Here is a prescient prediction from historian Gwynne Dyer, first published in March of 2003. Of particular interest here, one which we have noted on episodes of UnCommon Sense TV, is the origins of the use of the term “Shock and Awe.” From Prescott to George Herbert to Dubya, those Bush boys sure have something for that Reich thing.

Historical analogies are often misleading, but have you noticed that Saddam Hussein, in recent TV broadcasts, looks more and more like Joseph Stalin? That’s how he’s positioning himself politically, too. Like Stalin during the Second World War, he is effectively telling Iraqis to forget about the socialist ideology, the purges and all the rest, and unite against the foreign invader. As in the old Soviet Union, a lot of the citizens seems to be listening.

Stalin’s finest hour was in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union with the confident expectation of destroying it in a matter of weeks. He had this brilliant new military technique, blitzkrieg, which allowed relatively small numbers of German troops to spread ’shock and awe’ among the defenders (the phrase was first used in the Nazi magazine ‘Signal’) and achieve a rapid victory at low cost.

The blitzkrieg technique had beaten France in six weeks in 1940, and Hitler calculated that it ought to work even better against the Soviet Union because the vast majority of Soviet citizens hated Stalin and the Communist Party. Stalin’s secret police had murdered millions of people, and all the non-Russian citizens of the multi-national empire Soviet Union (essentially, the old Russian empire) hated Russian rule. So masses of Soviet troops would defect at the first opportunity, and the non-Russian half of the population would greet the Germans as liberators. Sound familiar?

In July of 1941 the German army launched its armored columns into the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, and within weeks its tanks were many hundreds of kilometres (miles) inside the country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were cut off and left behind as the tank spearheads raced for Moscow; points of resistance were bypassed in the interest of speed; ’shock and awe’ was the essence of the strategy.

But the cut-off Soviet troops did not surrender, the garrisons of the bypassed towns attacked the German supply lines, and the people did not strew roses at the feet of the invaders. Most Soviet citizens remained loyal to their country despite the monstrous character of its ruler. The German spearheads ultimately got quite close to Moscow, but after such delays that winter closed their offensive down and the Soviet capital was never captured. Instead the war turned into a nightmare battle of attrition that eventually destroyed the German army.

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