And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
William Shakespeare, from Richard III
The hysterical behavior of Poland on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has been an archetype of clumsy redirection, enthusiastically backed by western academics – Look! they cry; Putin is trying to blame Poland for starting World War II!! When everyone knows it was the Soviets with their notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under whose terms the filthy co-conspirators planned to carve up Poland for themselves.
It would not be an exaggeration to suggest here that if the Polish attempt to rewrite history meets with broad acceptance, the practice will become a model for countries who wish to sanitize their own history so that they appear to have been victim rather than aggressor; hapless sacrifice to a peaceful nature rather than eager collaborator.
History – well, we assume it is the real history, although you can’t be too sure these days – reflects that over 230 Soviet soldiers, including the commander of the 472nd regiment, died in combat in the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Seems a drop in the bucket compared with the Soviet Union’s losses overall in the war of extinction with Nazi Germany, but the number reflects combat losses in that operation alone; men who died when they might reasonably have been expected to live, in order that thousands of prisoners might be liberated. Poland’s recent response has been to destroy Soviet war memorials in the country, backed by an order of the nationalist Polish parliament, the Sejm. And suddenly, enough became enough as far as Russia was concerned.
It is against this backdrop of determined lunacy that I feature the first-ever guest post by Dennis Pennington, British-born resident of Russia for over 20 years, and better known to most of us here as Moscow Exile. Without further ado; Dennis, take it away!
A Four Hundred Year Grudge
On September 1, 2019, the Polish leadership did not invite Vladimir Putin to attend commemorative events to mark the outbreak of World War II in Europe, whereas practically all other world leaders had been invited. In that same year, the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi extermination camp, the same thing happened: the Russian president was snubbed, no matter that it was the Red Army that had liberated the inmates of that death camp in 1944. Furthermore, the Polish authorities have ostentatiously refused to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of Poland from Nazism. The Polish Foreign Ministry has already issued a sharp statement on the outcome of the Second World War in Europe. In its official account on Twitter, that ministry has expressed its views as regards this liberation of Poland from the Nazis:
“We respect the blood sacrifice of soldiers in the fight against Nazism, but in 1945, the Stalin regime brought terror, brutality and economic exploitation to Poland”.
The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs added that:
“The Red Army liberated Warsaw from Nazi occupation, but that did not mean freedom for Poland!”
During the Warsaw-Poznan offensive, on January 17, 1945, Warsaw was liberated from the Nazis by Soviet troops. This year is, therefore, the 75th anniversary of this event. However, although Poland had ceased to exist more than 6 years before this date, following a swift Nazi-Germany Blitzkrieg victory against the Polish armed forces in September 1939, present day Polish politicians prefer to call the Soviet liberators of Poland “Soviet occupiers” who “oppressed” Poland until the Soviet Union in its turn ceased to exist in 1991 and Poland had become a NATO member state.
Why is this Polish nation of Western Slavs one of the chief, if not the greatest, haters of its near neighbour, the Russian nation of Eastern Slavs, both of which having lived in close proximity for centuries? Why are Russophobic statements issued from Warsaw with such regular monotony? What are the roots of this undisguised hatred that all too many Poles seemingly bear towards Russians and the Russian state, be it that Russia ruled by the Rurik dynasty or the Romanov Russian Empire or the Soviet Union or the present Russian Federation? What are the roots of this apparent Polish hatred towards Russia and Russians?
The answers to the above questions are, of course, to be found in the histories of both nations: more precisely, they are to be found in a one-sided interpretation of their histories. However, how far need one go back in time in order to determine when this Polish hatred and suspicion towards Russia and the Russians began? Perhaps this apparent Polish fear and hatred of Russia and Russians has its roots in that time when the greatest conquering army the world had ever known came thundering westwards from the eastern steppes, which horde might well have subjugated Western Christian states had it not returned whence it had come, but not before it had sealed off from the rest of Europe what had been most of “Ancient Rus’”, crushing it for over 200 years under the “Tatar Yoke”, and in so doing, making it terra incognita for Western Christian Europe and turning its Eastern Slav people into “the other”, something unknown, something “Asiatic” and not European and, therefore, alien and to be feared?
Coming somewhat closer to modern times, the creation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – formally, the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, after 1791, the Commonwealth of Poland, might be a better starting point from which one should recount this tale of Polish animosity towards Russia. The Commonwealth of Poland was one of the largest and most populous and most militarily capable countries of 16th and 17th-century Europe. The Poles proudly claim, and with good reason, that in 1683 at the Battle of Vienna, the King of Poland and his army saved Western Europe from Ottoman invasion, albeit that the Russian Empire had been taking on and regularly defeating the Ottomans from about the same time and onwards, right up until the 1917 defeat of the Russian Empire in World War I — but the Russians are “the other”, not “real” Europeans but “Asiatics”!
At its largest territorial extent, in the early 17th century, the Commonwealth of Poland covered almost 400,000 square miles (1,000,000 km2) and sustained a multi-ethnic population of 11 million. Polish and Latin were its two co-official languages and Roman Catholicism its faith and one which it, of course, unabashedly proselytized. And therein one may recognize another cleft, perhaps the fundamental one, between the Poles and the Russians; though never part of the Western Roman Empire, the Polish nation was heavily influenced by it, as were all of the Western European states: the Slavs of Ancient Rus’ and its inheritor state, pace Ukraine Svidomites, the Russian Empire were not: the Poles are Roman Catholics and their laws and governance are to a great degree inherited from Rome, whereas the precursor of the Russian state fell under the influence of the Eastern Roman Empire, of Byzantium, and adopted the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of that empire.
Russians were, in Polish eyes, errant, uncivilized, eastern schismatics, who needed to be subdued and converted to the Western faith. In the 17th century, the Poles even made incursions into a Muscovy weakened by internal political divisions in an attempt to take control there and to set up a Roman Catholic puppet Tsar. Moscow was occupied by the Poles and eventually liberated by means of a popular uprising against them in 1612.
After many decades of prosperity, however, this once mighty Polish state, this buffer against the eastern Asiatic barbarian hordes, against “the other”, entered a period of protracted political, military and economic decline. This led to its partitioning by its neighbours, the Austrian Habsburg and the Russian Romanov Empires, as well as the burgeoning Kingdom of Prussia, which latter was the new boy on the block, so to speak, the rising star in Western Europe. In fact, there were three partitions of the Commonwealth of Poland: the first in 1772, the second in 1793 and the third in 1795. Interestingly, one seldom hears Poles complaining about Austrian and Prussian seizures of their Commonwealth lands, only of those annexations undertaken by the Russians. Could this be because the two former were considered Western and Christian, therefore “civilized”, whereas the latter were and remain, it seems, eastern barbarians, “the other”?
When Buonaparte with his Grande Armée and his mostly unwilling allied armies marched into the Russian Empire in 1812, the over 100 thousand-strong contingent of Poles in the Corsican’s armed forces were certainly more than willing participants; for them, it was a grudge match in which they were taking part: they wanted their “Commonwealth” back!
Then there was the Polish November Uprising of 1830–31 against the Russian Empire, also known as the Polish–Russian War 1830–31 or the Cadet Revolution, an armed rebellion in the heartland of the erstwhile, still partitioned by the Russians Commonwealth of Poland. Needless to say, the rebellion failed — and the Polish grudge got even bigger.
And then it was all over with the Romanov Russian Empire: in 1917, following two revolutions that year in Russia, the Bolsheviks surrendered to the German and Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, against which it had been at war since August 1914.
In 1918, taking advantage of the fact that Russia, Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary had suffered a severe defeat in WWI, albeit that during that war Polish troops (including Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel’s Polish grandfather) had fought for the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, Poland decided to restore its former glorious statehood within the borders of the 1772 Rzeczpospolita [a calque from the Latin res publica —“common thing”, meaning for the Poles: “The Polish State”].
The Polish–Soviet War 1919-1920 was a war of aggression launched by Poland [The Second Polish Republic] against the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic and the proto-Soviet Union and fought over what is now the westernmost part of the Ukraine and parts of modern Belarus.
At first, Polish arms were successful and Kiev was occupied by the aggressors. But then the Poles began to suffer defeat and retreated whence they had come. The victorious Reds chased the Poles back to Warsaw, but then the Poles experienced a remarkable change in their fortunes, due largely to the incompetence of the Russian general Tukhachevsky, who underestimated his opponent Pilsudski, and the Red Army was defeated, which Polish victory was declared by the Poles to be the “Miracle on the Vistula” that had saved Western Europe from Bolshevism.
There then followed in 1921 the shameful (for the Russians at least) Riga Peace Treaty. Russia handed over vast territories to Poland, which Included Western Belorussia and almost all of “Right Bank Ukraine”, namely that part of the Ukraine situated west of the River Dnieper. The Vilnius region of Lithuania was also annexed by Poland, notwithstanding the 1919 borders imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, whereby the Baltic Republics had been established.
According to the Treaty of Riga, the Soviet-Polish border was established much to the east of the “Curzon Line”, named after Lord Curzon, the British government minister who had proposed that the Bolsheviks accept this line as the Polish eastern border. Lenin had refused to accept this proposition. Now, according to the Riga Treaty, the Bolsheviks were to lose huge territories and had to pay Poland enormous reparations. Moreover, there was the question as regards the fate of 110 to 120 thousand Red Army prisoners of war. What happened to the majority of these prisoners is still unknown. In the West and in Poland, the issue of Katyn is often raised, but the issue of those Red Army prisoners of war was simply bypassed and has now been completely forgotten.
Having gathered what it considered its former “Commonwealth” territories, the Poles then took up their usual favourite pastime — internal squabbling. In the inter-war Polish parliament [Sejm], there were 112 parties, 31 governments and 19 prime ministers. One president, Narutovic, was killed by right-wing extremists only 5 days after the election. [On Stalin’s orders, of course!] Because of protracted, internal political crisis, Marshal Pilsudski came to power and conducted the dismantling of Polish democracy. In the mid-1930s, Poland became a centralized and aggressive state, even brazenly demanding from the League of Nations the granting of overseas colonies. At the same time, inside the country, one third of the population did not even speak Polish — in terms of national policy, Poland remained a powder keg.
