Posted on 03/07/2014 7:28:25 AM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
In assessing the motives and actions of Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton compared them to Adolf Hitler’s. Almost always a mistake. After 12 years in power, Hitler was dead, having slaughtered millions and conquered Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. And Putin? After 13 years in power, and facing a crisis in Ukraine, he directed his soldiers in the Crimea to take control of the small peninsula where Russia has berthed its Black Sea fleet since Napoleon. To the Wall Street Journal this is a “blitzkrieg.”
But as of now, this is a less bloody affair than Andrew Jackson’s acquisition of our Florida peninsula. In 1818, Gen. Jackson was shooting Indians, putting the Spanish on boats to Cuba and hanging Brits. And we Americans loved it.
Still, there are parallels between what motivates Putin, a Russian nationalist, and what motivated the Austrian corporal. Hitler’s war began in blazing resentment at what was done to Germany after Nov. 11, 1918. The Kaiser’s armies had defeated the Russian Empire, and the Italians at Caporetto, and fought the Western Allies to a stand still in France, until two million Americans turned the tide in 1918. When Berlin accepted an armistice on President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, not a single Allied soldier stood on German soil.
But, at Paris, the Allies proceeded to tear a disarmed Germany apart. The whole German Empire was confiscated. Eupen and Malmedy were carved out of Germany and given to Belgium. Alsace-Lorraine was taken by France. South Tyrol was severed from Austria and given to Italy. A new Czechoslovakia was given custody of 3.25 million Sudeten Germans. The German port of Danzig was handed over to the new Poland, which was also given an 80-mile wide strip cut out of Germany from Silesia to the sea, slicing her in two. The Germans were told they could not form an economic union with Austria, could not have an army of more than 100,000 soldiers, and could not put soldiers west of the Rhine, in their own country. Perhaps this Carthaginian peace was understandable given the Allied losses. It was also madness if the Allies wanted an enduring peace. Gen. Hans Von Seeckt predicted what would happen. When we regain our power, he said, “we will naturally take back everything we lost.” When Hitler came to power in 1933, he wrote off the lands lost to Belgium, France and Italy—he wanted no war with the West—but set out to recapture lost German lands and peoples in the East. He imposed conscription in 1935, sent his soldiers back into the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, demanded and got the return of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. He then sought to negotiate with the Polish colonels, who had joined in carving up Czechoslovakia, a return of Danzig, when the British issued a war guarantee to Warsaw stiffening Polish spines. Enraged by Polish intransigence, Hitler attacked. Britain and France declared war. The rest is history.
What has this to do with Putin? He, too, believes his country was humiliated and shabbily treated after the Cold War, and sees himself as protector of the ethnic Russians left behind when the Soviet Union came apart. Between 1989 and 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev had freed the captive nations of Eastern Europe, allowed the Soviet Union to dissolve into 15 nations, and had held out a hand of friendship to the Americans. What did we do? Moved NATO right onto Russia’s front porch. We brought all the liberated nations of Eastern Europe into our military alliance, along with three former Soviet republics. The War Party tried to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, which was established to contain and, if necessary, fight Russia. Had they succeeded, we could have been at war with Russia in 2008 over Georgia and South Ossetia, and today over Crimea.
Now we hear new calls for Ukraine and Georgia to be brought into NATO. Are these people sane? Five U.S. presidents who faced far more violent actions by a far more dangerous Soviet Union—Truman, Ike, JFK, Johnson, Reagan—refused even to threaten force against Russia for anything east of the Elbe river. These presidents ruled out force during the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the smashing of Solidarity in Poland in 1981. Yet, today, we are committed to go to war for Lithuania and Estonia, Obama is sending F-16s to Latvia where half a million Russians live, and the War Party wants Sixth Fleet warships moved into the Black Sea.
If there is a Cold War II, or a U.S.-Russia war, historians of tomorrow will as surely point to the Bushes and Clintons who shoved NATO into Moscow’s face, as historians today point to the men of Paris who imposed the Versailles treaty upon a defeated Germany in 1919.
It was your choice to call yourself Colonel, if you had served under Reagan, you might have remembered how incredibly aggressive he was in confronting the Communists all over the world, and his massive military buildup and aggressive military exercises, and operations and clandestine/mercenary operations globally.
It was pretty exciting serving under Reagan, scary, tense, but exciting, it was also pretty deadly since we averaged over 2200 military dead a year under Reagan, for a total of almost 18,000.
I think Reagan and his policy was the perfect match for the times. I just think it is not the long term way for today while the rest of the world grows fat living of our exertions.
Old anti-Semite Pat outdoes himself here, managing to make excuses for Adolf Hitler.
Amen!!!
To choose the screen name “Colonel” does seem odd, since the focus of your interest and posting, seems to be military issues and war.
Versailles was no excuse, but a cause. With a realistic, pragmatic treaty, Hitler would have remained well on the margin of German political life and none of us would have even heard of him.
I wouldn’t read too much into mere screen names, else we would think an alligator, a Civil War general and a chapter in the Bible were posting on this thread.
I’m not reading too much into a guy choosing the name Colonel who focuses on military and war issues.
I asked about Reagan because of your strange post 17, Reagan was an incredibly aggressive meddler, it is how he saved the world from the Soviet Empire.
Don't you think the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama deserve to be called international meddlers?
Colonel, just read my posts to you, I keep posting a correction to what you implied about Reagan.
I think it was my fault because of my imprecise grammar, but I would never cast such slurs on Reagan who was the perfect man to master such a critical moment in history.
You aren’t reading my posts to you.
“”Reagan was an incredibly aggressive meddler, it is how he saved the world from the Soviet Empire.””
“” if you had served under Reagan, you might have remembered how incredibly aggressive he was in confronting the Communists all over the world, and his massive military buildup and aggressive military exercises, and operations and clandestine/mercenary operations globally.
It was pretty exciting serving under Reagan, scary, tense, but exciting, it was also pretty deadly since we averaged over 2200 military dead a year under Reagan, for a total of almost 18,000.””
What was right and proper for Reagan to do in the one time special case of the Cold War does not apply when Europe is on its feet, Communism destroyed and the nation in debt. In the long run, our nation cannot survive being on a continual war footing. Do you not think the warnings of Washington and Madison are still valid?
Your arguments were being made before Reagan and during Reagan, and now, after Reagan.
Colonel, you are being too cute when you try to use Reagan.
What do you think about Washington and Madison’s warnings against foreign entanglements and continual war?
I'd say the same thing about Germany after WWI. What Germans did when they won wars wasn't so terribly different from what the Allies put them through.
I can see why you wanted to pretend to be a Colonel, and want to mislead people on Reagan, who we elected to end the weakness that we had seen was putting the world in danger.
You’ve not answered my question about Washington and Madison.
And in the post above, I told you exactly why I pretended to be a colonel- it was because I didn’t think about Arnold Ziffel that day.
LOL, you have a couple of centuries old quotes.
What was Washington’s policy on declaring war on Japan to protect Hawaii?, or on invading Grenada, or Reagan having 100s of thousands of troops, a massive army, in Europe during peacetime?
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