St. Charles, King and Martyr.
Most saints don't qualify for worldly wisdom.
Posted on 07/18/2008 3:18:55 PM PDT by forkinsocket
As the Russians vote in a poll on a national television station to choose the greatest Russian, Stalin and Nicholas II jostle for the crown. This seems strange. Stalin killed 25 million and sent 28 million through his Gulag camps while, during his own disastrous reign, Nicholas II displayed brutal insensitivity and political ineptitude, faced two revolutions, lost two wars, his throne and his life.
In the BBC Great Britons poll, this game was won by Churchill. Charles I, our equivalent of Nicholas II, didn't appear; Henry VIII, the English Stalin, was No 40; Cromwell, our Lenin, was tenth but our heroes were more Eric Morecambe than Ivan the Terrible.
Two people would not be amazed by Stalin's popularity. The first? Vladimir Putin, now paramount leader of a motherland of imperial oil-rich swagger, recently introduced a new textbook to teachers that acclaimed Stalin as “the most successful Russian leader of the 20th century”, a cross between Peter the Great and Bismarck, who committed some “excesses” but became a great war-winning Russian ruler.
The second person would be Stalin himself, who studied history and promoted himself as a Russian emperor, musing that “Russians need a tsar”. He compared himself to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. I have held a book from his library, a biography of Ivan, in which he wrote “teacher”. He said Ivan's mistake was to kill too few of his boyars.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
St. Charles, King and Martyr.
Most saints don't qualify for worldly wisdom.
The reference to Henry VIII annoyed me. Whatever one thinks of his methods, he was a succesful monarch.
Stalin wasnt a Russian, he was a Georgian, from Tiflis, or Tblisi..
If you live in a country where you’re having to choose between Stalin and Nicholas II as the greatest leader, you’ve had some awful leaders.
I puzzle at some of these comparisons. Chas I as Nicholas? Okay. Both marked the end of absolute monarchy as the underclasses revolted. But there was virtually no similarity between the New Model Army and the Red Army or the Roundheads and the Bolsheviks.
Henry VIII as Stalin? I don't know. Henry ran his own dynasty, to be sure, but he didn't murder thousands of his own countrymen just to ensure his throne. The rebellions against him were real, and their repression necessary for the survival of his House. He certainly never claimed to be one of the masses.
If Henry VIII was Stalin, how could Cromwell be Lenin???? Cromwell was a parliamentarian and a military leader. Lenin was the platform Stalin built his Terror on. How did Henry build on Oliver?
These are odd characterizations indeed ...
Russians already got poled by the millions, now they get polled on how much they liked it? Yeah right.
Henry II, now *THERE* was a king:
From Sir Winston Churchill
“Henry II Plantagenet, the very first of that name and race, and the very greatest King that England ever knew, but withal the most unfortunate . . . his death being imputed to those only to whom himself had given life, his ungracious sons. . .”
Greatest what?
Since Stalin was a Georgian [not a Russian, but then neither was Catherine the Great], I vote for Batu Khan.
Good Grief, I guess there was a silver lining in not absorbing Mongolia . The Russians didn’t have to consider Attila and Ghengis.
As much of an absolute monster Stalin was, we, in the West, were extremely fortunate to have had him as the leader of the Soviet Empire during WW2.. His ruthlessness in dealing with his own military and his willingness to inflict and take millions of casualties took most of the steam out of the toughest of the German Army Groups.
How about Stenka Razin?
What about Alfred the Great
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