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AFGuidesHD

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AFGuidesHD stands for Adrenaline Fuelled Guides ... HD, I got the name from the back of the Just Cause 2 box description "Relentless Adrenaline-fuelled action" as my old channel was started because of JC2, there I did over 500 videos on Command and Conquer Generals and Just Cause 2.

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The statement "history is written by the victors" cannot be more eloquently proven by a look at the most basic "facts" of history. Such as "WW2 began on 1 September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland", which the author Douglas Murray recently and confidently repeated on Joe Rogan's podcast with Dave Smith.

Why do we insist on maintaining the idea that WW2 began on 1 September and not 3 September ?

Answer: Because the date 1 September puts the culpability of WW2 on Germany, whilst 3 September puts the culpability of WW2 on Britain. To even begin on such a path, it is feared that this is a "slippery slope" to an education. To begin with "Germany started WW2 because they wanted more territory" and to end with "America caused WW2 by threatening Britain into giving guarantees to Poland, which gave Poland the confidence to provoke a conflict with Germany, and Chamberlain, under pressure from Parliament, after having given guarantees to Poland, rejected the French and Italian conference proposal which would have avoided a wider European war". Who profited the most from WW2 ? It was not Britain, France, Germany or Poland. It was indeed the country that acquired military outposts across the entire world. Which seems to have recently hit the point Britain hit in the 1920s, resentful at the fiscal cost of maintaining a large Empire.

Anglo-American "widely agreed upon consensus" = WW2 began on 1 September 1939.
Fact = WW2 is a misnomer for the Second Anglo-German War, which began on 3 September 1939. There was no state of war between Britain and Germany on 1 or 2 September. So saying the war began on 1 September is a retroactive apologia for the war that Britain unleashed on 3 September.

"Yeah but what if..."
We are not talking about what ifs, we are talking about the historiography of realized and actual events.
The realized event is that it was Britain that declared war on Germany, not the other way around. This is the basic fact of WW2 which conformist journalists, authors and 'historians' try so desperately to avoid.

One asks a few questions and the whole "Germany started WW2 on 1 September" narrative collapses in on itself:

Why didn't Britain declare war on Russia when it also invaded Poland ?
(Common response: Because strategic considerations, Germany was a bigger threat, Britain couldn't possibly have fought Germany and Russia at the same time. So you agree it was not morality or compassion that compelled Britain to go to war with Germany - As Alexander Cadogan said to the Romanian Ambassador on 7 April 1939 "We had never considered the question of guaranteeing either Poland or Romania against the Russians".)

How exactly did Germany invading Poland cause WW2, when we see countries get invaded all the time ?
(Because Britain promised to defend Poland. So you agree the guarantee of 31 March is the instrument that caused WW2 - as Churchill states in his Victory over Europe speech of May 1945.)

Why did Britain declare war on a powerful country when it had little armaments and knew it couldn't save Poland ?
(Usually the same response to question 1 and 2. But the truth is as Halifax stated to the Foreign Policy Committee on 27 March 1939 "We were faced with the dilemma of doing nothing, or entering into a devastating war. If we did nothing, this would mean a great accession to Germany's strength and a great loss to ourselves of sympathy and support in the United States. If we had to choose between two great evils, he favoured our going to war." - Throughout March 1939, Roosevelt and American Ambassadors posed this "dilemma" to the British Government, as explained by the Washington Times Herald on 14 April and corroborated, among other evidence, by Joseph Kennedy himself, to James Forrestal and Herbert Hoover.)

If the war was declared to "defend Polish independence" then why did Britain give Poland to Stalin in 1945, disallow Polish participation in the Berlin victory parade and disallowed a Polish judge for the Nuremberg Trials ?
(Usually the same response to question 1. Ironically 'we couldn't possibly have saved Poland in 1945', as if we had saved Poland in 1939.)

If Germany started WW1 by voicing support for Austria's potential attack against Serbia, then how did Britain not start WW2 by voicing support for Poland's potential attack against Danzig ?
(On 10 July 1939, Chamberlain announced that Britain would still support Poland even if it initiated hostilities against Danzig first. It's kinda funny how people look like Charlie Kelly when explaining how 'Germany started WW1', but suddenly geopolitics and international relations becomes very simple and uncomplicated when explaining how 'Germany started WW2'.)

The more one reads, the more questions one asks, the more "only Germany was responsible for WW2" becomes the victor's myth that it is.

"Why are you posting this"
Because I have nowhere else to post this where more than 5 people might read it. It's also interesting to me to see all these discussions, podcasts and videos about the current conflict in Ukraine and how "NATO provoked it". We could well have a similar discussion about WW2. In fact the idea that "NATO provoked Russia" is actually far more ridiculous than "Poland provoked Germany". NATO has been an alliance system for over 60 years, Poland was an "ally" of Britain for a mere 6 days before the German-Polish War broke out. People commonly justify WW2 by saying "Poland was a British ally", when it quite clearly served more of a Trojan horse than an ally.

"Why do you care about this ?"
Because I am British and it pains me to see British people so ignorant, blissfully ignorant you could say, to the truth. This ignorance, however, leads to people looking stupid in front of others, particularly of other nationalities, famously football fans shouting "two world wars, one world cup". Polish people have no problem with discussing the decisions their leaders made in 1939, in fact it is a constant topic of debate in Poland. We have no such debate in Britain, 95% of the people that annually celebrate the achievements of the Spitfire couldn't tell you who was Foreign Minister, the crucial Government decision maker in the question of war and peace, in 1939. Jozef Beck, who led Poland to war is an infamous figure in Polish history, Edward Halifax, who led Britain to war ? Perhaps a few paragraphs on Wikipedia, no one's ever heard of him. Poles have no illusions of their defeat in WW2. British people on the other hand have been so thoroughly programmed into seeing the loss of an empire, bankruptcy and rationing as a victory.

As Peter Hitchens points out, with worse than nothing to show for such a "victory", we instead made up an immaterial moral victory. Comforting ourselves with "Germany had to be stopped", "if Germany didn't force us to declare war on them then Germany would have taken over the whole world", "they did [thing] in 194x so it was right to go to war with them in 1939". Obviously we cannot say with certainty what would have happened had Britain not encouraged Poland to fight over Danzig, but coping with the idea that "Germany would have done what it did anyway" is a much more comforting blanket to live with than to ask, "did any aspect of WW2 outside of the German-Russian War need to actually happen?".

Not merely the hardships brought upon ourselves, but also to other people, including those we frame as agency-less victims of a German war machine - though the victims themselves are becoming ever more aware that the war against Germany was a choice, as Jan Szembek describes in his diary dated 11 October 1939, quote: "I recall that when Beck decided to go to war in case of a unilateral German decision in Danzig, he gathered the highest authorities of the Ministry and informed us about it. Beck had miscalculated. If Beck did not believe in the strength of our army, he would not have made this decision." Beck informed the ministry [of foreign affairs] on 24 March 1939. So there is an interesting debate here that 'actually it was Poland that dragged Britain into a war over Danzig' (Marek Kornat, 2021). Personally I disagree because even if Poland went to war with Germany over Danzig, it was still Britain that turned this local German-Polish War into World War 2. And I have doubts that Poland would have gone to war over Danzig without French and British guarantees, pledges of support and regular military meetings.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
After the shouting match Trump had with Zelensky in February 2025 over the subject of security guarantees, I feel like important people directing current American Foreign Policy know the truth about 1939. It's way past time everyone else did also.