I was asked recently if the United States was right in supporting Stalin and the Soviets in World War II. I find this a fascinating question, because it is built on decades of false history. I will take the question further – should the United States have been involved in World War II at all? I love alternate history, and this is my take on that topic.

Was the world better off for the United States helping to defeat the Fascist monster by allying with the Communists? I say no. And the world would be a much better place if we did not. I’m going to focus on just the European aspects of World War II and not the Pacific, because while there are geopolitical connections, and I like examining things in a wider lens, it really is a separate issue.

The approved history version of World War II makes no sense. Hollywood helped with this. Spielberg. Captain America. Nazi death machines. Ashtrays made of human bones. Canines that had poison implanted in their fangs. It’s goofy, super-villain stuff, but it’s swallowed wholesale. Hitler’s body count was in the hundreds by 1939, while Stalin’s was already in the tens of millions. But the United States were fighting for “the free world” just like we say we do today. We were fighting for the democratic integrity of nations like interwar-era Poland, who were engaging in ethnic cleansing, just like Germany.

There’s also an accepted narrative that Germany was suicidal to attack Russia. This also plays into the “Hitler was an idiot” narrative. Well, the war was always going to be between Germany and Russia. Poland happened to be in the way, but fascist Poland was not innocent, and unfortunately these geopolitical inconveniences were not unique in Polish history. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was not a treaty. You don’t sign non-aggression pacts with your friends, you sign them with your enemies. Germany did not break some vague “international code” by attacking the Soviets. The Soviets were always going to attempt to swallow up Germany in accordance with their global Marxist-Leninist vision. Germany’s only alternative was to lie down and die.

There are so many documents that have been unearthed within the past decade or so that reveal the extent of how involved Stalin truly was in the Spanish Civil War, and I wish conservatives would read them. Because then fascism will make sense. European integrity will make sense. The entire 20th century will make sense. The Stalin/Trotsky divide over international vs. at-home communism was a lie. They were both expansionists. Funny how all those disillusioned Trotskyiites eventually became NeoCons. Funny how they wrote the history.

Fascism was the bulwark against spreading Bolshevism. “National” socialism vs. “global” communism. 1917 cast a shadow over all of Europe. Spain, Italy, Poland and Germany all had communist uprisings that were put down by “nationalists” aka, fascists. Fascism was always going to come in many flavors due to the national element. You cannot simply switch out Salazar for Il Duce. But you can swap any Marxist/Leninist, because they do not believe in nationality. We can disagree with their economics, but the fascists felt they had to hyper-industrialize their economies via their states to fight Bolshevism, the true global threat.

So, this is where fascist German imperial ambitions come in. The United States had no interests in Europe, and they were never under the threat of mythical “Nazi occupation.” Germany had a miniscule navy that could barely get out of the Baltic. When Hitler went to Paris, he made no Middle Eastern oil demands or anything of the sort. He posed for a photo op and that was pretty much it. Yet, this was the international super-villain that the United States had to extinguish. While helping Stalin, who clearly had imperial ambitions.

In my opinion, Stalin was the most powerful man that ever lived. Not just due to the fact that he ruled over nearly 1/4 of the planet, or the fact that he had atomic weapons, but due to the fact that the psychological terror he wielded over an entire nation was unprecedented in human history. Hitler forced resignations from his disobedient officers, Stalin forced his officers to confess to crimes they did not commit, with the full realization that they would be executed as a result of said confessions. Stalin was a once-in-a-millennia evil, while Hitler wasn’t much different than the occasional backwards prince that we would get in Middle Ages Germanic city-states.

Yes, I do think we were wrong to help Stalin. I do not have a time machine and I cannot say with certainty what the various European fascist states would have done if left to their own devices. We may have seen several 1990’s Yugoslavia’s, or we may have seen Velvet Revolutions. But I do not think we see the catastrophic global consequences we see today.

Most importantly, Eastern Europe is left to their own devices, and not swallowed up by one of the most barbaric regimes in human history. I firmly believe Hitler was no danger to Romania, or Latvia, Hungary, etc. The Soviets absolutely were. The latter half of the twentieth century proves this.

And we also do not get the Global American Empire if the US stays out. It is my opinion that the United States wanted to fill the void that the failed British Empire left. While it wasn’t a linear transition, the US overtook the UK’s global hegemony as a result of WWII.

If Germany and Russia fight it out, communism potentially dies in 1941. America never engages in supporting money laundering operations masquerading as countries. America never engages in empire. That’s a beautiful alternate history and a world I would want to be a part of.