In other words, even after 80 years, fools never learn.

Both in Poland and the West, the true history of the dark summer months of 1939 when world war and the destruction of almost all of Continental Europe finally became inevitable have become calcified in mythical legend. Once again, the grim, true story needs to be told.

The Soviet Union is in the West now blamed almost as much as Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany’s ruling psychopath, for starting the war because in August 1939 it signed the fateful Nazi-Soviet Pact with Berlin. However, this simplistic picture willfully ignores, denies and buries the years of painful but vital history that went before.

Far from presciently seeking to oppose and block Nazi Germany, previous Polish dictator Josef Pilsudski and the military junta that succeeded him were Hitler’s first allies. They were the first nation to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler on January 26, 1934. On October 1, 1938, they took advantage of the infamous Munich agreement when Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler to seize an area of that country with almost a quarter of a million people.

Yet even then, war was still far from inevitable. The two arguably most powerful men in the world, Soviet ruler Josef Stalin and President of the United States Franklin Roosevelt both wanted to prevent it.

However, so reluctant was British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to talk to Stalin about anything he staffed his strategic talks delegation to Moscow with military nonentities and then sent them on a slow, cheap private ship around Norway and through the Arctic.

By the time that Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Draxx (a fine fighting naval officer but no diplomat or statesman) and his colleagues reached Moscow, Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had already flown swiftly in from Berlin and signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Stalin.

The Soviet leader had simply run out of patience: He concluded on good evidence that Chamberlain was determined never to work with the Soviet Union but wanted to feed him and his country up to the Nazi dictator instead.

Stalin could also see very clearly that in the British negotiations with Warsaw, the Polish government led by Foreign Minister Colonel Jozef Beck, was determined not to permit any military cooperation or alliance with Russia under any circumstances.

Beck was an idiotic buffoon who regarded himself as a genius. He liked to say that only three men counted for real power in Europe: “There is Hitler. There is Stalin. And there is – Beck.”

The price of Beck’s crass stupidity was paid by his entire people. Around six million out of Poland’s prewar population of 30 million were slaughtered by the Nazis – a death toll of 20 percent or one in five.  At least 87 percent of Poland’s prewar Jewish population of three and a half million were slaughtered in the Nazi genocide. Ethnic Russians and gypsies were also murdered without number.

Yet it could all have been so easily avoided. Beck and Chamberlain refused to recognize that the Soviet Union remained the dominant military power of Central and Eastern Europe. They refused to admit that Russia was essential to lasting peace and stability in Europe – just as it is today. They also refused to recognize that even Stalin wanted peace rather than war.

Beck lived in cloud-cuckoo-land: He and his fellow colonels genuinely believed that tens of thousands of Polish cavalry would rout the Nazis and sweep to Berlin in two weeks, after which Polish horsemen would wheel around and gallop to Moscow too.

Today, the make-believe fairy tales posing as deterrence and strategy in Warsaw are just as bad and their fateful consequences could be even worse.

President Trump, to his credit has consistently and courageously repeatedly expressed his desire for the United States and Russia to reduce their strategic tensions and cooperate in the world.

However, Trump has allowed himself to be surrounded and swayed by reckless, hardline ideologues led by National Security Adviser John Bolton who just recently scrapped the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) in Europe treaty. Now they are on the warpath to kill stone dead the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) itself when it comes up for renewal next year.

Duda and Poland’s other policymakers have made repeatedly clear that they back Washington’s super-hawks and armchair warrior heroes to the hilt every time.

But they would do well to remember how Poland could have been the Soviet Union’s ally in 1939, thereby deterring or successfully containing Nazi Germany. Instead, they isolated themselves, trusted in far off, militarily feeble Western allies who could not protect them and ignored or insulted the only nation that could have aided them against the Nazi predators.

Today, 21^st century Russia is neither communist nor revolutionary: It has a long-established track-record of respecting its friends and allies and it is not in the business of regime change. It stands for and defends the right of sovereign nations to regulate their own immigration flows and foreign trade. These are policies that Poland claims to support too.

The dark story of the descent into nightmarish world war in 1939 proved once again that senseless hatred for Russia and all Russians is a stupid as well as a contemptible policy and that it never succeeds. Trying to organize Western powers into a Russia-hating coalition, as Warsaw’s leaders still imagine they can do today has NEVER been a Good Idea.