Reliance on archaic nobility complexes naturally led to aggressive foreign policy, complete rejection of internal compromises in a multi-ethnic society, reluctance to accept historical changes, orientation towards the past, and a lack of strategic vision.
Cue: Friendship with “New Germany”
Springtime for Poland and Germany, Bad time for Moskals and France?
(With apologies to the makers of “The Producers”.)
During his Warsaw official visit, Himmler met the Polish Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Assistant Under Secretary of State.
In 1935, the news of the death of Polish leader Pilsudski caused great comment in Germany. Goering, for example, followed Pilsudski’s coffin in Poland in the front row; all the main German newspapers came out with condolences on the front pages.
The Nazi Party, racist rag “Völkischer Beobachter” wrote:
“New Germany bows its flags and standards in front of the coffin of this great statesman, who for the first time had the courage of open trust and full alliance with the National Socialist Reich”.
Moreover, Adolf Hitler declared national mourning in the Reich and sent a telegram to the Polish president, in which he wrote:
“I am deeply moved by the news of the death of Marshal Pilsudski and express my sincere condolences to Your Excellency and the Polish Government. Poland lost the creator of its new country and its most faithful son in the Marshal’s call to eternity. Together with the Polish people, the German people mourn the death of this great patriot, who, through his full cooperation with the Germans, rendered a great service not only to our countries, but also invaluable help in calming Europe.”
Hitler even ordered that a memorial service be held in Berlin Cathedral, at which a symbolic empty “Pilsudski” coffin was present. After this symbolic funeral service, a Nazi guard of honour gave the empty coffin full military honours.
Why did Hitler make such genuflections to the Poles?
The Anti-Aggression Treaty (“Pilsudski-Hitler Pact”) between Poland and Nazi Germany was signed in 1934, just a year after Adolf Hitler had been chosen as chancellor of Germany. Japan, Romania, Denmark, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia would also sign individual “pacts” with Nazis, the last of which being the USSR in 1939. The signing of the “Pilsudski-Hitler Pact” was one of the first foreign policy successes of the German government under Hitler’s leadership. The normalization of relations with Poland allowed Hitler to act in the West, where he planned to occupy the Saarland and Ruhr regions of Germany, which had been demilitarized as per the Treaty of Versailles. Now Hitler’s post Versailles re-arrangements of the German western border could be undertaken without fear of what would happen to the German eastern border with Poland. Moreover, Hitler was actively trying to involve Poland in an alliance directed against the USSR.
In turn, the Polish leadership expected Germany to support the realignment the Polish borders, which had also been drawn up at Versailles. In part, these expectations were met after the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Germany, Hungary and Poland began to partition Czechoslovak territory.
Eventually, Hitler unilaterally broke off the non-aggression treaty with Poland on 28 April 1939, on the pretext that Poland had refused to allow Germany to build an extraterritorial highway to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) through the territory of the so-called Polish Corridor. Poland, however, referring to the text of the Pact, continued to consider it valid until the German attack of 1st September 1939.
In addition to the Pact, additional secret agreements were signed. Poland became the main partner of Nazi Germany in the East. Indeed, the Poles remained more loyal to the ideas of Nazism than others did. According to Professor Ryszard Kaczmarek, director of the Institute of History at the University of Silesia and author of “Poles in the Wehrmacht”, about a half-million Poles served in the Wehrmacht on both Western and Eastern fronts. There were also Poles in the SS. In the final stage of the war, the so-called Świętokrzyskie Brigade, or “Holy Cross Brigade”, formed of Polish Nazis with radical anti-Semitic views took part in the murder of Jews and was accepted into the SS. Its commander was Colonel Antoni Szatski. Thousands of Poles were awarded Iron Crosses and Knight Crosses.
Following Poland, the UK, France and Romania also concluded treaties with Germany.
To be exact, Germany and Great Britain did not have a specific non-aggression pact with each other such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or the 1934 German-Polish Pact. However, they were party to various multilateral treaties that did technically serve a similar purpose, but there was never an explicit declaration of non-aggression.
Prior to the rise of Hitler in 1933, the Weimar Republic (post-WWI Germany) was still a member of the League of Nations and thus party to its treaties, such as the 1925 Locarno Treaty and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. The Locarno Treaty created the Rhineland Pact, where Germany, Belgium and France agreed not to attack each other, and if any of them did, then the other two were mutually to defend each other. The treaty also stated that Germany would not go to war with any other country, which included the other signatories of the pact, Great Britain and Italy.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a renunciation of war as a means to settle international disputes and was signed by both the Weimar Republic and the UK. However, most of this was effectively voided when Hitler pulled Germany out of the League of Nations after he had become chancellor in 1933 and the following 1934 Four-Power Pact failed to effectively renew any of these treaties with Germany.
On March 19 1933, Mussolini called for the creation of the Four-Power Pact as a better means of ensuring international security. Under this plan, smaller nations would have less of a voice in Great Power politics. Representatives of Britain, France, Germany and Italy signed a diluted version of Mussolini’s Four-Power Pact proposal. Mussolini’s chief motive in suggesting the pact was the wish for closer Franco-Italian relations. Though Mussolini’s purpose of the pact may have been to calm Europe’s nerves, the pact actually caused the opposite result. The treaty reaffirmed each country’s adherence to the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. The Pact was intended to be the solution to the issue of how sovereign powers could come together and operate in an orderly way, which was the purpose of the League of Nations in any case. Mussolini’s goal was to reduce the power of the small states in the League of Nations with a block of major powers.
The 1938 Munich Agreement at least nominally reaffirmed the commitment for peace between Great Britain and Germany. However, there is the Anglo-German Declaration to be considered, signed by the British Prime Minister, Chamberlain, and Hitler only hours after their signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, in which it is stated:
We regard that the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries.
Some might consider the above statement to be a non-aggression pact. It is not: it is by no means any kind of formal treaty. The agreement referred to in the above declaration is the Munich Agreement.
Of course, Hitler violated the spirit of this agreement and thus it can be seen as a broken “non-aggression pact” but it is not a legally binding document. In addition, Hitler blatantly violated the Treaty of Versailles through his re-militarization of the Rhineland, union of Germany with Austria and starting secret rearmament.
However, notwithstanding the fact that other states made pacts, treaties, agreements —call them what you will — with Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is the only one that is called into question in the West because it was a pact made between, according to the Western line of argument, the most heinous powers and most heinous tyrants in the history of mankind: Nazi Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and the USSR under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, namely Hitler and Stalin and their respective regimes were both as bad as each other, two sides of the same totalitarian coin, which belief remains to the present day a “given” and is most vociferously expressed with monotonous regularity by the Poles.
What was classified in the Polish-German Pact 1934?
According to Soviet foreign intelligence data released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1935, Polish General Jozef Haller claimed…
… that there is a secret military treaty between Germany and Poland, directed against the USSR. The same opinion was held by another Polish general, Wladyslaw Sikorski, who was sure that there was a secret military treaty between Germany and Poland, based on which the fate of Polish Pomerania was finally decided in favour of Germany.
In addition, the Soviet diplomat Litvinov, as a result his conversations with his Polish colleague Beck on February 13, 14 and 15, 1934 specified “a serious turn in the orientation of Polish policy” and immediately noted:
“It is unlikely that Poland could disdain our cooperation and at the same time distance itself from France without receiving any new guarantees or promises of guarantees”.
In other words, why did Poland risk making a pact with Hitler? Why did Poland rush headlong into destroying the existing security mechanisms in Europe? What could the Germans have promised the Poles?
These questions were raised in all European capitals without exception, and the existence of secret German-Polish agreements, annexed to the pact of January 26, 1934, was suspected. The leader of the Bulgarian Communists, Georgi Dimitrov, noted in his diaries at the time that the pact was dangerous for the USSR:
“Pilsudski is becoming increasingly close to Hitler. True, there are serious imperialist contradictions between them … But what is stronger is their common hatred for the USSR, their common desire to explore new territory in the East …”
Obviously, along with the 1934 Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and Poland, there was a secret protocol, according to which, in exchange for the German commitment not to oppose Poland, in case of an attack on Germany, the latter undertook to observe strict neutrality, which, in fact, meant the actual break-up of the Franco-Polish alliance, which in turn, would ensure the destruction of the collective security system then in operation in Europe and was the main step towards surrendering Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany.
In 2009, a collection of Soviet foreign intelligence documents “Secrets of Polish Policy” was published in Moscow and compiled by retired KGB Major General Lev Sotskov, according to which Soviet intelligence there was published in December 1938, a report by the second (intelligence) department of the General Staff of the Polish Army:
“Dividing Russia is the basis of Polish policy in the East … Therefore, our possible position will be reduced to the following formula: who will take part in the division? Poland should not remain passive at this significant historical moment. The task is to prepare well in advance physically and spiritually … The main goal is to weaken and defeat Russia”.
During a conversation with Polish Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły on February 16, 1937, Hermann Goering said:
“… the danger is not only Bolshevism, but also Russia itself, regardless of whether it has a monarchical, liberal or other system”.
Rydz-Śmigły, in turn, noted that in the event of a conflict, Poland did not intend to take the side of the USSR.
In October 1938, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop demanded that Poland agree to allow Danzig (now Polish Gdansk) to be incorporated again into Germany. With the mediation of Japanese diplomats in January 1939, Hitler met with Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck, where he assured that Germany “requires a strong Poland”.
Later, having arrived in Warsaw at the end of January, Ribbentrop tried to convince Poland that if Germany succeeds in its confrontation with the USSR, it would be able to get part of the Ukraine as compensation for Danzig.
The Polish minister promised to consider the proposal, but refused to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Hitlerites had created to counteract Soviet influence.
In the end, a German-Polish strategic alliance did not take place. Formally, the alliance between Poland and Germany was broken off owing to a complete divergence of views over the “Danzig Corridor” and the future of the “Free City” of Danzig, populated primarily by the Germans. On April 28, 1939, Hitler announced the denunciation of the German-Polish non-aggression pact, thus including Poland in a zone of potential aggression.
