Posted on 12/06/2002 11:03:54 PM PST by SAMWolf
JUST A MATTER OF TIME! - OPERATION KEELHAUL
By Albert Burns
In our last column, we discussed a bit of the history of the 20th century as it pertained to our government. I believe that it would be valuable to consider more of that history as a means of better understanding what is happening today.
NOTE: I shall be dealing strictly with FACTS, demonstrable, provable facts although I doubt that one American in a thousand has ever heard of many of them. That fact alone gives mute testimony to the effective control of the mass media which can bury unpleasant or embarrassing facts by simply not reporting them. If some of the history you read in the next few columns makes you angry, please direct your anger at those who MADE the history, NOT the person exposing it.
We just passed a significant anniversary. On October 16, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The Communist government was about to collapse for lack of financing. Granting them diplomatic recognition literally saved the Soviet government which had been ostracized by virtually every other government in the world. Throughout the rest of the 1930s and the 1940s, two disparate groups infiltrated dozens of agents or members into the executive branch under Roosevelt. Those two groups were the Communist Party and the Council on Foreign Relations. While these two groups had radically different motivations, they both had the same ultimate goal, i.e., to weaken and eventually destroy American freedom and independence.
Very few people today remember that World War II started in 1939 because Germany AND RUSSIA invaded Poland at the same time. The Soviet Union was exactly as responsible for STARTING that war as Germany was. This was known and condemned at the time. However, in 1941 when Hitler attacked Russia, suddenly our mass media made a 180 degree about face and Russia became our "noble ally" in fighting the war. Of course, it was up to the United States to supply Russia with the armament to fight the war. The world went to war to "save" Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe. Yet, at Yalta, before the war was over, the United States State Department AGREED that the Soviet Union would be allowed to add Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, half of Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Bulgaria to its territory in Europe. Before the addition of those countries and peoples, at the end of the war, Russia had a population of about 160 million people and controlled a land area smaller than the Russia of the Czars. Soviet industry had been almost totally destroyed by the Nazi war machine. Communism was a third rate power, militarily, industrially and economically. There was, literally, no reason for Eastern Europe to be handed over to the Communists other than the influence of the Communist agents in OUR State Department.
We have all seen, over and over, the movies of the trains of freight cars loaded with Jews and others being hauled off to Hitler's extermination camps. To the best of my recollection, I have NEVER seen ANY still or moving pictures of similar trainloads of men, women and children which OUR government was responsible for shipping off to a similar fate.
In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered that "Operation Keelhaul" be put into effect. This involved rounding up and shipping back to "their countries of origin" ALL the refugees from communism: men, women and children, soldier or civilian, male or female — even though many of them had been fighting on OUR side during the war. Since all of Eastern Europe was then under Communist domination, sending these people back was, quite literally, a sentence of death, some by immediate execution and the rest by slow extermination from overwork and malnutrition in the Soviet slave labor camps in Siberia. These people were rounded up at bayonet point, forced into freight cars and shipped off to a terrible fate. There was no accurate count kept but the MINIMUM figure was 2,000,000 people and a maximum of 5,000,000. The elimination of all these anti-Communist people made the Communist domination of Eastern Europe MUCH easier. And the American people were kept blissfully unaware of this action which Eisenhower enforced rigidly, even though it violated international law, the laws of his own country and laws of humanity. Germans were prosecuted at Nuremberg for similar crimes but control of the news ensured that Eisenhower, and those under his command who took part in this outrage, were never even officially accused of wrong doing.
Facts like these may be unsettling but they MUST be faced if Americans are to fully understand WHY the almost universal respect and admiration which foreigners had for Americans gradually turned into hatred.
I just saw the scene which commemorated his heroism, today, on AMC, in the excellent docudrama "Tora! Tora! Tora!"
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