Posted on 12/24/2017 1:12:14 PM PST by 3161J410
The Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour will feed into the debate around the nature of President Donald Trump’s abrasive, confrontational form of leadership, says Joe Wright, the film’s director. Wright suggests that Darkest Hour, which stars Gary Oldman as the British prime minister during arguably the UK’s most testing period of the second world war, is directly relevant to the US’s current political turmoil.
“There’s a big question in America at the moment: what does good leadership look like,” says Wright,
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
>I wish we as Americans took greater care to preserve these narratives and own these victories. Not to lord over others, but to remember those we’ve lost and to stop self-sabotaging ourselves with P.C. revisionism.
Me too. Problem is the left is still in love with Communism and is completely unwilling to admit what a disaster it was. Hence why they play up the Soviet Union during WW2. Stalinist propaganda is still repeated word for work by western historians despite what we learned from the Russian archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. Stalinist Russia lied about everything during the war in order to portray themselves in a positive light.
Our strengths were technology and allowing Officers to analyze and change things on the fly. Our creativity was something no other army had at the time.
Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs:
I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin’s views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were “discussing freely” among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don’t think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.[30]
In a confidential interview with the wartime correspondent Konstantin Simonov, the famous Soviet Marshal G.K. Zhukov is quoted as saying:
Today [1963] some say the Allies didn’t really help us… But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.[31]
Magna Carta? You remember, the document our Constitution drives from?
Even some freepers might agree with my tag line.
This movie was not created for the likes of us and this was not a just shoot’em up action movie like Dunkirk. It is well acted and for many people will be their first introduction to the era.
I was leaving the theater and a young family was walking out. Kids in their teens, mom and dad in their forties. Dad had tears in his eyes and the kids were hugging him trying to figure out why he was moved to tears. That was meaningful to see for an old coot, like me.
I hadn’t heard that before. Very interesting. Thanks!
Ok, but other than The Magna Carta, what have the Brits EVER done for us?
Why do you think Trump’s a flawed man?
BTW—Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Trump fan. Voted for him and will again. But there are times I think he makes things harder than they need to be.
My own view is that most people are their own worst enemy. Me included.
I’m a big Churchill can and was looking forward to the movie. I think I’ll skip it now. I’ll just re-watch Robert Hardy in “The Wilderness Years”.
The two fronts were very different. Men died on both fronts but the Eastern front was an example of two evil men trying to destroy each other.
The Battle of Kursk, had 6,000 tanks, 2 million men and 5,000 aircraft. Not to even mention the rape and civilian murder on both sides. Women were raped in front of their men and crucified on barn walls in retaliation for what the Germans did. I don't think any American units did that.
Here is a great podcast series by a guy named Dan Carlin. He really puts the Eastern Front in perspective.
Here's a great sample. I actually bought all his podcasts. This one is free online. I promise that anybody that loves history will love this podcast.
https://soundcloud.com/wonkywombat696969/ghosts-of-the-ostfront-i
Let’s see, one side will take good care of you, and the other will most likely rape your women, which one do you think the Germans would fight harder against?
Soviets lost 100,000 just in the Battle of Berlin alone, had the Western allies gone in, it would have been a cake walk.
the British system is the direct ancestor of ours and flawed as it is, better than almost all others.
why someone would say that it is not, is baffling.
Perhaps we are not educating the young properly these days unlike back in the 50s when I attended grade school..
it is said by some that he “shoots from the hip”. this is disconcerting to some coming from the POTUS.
what have the Brits EVER done for us?
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They were the first to burn down Washington DC ...:)
Up until late ‘44 even with all the other fronts the Germans had a 4-1 kill ratio, including tanks, on the eastern front. I do not think the Germans could have defeated the Soviets only because i do not think the Soviets would have ever surrendered.
DUNKIRK was awful if you knew about the battle. If you did not know anything about the battle going into the theater you knew even less coming out. PS the Germans lost more troops after Dunkirk. The politicians gave up after Sedan.
the Soviets earned the right to conquer Berlin by virtue of the extreme carnage perpetrated against them on their soil by Hitler.
Well hey, if they wanted to sacrifice another 100,000 men just for the right to place the Red Flag on the Reichstag, well hey, who were we to stop them?
Just saw it this afternoon. It’s a great movie. Anyone can put any spin they want on anything, but that does not mean it is there. That this movie is supposedly a political attack on Trump was literally the last thing on my mind.
we were in no position to stop them, and for the Russians, it was intensely personal.
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