Nationalist Populist Movement and the ‘Indian Question’

Andrew Roberts’s magisterial The Storm of War ends with a chapter of pure analysis on the basic question of why the Allies won and the Axis lost the Second World War. The last line of the chapter and thus the book puts a fine point on things. Hitler lost the war, Roberts writes, because he was a Nazi.

This isn’t Roberts falling for the progressive fantasy that the only true things are the desirable ones, that success proceeds nomically from having just opinions and failure from having unjust ones. He isn’t virtue signaling, or even being Whiggish. Rather, he is saying that Hitler and by extension the Reich were wedded to a Nazi ideology that was, in the end, dumb. The man wrote it all down in Mein Kampf, a theory of victory that required immoral ends but, more to the point, actively idiotic means — a reality that set in sometime between Stalingrad and the Führerbunker.

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Daniel Foster

Daniel Foster is a contributing editor at National Review.

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Andrew Roberts’s magisterial The Storm of War ends with a chapter of pure analysis on the basic question of why the Allies won and the Axis lost the Second World War. The last line of the chapter and thus the book puts a fine point on things. Hitler lost the war, Roberts writes, because he was a Nazi.

This isn’t Roberts falling for the progressive fantasy that the only true things are the desirable ones, that success proceeds nomically from having just opinions and failure from having unjust ones. He isn’t virtue signaling, or even being Whiggish. Rather, he is saying that Hitler and by extension the Reich were wedded to a Nazi ideology that was, in the end, dumb. The man wrote it all down in Mein Kampf, a theory of victory that required immoral ends but, more to the point, actively idiotic means — a reality that set in sometime between Stalingrad and the Führerbunker.