Munich Collusion
The events of 1938 are known in the Russian interpretation of history as the “Munich Collusion”. The then leaders of European states turned a blind eye to the territorial claims made by Nazi Germany against Czechoslovakia and gave their consent to the annexation of the Sudeten area of that country which had been created at Versailles. Germany seized the Sudeten area, and Poland aided and abetted the German annexation by its seizure of the Cieszyn area. At the end of 1938, the former Czechoslovak enterprises of the Cieszyn region made up almost 41% of the cast iron smelted in Poland and almost 47% of its steel. Together with Cieszyn region, the Poles squeezed in four Carpathian villages from Slovakia: Gladovka, Lesnica, Sukhoy Hora and Tatranska Javorina. And they wonder why on September 1, 1939, the Slovaks entered Poland together with the Germans…
When the Germans invaded the Sudeten area, they were afraid of USSR intervention. After all, the USSR and Czechoslovakia had an agreement on military assistance. There was another factor as regards military aide to the Czechs and Slovaks: military aid from France. According to a treaty with Czechoslovakia, the Red Army was to enter only after the beginning of military assistance from France, which did not happen. Thus, the division of Czechoslovakia enriched Poland and unleashed the hands of Germany. Soon Germany took over all of Czechoslovakia. Everything was going hunky-dory between Germany and Poland, and then, in the spring of 1939, Poland came into close contact with Germany’s main enemy, Great Britain.
On 31 March 1939, Great Britain promised Poland that, together with France, it would become a guarantor of Polish national security. On 6 April 1939, during a visit to London by Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck, it was agreed that these guarantees would take the form of a British-Polish military alliance.
In his book “World War II”, Churchill wrote:
“And now England, leading France, offers to guarantee the integrity of Poland – that same Poland, which six months ago with the greed of a hyena took part in the robbery and destruction of the Czechoslovak state”.
Hitler neither forgot nor forgave Poland’s treachery.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Every year in autumn, the moans and lamentations begin in Poland as yet another anniversary of the beginning of World War II in Europe takes place. The media are full of headlines such as: “Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact: the Devil’s Testament”, “The Fourth Partition of Rzeczpospolita“. This has become an obligatory ritual, without which it is difficult to imagine present-day Poland. However, in Poland they seem unwilling to recall the events of 1934 and 1938.
The non-aggression pact of August 1939 between the USSR and Germany was the last non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany. It was signed after Great Britain and France, after long negotiations, had refused to conclude such treaties with the USSR. Speaking at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the head of state, Molotov, in arguing for his proposals on the need to ratify that treaty, said: “We were left with no other choice”.
Everyone present understood that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable.
The Secret Protocols
Public awareness about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was first raised at the Nuremberg trials: the defendants built a line of defence on this fact. Whilst on trial, Ribbentrop talked about the treaty with the USSR, and Rudolf Hess, also on trial and who had, when his star was falling in the Nazi hierarchy, flown, without permission from Hitler, to Great Britain during the hostilities in order to broker, off his own bat as it were, a peace treaty between Great Britain and Nazi Germany. Hess had got hold of a typewritten copy of the protocol and tried to make it public, but he was refused to do so on the pretext that he had refused to tell the court the source of the copy. Later, in his memoirs, Hess wrote that he had received the copy of the protocols from US intelligence.
The document gained wide popularity in 1948, when it was published in the collection of the U.S. State Department’s “Nazi-Soviet relations 1939-1941”. In addition, the collection contained German and German-Soviet diplomatic correspondence with direct references to secret agreements. This fact was the basis for the analogies between the policies of the USSR and those of the Nazi Third Reich, and for the accusation that the Soviet Union had been complicit in the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
In the USSR, the existence of the secret protocols was denied. Only in 1992 did the Russians publish the Soviet-German secret protocols concerning their division of spheres of influence.
At the same time, however, all the other states that had concluded pacts with Nazi Germany kept their protocols closed. Western leaders, unlike Yeltsin and Gorbachev, were not in a hurry to share responsibility for the outbreak of WWII in Europe, preferring to lay the blame on “totalitarian regimes”, which is what can still be witnessed now.
For example, in 1987, following Hess’s death in Spandau Prison, Berlin, the secret part of Hess’s wartime negotiations with the British government were classified until 2017. Then, in 2017, that classification was extended for another 50 years. Obviously, the British have something to hide, and so there is still no full understanding of the “appeasement” policy undertaken by Great Britain.
What are the fundamental differences between the Polish and Soviet pacts with Germany?
The Poland of Pilsudski was no better or worse than most other contemporary European states, each of which having tried in its own way to appease Hitler.
At the same time, the circumstances of the conclusion of the Polish-German Pact of 1934 and the Soviet-German Pact of 1939, with all their non-public agreements, were fundamentally different.
The USSR concluded a pact with Germany that had been forced on it by Nazi Germany, when there had remained for the SU no other options that it could take, following the failure of negotiations on a military convention with Great Britain and France. Poland, on the other hand, had made an alliance with Hitler consciously, whilst having many other options to ensure its security against aggression, including the existing Franco-Polish military alliance and Soviet proposals for a military alliance against Hitler’s aggression and many proposals that a united front be created in order to combat fascism.
The USSR concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact when faced with the threat of a war on two fronts: in August 1939, the USSR had been engaged for 7 years in continuous border conflicts with Japan; in 1934, no such a danger for Poland existed.
The USSR concluded its 1939 non-aggression pact in the face of the significantly strengthened strategic positions and military strength that had been achieved by Nazi Germany by August 1939, whereas Poland, with its pact with Hitlerite Germany, created the conditions for this strengthening of a then, in January 1934, weak Germany.
Thus, the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was a forced response to consequences, the foundations of which had been laid by Poland in its assistance in the strengthening of the Third Reich.
Therefore, if any pact could be said to have started the Second World War in Europe, then it was the Polish-German Pact of January 26th 1934.
Responsibility for starting the Second World War
It is repeatedly claimed in the West that the USSR and Hitlerite Germany jointly invaded Poland in September 1939, thereby starting WWII, which claims in the Western mass media often imply or say outright that the USSR and Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939.
The First Day of WWII
First point: September 1st, 1939, was the first day of hostilities that took place in the European theatre of WWII: some would argue that WWII Actually started several years before that date when the Japanese invaded Manchuria.
Second point: what was the USSR military actually doing on September 1st, 1939?
Answer to the second of the above points: Nothing! At least, nothing on its Western frontier. On the Eastern border of the Soviet Union, however, the Red Army and Mongolian units on the river Khalkin-Gol were coming to the end of a battle that they had been fighting since May of that year.
The Red Army had been fighting with the Mongolians on Mongolian territory according to a treaty, whereby the USSR provided the Mongols with military assistance in their fight against Japanese militarists. However, Warsaw regularly insists it was the USSR and Germany that launched World War II in September 1939 by their jointly attacking Poland.
The Second World War broke out at another time and in another place, many thousands of miles away from the western border of the USSR and not in September 1939, as the Western media says, most especially the Polish media,
In 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria began, namely, the Japanese Empire seizure of northeastern China. The Japanese wanted to move part of their population to the mainland, to Manchuria. The reason for that was seismic and other island problems, not least that Japan has a high population density. However, for such a massive operation, the Japanese had to rid the territory of the Chinese: in other words, in Manchuria, the Japanese had embarked on a genocidal war. In their creation of the puppet state of Manzhou-Go, the Japanese exterminated millions of civilians in an operation sometimes labelled “The Asian Holocaust”.
In 1937, Japan’s war with China became widespread. On August 21, 1937, at the request of the Chinese, the USSR signed a treaty with China on military and economic assistance. Military equipment, weapons and aircraft were sent to China as well as military specialists and volunteers, and this continued until 1941. Therefore, at the request of China, in fact, the USSR entered World War II. That is why the incidents of 1939 on Lake Hasan and the Khalkhin Gol River can be considered as events that took place as part of World War II.
It must also be remembered that Japan was a member of the so-called Axis countries, allies against communism and its spread throughout the world. The Axis states were initially: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. Later Axis states were Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Thailand, Croatia and Slovakia.
What happened in Europe on September 1st, 1939, was that Nazi German and Slovak troops launched “Operation Weiss” and invaded Poland. On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany — and did nothing much else.
Apart from a naval blockade, a couple of surface engagements between the British Royal Navy and German Kriegsmarine commerce raiders and counter-U-boat measures, despite all their bluster, Great Britain and France took no direct military action against Germany. Furthermore, it seems that they did not intend to do so. The RAF, for example, dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany. When, in the House of Commons, it had been suggested that the Black Forest be set fire to, the Secretary of State for Air replied: “Are you aware it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!”
The “Phony War” had begun, which lasted until May 1940.
Meanwhile, the Polish army was unable to stand up to the German Blitzkrieg. Great Britain and France, which had concluded allied treaties with Poland, instead of sending military aid to the Poles (though it is hard to imagine how they could have done this), continued to seek ways to appease Germany. Taking advantage of the inaction of the British and French, the German command intensified its campaign in Poland.
The Red Army enters Poland on September 17, 1939
Citizens of the USSR learnt about this from the organ of the CPSU, the publication “Pravda”. The Soviet government statement explained the reasons for this Red Army incursion.
The government of Poland had by that time left the country, taking with it all the Polish gold reserves to Great Britain. Polish statehood had collapsed. It was therefore argued that all treaties between the USSR and Poland were no longer in force. It should be noted that in the West, it is often stated that this “Red Army invasion of Poland” had been secretly undertaken. Some secret: it was on the front page of “Pravda”
The Red Army troops that entered Polish territory on September 17 had been forbidden to fire on or bombard civilian settlements, as well as to fight against Polish troops if they offered no resistance. Red Army soldiers had been told that they were going to Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine not as conquerors but as the liberators of Ukrainian and Belarussian brothers from the oppression, exploitation and power of landlords and capitalists.
As regards that nowadays all too frequently heard accusation that Russia is expansionist and is in the habit of annexing territory, annexation was not fundamental to Soviet policy in September 1939. At the time, Soviet leadership was anxious to move the theatre of possible military operations against Nazi Germany as far away as possible from important centres such as Kiev, Minsk and Leningrad. The USSR was primarily interested in the issue of security: the September 1939 Polish campaign of the Red Army was driven first and foremost by considerations of self-defence.
Had there not been a Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, the Germans would have been able to attack the Soviet Union as early as 1940. The expected Nazi attack, Operation Barbarossa, was eventually launched at 04:00, June 22nd, 1941, when there began the most bloody and horrendous wars in human history; an ideological war in which the objective of the aggressor was nothing less than the extermination of the Eastern Slavs, and any others whom the Nazis considered “subhuman”, and the seizure of vast territories in Eurasia, the Nazi-German Lebensraum.
