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Bush says Cold War captivity one of great wrongs
NY Times ^ | May 7, 2005 | REUTERS

Posted on 05/07/2005 3:20:28 PM PDT by neverdem

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To: ms_68
Even Hitler's Germany didn't murder POWs.

It depends on who and when. There were some isolated incidents in the West (as there were isolated incidents of the Western allies murdering German POWs.)

On the other hand, the Germans were not bound by the Geneva convention in their dealings with the East.

81 posted on 05/07/2005 7:57:09 PM PDT by PAR35
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To: risk
This news is rather suprising, don't you think?

Meanwhile, rust and evil never sleep.

82 posted on 05/07/2005 7:58:45 PM PDT by cornelis
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To: ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted
Too bad he continues to move us toward communism with steps closer toward socialized medicalcare, nationalized education and a national ID...

Yes, I cannot say that the domestic agenda is going as well as I would have hoped.

President Bush is very likely to go into our history books as a great foreign policy president. But his domestic agenda just isn't shaping up the way I would like to see a conservative government -- Republican in the House, Senate, and Presidency -- come together.

I particularly didn't like the recent addition of means testing to the Socialist Security reform proposal. Private accounts are a fine idea -- especially as they move us toward completely privatizing this FDR monstrosity -- but means testing isn't, it just moves Socialist Security deeper into left field.

The failure to make meaningful budget cuts is another one failure that I find it hard to fathom. That is a target-rich environment, one that with some party discipline should be easy to make some real ground with.

And then there is the judicial debacle: That again is a matter of a circular firing squad -- we don't seem to be able to grasp the reins and go forward.

The internal passport is a bad idea, a creation that will not be looked at fondly by our children who will have a diminished sense of what it is to be a free American.

As to the drug "benefit", well, that's one that I would very much like to see rolled back, but it's not going to be and it is going to take an already creaking socialized medical payments system and break it within the next 30 or so years.

I would like to see the Department of Education, one of the silliest boondoggles that we have, eliminated.

83 posted on 05/07/2005 8:02:34 PM PDT by snowsislander
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To: cornelis

Putin called the brake up of the USSR a catastrophe because it stranded Russian populations outside of Russia - but people who distort the truth like only to tak ethe first part of his words and not what followed.


84 posted on 05/07/2005 8:04:59 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: BringBackMyHUAC
Patton also believed in reincarnation. No American was willing to die for Nazi allies Hungry, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic republics which soiled their cause during the war years. A case can be made for trying to save Poland - but we still had Japan to fight.
85 posted on 05/07/2005 8:08:04 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: cornelis
The Cold War put the west in a difficult situation where we had to make existential choice after existential choice regarding our responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We weren't the cause of these dilemmas, but our response to them carried weight. Looking around the world, I see that our indecisiveness during the Cold War helped set the stage for third world terrorism. Soviet and Maoist tyranny were treated like diseases that had no cures by our State Department and the Democrats. The oppression in the Mideast has had a lot to do with support by both the Soviets and the Anglosphere for tyrants in the name of strategic advantage. Bush has said he's going to bring that to an end. Natan Sharansky has had a powerful impact on his thinking. The question is: can Bush bring along the rest of the free world's leaders? Both Tony Blair and John Howard have been reelected recently. I think this is a sign that appeasement and "dirty dealing" for strategic advantage may well be shelved for a time.
86 posted on 05/07/2005 8:08:10 PM PDT by risk
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To: Destro
"No American was willing to die for Nazi allies Hungry, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic republics which soiled their cause during the war years."

I don't know enough about the specific histories of these countries to address your point. But, as I said, I don't think Patton was thinking about any specific countries, he just wanted to kill Communism before it had a chance to spread further. And what better time to do it than at the conclusion of WWII? The equipment and troops were already there, and the Soviets were severely weakened. Moreover, had we invaded the Soviet Union, Russians would have joined our cause in droves. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Russian citizens, not realizing what the Nazis were all about yet, actually greeted the Nazis as liberators...that is, until the Nazis mowed them down with machine guns.
87 posted on 05/07/2005 8:20:20 PM PDT by BringBackMyHUAC
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To: BringBackMyHUAC

The war was not over - Japan was still fighting - and the Russian outnumbered the Western allies 3 to 1 or more with some good tanks armies.


