Yesterday TV

[Trojan]

Not sure whether this belongs of here or politics, but here goes.

Being a bit of a history nut, i watch this channel quite a lot.  There's currently a series on this called War Factories.  The "historians" constantly "big up" how the capitalist system won the war.  They denigrate Roosvelt's "New Deal" and say it made streamlining the war effort difficult. But surely it was the planning of the US administration with admittedly a great deal of help from the big US corporations that produced the superb effort by the US.

Similarly Britain's "private" companies are praised to the skies.  One example was the Vickers Valentine tank, which compared to the German vehicles was incredibly inferior.  One regular interviewee boasts of 3000 of these vehicles having been sent to Russia.  The Soviet Union produced 68000 of their superior T34.

The most recent one I've seen spent an hour denigrating the Soviet Union.  Sure much of the materiel came from the West but then there were 156 German Divisions in the USSR as opposed to 50 odd. on the Western Front.   Emphasis was placed on the Spitfires we sent - what was not mentioned was that they were obsolete marks and no spares of service literature was sent with them.  Or the newsreel of a tank with "to Uncle Joe from Britain" painted on it.  It is a known fact that many of the "tanks for Russia" actually ended up in North Africa.  The right wing managements thought that the workers would work harder if they thought they were going to Russia.

The whole tenure is to down play the role of the Soviet Union in WWII.  Oh, and as an addition, criticise the Attlee government for using Soviet style planning when they nationalised coal, steel and railways in the forties - describing it as a disaster.  Of course privatisation has been such an unmitigated success hasn't it.

Anyone who reads this forum knows my political views.  And I know the Soviet government was cruel, and oppressive.  But to put this sort of stuff out as serious history, whilst all it is is series  of right wing economists trying to downplay the enormous contribution the Soviet Union made to the defeat of Nazi Germany I find offensive.