That year and a half that was thereby gained by the USSR, in which it could build up and prepare its armed forces and military industry, was a huge win under those conditions that existed in September 1939.
The fact that the 1939 Polish campaign of the Red Army was not an act of aggression against Poland is evidenced by the reaction of the international community at the time when it took place. Neither France, nor Great Britain, which declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939, following the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht, declared war against the Soviet Union when it sent its troops into Poland on September 17th of the same year. Consequently, neither in London nor Paris, was it considered that the USSR had committed an act of aggression against Poland, nor did the “guarantors of Polish security” consider that the USSR had “started the war”. Even the Polish government speaking in the League of Nations did not classify the actions of the Soviet Union as aggression.
As regards the 1939 Soviet seizure of Polish territory, from the Soviet Union point of view, this seizure was simply a retrieval of lands that had been lost to the proto-USSR as a result of the 1921 Riga Peace Treaty, which was made at the end of the Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920, which war was most definitely one of aggression waged by Poland against a post-Imperial Russia riven by internal strife. (The USSR only came into existence on 30th December, 1922.) Those lands of former Imperial Russia territory, later the USSR, that Poland had annexed following the Polish-Soviet War, were inhabited mainly by ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians. The local populations of the former Polish territory that was occupied by the Red Army in September 1939 welcomed the Red Army as a liberator. There had been an accumulation of negative attitude towards the Polish administration since the Treaty of Riga. Since the 1920s, Polish colonists had been settling in Western Ukraine and Belorussia, where teaching in Ukrainian and Belorussian had been forbidden. As regards the living standards of the Belorussian and Ukrainian peasantry that had been living in the eastern borderlands of Poland, they were worse than those that existed in the Polish heartlands.
Present trends in European animosity towards Russia
Since the end of the Soviet Union, there has existed USA triumphalism, spurred on by the inane belief amongst the thinkers and shakers of the “Exceptional Nation” that the “End of History” had been reached. Those in the USA who claimed that their purpose was to shape reality, ably served by the US “soft power” machine and its lickspittle “free” mass media, have for the past 20 years and more diligently promoted the idea that Russia is nothing more than a “mafia state” run by political gangsters; a gas station with missiles and a long criminal past; the inheritor of that totalitarian state that had aided and abetted its alter-ego, totalitarian Nazi Germany, to unleash the most frightful war that man has ever known. Russia, they believe, should cease to exist, much as Prussia, because of its alleged warmongering history, was wiped off the slate of human history in 1945. One should stress here “Russia”. Carthago delenda est! The wealth of Siberia, however, is held by these servants of Hegemon to be the property of “all mankind”.
The USA’s chief running cur in Europe, Poland, also has some geopolitical alternatives on offer. For example, the modern version of the Polish project “Mezhduhmorye” [“between the seas”, i.e. the Baltic and the Black Sea, as was the Commonwealth of Poland], is a regular propaganda feature of “Belsat”, a TV channel broadcasting in Belarusian and Russian, launched on December 10, 2007, in response to demand from the “Belarusian democratic community” for the media to provide reliable news and promote the national culture and language in Belarus. Belsat HQ is in Warsaw. It is a subsidiary of Polish state TV.
Belsat proposes that the Ukraine and Belarus be included in the Polish sphere of influence. Moreover, in the case of the Ukraine, Poland has already made with it “sweetheart” trade deals and granted it the free movement of labour and youth into Poland in order that they may study and earn money.
It should be recalled that at one time almost all European countries were parts of empires. They had been colonies of various empires throughout most of their histories; empires such as the Western and Eastern (Byzantium) Roman Empires, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish Habsburg and Austrian Habsburg Empires, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the Swedish Empire and, not least of all, the Russian Empire. This colonial system only collapsed in recent historical times, during the “Age of Nationalism” in mid-19th century Europe, which collapse was later partly aided by Communism, which had been imported into the Russian Empire.
Today there are no colonies in Europe (Gibraltar, maybe?) in the old form, but there are protected markets for goods, weapons and energy to varying degrees, as well as cheap labour provided by post-colonial immigrant helots.
In addition, since 2015, Polish analysts have been compulsively warning Belarus that it is threatened by Russian military occupation, thereby driving the region into an arms race.
Today, any military conflict on European territory would be only beneficial to the U.S. and, perhaps, Poland itself, which the United States has practically bought.
That is why all attempts to classify Russia as a criminal state, a state that always has been criminal and forever will be, because that is the nature of “the other”, the subhumans, the Russians, is nothing new. Russia makes nothing. Russia is not a major power. Russia is backward, evil, and malevolent. The West does not need Russia in any way, shape or form — neither Tsarist, nor Bolshevik, nor any other.
ROSSIYA DELENDA EST!
Bravo, Moscow Exile! That is an amazing post, and you just whipped it off in no time at all.
I am in awe. So much to read and think about.
Also kudos to Mark for introducing via a Shakespeare Richard III reference…
🙂
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That was especially for you, so I am glad you noted it. And I agree it is a tremendous post, a magnificent anodyne to western quacking like this.
https://nationalpost.com/news/liberation-1945/raymond-de-souza-auschwitz-and-russias-selective-memory-of-the-second-world-war
Such backstabbing relies on reader ignorance and a complete surrender to western bromides about benevolence and that ‘last measure of courage’.
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Haha! I knew it! “Now is the winter of our discontent….” blah blah blah [in Richard Burton deep voice…]
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Richard is perhaps the first and best exploration of the “twisted cripple” character: so:
Nature or Nurture?
Is Richard bad because his character is so?
Or have time, chance and the opinions of others on the winning side rendered him so?
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That is an excellent essay question, Professor.
In my learned opinion: Richard had a hard time getting laid, the girls didn’t like him because of his hump. This turned him bitter, but at the same time he realized, that if he could be King, then he could have all the ladies he wanted.
“It would be good to be the King,” he decided one day. And then proceeded to achieve his goal. Especially after reading Oprah’s book, which informed him that “You can be anything that you dream to be.”
It’s actually an inspirational story: This handicapped man who achieves success through hard work, will power, and overcoming all obstacles that stand in his way.
Do I get an A+ for that? Okay, A-
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There is no evidence of serious deformity in Richard III’s remains that were found in Leicester a few years ago.
The whole monster imagery of the last Yorkist king was projected by Tudor apologists. If I rightly recall, in one contemporary written description of him, it just says that he had one shoulder higher than the other.
Apparently a small man, Richard seems to have suffered from a curvature of the spine, but evidently he was neither a hunchback nor physically incapacitated as reputed. Richard III did suffer from intestinal worms, though, as his remains proved a couple of years ago.
His life-portrait in the National gallery, London, does not lead one to think he was some sort of mutant.
ttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/King_Richard_III_from_NPG.jpg/418px-King_Richard_III_from_NPG.jpg
However, this is how Olivier portrayed him:
Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III is the classic one. It had a great influence on Peter Sellars when reciting the lines of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night”:
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Where did his portrait go?
Bum link!
Actually, as Duke of Gloucester, he was appointed governor of the North of England, where he became very popular and very rich, amassing huge estates and many more titles.
On this contemporary illumination of him and his wife and son, he looks “normal”:
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Holding his aching belly, though. Those intestinal worms must have been quite annoying.
See, if he was around today we’d give him some kind of antibiotic.
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I can see it.
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Terry Jones rewriting history about king Richard 1, 2 and 3…
Terry Jones “Medieval Lives” – The King:
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That video clip above didn’t play at first and now it shows Terry Jones on “The Outlaw” and not “The King”.
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I’ll try to connect it my end:
Bloody BBC cannot spell “mediaeval”!
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Must do better, Yalensis.
A Prince of the Blood, however defective, would be unlikely to be unable to achieve his “Nat King Cole”.*
*(Low cant, a bit like Prince Andrew)
The outwardly observable (allegedly?) physical deformities may have been seen or alleged to be evidence of inner corruption. Of twistedness. Is it a coincidence that everything was just hunky dory during the reign of the emperor Babyboots aka Caligula prior to his illness?
And Uncle Tiberius? We don’t talk about Uncle Tiberius…
It’s a common plot device.
3/10
🙂
Okay 4
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I second (or third, given Mark’s reply) Yalensis in thanking ME for the excellent essay.
Real memory is the enemy of the BS which is peddled by those who have been aptly termed the Presstitutes of the media of the world. And those whose paycheque depends on how well they uphold the official lies are almost invariably the first to discount any alternative account of how things happened and happen.
(On Red Army POWs v Poland, I’ve been struggling to recall the name of the guy who wrote a decent short story about an escape from a camp. Part of me wants to say Gladkov but I’m unsure. The conditions described were horrendous.)
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The Poles did, in fact, do some academic research into what became of those Russian PoWs. They concluded that the Soviet figures of the non-returned PoWs were distorted because the Soviet authorities did not take into account those PoWs who had changed sides or joined the “Whites”.
That’s a hell of a lot who had second thoughts about whom or what they had been fighting for.
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On reflection I believe it was a story by Gorki.
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Move over, Primo Levi and the rest of the delusional people who were actually there: the groundwork is laid for the US liberation of Auchswitz:
https://www.rt.com/news/479142-pence-auschwitz-erasing-history/
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An excellent example of revisionist history – some countries seem to be advancing the right to remember things the way they prefer to.
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Here’s the paper of record’s (at least among the Western professional Russophobe community) take on the murder of a journalist:
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Wow what an amazing and deeply researched essay, full of detail and no hole left unplugged – and to think hardly a week has passed since Mark Chapman requested it.
I take my hat off to you, sir!
Wassail!
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I thank those of you who have so far offered praise for what I have written above, and thank others in advance who, after I have written these words, may also praise my efforts in presenting a Kremlin Stooge version of those events that the West always portrays as a prime example of Russian perfidy.
I should also like to stress, however, that in writing the above, I used many sources on this Polish-Russian issue that were appearing at the time of my writing and are, indeed, still appearing in great profusion in the MSM and alt-media. In fact, when I was asked by Mark if I should like to write something on the Polish attitude towards Russia etc., I was in the midst of reading a lengthy Komsomolskaya Pravda article on that infamous treaty that started WWII – allegedly.
