PFP156 | Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof - On the Many Fathers of World War 2 (PFS 2016)

This talk is from the 2016 meeting of the Property and Freedom Society. Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof (Germany), On the Many Fathers of World War II.

Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof’s posits that the war didn’t have a single aggressor but grew out of a web of missteps, rivalries, and manipulations by many states. He claims Germany wasn’t uniquely guilty and that Britain, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, and even the United States each helped push Europe toward war through broken treaties, secret guarantees, propaganda, and economic coercion. He sees the Versailles Treaty and Western encirclement policies as the real fuse. His lecture questions the entire post-war moral narrative.

Whether one accepts or rejects his framing, the value of his talk lies in forcing scrutiny of “official history”: who wrote it, why, and what evidence got buried or rewarded.

This is a photo of a German soldier whose face was severely disfigured by artillery fire during World War I.

"It is not enough to have the means; you must have the courage. And this is something that can only be done by poor peoples. We must have the courage to face the risks of war and sacrifice. These are things which are alien to a people who eat five times a day, smoke refined cigars, and who have turned recreational games into a kind of professed religion."

Benito Mussolini (1938). Speech to the National Council of the Fascist Party, October 25. Available at: https://bibliotecafascista.blogspot.com/2012/03/speech-to-national-council-of-fascist.html

So in 2010, thirty-five Australian special forces soldiers were pinned down by 100 Taliban fighters and should have died near a village called Tizak.

The situation was so bad, local ‘friendly’ Afghani soldiers who were supposed to be helping the Australians began speaking their native language on a radio, trying to do a deal with the Taliban. They agreed to murder the Australians to save their own skins.

But despite being outgunned and outnumbered, Ben Roberts Smith & his small patrol group attacked the Taliban positions and somehow won the battle.

He’s pictured here after that battle wearing a ‘crusader’ patch on his uniform.

Someone should make a movie about this guy.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, edited by Damian A. Pargas and Juliane Schiel, is an academic collection published in 2023. The book takes a comparative and global approach to studying slavery, moving beyond the traditional focus on the Atlantic world to explore its manifestations across different regions and historical periods.

With a focus on Global perspective rather than standard White slavery, The handbook includes research on slavery in ancient, medieval, North and sub-Saharan African, Near Eastern, and Asian societies, in addition to the Americas.