“Eastern Europe, remember, wasn’t just unconditionally handed over to Stalin. And yet it was betrayed.”
Yet not a peep about the 24,000 ‘liberated’ US POWs Stalin interred in gulags? Stalin used them to obtain concessions and very few came back. The Brits got some of theirs back by bargaining away the lives of 2,000,000 Cossacks who had fled westward into Czechoslovakia. The Cossacks, and their families, were unloaded from the trains into quarries and machine-gunned.
The biggest shame of all was Operation Keelhaul.
Yes, people still don’t seem to realize it’s not just about unnecessarily embarrassing your ally or acquiescing in the face of not wanting to start another war. Nor is it just that they didn’t see it coming, nor that their appeasement strategy was stupid. The US and Britain did all that, but they also actively participated in the red terror. They went out of their way to hand over people destined for execution ir the gulag.