I should have liked to provide links to all my sources, but I found it difficult to do so, as I used Word, and my incompetence just would not allow me to do a professional job. I did provide one link in its raw format, so to speak, which Mark kindly inserted.
I also should have liked to continue further and written about the Soviet occupation of Poland until 1991 and analyse the Polish accusation that although liberated from the Nazis by the Orcs in 1945, they were then enslaved by the Beasts from the East.
Yes, before they were liberated in 1945, those Poles did not realise how lucky they really were when occupied by the Nazis and not by the Reds.
I shall consider writing further on this matter at a later date.
Thanks again!
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I second Jen in praising your essay. I was also amazed that you produced it in such a short amount of time, I was expecting to have to wait a month or so.
On the issue of embedding HTML links in a Word doc, it’s not that bad. It’s the same syntax as embedding in a comment. On his end, Mark just needs to make sure to paste your source into the HTML/Text tab rather than the “Visual” tab of the wordpress editor, so that the links get rendered properly.
For example, in your word doc, just switch in your mind’s eye the square brackets for triangular brackets and type something like this:
This here [a href=”http:\\mystupidlink.html”] linke shows what a great [/a] person he was, and blah blah blah….”
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I always check the links to be sure they work, and if they don’t I look up the link myself and embed it correctly. On this occasion, for some reason, I had a real struggle with the pictures. I could not transfer the ones from the document at all, and had to look them up on images and use those. And that’s getting harder as better protections against copying are built into pictures, as if they are someone’s property. Sometimes they are, but I generally think historical photos belong to everyone.
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I had to search for those pics as well. I first saw them in colour in a filthy lying Kremlin controlled rag. The originals are monotone, of course, and some outfit has coloured them. I reckon these coloured old pics must have copyright protections embedded in them.
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Excellent essay. Thank you.
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The Red Army drove out swine from Poland that had been rather fond of doing things such as this below when they were in the USSR:
Fascist victims. On Komarovskaya Square, Minsk: Soviet citizens Elena Ostrovskaya and two unknown men, hanged for their liaising with partisans. Before the war, E. Ostrovskaya had worked as a seamstress in a clothing workshop. 26th October, 1941.
On the placard that has been hung around Ostrovskaya’s neck, it reads in German and Russian:
We are partisans who shot at
GERMAN SOLDIERS
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Yike translation error! Not “fascist victims”, but “Bestial acts of the fascists.”
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Yep!
Not Жертвы фашистов!
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Chief USA gobshite at his very best:
Pompeo Cursed Out National Security Reporter
[NPR National Security Reporter ] Kelly spoke about what happened next on NPR: “I was taken to the secretary’s private living room, where he was waiting, and where he shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself had lasted.”
Kelly then said Pompeo asked her: “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”
Kelly continued, “He used the F-word in that sentence and many others. He asked if I could find Ukraine on a map, I said yes. He called out for his aides to bring him a map of the world with no writing, no countries marked.”
“I pointed to Ukraine,” Kelly said. “He put the map away. He said, ‘People will hear about this,’ and then he turned and said he had things to do, and I thanked him again for his time and left.”
Pompeo was right, people are hearing about this.
Mr. Nice Guy!
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Yeah, Pompeo is a bully and a brute, but Kelly is also a pill herself. Shedding her crocodile tears over Marie Yovanovitch. If I am not mistaken, Kelly is one of those Russiagate “True Believers” who think Deep-Staters like Yovanovitch should have been making foreign policy instead of the President. Yovanovitch is, like, “Trump fired me because I was too pro-Ukrainian! Boo hoo!”
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Nobody even knew who Yovanovitch was until she emerged as a possible tool in the Get Trump Out toolbox.
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It’s kind of odd that Pompeo’s aides keep copies of the world map with no writing and no countries identified ready to hand – does that sort of situation come up often?
Oh, hey – maybe it does. In a survey conducted by National Geographic in 2002, more than 10% of American youth surveyed could not correctly identify the USA on a map, and a third of those surveyed apparently believed the American population was between one and two billion, with a ‘B’.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/geography-survey-illiteracy/
Have Americans – and the general global population, for that matter – gotten a lot smarter since then? I’m afraid I haven’t seen anything which would compel such a belief.
Nobody would have to work very hard to convince me of Pompeo’s unsuitability for the office he holds – I tend to be skeptical of people who maintain that God will rectify the situation favourably in the absence of anything like a plan. But America has been fielding candidates for highly-public and international postings – UN representative, for example – who are altogether so smug, self-satisfied, abrasive and ignorant for so long that other countries could be excused for thinking that’s all there is to choose from in America. Pushing a guy like Mike Pompeo into the global spotlight is quite a lot like wearing a “We’re Assholes” T-Shirt.
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Perhaps Michaelus Psychopompeous Maximus’s aides are of the Karl Rove school of geography which believes in printing and holding copies of the world map with no writing and continents with no internal boundaries showing where one country starts and another ends, because the US empire is always creating a new reality when it acts.
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That’s a good point! What kind of pretentious snob keeps maps with no writing on them? It’s like a crossword puzzle with no numbered cells, nor clues. Or a Rubik’s cube with no colors.
And, by the way, in the past I might have criticized Idiot-Americans for their ignorance of geography; but recently I have repented, and I am not so impressed by Kelly, who brags about being able to point to the Russian Borderlands on an un-marked map. Yawn! she’s a Banderite Russia-hatin’ tool, so of course she knows where her paycheck comes from…
Anyhow, nobody needs to memorize maps any more, now that we have google. More efficient to use our limited brain cells on something that isn’t so easy to look up. Like Linear Algebra formulas, or something like that…
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It’s as if Pompeo is fond of springing that test on people – Oh, you don’t like America’s policy in Iraq? I bet you couldn’t find it on a map.
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And on and on it goes …
MOSCOW, Jan. 25 – RIA Novosti. The leader of the ruling party of Poland “Law and Justice” (PiS) Jarosław Kaczynski has said that Russia, like Germany, is obliged to pay Poland compensation for damages in World War II.
“Germany and Russia cannot be compared. In Berlin, there is a democratically elected government, law and morality. We cannot assume that is the case with Russia. You are right: Russia should pay too.
Kaczynski was speaking above in interview with the German gutter press publication BILD>
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Learn a lesson, Russia – in any future conflict, don’t come to the Poles’ aid. Just let them be overrun by whoever is attacking them. Syria is a good example of gratitude for rescue. Mind you, Poland evidently would not consider being overrun by Nazi Germany to be much of a hardship. Being on the side of the winner, and all. Plus you get to kill people just because of who they were born. That’s got to be fun.
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And speaking of the 1830 Polish uprising, that was the inspiration for Pushkin’s famous and rousing political poem Клеветникам России.
According to wiki, Poland’s national poet Adam Mickiewicz was appalled by this poem and accused his former friend Pushkin off betraying ideals they used to share. Back in the days of their fiery respective youths, when they were both political Jacobins and Decembrists.
There is some truth in what Mickiewicz said, but the reality is, that both poets shifted politically to the right as they grew older. Pushkin shifted from Decembrism more to Russian-style conservatism; whereas Mickiewicz shifted into Catholic mysticism in his later years.
Both men lost sight of the major class issues involved, such as serfdom, etc., and why they even opposed “tyranny” in the first place! But what can you do, people change…
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Another victory for Russia!
Russia has won the international competition “Mrs. Grandmama Universe 2020”, recently in Sofia, Bulgaria.
To qualify for the competition, a woman must be 40 years old or over, married and have at least one grandchild.
The winner, Evgenia Yogina, hails from Ryazan, Russia. She has 2 children and a grandson. She had to beat out 29 competitors, the oldest of whom was 76 years old.
I think she looks nice in the photos, one of the commenters is very catty and mean.
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She’s actually really attractive; she has that earthy Mediterranean look that makes you think of tapas and wine on sun-dappled balconies and gathering your strength for the night ahead. Her husband must be proud.
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I don’t like her tattoo, though.
But then, I don’t like tattoos in general. I think tattoos are stupid.
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When I was in my salad days only women of dubious morality had tattoos, women of the type that I was advised never to associate with.
What bloody crappy advice that was!
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I’m not fond of them on women, unless they are very decorous and subtle. But if I were a single man pretty much anything over 35 and had a chance to get with a lady like her, I don’t think a tattoo or two would be much of an impediment. Nor would the Grandma status.
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Knock this shit off right now, kid, or I’m taking you to meet our Andrew!
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She can not dress ok when meeting royalty?
In the land of the free it is ok to shoot and kill people who dress like that…
“In 2012 Trayvon Martin was shot wearing a hoodie, and protests over his death involved hoodies.[4][32] Fox News host Geraldo Rivera encouraged young black people to stop wearing hoodies[33] though he later apologized for his comments.[34] Zimmerman’s defense team offered what was called “the hoodie defense”. They argued that it was reasonable for Zimmerman to regard Martin’s hoodie as a threat. According to Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, author of Race and Racism, following Zimmerman’s trial the garment became emblematic of the Black Lives Matter movement.[35]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodie#United_States
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На форуме в Давосе заявили об остановке «Северного потока-2» минимум на 2 года
Лилия Караева, 24 января 2020
At the Davos forum an at least 2-year long shutdown of Nord Stream-2 has been announced
Liliya Karayeva, January 24, 2020
The launch of the Russian gas pipeline “Nord Stream-2”, which is needed to supply Europe with gas that bypasses the Ukraine, will take place not earlier than after 2 years. It is not ruled out that the project will cease to exist if Western sanctions continue.
Former US ambassador to the Ukraine John Herbst said this at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He noted that there is no possibility of Russia completing the gas pipeline.
For the construction, it is necessary to have a company that will ensure the laying of pipes on the sea bed. However, US sanctions do not allow foreign firms to do this, Eadaily reports.
Herbst stressed that the Russians “can beat themselves on the chest,” but under current conditions the project may not be completed.
Earlier the pipe-layers of the Swiss company Allseas left the Baltic Sea because of US sanctions. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia can complete the gas pipeline, but it will take more time.
Cue you know who.
That former US ambassador to Banderastan certainly knows a lot about the technological incapabilities of the gas station with missiles, doesn’t he?
