. Originally, I thought that after defeating **, like the First Sino-Japanese War, I would get a generous indemnity, not only to repay the debt, but also to leave a lot behind.
But I didn't want to run into the hard bones of Russia, which does not enter oil and salt, and the tsar said that he wanted no money, but he wanted a life, and he only cut the land without compensation, and continued to fight if he was not satisfied.
But Japan's ** is still moving! Although it has obtained many rights and interests in Northeast China, these are fixed assets, which will be difficult to realize for a while and a half, and cannot be used to repay debts.
It was precisely because of the debt that it was difficult for Japan to launch any large-scale war of aggression after 1905, and it could only honestly work for people to pay off its debts.
Even if China fell into a warlord melee after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, such a good opportunity could only be missed.
Except for the Qingdao colony, which was captured during World War I, when Germany had no time to look east, nothing was done after that.
Therefore, among the great powers, Japan actually belongs to the existence of the tail of the crane, and it is not as good as Germany after the Dawes plan.
After the outbreak of the Great Depression crisis, Britain and France, the old colonial countries, could rely on the vast colonial market to cushion the spread of the crisis.
But Japan did not have such good conditions, and the only colonies in his hands were Qingdao, Shandong, China, the Korean Peninsula, and Taiwan, and these small places were simply not enough for the Japanese to cope with the crisis.
Doesn't Japan still have colonies in the three eastern provinces? When it comes to this, the Japanese get angry.
Zhang Zuolin. At that time, the warlord in the Northeast was Zhang Zuolin, although he was personally supported by the Japanese, but in the face of the country's righteousness, he was never ambiguous, and he always treated the Japanese as monkeys, and from time to time he tried to find a way to get a few wool from the Japanese, so that the Japanese could encroach on the Northeast's plan, and the progress was extremely slow.
Therefore, after the impact of the Great Depression, the situation of the Japanese was no better than that of Germany, and there was also a tragic phenomenon of unemployment of workers and bankruptcy of peasants in the country.
Many of these bankrupt migrant workers had to tearfully send their wives and mothers to work in the service industry in order to support their families.
Therefore, they have long accumulated a wave of resentment against the society, and as long as someone raises their arms and shouts, they will immediately gather in response.
However, the fascist leader of Japan was a bit special, he was not a man from the bottom like Hitler or Mussolini, but Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
Emperor Hirohito is the only emperor in Japan who has held real power for more than 1,000 years.
Neither his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, nor his father, Emperor Taisho, did this.
And Emperor Hirohito was able to do this because he controlled the fascist force.
But because of thousands of years of theocratic blessings, Hirohito is naturally a god.
So he didn't need to be like Mussolini and Hit, who went to public every day to engage in god-making campaigns.
As long as he waved his hand, the people who could not survive would naturally belong to him.
Emperor Hirohito. So he has the conditions to be like the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China, who hums, nods, and shakes his head for many decisions, expressing some specious attitudes.
As if he didn't say anything, but as if he had said everything, he never left a clue.
So much so that people in later generations often thought that he was a poor man who was kidnapped by fascists. And he managed to escape the judgment of history, otherwise if he was as guilty as Hit, the Americans would not be able to protect him, even if they wanted to.
But if the public opinion lifts up the emperor and these people, it will naturally be able to pull him down.
The reason why people chose them was not because they were handsome, but because they hoped that they would be able to take them out of the predicament of the Great Depression. If they fail to do this, they will be taken down immediately.
But what kind of talent do these people have to govern the country, their only way is to go out and rob.
So with these people, the outbreak of World War II was almost inevitable.