A year after taking power, in June 1934, Adolf Hitler made his first visit abroad -- to his idol Benito Mussolini in Venice.Posted on 08/26/2008 6:04:13 PM PDT by 1rudeboy
A year after taking power, in June 1934, Adolf Hitler made his first visit abroad -- to his idol Benito Mussolini in Venice.
Babbling on incessantly about "Mein Kampf "and the Negroid strain in Mediterranean peoples, the Fuhrer made a dismal impression.
"What a clown this Hitler is," Mussolini told an aide.
Two weeks later, Hitler executed the Roehm purge and murdered scores of old Stormtrooper comrades. In late July, Austrian Nazis, attempting a coup, assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, a friend of Mussolini whose wife and child were then his guests.
Il Duce ordered four divisions to the Brenner Pass and flew to Vienna to vent his rage and disgust with Hitler. He called a summit at Stresa with Britain and France to agree on military action should Hitler make any new move in violation of Versailles.
At the time, however, Il Duce was also plotting revenge on Abyssinia for a bloody border clash with Italian Somaliland.
Mussolini thought his Allies would understand if he invaded the Ogaden to add an African colony to his new Roman Empire, just as the British and French had so often done in previous decades.
Mussolini miscalculated. Morally outraged, Britain and France went before the League of Nations and had sanctions imposed on Italy that were too weak to defeat her but punitive enough to insult her.
Friendless, isolated and condemned as an aggressor by Europe, Italy and Mussolini had nowhere to turn now but Hitler's Germany.
Thus, over the fate of an Abyssinian slave empire, Britain drove her faithful World War I ally into the arms of a Nazi dictator Mussolini loathed and had wished to confront beside Britain. And Abyssinia was overrun.
Are we making the same mistake in the Caucasus?
Mikheil Saakashvili started this war with his barrage attack and occupation of South Ossetia. Russia's war of retribution was far less violent or excessive than the U.S. bombing of Serbia for 78 days over Kosovo, or our unprovoked war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which has brought death to scores of thousands, or Israel's 35 days of bombing of Lebanon for a border skirmish with Hezbollah.
Yet, declared John McCain of Russia, "In the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations." Even Dick Cheney must have guffawed.
Russia must get out now, adds Bush, for South Ossetia and Abkhazia belong to a sovereign Georgia. But when did Bush demand that Israel get off the Golan Heights or withdraw from the birthplace of Jesus, which Israelis have occupied for 41 years, as he demands that Russia get out of the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, which Russia has occupied for two weeks?
As Israel was provoked in 1967, so, too, was Russia provoked.
Russians died in Saakashvili's attack, as American died in Pancho Villa's raid on New Mexico in 1916. We sent "Black Jack" Pershing, future Gen. George Patton and a U.S. army 300 miles into Mexico to kill Villa. Was this proportionate?
If we proceed on a course of isolating Russia from the West, keeping her out of the World Trade Organization, throwing her out of the G-8 and ending cooperation with NATO, where do we think Russia will go? Where did Il Duce go, when he was excommunicated from the West?
Condi Rice compares Vladimir Putin's action in Georgia to Leonid Brezhnev's crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. She raced to Warsaw to ink a deal to put 10 anti-missile missiles and U.S. Patriot missiles manned by Americans into Poland.
Does the Stanford provost have any idea where the end of this road lies, upon which she and Bush have started the United States?
What do we do if Russia responds to our Patriots in Poland with the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft system in Iran and Syria?
If the United States intends to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and arm them to fight Russia, why should Russia not dissolve the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe and move her tank armies into Belarus and up to the borders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?
Would we send U.S. troops into the Baltic republics to signal that we will fight Russia to honor our NATO war guarantees? Which NATO allies would fight alongside us against a nuclear-armed Russia?
If we bring Ukraine into NATO, what do we do if Russified east Ukraine secedes and Russia sends troops to back the rebels? Do we send warships into Russia's bathtub, the Black Sea, and commit to fight as long as it takes to restore Ukraine's territorial integrity?
In March 1939, Britain pledged to declare war and fight Germany to the death to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Poland. How did that one turn out for Britain and Poland?
Before we start down the road of isolating and encircling Russia with weak NATO allies, let us think through Gen. Petraeus' question in 2003 about Iraq, "Tell me, how does this thing end?"
But, then, these folks never seem to think anything through.
pat is a nutcase
Unfortunately isolationism for the US isn’t in the cards, so we have to counter Russia or run up the white flag. In other words, use it or lose it. (Power, that is.)
What if Russia puts tanks on the border of Estonia? What if Russia rolls on Estonia, what will happen then?
I’ll tell you exactly what will happen. Buchanan will publish an op-ed defending it. Thats what will happen.
He asks all the right questions but comes to all the wrong conclusions.
Right where they are, and then some.
Stopped reading after that.
Why post crap like this?
Useless waste of bandwidth, you give legs to the POS author's intent.......
It's crap, nothing more.
"If we bring Ukraine into NATO, what do we do if Russified east Ukraine secedes and Russia sends troops to back the rebels? Do we send warships into Russia's bathtub, the Black Sea, and commit to fight as long as it takes to restore Ukraine's territorial integrity?"
Pat better go back and read some more history before writing drivel like this.
They are going to export those missiles to Iran and Syria anyway. Our actions aren't affecting that.
If the United States intends to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and arm them to fight Russia, why should Russia not dissolve the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe and move her tank armies into Belarus and up to the borders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?
Russia has already dissolved that treaty. As for tanks in Belarus, they only have one modern tank army and it's in Georgia. We will be seeing it in Europe soon though.
Our intentions in arming and training the Georgians has been to enable them to govern their country and protect their borders. The Georgian army has not been trained or equipped for offensive action - as indicated by recent events.
I saw that earlier today. That url needs to be tattooed onto the forehead of every Russo-Serb relativist/apologist on this forum.
Those are tough questions. The solution is not to cower in the bathtub as Pat suggests.
Neither is McCain’s “BOMB THEM!! KILL! KILL! KILL!” brinksmanship.
Is Buchanan now working for Gazprom?
Haven’t seen that . . . got a link?
No, but nearly the same place, and for the same reasons—MSNBC.
Good questions, but Pat asks them with the intent that we do nothing.
Its obvious to me that we can’t directly defend eastern Europe. But its just as obvious that if they are looking to defend themselves we can have a role in that. We aren’t going to base 250,000 American troops in Ukraine the way we did in West Germany, and we aren’t going to threaten nuclear war over them.
But we have every right to do business with them, and if they want to modernize and build an effective force, we can help them do that. Bringing them into NATO isn’t going to guarantee them the security that we offered Germany. Face it, the old NATO is dead.
If Ukraine and Poland and the Baltics want to defend themselves, they are going to have to build a military capable of doing the job against a superior force. That means high-tech, high-speed, a serious force that is designed to fight and not merely for internal crowd control. And they are going to have to form an alliance-within-an-alliance, that an attack on one is an attack on all. If they will do that, Russia might think twice. If they can’t or won’t do that, they will have to depend upon appeals to world opinion, and good luck with that.
We won’t put soldiers into that battleground. They’ll have to defend themselves. But between now and then we can help these countries that clearly want to be a part of the West. We shouldn’t be embarrassed of that role.
In Buchanan’s world free people should be enslaved just because the neighborhood bully wants his due.
Pat Buchanan probably knows all the verses to “Das Horst Wessel Lied”.
Listen on youtube. Then read the comments. Even more chilling than the words.
Pat’s off the deep end. Digs double eagle flags. Thinks Vlad the Putin is terribly misunderstood.
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