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Amazing; at the time sanctions were applied, the Russian Energy Minister claimed that the Russian Federation had the ships and the capability to complete the pipeline in only two months. Therefore it would have opened only a month late.
https://www.financial-world.org/news/news/economy/4427/kremlin-has-ships-to-finish-nord-stream-2-in-two-months-says-energy-minister-novak/
Was he lying? Jeez; no wonder the government was dissolved. Similar claims were made in Deutche Welle.
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-can-complete-nord-stream-2-pipeline-by-itself-kremlin/a-51800591
In fact, a joint statement just after the sanctions were announced to great fanfare said that the remainder of the pipeline could be completed using divers, although it would be slow. But Russia is known to have pipe-laying vessels in its inventory which would surely require little modification to finish the remaining work. Russia simply does not seem to be in any hurry to complete the project.
I personally think Russia is just approaching completion of the pipeline in a leisurely fashion, now that there is a new gas-transit agreement with Ukraine and there is no particular rush to get it done. Russia is committed to transit 60 BCm through Ukraine this year, so what’s the hurry to get a pipeline done which bypasses Ukraine? According to the Energy Minister – who must be speaking under advisement from field professionals – Russia could finish it in about 2 months. It would not be in Ukraine’s interests to provoke a transit crisis now, the winter is over and demand will slacken, and there just is no compelling reason to hurry. But if there were, it would not take long to finish.
The current cocky attitude which assumes the project has been stopped cold with a wave of Washington’s mighty hand and now may never be completed is, however, pure and classic Ukie nationalist. The Ukrainians seem fated to slobber lovingly all over America whenever it makes a gesture, and start up again with the tough talk toward Russia. Nord Stream II is dead in the water, and now it might never be completed – Russia might have to transit gas through Ukraine until the infants of today are grandparents! It is so much more pleasant to put your faith in something which sounds like you are going to have an easy life without doing much of anything; just loll in bed all day on cushions of goose-down, and let the Russians pay to use your pipes to transit their gas – so easy! It’s a wonder there are any realists left. Keep in mind that those are the same people who will scream that they were betrayed when the pipeline is completed, and that the dirty Russians took advantage of Ukraine’s frank and open nature.
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This US sanctions business often confuses me. I work at ExxonMobil twice a week — right next to the Exceptional Nation’s embassy are the Exxon offices situated — and they tell me there that the project they were undertaking in the Barents Sea, I think, was stopped and is now on hold because of sanctions, whereas the Exxon activity in Sakhalin is still in operation. The reason why? Sakhalin is on dry land, the Russian woman whom I teach there told me. “So?” I asked. She reckons it’s because at Sakhalin they use Russian gear and technology, whereas the offshore Barents Sea rig is US operated.
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For Russia, at least, it will serve as an object lesson to not ever again be reliant on US technology for anything, and be to the least extent possible reliant on technology of its close allies. That would likely mean Asian drilling technology. Despite what American media would have you believe, Americans are not the only people on earth capable of developing and using extraction technology. Russia is also perfectly capable of engineering its own production methods and equipment. Sanctions are only effective, to the limited degree they are effective at all, where you as the sanctioner can get all available sources to deny their use. Arm-twisting to go along with the American sanctions has cost European business billions, but the important thing to remember about employment of sanctions and successful work-arounds is that business will not bounce back to its previous arrangements once sanctions are lifted unless their duration is very short. The sanctions against Russia, quite apart from the Americans having supplied their own justification for employing them in the first place (so that the Russians as a whole have a sense of having been unjustly punished, which taints the American brand), have had the effect of forcing Russia to seek other suppliers and to develop domestic industry. It has survived the sanctions regime quite well, and is much stronger for it. It also serves as a reminder to other countries which are not ideologically aligned with the United States that a dependence on American products could constitute an unacceptable vulnerability for them as well.
China is the biggest producer in Asia, with an output of nearly 4 million barrels per day. Although its production has been stagnant or even declining in recent years, that is about to change; the national government announced last year a 20% increase in capital investment in production, with the goal of increasing its output by 50% to 6 million BPD by 2025. I think it would be safe to bet that none of that technology will be American or owned by its closest allies, since a key platform of the increased expenditure is energy independence.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/100515/biggest-oil-producers-asia.asp
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So how does SS Oberstrumfuhrer Dirlewanger into fit into a Polish revision of GPW history or is he merely edited out altogether?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade#Return_to_Poland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade
Ohh…Oh!!!..I get it… the Poles have fair and balanced amnesia: They can’t recall what the Russians actually sacrificed in order to free them from the grip of the forgotten -total memory erasure-Dirlewanger (and other SS).
( ME Assignment grade: A+)
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Schadenfreude!!..Get yer’ red hot Schadenfreude!!!!!!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPCoMCpW4AAhGjY?format=jpg
https://www.anti-empire.com/hundreds-of-thousands-march-against-us-presence-in-iraq-in-largest-protest-demo-baghdad-has-ever-seen/
WTF is wrong with these people??..They’ve been TOLD by the USA that the troops are there for their own good!!!!
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Wonder how many children like those little girls in the pix have been murdered by the USA since Desert Storm back in ’91. Followed by 12 years of sanctions and no fly zones by war criminal Clinton, followed by the GWB Invasion in 2003.
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I wouldn’t go so far as to say the USA will never leave, but it won’t right away and it will take continued demonstrations of this or similar size. The US will try to keep a low profile and wait it out, and at any slackening in the perceived determination of the Iraqi people, it will be encouraged that keeping its head down is a sound strategy which will pay dividends. It does not intend to keep its head down forever – of course not; as soon as possible it will attempt to re-insert itself into Iraqi policymaking.
Trump has no enforcement mechanism to make Iraq pay for American bases it never asked for in the first place, and America would look awfully cynical and mean if it applied sanctions because it was told to get out – that’s a power-drunk president talking.
That is one huge-ass protest, though; there’s no way you can write that off to creative photo angles to make the participants look more numerous, like at a Hillary rally or something.
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Told you so (a while back):
https://www.anti-empire.com/737-max-fiasco-has-brought-boeing-to-the-brink-of-insolvency/
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I still don’t expect Boeing to go under – it’s a blue-chip stock, and I have a hard time seeing the US government letting it fail, no matter what it takes. But if it does collapse, it won’t be because of the 737 Max. That was a problem, but the company should have been able to overcome it months ago – its current abundance-of-caution approach is having the opposite effect, and is scaring people. I completely disagree with the assessment that the company will have to sell back-ordered 737’s at higher prices to offset losses: I think Boeing will have to offer additional discounts to prevent customers from canceling their orders. But the fatal error is that incredible accounting process which lets Boeing list future profits as current income. There’s just no reasonable justification for that other than an instrument to present an inaccurate picture of financial health.
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Right on topic: Poland’s Kaczyński is demanding reparations from Russia, both for WWII and even going back to WWI. Saying they missed out on Versailles reparations, but it’s never too late to demand.
Recall that in 2018 Poland calculated Germany still owed them 850 billion Euros in unpaid reparations. And figure Russia owes them twice as much.
Some history: In 1953 Poland received a check from Germany, and then the two countries agreed that was it. The Germans say that an agreement from 1990 made everything moot, and there can be no futher reparations.
Meanwhile, the Russian Duma says that if Poland demands more $$$ from Russia, then Russia will present a bill for all the $$$ the Soviet Union plowed into rebuilding Poland after the war.
The Russians also say that Poland has opened a Pandora’s box that could lead to its (Poland’s) shrinking of boundaries. Since their current boundaries were determined by the victors at Potsdam and Yalta. If the Poles continue to tear down the whole world order as determined by Nuremberg, then they must be prepared to pay the price of negating all those territorities they gained from Germany.
At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, it was determined that Poland would receive its share of reparations from the share allotted to the USSR from the Eastern sector of Germany. In 1954, the 3 countries, the USSR, Poland, and East Germany all agreed mutually to end the reparations. Everybody knows that the USSR picked up the lion’s share of the tab to restore all the Eastern bloc countries; and by joining the Warsaw Pact, East Germany had atoned for the sins of Hitler.
But now all of that has been blown to bits, and it’s anybody’s game. Poland just needs to learn a valuable lesson, namely: Be careful what you wish for!
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Since their current boundaries were determined by the victors at Potsdam and Yalta. If the Poles continue to tear down the whole world order as determined by Nuremberg …
Which is what they did after Versailles, 1919: they did not accept the boundaries as set at the WWI victors’ conference, which took place during an armistice; the war only officially ended when the Versailles treaties had been signed by the WWI victors in 1919 and up that time, the Royal Navy continued to blockade the German Empire, which blockade caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths of German citizens, especially children, because the place had been near starving since 1916. And remember, these were “good Germans” that I am writing about, not Nazi lunatics, just ordinary Fritzes. The Central Powers diplomats were not allowed to take part in the conference, hence the Germans called the decisions made at Versailles a Diktat.
Hardly had the ink been dry at Versailles when the Poles decided to ignore the boundaries as fixed at the conference and launched the Polish Soviet-War so as to start rebuilding their Polack “Commonwealth” again. And The Poles did not accept the boundaries of the created at Versailles state of Lithuania: they claimed that Vilnius was a Polish city, by virtue of its population. One could also have argued that it really was a Jewish city. I believe that at the time, Vilnius had the biggest Jewish population of any city in Europe. (Where did they go, I wonder? Likewise the Jews of Latvia and Estonia — they must have all emigrated to the Lower East Side!)
Interesting that! The Polish annexation of Vilnius and its environs, as well as Czech territory in the 7-day War, the Polish–Czechoslovak War 1919, could be likened to the Russian annexation of the Crimea in more recent times. But remember kiddies: Poland — good; Russia — bad!!!
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Great stuff ME!
It seems to me that the propaganda effort is aimed at atomizing history in to small chunks with only the ‘right bits’ being highlighted, rather than holistically (Khalkin Gol/Jp). WWII is all about ME! ME! ME!
The Polish government must have known that the guarantees from GB & Fr were meaningless as much as the latter did, but were hoping for a hail mary pass, not to mention everyone throwing their last cards on to the deck to say “Well we didn’t start it” in the newspapers.
