Posted on 01/15/2005 6:35:50 AM PST by veronica
You forgot to mention being put in stockades and pelted with rotten fruit and have sand rubbed in his eyes.
An important thing to remember is that photos can do a lot of harm.
You would think after Abu Ghraib people might realise this.
The double standard, too, is striking. Would anyone have noticed if the Prince had dressed up in a Soviet uniform? We live in such a morally obtuse age that many people apparently believe that the entire focus of evil for all time was a 12 year span of German history, even though Communism claimed many more victims world wide than Nazism and mass murder continues in many places throughout the world today. I believe something like a million Congolese have been killed in the civil war there. Does anyone even care? Perhaps someone in the Congo should dress up in an Afrika Korps uniform to get some international attention.
His sort of privilege comes with responsibility. Or let him renounce his royal mantle and go get drunk and act like a lout on his own dime. He should also be forced to take a course in WWII history, and not cheat on the final exam, as he did before, by getting someone else to take the test.
Bravo. See my post: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1321360/posts
If you people don't understand why what he did is wrong, and why he especially should not have done it, then there is nothing I can say that will be instructive to you. There is nothing "private" in the life a royal. They are public servants and they represent a long history, a history that includes WWII and the liberation of the death camps. The prince is not "free" to make sport of the deaths of millions of Jews, and thousands of British troops. Unless he wants to renounce his crown and go live in exile in France, like the pitiful Duke of Windsor.
Ooh...more royal scandals! Delish!
"His sort of privilege comes with responsibility. Or let him renounce his royal mantle and go get drunk and act like a lout on his own dime. He should also be forced to take a course in WWII history, and not cheat on the final exam, as he did before, by getting someone else to take the test."
Please do not limit his history lesson to WWII, he should be taught how it is he got "his sort of privilege", and what that responsibility means.
I was thinking the same thing. Having lost family (and everyting my family had) to the Soviets...It amazes me that people don't even realize that compared to Stalin, Hitler was a choir boy! Yes, they were BOTH evil and twisted men but it seems to me that Hitler tends to get much more attention but Stalin killed at least ten times more people in his time!!
Idiotic. Shows the same lack of seriousness and intelligence as the prince's boneheaded stunt. Why are you defending the wearing of a Nazi outfit, by someone who is third in line to be King of England?
Good God. Am I posting on FR, or some Neo-Nazi site? I read the same idiotic claptrap at kooksites.
It's time for the royalty to go away.
Are you serious about your disbelief that Stalin was worse than Hitler?
How about a first apology to the Archbishop of Canterbury since their were more Christian Brits that lost family to the Nazis and whose houses were bombed. And an apology to the Orthodox Church for the million of Eastern Europeans and Russians who died under the Nazis. There should also be an apology to the Pope for the millions of Catholics who died because of Hitler. I would also like an apology for my great uncle that was killed. I would also like an apology from the Rabbi for forgetting the millions of others who died under the Nazis.
One thing has nothing to do with the other.
I'm on your side, Veronica. Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform is about the same as George Bush wearing a KKK outfit to address the NAACP. It's in frightfully poor taste, and a symbolic kick in the teeth of all those (many millions still alive) who suffered directly under Nazi oppression. I've no problem with the little Prince getting a taste of what public opinion means. Maybe it'll teach him to be a bit more circumspect in the future.
It seems that Jews are very successful in their relentless endeavor to make the world aware of the atrocities that happened to them under Hitler. This should be applauded and admired.
Perhaps you could assist other groups in employing the Jewish methods of educating the rest of the world (Holocaust museums, Jews making movies such as Schindler's list, victims speaking at churches and schools, etc.)
I don't think they think what he did was right, but they raise a good point. See here:
Stalin's Starvation of Ukraine – Seventy Years Later,
World Still Largely Unaware Of Tragedy
By Askold Krushelnycky, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
A famine deliberately engineered by the regime of Josef Stalin 70 years ago claimed millions of lives, mostly in Ukraine but also in some other parts of the Soviet Union. It is today considered one of the worst atrocities of the Soviet regime and a terrifying act of genocide. Even so, the famine of 1933 is relatively unknown. RFE/RL correspondent Askold Krushelnycky examines the reasons behind this and reports on a campaign to draw attention to the atrocity.
Prague, 8 April 2003 (RFE/RL) -- Estimates of how many people died in Stalin's engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale -- between seven and 11 million people.
But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial.
Lyubomyr Luciuk is the director of research at the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. He explained why there was no such opportunity to investigate the famine in the Soviet Union.
British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, "Harvest of Sorrow," brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.
Conquest said that while most historians now accept that a devastating famine took place, some skeptics remain that try to find a justification for Stalin's behavior.
But Conquest said more evidence has emerged since the disintegration of the USSR allowed greater access to Soviet archives. He says he himself has uncovered documented evidence that shows Stalin knew that hundreds of thousands of peasants were trying to enter Russia in search of food.
Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself.
Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.
The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was "The New York Times" correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin's, whom he described as "the world's greatest living statesman." He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.
Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America's most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Liciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty's award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine.
A spokesman for the Pulitzer board, Sid Gissler, said the board has considered withdrawing Duranty's prize on previous occasions but had decided against doing so because it had not been awarded for articles related to the famine. He said he sympathized with the Ukrainian campaign, and added the board would reconsider the question again later this year.
Duranty died in 1957 an impoverished drunk. Luciuk said that when details about the famine finally came into the open, Duranty was credited with coining the famously callous phrase, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Luciuk said he hopes Ukraine, meanwhile, will do more to educate its own population about the famine. Since gaining independence, successive Ukrainian governments have done little to publicize the episode for fear of instigating a controversy with the country's still-powerful Communist Party, which continues to deny the famine was deliberately organized. Moreover, many of those who took part in the executions, deportations, and confiscation of food are still alive and receiving state pensions.
In February, the Ukrainian parliament conducted a special hearing about the famine. The deputy prime minister for humanitarian issues, Dmytro Tabachnuk, said the famine was a deliberate terrorist act that claimed the lives of up to 10 million people. He said the government is planning to build a National Famine Memorial Complex.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.