Thanks, you've beat me to it.
Looking forward to 1 hour 30 minutes and 4 seconds of pure HARDCORE!
Oh, this reminds me of a discussion Ian and Mark had on a show a few days back (June 13th?) about what would have happened if USA hadn't intervened in WW2 (i.e. by provoking Japan and setting up an oil embargo). As a person who've lived in the Soviet Union and knows quite a bit about the time period, I am 100% certain that USSR would have fallen within just a few months, with Japan finding most of the natural resources then needed in Siberia instead of Indochina. The German navy would have just sailed into the Black Sea and a lot more
Holodomor-weary Ukrainians would have
welcomed them. A huge amount of the Soviet war-time manufacturing base and even logistic support came from the United States. After a decade of ever-growing political repression, the Stalinist economy was on the verge of collapse. They couldn't even get enough warm socks for their soldiers without foreign aid, much less rifles and heavy equipment manufacturing know-how! The war is what saved it, ideologically as well as with all the foreign aid the country has received.
WW2 should have been like any other war in history - dysfunctional nations (Poland, USSR, China, etc) having chunks of them taken over by more functional ones (Germany, Japan), which is in no way different from what USA has done to Mexico over the years... The
Madagascar Plan (or something similar) made a lot more political sense than the Holocaust, but after England and France declared war Germany had little choice. If America had stayed out of the war, opened its borders to refugees, and kept at it with the free market economy, it would have been even better off while the Eurasian dictatorships burn themselves out.