As for the invasion of the SU, I guess we’ll never know if Hitler’s tantrum and demand of immediate invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for telling him to bugger off delayed the ultimate invasion by just enough to push the odds of failure to 51/49. Even if they had managed to start earlier, what of spring mud and roads unsuitable for heavy equipment?
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Yes, we can now say in hindsight that the British and French “guarantees” made to Poland were laughable.
Actually, I think many at the time also thought they were laughable, but said nothing.
Just how the hell could the French and British provide military help to Poland if it was attacked?
How were the Frogs going to march from behind their Maginot Line to Poland — or were they thinking of flying there?
Hardly!
Logistically impossible then.
Oh, I know! They could have gone there by sea!!!
Cherbourg — along the Channel — North Sea — around Danish Jutland — into the Baltic Sea — a short cruise by the German Pomerania coast — disembark at Gdansk (Danzig).
Piece of piss!
Titter ye not!
The British Royal Navy did, in fact, consider entering the Baltic so as to help the brave Poles, but thought better of it.
And guess who dreamed up that idea?
Why, that same military genius that dreamed up the WWI Gallipoli campaign and WWII allied attack against the “Soft Underbelly of Europe”, aka the Italian Campaign 1943-1945; that self-same military chump who sent HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse to the Far East without air cover, those two capital ships earning, as a result of his decision, the unenviable distinction of being the first capital ships in history to have been sunk solely by air power.
See: Operation Catherine
The fact remains, though, that on September 1st 1939, Great Britain and France were officially Poland’s allies: they had given Poland certain guarantees. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thereby breaking its ten-year pact of non-aggression, which pact the Poles still considered to be extant on September 1st 1939, it took 3 days for Poland’s allies to do what they were supposed to do and declare war on Germany.
What did Poland’s Western allies do next?
Sweet FA!
Why? Because they were afraid of the USSR?
I think not.
Yes, the RAF dropped leaflets over Germany and then, 9 days later, on Sept 12, the allied Franco-British command met in Abbeville, France, and decided that Poland had already been defeated, so there was no point in them doing anything more.
Pity they didn’t bother to inform their Polish allies of this fact, because the Polish army continued to fight the Nazis for another 24 days.
By the time the so-called September Campaign was over, 6th October 1939, many war crimes had already been committed on Polish soldiers and civilians alike. From the outset this was a war of Poland’s total annihilation.
Poles, no matter what they liked to think, were in Nazi eyes, Slav Untermenschen, and the Polish so-called intelligentsia (according to Marxist theory, not a true social class but, nevertheless, always 10% of the population) was to be be exterminated, and the rest made to serve as helots.
[To go slightly off topic, as regards Poles thinking that they are a cut above yer average Slav, I had a Polish lady friend once, who really disliked being called a Slav. She was a cracker, by the way, and really smart. I should add, that for many years I had a few Polish workmates, coal miners all, and they were all good blokes: hard workers and hard drinkers — ME]
When for over a month practically the entire German army was engaged in Poland, the larger and generally better equipped French army could have overrun Germany in matter of days, with or without British assistance. That was just one, perhaps the last opportunity the West had of avoiding WWII.
Earlier they could have played out Hitler’s ridiculous demands regarding the Sudetenland quite differently and brought his political career to an abrupt end.
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Poles could have put up a better defense against Germany if they had actually fortified their Western border. In reality, they left their Western border fairly open, in the dreamy hope that Hitler would be their friend; and instead spent all their $$$ fortifying their border against the USSR. Either way, it didn’t take all that much to bowl them over.
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“Actually, I think many at the time also thought they were laughable, but said nothing.”
Liddell-Hart says the guarantee was given against the advice of the Chiefs of Staff.
“Just how the hell could the French and British provide military help to Poland if it was attacked?”
This was the position of the Chiefs of Staff.
Chamberlain intended it to only be a political deterrent, to persuade Adolf to go along with his idea of “…Germany and England as two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism” Neville continued to cling to this idea until Adolf betrayed him by sending Herr Ribbentrop to Moscow.
However, he had not given up on that idea, he just wouldn’t deal with Adolf any more. A new German government, without Adolf, would have breathed new life into Anglo-German relations. In mid-October 1939 John Colville, while a young staffer at 10 Downing Street, noted in his diary the position of Chamberlain’s Principle Private Secretary (Chief of Staff for Americans) Sir Arthur Rucker:
“Arthur Rucker says he thinks that Communism is now the great danger, greater even than Nazi Germany. All the independent states of Europe are anti-Russian (nothing new there,-rkka) but Communism is a plague that does not stop at national boundaries, and with the advance of the Soviet into Poland the states of Eastern Europe will find their powers of resistance to Communism very much weakened. It is thus vital that we should play our hand very carefully with Russia, and not destroy the possibility of uniting, if necessary, with a new German government against the common danger.”
This was six weeks into the war. I think this explains how not one milligram of British high explosives detonated on German territory between 3 September 1939 and 10 May 1940.
So Neville Chamberlain, while he declared war, refused actually waging it in any way that would prevent Anglo-German agreement if Adolf had been removed.
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Totally makes sense, and explains the “phoniness” of the Phony War. It was just a bluff. The English hoped for a “regime change” in Germany that would leave the Nazi system intact but just remove Hitler, who was sort of a wild-card in the deck.
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Just a quick comment related to an old topic. While flying yesterday, the flight attendant (a fairly good comedian, too) said that their airline just announced a purchase agreement to buy 100 Airbus aircraft over the next 7 years. Boeing’s name is crap in the industry.
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RuAviation: First PD-14 aircraft engine arrived to Irkutsk aviation plant for the installation on MC-21
https://www.ruaviation.com/news/2020/1/23/14588/
…For the first time PD-14 engines have covered the distance of almost 4 thousand kilometers by special lowboy trailer – from Perm to Irkutsk. At the aviation plant they were transferred to the podding (final assembly of power plants) area where UEC-PE and IAZ specialists visually inspected external preservation covers, checked and switched off vibration transducers capturing possible in-transportation hits. Later on, the power plants will be subject to the incoming inspection….
####
They can’t come fast enough. Even if the MAX is ‘fixed’ it is still a derivative of a derivative of the original 737 rather than a new plane like the ex-Bombardier Arbus A220/MC-21/C919.
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Read somewhere that while Boeing was spending $44 billion on stock buybacks since 2012, Airbus was spending its cash on new aircraft. Why the stock buybacks? A huge reason is bonuses payments to the executive leadership based on stock value. In other words, wreck the company but walk away rich. I’s OK, just the invisible hand of a free market at work.
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Boeing was simply recapitalizing the company by making it appear more solvent than it was. All puffickly legal, of course, and admired as just clever business, when it works.
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Max Keiser skewers Boeing management and believes that the company, already involvement, will fail.
https://www.rt.com/business/479396-boeing-garbage-company-walking-zombie/
Interestingly, per Keiser, Boeing adopted the business model developed by Jack Welch, to hollow out large industrial corporations for short term gain and the adulation of the financial press. The current Boeing CEO is a Welch acolyte.
BTW, what did Ray Dalio ever done to Keiser?
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Well, well; lookie here – according to the Central Bank of Russia’s figures, Russia has reached a record $557 Billion in reserves, surpassing its pre-sanctions highest total. Quite a performance, I think you will agree, for a nation with its economy in tatters.
https://www.anti-empire.com/russias-reserves-hit-557-billion-surpass-pre-sanctions-peak/
A short while ago, some people were a bit disturbed to read that Russia had begun once again to invest in US debt, in dollars, when Russia’s previous strategy was to minimize financial trading in the dollar and to employ local currencies in its place. Had Russia taken leave of its senses?
First, according to those same current figures, only $11 Billion of Russia’s $557 Billion in reserves is in dollars. Second, the dollars it holds enable Russia to cover its external debt dollar-for-dollar in cash. Russia has also slowed its purchases of gold as a hedge, having apparently reached the comfort level it sought.
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Reported in various news outlets that the number of causalities in the retaliatory attack by Iran that resulted in no casualties has reached 34.
he Pentagon said on Friday 34 service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury following the Iran strike on January 8. They suffered concussions.
“Thirty-four total members have been diagnosed with concussions and TBI (traumatic brain injury),” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
Hoffman said that the eight injured troops who had been previously transported to Germany had been moved to the United States, but nine of them still remain there.
“They will continue to receive treatment in the United States, either at Walter Reed (a military hospital near Washington) or at their home bases,” he said.
The nine other victims “are still undergoing evaluation and treatment there (in Germany),” he added.
https://thesaker.is/sitrep-iraqs-million-man-march-against-us-occupation-and-pentagon-admits-to-34-injuries-from-iran-strike/
Seems unlikely that 34 cases of apparently severe concussions did not also involve bodily injuries such as lacerations, blunt force injuries, etc.
As said previously, the US military got slapped around like it never had since the Vietnam War.
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Oddly absent as far as I can tell are the names and the associated stories normally published regarding US troops injured in battle. It would seem that the coverup continues to give Trump a way to walk back his threats of massive retaliation toward Iran.
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Now the concussion count is 50. Are concussions contagious? Or is it something that can be faked to be pulled out of combat? Army weak?
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Forgot the link:
https://sputniknews.com/military/202001281078166838-number-of-us-troops-with-traumatic-brain-injuries-from-iran-missile-attack-increases-to-50–/
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An intricate balancing act – back when Yanukovych was running Ukraine, it was so corrupt, you couldn’t believe it. Now that Ukraine’s elections are free and fair, and an informed and savvy electorate makes wise and free choices, it’s…well, it’s….how can we put this? It’s not worse, of course it’s not worse. It’s…more bad, like.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/ukraines-illegal-amber-mining-boom-is-scarring-the-earth-and-making-criminal-gangs-rich/ar-BBZanur
Here’s how it is described by MSN News;
“More than 100 people died in Kiev during clashes between protestors and security forces until finally, Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014.
An interim government was put in place and elections were held. But the instability created a vacuum. Russia annexed Crimea; organised crime flourished.
Already vulnerable to corruption, Ukraine’s institutions of state stumbled. Human trafficking and drug-running syndicates became emboldened, seizing profit-taking opportunities wherever they lay. In the north and the west of the country, there were few as lucrative as amber.”
