This guy.
Posted on 05/21/2014 12:41:57 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
When I was deployed to Uzbekistan I met a young woman who looked me in the eye and told me in perfect English, “I want you to know one thing: I admire Josef Stalin!”
When I countered with, “Because he killed seventy million people!?” she calmly replied “You need a strong hand to rule so large a country as the Soviet Union!”
This was in 2003. Uzbeks used to be Soviet citizens.
Not surprising, as people such as she are necessary to allow people such as Stalin to gain and maintain power. To be honest, it's not entirely different than when Eleanor Cliff defended Bill Clinton's sexual escapades by saying that ‘strong leaders often have pronounced sexual appetites’. It's all the same - making excuses for those who hurt others, because in some manner it serves your self-interest.
Altruism exists, but it's certainly not in surplus.
No, but nor has the Prince of Wales. If he's saying this type of thing right now, it's because he's been asked to by Her Majesty's Government to say something in a way that allows themselves to officially distance themselves from it. The Prince does have a little more freedom to speak than the Queen, but not this much.
I wonder if the odd but often sane wisdom of the Brits will skip Charles as king.
I am lucky enough to be a friend to the Prince of Wales, and to know him fairly well. Though he's on the left on some environmental issues, overall he's actually a genuine conservative who would fit in quite well here, if he had that sort of freedom. The caricature you get of him in the press is simply yet another example of the mass media trying to make a conservative seem foolish and strange - just as they do to conservatives in America. For some reason, I find difficult to understand at times, Americans who understand this is being done to conservatives in America, buy it when it comes to the Prince.
When it falls to him (and long may that day be delayed) he will be a good King. There's no question of skipping him. I think William has great potential as well, but besides anything else, nobody wants to do that to William - he deserves as long a chance as possible to have a more normal life before he has to take on that burden.
I knew from conversations on cruises on a very-British liner that Charles is highly regarded for his charities. I wish more US citizens knew that we'd have nothing to fear from a King Charles of England.
This guy.
Hitler and Putin - May 21, 2014Both bear furious historical grievances. Hitler wanted to avenge the Versailles Treaty, which punished Germany for its defeat in World War I. Putin believes the West exploited Russia’s weakness after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In truth, the collapse of communism was a liberation for the Russians, who suffered grievously under Soviet rule. But Putin calls it the ‘geopolitical catastrophe’ of the last century.
Both leaders stoke and exploit paranoia. Hitler blamed Jewish bankers for Germany’s woes. Anti-Westernism is the fuel that fires support for the Putin regime.
Just as the League of Nations — the forerunner to the United Nations — failed to contain Hitler and his Italian fascist ally Benito Mussolini, Putin plays divide and rule with Nato and the EU by striking backroom deals with greedy and short-sighted national leaders.
Just as Hitler’s Germany was an expansionist power, so is Putin’s Russia. In 1938, as Hitler began to mobilise his forces for a devastating war, he forced Czechoslovakia to give up the German-speaking region of Sudetenland, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of German-speakers, leaving the remnants of Czechoslovakia ripe for takeover. The Nazis invaded a year later.
In a similar vein, Putin has already seized Crimea, and now sponsors separatists in eastern and southern Ukraine to stoke the flames of revolution against the government in Kiev.
Aggressive Russian interference risks making Ukraine — which is trying to hold a presidential election on Sunday — a failed state. Both Hitler and Putin base their thinking on race, and used race-based grievances to whip up a nationalist frenzy at home.
Hitler wanted to unite the ‘Volksgenossen’ (‘racial comrades’) of German-speaking Europe into the Third Reich. For his part, Putin wants to unite sootechestvenniki (‘compatriots’) into a new ‘Russian world’.
To both men, other countries’ rights or interests are irrelevant. Putin thinks Ukraine is a ‘territory, not a state’. Hitler believed that Czechoslovakia and Poland had no right to exist — which is why he ordered his tanks to smash their way across them.
To be sure, a neutered Germany — and Germans stranded abroad by the Versailles Treaty — had grievances aplenty, just as do Russians who woke up in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union to find they were effectively living abroad in newly independent nation states. But that is what happens when empires collapse.
Resolving ethnic grievances by changing borders and breaking up countries led to disaster in the Thirties. It risks World War III now.
Warren Wilhelm Jr?
I would have said the face of evil before Hitler was Lenin, but that’s just my humble opinion.
When Kaiser Bill abdicated, his evil died along with the German Empire. He himself died in exile, spurned even by the Nazis.
Lenin’s power of evil persists to this day after a century of fomenting the deaths of hundreds of millions.
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