President Barack Obama’s decision to join other Western leaders in snubbing Russia’s weekend celebration of the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe looks more like pouting than statesmanship, especially in the context of the U.S. mainstream media’s recent anti-historical effort to downplay Russia’s crucial role in defeating Nazism.
Obama should have sent a representative for this historic event. That said, the russian people were heroic in that war, the Soviet Union was not. Allies with Hitler right up to 3 am June 21 1941 when, fifteen minutes before the attack, the last Soviet supply train chugged over the river Bug to send supplies to Nazi Germany. As for Putin, the Baltic countries will be next.
We live in echo chambers that endlessly repeat lies, distortions, and revisionisms. But then so do they. It’s disheartening.
Of course there is another possible point of view. Perhaps now it is the West which is diseased with rampant psychopathic capitalism and corporate feudalism, and headed to a return of serfdom and slavery, and the people there need support to fight and in certain places, be rescued. It may not be Putin, or the Baltic states. But there will be someone and he will be moving West.
Such small minded and foolish and petulant gestures are beneath contempt and those participating in them should be censured for their childish tantrums.
There is absolutely no evidence at all that Putin has any designs on Western European nations other than to trade with them. Read my lips, none! It is the US and NATO that has continuously pushed Eastwards towards Russia’s borders and then complained that the Russians are somehow bordering NATO countries. It is the US as evidenced by Victoria Nuland that destroyed Ukrainian democracy, forced an illegitimate government on Ukraine which is allied with neo Nazis, or if you prefer, fascists. The US destabilized a neighbour of Russia’s with the goal of destabilizing the whole Russian nation. What a shock it must have been to see Washington’s nefarious plans crater in flames. It is just too bad that those flames were lit by Washington but consumed Ukrainians. Their nation is now a failed entity and will never be whole again. Don’t even think to place that tragedy on Russia. The US started it as it usually does and then tries to blame everyone but the guilty party, itself!
“From the U.S. government to the major U.S. media, it’s as if the “cool kids” line up in matching fashions creating a gauntlet to demean and ridicule whoever the outcast of the day is. And anyone who doesn’t go along becomes an additional target of abuse.
“If you don’t make the obligatory denunciations of “Russian aggression,” you are called a “Putin apologist” or “Putin bootlicker.”
Actually, the lock-step circle-jerk began right after 911. No one was allowed to question the redi-made story; and to this day, it remains the career-decimating great taboo. But it was that crime against this nation and others that made for the military mindset that forecloses on any alternative to its hubristic, armed and dangerous self.
Do the forum a favor and change your screen name to Blight. More accurate all around.
Well, as is so often the case, we aren’t getting the whole story here. Putin did the same thing to Obama on several occasions. Putin was fine with Bush, but when it came to Obama, he was infuriated by Obama’s refusal to essentially bow down to him, as if Putin were Obama’s superior. He never forgave Obama for this, and I doubt that a month has gone by when Putin hasn’t issued some cheap shot via media concerning Obama.
How so? While I disagree with many of his policies, at no point did I see him act as an embarrassment to the country.
The list is too long, but not showing up at Victory day demonstrates a contempt for the Russian people. Russia lost 20 to 30 million people. This is a very important day for the Russian people, Putin is part of the equation because he is Russian. The Russians will not forget.
Well, the pressures to conform to the right wing version of what we’re are supposed to be (“hardworkin’ Americans”), were well in play since the Reagan administration.Liberals have the same problem, we see this most strikingly in their promotion of middle class elitism. (This, of course, comes with contempt for the poor.) When I was young, I never could have imagined that those who consider themselves on the left would have this as their motto: “Stand in Solidarity to protect the advantages of the better-off alone, the middle class!”
The Soviet Union was never allied with Hitler. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a treaty, not an alliance. The United Kingdom and France both signed similar non-aggression pacts with Germany in 1938, Denmark signed one in May of 1939, and Estonia and Latvia in June of 1939. The German-Soviet pact wasn’t signed until August of that year, making the Soviet treaty the last made with Germany, while everyone else was falling over themselves to make deals with the Nazis. And Belgium adopted a policy of neutrality towards Germany in 1936, and refused to militarily coordinate with Britain and France.
I’ll also say that, far from the now widely accepted historical fiction of appeasement, the British and French were actively supporting and encouraging Nazi expansionism and aggression. They essentially browbeat the Czechs at Munich into accepting the German annexation of their industrial regions, and the Poles and Hungarians also took part in carving off pieces of the country for themselves. Hitler was viewed as a useful tool, an asset that could be worked with. He was allowed to blatantly violate the Versailles Treaty, allowed to retake the Rhineland, allowed to annex the industrial areas of Czechoslovakia. Not as appeasement in the hope that he would be satisfied, but because it was believed a militarily and industrially strong Germany would be a useful bulwark against the dread threat of Communism. After the technical start of hostilities after the German invasion of Poland there followed a full eight months of ‘Phoney War’ in which neither Britain nor France took any significant action, instead waiting to see whether Hitler would continue east. They allowed him to invade Denmark, and only took action when he started on Norway, aid that they abandoned once he invaded France. It was only after the invasion of France that Chamberlain was finally forced to resign.
Chamberlains failure wasn’t one of appeasement, it was one of control and believing Hitler could be directed eastward. Chamberlain was forced out when it became clear he had lost control of his pet dictator, at which point the British upper-classes, who had largely supported this policy, panicked and put one of the few Conservatives who had consistently warned of the threat Hitler represented, Churchill, in charge. Appeasement is a post facto fiction created by Churchill and others to distract from the reality that they were trying to control Hitler and Germany by scapegoating Chamberlain for pursuing a failed policy that in fact never existed in the first place. Communism was the ‘great enemy’. Before WW2 it was all ‘communism, communism, communism’, and not long after the fighting ended the Cold War was begun. Hitler wasn’t a great evil (though he was that) that united the world because he simply couldn’t be tolerated, he was a dog who turned on his masters and that they were forced to crush, in the process allying with the ‘great enemy’ they had hoped to direct their pet against in the first place.
There is no question that the SU was largely responsible for the defeat of the Nazis. 8 of 10 Germans soldiers who perished in WWII were killed by Russians.
This is simply sick, since Russia suffered 80% of allied casualties, and would have won against Germany without the allied invasion of Normandy. Seems sick not to acknowledge that, even if Stalin was dictator at the time.
Quite right. The west embraced fascism easily and this is no more apparent than when Mussolini was named Man of the Year by Life Magazine in 1925, or when the Walker family of Bush fame was still moving Nazi money around in 43, a year or so after it was illegal to do so. As Mussolini defined fascism in Life Magazine, it was simply a merger of state and corporate power. Pretty much what we have now in the U.S. don’t you think?
