JACQUES PAUWELS—Western historiography tends to focus on the Wehrmacht’s spectacular advances and victories in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, while ignoring or minimizing its losses; conversely, the Soviet losses receive plenty of attention, while any Soviet successes tend to be ignored or downplayed. Even though the Wehrmacht’s performance did indeed appear to be very impressive, Hitler’s blitzkrieg in the east started to lose its blitz qualities after only a few weeks. Robert Kershaw, a specialist in the German-Soviet war, has described how “Blitzkrieg momentum petered out” as early as the first week of July, “the tempo faltered” in the following weeks, and the vanguards ceased “sprinting as they had done in the Polish and French campaigns.”
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JACQUES R PAUWELS—To the British soldier and poet Isaac Rosenberg too, the poppies were a strong symbol in the sense of blood and sacrifice; in his poem “Break of Day in the Trenches”, he wrote that “the roots” of the poppies “are in man’s veins.”
It was not a coincidence that poppies flowered abundantly in Flanders’ Fields in the spring of 1915. Normally, the minuscule seeds of this flower penetrate deep into the earth to wait there, sometimes for years, for the soil to be upturned for some reason, and thus exposed to the sunlight and warmth they suddenly germinate. With the digging of miles of trenches and the explosion of tens if not hundreds of thousands of shells starting in the fall of 1914, the conditions were created for an unprecedented burgeoning of poppies the following spring in that corner of Belgium, of course most spectacularly so in the immediate vicinity of the trenches and in the pockmarked no-man’s land. -
JACQUES PAUWELS—The [Western] elites had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.
In Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the elite is still very much focused on this task, clearly in the hope that soon nothing at all will be left of the welfare state. The fall of the Berlin Wall made it possible that we are now witnessing a return to the unbridled, ruthless capitalism of the nineteenth century – a catastrophe for ordinary people, for the demos, and therefore a major setback for the cause of democracy.
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Jacques R. Pauwels est né à Gand, en Belgique Flamande, en 1946. Il est historien, politologue et essayiste belgo-canadien. Il a fait ses premiers pas à l’université en obtenant une licence d’Histoire en 1969 en Belgique. Il poursuit ensuite ses études au Canada jusqu’à un Doctorat en histoire, à la York University, à Toronto, en 1976. Il continuera son cursus universitaire dix ans plus tard, en obtenant une Maîtrise en sciences politiques, puis un Doctorat en sciences politiques en 1995 à Université de Toronto.
Jacques R. Pauwels a enseigné l’Histoire et les Sciences Politiques dans plusieurs universités canadiennes. Il s’est spécialisé dans l’histoire de l’Allemagne contemporaine, le Troisième Reich en particulier, et la proximité du géant états-unien. Cela va l’amener à analyser le rôle des USA pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Jacques Pauwels a publié une dizaine de livres. C’est en 2002, que Jacques Pauwels écrit « Le Mythe de la Bonne Guerre : Les États-Unis et la Deuxième Guerre mondiale » qui sera traduit en six langues et en français par les éditions Aden, en 2005. Il écrira “Big Business avec Hitler” en 2013, où il explique que Hitler a comblé les attentes qu’industriels et banquiers avaient placées en lui.
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JACQUES PAUWELS—The Great War, then, was an ambiguous affair. On the one hand, it was an imperialist war, a fight for supremacy between two antagonistic blocs of imperialist powers. But it was also, and arguably primarily, a war to avoid revolution and to counter democracy, it was the upper-class’s great counterrevolutionary and antidemocratic project. But to openly admit this, was impossible. That is why rationalizations were conjured up, that myths were created.
