Posted on 05/10/2005 1:09:30 PM PDT by Pikamax
Presidents aren't expected to know much history, but their speechwriters are. President Bush's speech in Riga on Saturday did not measure up.
It wasn't Bush who started the quarrel about whether the Soviet Union "liberated" or "occupied" Eastern Europe after 1945. It was the presidents of Lithuania and Estonia, who refused to go to Moscow for the ceremonies commemorating the Soviet defeat of Germany 60 years ago, and the presidents of Latvia and Poland, who only agreed to go with great reluctance. But Bush jumped into the argument with considerable ignorance.
What he did was to condemn the Yalta agreement of February 1945, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt for the United States, Winston Churchill for Britain and Joseph Stalin for the Soviet Union. It didn't actually "carve Europe up" between the victors, but it did give each of them responsibility for getting certain liberated countries back on their feet.
Bush condemned Yalta, claiming that the Western allies had needlessly sold the Eastern European countries into 40 years of Communist rule and Soviet control. "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," Bush promised, implicitly accusing Roosevelt and Churchill of just those crimes -- and then he flew off to Moscow to shake the hand of his host, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Truth hurts.
Not strictly true. There's good evidence that Patton considered it.
But then Patton was with good reason widely viewed as a nut in some areas.
If she's said "liberate Eastern Europe from something as evil as Communism" or "even more evil than Communism", that would be one thing. To say Nazism was "far worse" than Communism spits in the face of the tens upon tens of millions who were murdered in the name of Marxism. BOTH philosophies were pure evil, and neither was "far worse" than the other.
So how did the part we had responsibility for do as opposed to the part the Soviets took charge of? Whether through illness, naivety, war weariness or whatever...trusting Uncle Joe was not a good decision. Whether another way was possible, I don't know.
It didn't take them long to start their crap did it?
Only a Communist or an Ignorant Journalist would defend the Treaty of Yalta.
The author probably believes only ignorant people can possibly disagree with him.
This whole article is an ode to the great red army. You see, the Soviets DESERVED to enslave Eastern Europe for 50 years. Just like we enslaved Western ... oops, guess we did it a different way, huh? Yes Hitler was pure evil. But Stalin and his succesors caused the deaths of how many millions in famines, gulags, wars? I think they ended up killing more people than Hitler.
Gwynne Dyer is some kind of spin artist!
They are even more rabid about FDR than they are about Joe McCarthy!
Not a nut, just ahead of his time. Tell it to the war dead of Korea and Vietnam that the commies were good allies.
"Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall....."
Such a colorful, avant-garde romantic sort, don't you know.
it was simply not fitting for Bush to talk like this while he was on his way to Moscow to join the Russians in mourning their 27 million dead.
Doesn't seem like a problem to me. The Soviets used Nazi perfidy as an excuse to perpetuate their own perfidy, why let them get away with it.
I thought the libs loved it when a US president critiques events in America's past while abroad!
Typical Canadian America-hater.
Wow, that astoundingly Orwellian phrase deserves repeating. As Kerry would say, they liberated it just before they enslaved it.
Had the author read Churchill's history of WWII, she would know that Churchill tried every way to Sunday to get Roosevelt to take the problem of post-war occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviets seriously. Roosevelt had all the money and all the troops and he squashed Churchill's initiatives over and over. Roosevelt was determined to give Eastern Europe to the Soviets and he did just that. Churchill was blameless in this regard.
"What he did was to condemn the Yalta agreement of February 1945, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt for the United States, Winston Churchill for Britain and Joseph Stalin for the Soviet Union. It didn't actually "carve Europe up" between the victors, but it did give each of them responsibility for getting certain liberated countries back on their feet."
That's like saying the wolves decided to "liberate" the sheep. The hypocracy of the left never ceases to amaze me. Do they REALLY believe this tripe, or are they hoping the unwashed masses do?
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