Free Republic

The Yalta Conference wrapped up. American President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill and Soviet leader Stalin came to agreement on several important issues regarding the outcome of the War. The leaders agreed that the unconditional surrender of German would be the way the war ended. Germany and Berlin would be divided into four occupation zones after the war ended. There would be international trials of German war criminals. In addition the Soviets agreed to declare war on Japan within three months after the war in Europe ended. They would join the UN. The Soviets would also retain possession of that...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan? Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the...

As Russian tanks rumble through Georgia, and Western pundits talk of the "new Cold War," one trope keeps reappearing in their discourse. Russia's newly aggressive stance, we are told, is partly our fault: After the fall of Communism, the West went out of its way to humiliate and trample Russia instead of treating it as a partner--and now, an oil-powered Russia is striking back. "Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed," Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and former Barack Obama adviser, wrote in Time. "A bipolar universe gave...

Ben Rhodes, the president’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, recently told the New York Times Magazine that newspapers no longer have foreign bureaus, so “they call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo.” The average reporter Rhodes encounters is 27 years old and “their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” One of the things they know nothing about is the major movement of modern times, Marxism-Leninism, also known as Communism, which first appeared nearly 100 years ago in the Union of Soviet Socialist...

Czech leader calls migrant wave in Europe an 'organised invasion' Prague (AFP) - Czech President Milos Zeman called the current wave of refugees to Europe "an organised invasion", adding young men from Syria and Iraq should instead "take up arms" against the Islamic State (IS) group. "I am profoundly convinced that we are facing an organised invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees," said Zeman in his Christmas message to the Czech Republic released Saturday. He went on to say that compassion was "possible" for refugees who are old or sick and for children, but not for young men...

Donn Fendler credited wild berries and a Boy Scout's 'never-give-up attitude' for his survival after he was separated from his family, aged 12, atop Maine's highest peak in 1939. They helped him through nine tough days traversing Mt. Katahdin's dense wilderness — battling hunger, fatigue, hallucinations, bugs, and leeches. He even lost his shoes in a river. Fendler's gripping survival story was front-page news in the build up to World War Two, and the boy's grit earned him an award from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His memoir, Lost on a Mountain in Maine, has regaled generations of schoolkids in the...

In April 1948, Deir Yassin was an Arab village of about a thousand residents. It was captured then by Jewish forces seeking to break the siege of Jerusalem during the war for Israel’s independence. Most of the fighting was done by the underground soldiers of the Irgun and Lehi, with assistance from the Haganah, the official fighting force of the Jewish establishment. A truck-mounted loudspeaker blaring a warning for residents to flee the village fell into a trench that had been dug by villagers. The result was a bloody house-to-house battle with a high death toll. That much everyone agrees...

Meet historical fascism’s true heirs.In the famous anecdote usually attributed to Bertrand Russel, a scientist lecturing on the earth’s position in the solar system is corrected an old lady who says the earth is actually supported by a giant turtle. When the scientist asked what supports the turtle, she triumphally answered, “It’s turtles all the way down!”Since the Twenties and the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism––which eventually become the main referent of the word––the term has become an all-purpose question-begging epithet so promiscuously abused in the Thirties that, as George Orwell said in 1944, “The word Fascism has...

Disbelief is the instinctive reaction to the double life of Anthony Blunt. One of the sons of the quite conventional chaplain of the embassy church in Paris. Attentive to his mother. Marlborough and Cambridge. Frequent long spells in France and Germany, fluent in the languages. Art historian and homosexual. Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, a natural for the Queen Mother’s circle. This is close to a novelist’s parody of a certain sort of highbrow career. And then betrayer of all that reassuring English stuff in favor of Stalin, foulest of murderers. The man, the Establishment he adorned, the country in...

Russian president Vladimir Putin over the weekend celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany with a military parade on Red Square and a series of smaller events. But while standing next to German chancellor Angela Merkel, he appeared to justify the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which the Soviet Union signed with the Nazi regime in 1939. “This pact made sense in terms of guaranteeing the Soviet Union’s security,” he said on Sunday (10 May). Putin noted that Moscow, in the 1930s, had tried to stop Nazi Germany, but felt isolated after Germany, France, and the UK signed the...

An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans. The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.” The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the...