As the great American peace activists and folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary sang in their classic song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” – When will they ever learn?

Many authors are referring to the current state of international relations as «Cold War 2.0», noting that the ideological conflict between the West and the USSR during the last Cold War was based on different interpretations of events in the 20^th century, among which there is no subject more important than the Second World War. And within this, the question of «who’s to blame» is the most important. Who is responsible for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, for Hitler coming to power, and for the outbreak of World War Two? This seems to be what the author of the article in The National Interest is writing about. Yet his focus on the Führer’s personality and his sidelining of the influence of powerful political forces that ensured Hitler’s rise to power become a smokescreen that hides the problem. Hence the outright lies regarding the 1939 German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) and the 2009 PACE resolution, which placed an equals sign between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany as «two totalitarian regimes». 

So when exactly did Hitler become Hitler?

A revealing detail noted by Historian Jacques Bergier is that by the summer of 1938, the residents of Berlin had stopped shouting «Heil!» and had gone back to the old form of greeting. In the summer of 1938, Hitler’s power was considered complete, yet the commander of the 3^rd Military District in Berlin, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who was executed by Hitler in 1944, openly rehearsed taking the Reich Chancellery. Many German generals believed that Germany was facing inevitable defeat in its attempt to seize Czechoslovakia in 1938. Giving evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, German field marshal Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces), said: «We were extraordinarily happy that it had not come to a military operation, because […] we had always been of the opinion that our means of attack against the frontier fortifications of Czechoslovakia were insufficient. From a purely military point of view we lacked the means for an attack which involved the piercing of the frontier fortifications».

Moreover, Western ‘appeasers’ presented Hitler with Czechoslovakia’s first-rate armaments industry in Munich. Germany got its hands on the Škoda works, the second most important arsenal in Europe. And as well as the famous Škoda works, Germany also got its hands on the comparable engineering giant ČKD, the aircraft company Aero Vodochody, which produced Focke-Wulf Fw 189 aircraft for the entirety of the war, and many others. At that time, Czechoslovakian tanks and guns were sold all over the world, making Prague one of the world’s leading arms exporters.

Prior to the Munich Agreement, the armed forces of the two countries looked like this: the Czechoslovak Army had 1,582 aircraft, 469 tanks and two million people, while the German Army had 2,500 aircraft, 720 tanks and 2.2 million people. The size of the two armies was comparable. Moreover, the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany was the mountainous Sudetenland. Ever since Czechoslovakia was formed in 1919, it had been building fortifications in Sudetenland. The combination of modern fortifications and the mountainous terrain made Czechoslovakia impregnable in the face of German aggression. And all of this was handed over without a fight. 

As well as the uniquely fortified Sudetenland there was also the Soviet-Czechoslovak agreement, but the promise of military assistance it contained was blocked by Poland. And Moscow’s experience was that there was already a real war in progress between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany in 1938, only it was going on far away, in Spain, and the issue of who would win was still undecided. 

In Munich, the English provided assurances to the Czechoslovak representatives. Chamberlain told the Czechs: «The rights of national minorities are sacred! Hand over Sudetenland and you will receive new guarantees on new borders». 

All talk of Western guarantees was just that, whereas the mountainous, heavily fortified region of Sudetenland guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s security one hundred percent. On 30 September 1938, however, the Czechoslovak Army began its withdrawal from Sudetenland, leaving behind the mountain fortresses and the major industrial facilities. But Hitler soon presented Czechoslovakia with a new set of demands and on 15 March 1939, Germany occupied the whole country. 

Hitler was saved by the Munich Agreement. The deal with the Western democracies gave Hitler enough power to see him through to April 1945. The question asked by The National Interest, «When did Hitler become Hitler?», has a simple answer: «In Munich in 1938». The Munich Agreement was an amicable deal between democracies and Nazi Germany, and this is something that cannot be erased from history. It was a deal between an aggressor and his ‘appeasers’. The reason we should all remember this today is clear: The West is once again trying to posture as the ‘appeaser’ in order to prevent the defeat of the terrorist forces that have engulfed Syria and are already threatening Europe.