88 posted on 05/07/2005 8:25:06 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: Destro
The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind. The best help to all who suffer under totalitarian regimes is to confront the evil which a totalitarian system constitutes, from which it draws its strength and on which its "vanguard" is nourished. If there is no such vanguard, no extremist sprout from which it can grow, the system will have nothing to stand on. A reaffirmed human responsibility is the most natural barrier to all irresponsibility. If, for instance, the spiritual and technological potential of the advanced world is spread truly responsibly, not solely under the pressure of a selfish interest in profits, we can prevent its irresponsible transformation into weapons of destruction. It surely makes much more sense to operate in the sphere of causes than simply to respond to their effects. By then, as a rule, the only possible response is by equally immoral means. To follow that path means to continue spreading the evil of irresponsibility in the world, and so to produce precisely the poison on which totalitarianism feeds.

I favor "antipolitical politics," that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.

--Vaclav Havel Open Letters "Politics and Conscience"


89 posted on 05/07/2005 8:32:54 PM PDT by cornelis
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Comment #90 Removed by Moderator

To: ms_68
They derive from the party that was the only in communist times

I thought once a commie always a commie with you anti-Putin crowds? LOL

91 posted on 05/07/2005 8:49:41 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: Destro; ms_68

Destro, why are you baiting ms_68?

Look at his home page, this person is Polish. If anyone has a right to think the Communists were horrible, it's his/hers. They lived under that oppression for years. For God's sake, cut them some slack.


92 posted on 05/07/2005 9:05:20 PM PDT by baseballmom
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To: baseballmom

They attacked "Commie" Putin - yet his nation elected Polish Communists and he seems to support his "Commie" President. I baited no one.


93 posted on 05/07/2005 9:11:37 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: snowsislander

The irony of it is that he isn't even a really good foreign policy president. He openly supports the anti-American Law of the Sea Treaty, FTAA and other measures that give more of our sovereignty to global governance bodies. LOST effectively gives the UN tax and regulatory powers independent of our control.

Whoever says that Bush is against the UN is either ignorant or dishonest. Part of the reason we invaded Iraq was to uphold UN resolutions against Saddam's WMD programs and now Bush actually quietly supports a UN treaty that would give them more power. In this case, real, meaningful power.


94 posted on 05/07/2005 9:48:21 PM PDT by ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted
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To: Destro

Even if we concede that Putin is not a communist that doesn't make him any friend of freedom. Besides, calling a typical social democrat in Europe a communist is akin to calling a libertarian a paleo-conservative.


95 posted on 05/07/2005 9:52:18 PM PDT by ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted
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To: Destro

He told you the president of Poland is not a communist.

"Kwasniewski is a democrat, and from the democratic wing of PZPR, SLD was formed."

He told you his grandfather fought the Nazi's and was in a German POW camp and came home alive after the war.

His fellow soldiers who were captured by the Soviets were murdered.

His family lived this hell for over 50 years. You didn't.

I don't know what kind of pleasure you get from this continued baiting. But I ask you to stop it.


96 posted on 05/07/2005 9:56:11 PM PDT by baseballmom
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To: ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted

Communist party under a new name is not Social Democrat.


97 posted on 05/07/2005 9:58:13 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: Destro

Then the Republican Party under Bush is no different from the Republican Party whose leaders razed the South to the ground in the Civil War committing some of the worst warcrimes in American history. Personally, as I have no direct experience with Polish politics I will take ms_68's words since he/she is Polish. If he/she says they're a multifactional party, then I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until I have reason not to.


98 posted on 05/07/2005 10:01:47 PM PDT by ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted
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To: baseballmom
Communist fought the Nazis, so I don't get that point, and Kwasniewski was a member of the Polish Communist govt when Solidarity was being repressed.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/walesa/

As a young communist, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was minister of sport. Now at 41, in democratic Poland, he is a Social Democrat.

"People still don't know whether the former communists will perform very well once they hold all positions of power in Poland," said Jacek Kurczewski, a sociologist at Warsaw University. "Until now we must say, frankly, that they were performing quite well democratically."

Kwasniewski has his own debts to pay.

"His buddies. The dozens of thousands of old comrades have been waiting behind him all those years, for a comeback. Not to build a gulag mind you, no, just to get a slice of the pie," said Gebert.

One force in Poland, now barely with a place in the table, is the Catholic Church which strongly supported Walesa.

In the end, what the church wanted didn't matter to Poles willing to abandon the hallowed past and the legacy of Walesa to take a chance on new blood.

99 posted on 05/07/2005 10:07:16 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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To: ILurkedIRegisteredIPosted

What ever happened to fact checking on your own? The Communist party in Poland changed their name to the Social Democrats and won in a landslide - defeating Walesa despite the fact he and his party were supported by the Catholic Church.


100 posted on 05/07/2005 10:10:18 PM PDT by Destro (Know your enemy! Help fight Islamic terrorism by visiting johnathangaltfilms.com and jihadwatch.org)
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