One of the most accurate aspects about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is the use of the word Nazi to describe the terrorist enemy. No other label or historical parallel could capture the chilling ferocious madness – but not scope – of Palestinian butchery of Israelis. The Nazi vilification epithet has now become conventional Israeli discourse in public and media circles with the vivid revelation – in words and photos – of Palestinian savagery and barbarism by Hamas on October 7. Hamas terrorists, without an ounce of inhibition or remorse, shot youth in cold blood at the music festival...

In September 1939, Southern Californians were pummeled by four tropical cyclones that hit the region within weeks of each other. Each of the four made landfall at varying stages of cyclone development. [T]he first three storms were remnants of hurricanes with tropical storm-level winds, moving into the area after making landfall in Baja California — a similar path that Hurricane Hilary appears to be taking. The most notable of the bunch was the fourth storm to make landfall in the region, touching down in Southern California on Sept. 25. The unnamed storm hit near San Pedro...becoming the first and only...

We should never have taken our marching orders from Signor Mussolini. We should have countered the proposals and the propaganda which Italy and Germany poured in to make the Arabs not anti-Jew but anti-British. The "Times" has informed us that for five pounds an Arab can be got to kill a Jew. I wonder where the money comes from?Parliamentary Debates: Official Report. United Kingdom: H.M. Stationery Office, 1938, p. 943

Michigan’s Democratic-majority legislature has voted to repeal a state abortion ban from 1931, sending the bill to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) desk for a signature. The Michigan state Senate approved a bill on Wednesday to overturn the law, which made it a felony punishable by up to four years in prison to provide an abortion to a woman unless her life was in danger. The vote fell largely along party lines, as it did when it passed the state House last week. The 1931 law remained unenforced for decades after the Supreme Court established a federal right to abortion with...

Last seen in 1958, it was designed to travel 5000 miles and self-sustain for an entire year. It’s quintessentially American to drive everywhere. This must’ve occurred to the planners of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition in 1939 when the joint government-private sector project ran into the question of how best to traverse Antarctica’s frozen wastelands. The obvious answer? A car. A really, really, really big car. Or so thought Thomas Poulter, designer of the doomed Antarctic Snow Cruiser seen in these pictures. You’d think a massive machine like this would still exist somewhere, even in pieces. And surely they...

Elpeleg, Zvi. Through the Eyes of the Mufti. The Essays of Haj Amin, Translated and Annotated. (Hebrew). Israel: Tel Aviv University, 1995, p.27: Blame B: The Palestinians' defense of their land The second claim was that the Arabs of Palestine did not defend their land... Hitler cited the Jihad of the Arabs of Palestine as an example at an official reception held in 1938 for Khaled al-Qarqani, the adviser of His Majesty the King Abd al-Aziz to the House of Saud, Hitler said, that he was full of admiration for the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs and their heroism... *...

This World [HaOlam HaZeh], Nov 7, 1962.Was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, Known as Stalin, a Jew? It turns out that this question greatly troubled Adolf Hitler. This week, British journalist Sefton Delmer published his memoirs, revealing that Hitler's personal photographer had told him that Hitler had personally instructed him to inquire into the matter. The photographer was sent with the Nazi foreign minister to Moscow at the time of signing the famous Soviet-German agreement. Hitler told him: "Listen, I want you to get as close to Stalin as possible and take a picture of his earlobe. I want to know if...

Polish deputy PM says Germany wants to turn EU into ‘fourth reich’ Jarosław Kaczyński’s remarks in far-right newspaper are latest episode in Poland’s lengthy standoff with EU Kaczyński during a meeting with French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen Kaczyński during a meeting with French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen this month. Photograph: Alain Robert/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock Agence France-Presse in Warsaw Fri 24 Dec 2021 10.32 EST The head of Poland’s ruling party, Jarosław Kaczyński, has said Germany is trying to turn the EU into a federal “German fourth reich”. Speaking to the far-right Polish newspaper GPC, the head of the...

Nazi Arab: 1930s, 1940s & beyond Hitler was clear about his disdain for the Arab world, writing in Mein Kampf: "As a völkisch man, who appraises the value of men on a racial basis, I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called 'oppressed nations' from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs".[1] And the Grand Mufti al-Husseini has said "that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs— he knew this."[46]In the 1930s, Arab students returning from studying in Europe were determined to found the Arab Nazi party.[2]In February, 1932, the predominat...