Some Marxists Prove They Don’t Know WWII History While Yelling at People to Study History

I could be violating a rule of mine with this blog, which is writing about interminably stupid online discourse that has no impact beyond said discourse, but I am beginning to worry that this extremely wrong view of a very basic history my grandfather lived is taking root on the left, and so I feel a responsibility as someone who runs a lefty site to join the SEO wars to put some broadly known facts into the bloodstream of an internet increasingly allergic to them.

**Heavy sigh**

OK so here’s the background: Will Stancil, one of the most terminally online characters in the poster’s universe who ran for Congress in Minnesota and wasted a lot of other people’s money in a losing effort as his opponents mailed his posts to people, has frankly, been cooking on Bluesky. This new era of anti-Trumpism aligned along the willingness to fight rather than ideology has created some strange bedfellows, as now I can safely say I would vote for Bill Kristol for president a hundred times before I would even think about casting a vote for Gavin Newsom. Stancil’s Bluesky revelation among the lefties he has fought with forever has been part of this strange bedfellows dynamic because his core posting thesis is correct: this is an unprecedently lawless administration whose every action is a threat to the very idea of America itself. Ideology really has taken a backseat to trying to stop the gargantuan crisis unfolding in front of us.

But Stancil ran into the poster’s curse again, which is that once you start doing epic posting, you simply cannot stop, and he has reanimated the corpse of his many fights against the Twitter left on Bluesky. This has led Stancil to fight for what seems like months at this point with an army of extremely misinformed lefties, anarchists and communists who adopt an ahistorical view of World War II while avoiding ever saying phrases like “Lend-Lease” or “Nazi-Soviet Pact.” A lot of people are really out here arguing that FDR liked Hitler’s whole WWII vibe even though there is a public record of FDR sending a letter to Hitler in 1938 pleading with him not to drag the world into war. There are seemingly thousands of posts like this below piling up in Stancil’s mentions every day, and I am becoming increasingly concerned that negative Stancil polarization is leading some lefties to completely lose touch with any semblance of our shared reality.

Will Stancil is 100% unaware that the United States backed Hitler in WW2 until we smelt the wind change and backed the winner at the last minute.

Of course he is.

He’s a fucking monstrously stupid fuck.

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— Blaise Ulysse Bernard Collins (@wittywebhandle.bsky.social) April 20, 2025 at 9:11 AM

The United States government has done a lot of horrible things in its history, but supporting the Nazis during World War II is not one of them. Some American companies were sympathetic to the German effort, as a lot of evidence exists that Ford was helping the Nazis, which makes sense because proud antisemite Henry Ford was one of Hitler’s inspirations. General Motors also still has some explaining to do too, as well as businesses like IBM whose subsidiaries in Nazi Germany aided the Holocaust, all while these US companies have obfuscated how much control they really had over these pro-Nazi entities. If these lefties had switched “American capital” for “American government,” I would generally agree with the point they’re making, and this blog wouldn’t exist.

But the United States government was decidedly on the side of the Allies, as demonstrated by the Lend-Lease Act, perhaps the most uncomfortable fact for this Fox News-style myth for tankies. This was a very straightforward bill passed through the United States Congress in 1941 that shipped weapons to our European allies (and eventually the Soviets too), proving the diametric opposite of these tankies’ assertions to be true. This is extremely basic history that someone who never went to school and only played Hearts of Iron IV could tell you all about (any early game US strategy other than the New Deal is a loser, by the way).

There was, however, another WWII superpower who did ally with the Nazis in order to allow each other to carve out spheres of influence across Europe a couple years before the US passed the Lend-Lease Act. If you cannot tell me what is happening in this photo below, you should seriously stop snidely telling people to study history. I genuinely feel embarrassed for you. You are beclowning yourself in front of a bunch of hungover freshmen in a political science 101 class.

One of the like, most classic things people know about World War II is that the Nazis turned on the Soviets after they allied, not that the US turned on the Nazis. Failing to learn from every other Russian winter war campaign throughout human history was possibly Hitler’s biggest mistake. Arguing that the USSR were the only good guys in World War II because the US supposedly allied with the Nazis is some Andy Borowitz New Yorker-style anti-humor. You are taking one of the most obvious and widely-known things in the world and saying it is the opposite. OK. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this.

Now, this does not mean that Stancil’s negatively polarized stance is correct either. There is a lot of nuance in this realm of how much Hitler was inspired by America beyond what your average high school B student could tell you, but “Hitler was not a fan of the US” is not a statement that Hitler himself would agree with. Sure, in 1944 he probably wasn’t enthralled with us, but in 1925, he had a very different view of America. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he thought US immigration policy was pretty neat, as Edwin Black wrote in this Guardian essay I have permanently bookmarked because of stupid interminable online fights like this.

Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People’s State.”

Anyone selling you a “100%” black and white version of history is just selling you their own politics. The entire point of history is it exists in shades of gray and historians know better than anyone that documented history is not all that there is to the story, not even close. Epistemology is pretty trippy once you start down that rabbit hole, especially outside hard science, but unfortunately some people have sadly followed it to “the country sending weapons to the Allies for years was actually helping the Nazis.”

Commies, tankies, assorted lefties who have fallen down this condescending rabbit hole, I beg of you: heed your own advice and take a history 101 class at your local college. It will stop your astonishingly ahistorical takes from living forever in the SEO bloodline of the internet.