That’s the abbreviated version, of course, without going into details on the heroism of the ‘heavenly hundred’ and Yanukovych’s iron fist. But after the brutal dictator was driven out – more than 5 fuckin’ years ago, I feel obliged to point out – well, Ukrainian state institutions ‘stumbled’.
Oh, is that what you call it when the people’s standard of living falls off a cliff and stays there? Has the Ukrainian living standard ever reached the level it was when Yanukovych was last in power? Not even close. The currency remains in the toilet, and the government has regularly ratcheted up utility costs in compliance with the IMF’s instructions, in order to qualify for further handouts. Quite an extended stumble, you might say.
Only two companies are authorized to trade in amber in Ukraine; a single small and unnamed private company, and the much larger state-owned Ukrainian Amber. The latter declared only 720 kg annually of the annual 300 tonnes extracted in 2016 and 2017. 90% of extracted Ukrainian amber is stolen and sold for criminal proceeds. Poroshenko and Zelensky have certainly made tremendous inroads on corruption.
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Looks like two former ministers in the previous Medvedev government got bumped upstairs: Vladimir Medinsky (Culture Minister) and Maxim Oreshkin (Economic Development Minister) have become Presidential aides.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news
Alexander Novak is back in as Minister of Energy so he must have been telling the truth back in December about Russia being able to finish the Nordstream II pipeline construction in two months.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62625
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Either that or his lies are so reliable that the Kremlin knows immediately to believe the opposite of what he says. But that’s not likely, because an Energy Minister who started a massive project like that and had no prospects at all of completing it would not likely be reappointed.
Another potential reason for Russian relaxation toward pipeline completion might well be the global collapse of LNG prices due to overproduction: according to the new (ish) CEO of Gunvor Group (remember them? The energy company that Putin owned 75% of its shares?), US LNG exporters are 50 cents away from shutdowns.
“LNG prices are on track to hit an all-time low in Asia later this summer. Gas is also at its weakest seasonally in the U.S. and Europe since the late 1990s. “There’s a surplus already in the U.S. and Europe. And the mild winter in Asia means another surplus is building up there,” Marco Dunand, chief executive officer of trading house Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., told Bloomberg. Torbjorn Tornqvist, chief executive officer of Gunvor Group Ltd., said U.S. LNG exporters are 50 cents away from shutdowns.”
https://news.yahoo.com/oil-bears-back-demand-fears-200000056.html
Under such conditions, it’s unlikely the Kremlin is overly concerned at the thought of American LNG carriers steaming into European ports and snatching the energy rug from underneath them. Think what a great time this would be to have an energy-extraction empire in which – thanks to western sanctions – your production costs were in rubles and your selling price was in Euros. Why, you’d still be able to take a profit no matter how low prices went!
Oh…wait…
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An unexpected bit of good news (if true) from the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752 crash in Tehran: one of the passengers killed on the flight was a businesswoman who ran two companies involved in running illegal arms and parts for military drones to Libya.
“Ukrainian jet victim ran company suspected by UN of violating Libyan arms embargo”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/24/europe/ukrainian-crash-victim-olena-malakhova-libya-iran-intl/index.html
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Well, well; and the Ukrainian government backed her claims that there was no military cargo aboard the company plane that was blown up in Misrata. Makes you wonder how much jiggerypokery on the part of the Ukrainian government the USA is prepared to absorb, considering it was allegedly Solemani’s plans to ‘hurt Americans’ that caused the USA to whack him. But here is a business associate of the Ukrainian government transferring military technology to tribal warlords in Libya.
Oh, I forgot – the USA needs to fight Russia in Ukraine so that it doesn’t have to fight Russia in New York. So I guess that means they get a free pass.
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You have to wonder though, Malakhova was one of two Ukrainian passengers (I think) on a jet that was otherwise composed of diaspora Iranians. The plane was flying to Kiev and then presumably going straight to Toronto, to judge from the number of Iranian-background passengers with Canadian passports. What business did Malakhova have that she had been in Tehran to catch a UIA flight to go to Kiev? She must have had a reason to be there, if not to go sightseeing.
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Lo and behold! Able to answer my own query about the reason for Malakhova’s presence in Tehran within a matter of minutes! She wasn’t in Tehran just to admire the touristy sights.
Air taxis would be very convenient for ferrying small quantities of goods on short trips within Iran or from Iran to somewhere else not far from the Iranian border – like Afghanistan on one side, Azerbaijan on another side or Kurdish-held northern Iraq and Turkey on yet another side.
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Excellent research, Jen!
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Vladislav Surkov, variously described by fanciful western media sources as ‘the Kremlin’s gray cardinal’ and ‘the minister in charge of backing Ukrainian separatists’ resistance efforts’ – and whom our long-ago associate, Poemless, described as ‘the sexy Chechen’, has resigned.
Bloomberg has the story, but I only get one free article a month from them, apparently, so all I could cite would be a strongarm effort to make me subscribe. I daresay it will soon be picked up by other outlets. The reason is cited, without any substantiation, as ‘policy differences’. Jeez; Putin’s whole government is in rebellion – can the surge of angry citizens into the streets be far behind?
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Yeah, Westie press is all over this.
And pro-Ukrainian kreakles are celebrating, saying that the new guy (replacing Surkov) is pro-Ukrainian.
Highly dubious.
My personal opinion: Surkov had all the right opinions about the Ukraine, but was ineffective when it came to tactics and strategy.
Methinks Russia is on the verge of coming up with a new strategic direction for Ukrainian relations. And it don’t involve appeasing the Banderites. More like ideological de-construction. I could be wrong, but don’t think I am.
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BBC
Iran executes ‘Crocodile of the Gulf’ drug kingpin
25 January 2020
Good or bad?
Right or wrong?
Is this article about the legal execution of a piece of filth or the killing of a human being in a state where capital punishment is still used and with very high frequency?
Iran has executed a drug kingpin nicknamed the “Crocodile of the Persian Gulf” and dismantled his smuggling ring, state media report.
The “crocodile” was arrested in the middle of transferring more than 100 tonnes of drugs in international waters, officials said.
The 36-year-old and an accomplice were killed following a years-long intelligence operation.
Iran executes hundreds of prisoners each year.
Amnesty International says the country executed at least 253 people in 2018. That represents a drop of 50% from the 507 executed the year before, credited to changes in the country’s strict anti-narcotics laws.
But drug dealing on an international scale can still carry the death penalty.
Executed or killed?
Both, actually, but “killed” sounds more emotional.
Wicked, wicked Iran!
Unbiased BBC!
PS I am against capital punishment simply because of human fallibility.
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Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki: “Attempts to paint Poland as a perpetrator, rather than a victim, can’t be tolerated”.
“And although the Red Army subsequently did liberate Auschwitz, the concentration camp could have been liberated six months earlier. In the summer of 1944, the Soviet Army stood at positions 200 miles from Auschwitz, but the offensive stopped, giving the Germans time to retreat and continue organising deportations up until January 1945. Saving Jews was never a priority for Stalin and the Red Army.” — Morawiecki in Politico
Response to Mr Morawiecki – Why the Red Amy Did Not Liberate Auschwitz Earlier
January 23, 2020
Stalker Zone
The two women pictured above, each holding a toddler, are dirty, filthy subhuman Orcs, by the way.
Well, besides Germany, the main fault lies with Poland for the fact that Auschwitz generally appeared as a death camp.
Because Poland itself hated Jews too and even took it to the official level, as the words of Poland’s ambassador to Nazi Germany prove. Poland is guilty because it until the last minute flirted with Nazi Germany, hoping to hit the USSR along with it. Poland is to blame for failing to provide decent resistance to Hitler. In addition to Poland, the blame lies certainly with France and Great Britain, which, as allies of Poland and promising to save it in the event of Hitler’s attack, simply spat on it and did not come to its rescue. They did not come with a military force that could destroy the Third Reich. Instead of real fighting, a simulation was made, surely hoping that after Poland fell, Hitler’s next goal would be the USSR. But the calculation was a little off, and Hitler’s next victim was France and the British expeditionary force in Dunkirk….
Soviet soldiers paid with their blood for the world to live. And they liberated Auschwitz exactly when they were able to, having passed before this along a path that no one in the world can possibly pass. Ordinary men – Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusian, Georgians, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs – all nationalities of the Soviet Union in one structure, did as much as the rest of the world did. And now they are openly spat on in their memory, and those whose graves are scattered all over Europe are mocking. And many still don’t have graves.
And Soviet women too, I should like to add.
And as regards the unknown whereabouts of many of the fallen, my elder daughter every Victory Day holiday proudly yet sadly joins the march of the “Immortal Regiment”, carrying a placard that I made, which has a photograph of her great Uncle Stepan, who, whilst serving in the Red Army, fell in 1942 fighting the invader. He left home and never came back and nobody knows where his remains lie — out there, somewhere to the West, in Belorussia, maybe, or the Ukraine or nearer to his home, which was Moskva.
Of course, home grown filth here, the kreakly and liberasts say the “Immortal Regiment” marches are fake and its participants receive handouts off the Evil One to attend.
They Did Not Use Artillery, but Went on the Attack with Doctors: How Soviet Troops Liberated Auschwitz
January 25, 2020
Stalker Zone
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And get this, you Polish revisionists!
From Spiegel, which, in case you have forgotten, is a German publication:
Die Rote Armee war es, die die Vernichtungslager befreite und die meisten eigenen Opfer zu beklagen hatte, das ist wichtig zu betonen, weil in Russland der Eindruck entstanden ist, dies werde allmählich vergessen.
It was the Red Army that liberated the extermination camps and had to suffer and mourn the most losses [during WWII]: this is important to emphasize, because in Russia the impression has been created that this is gradually being forgotten.
[My stress — ME}
And at the fore of those who are conducting this forgetfullness are Polish historical revisionists!
See:
Zwei KZ-Befreier erinnern sich
“Dieser Geruch, dieser fürchterliche Geruch”
Der US-Soldat Don Greenbaum und Rotarmist Iwan Stepanowitsch Martynuschkin beschreiben den Moment, als sie vor 75 Jahren dem Grauen ins Gesicht sahen.
Von Susanne Beyer , Christian Esch und René Pfister
25.01.2020, 19:02 Uhr
Two concentration camp liberators remember
“That smell, that horrible smell”
US soldier Don Greenbaum and Red Army soldier Ivan Stepanovich Martynushkin describe the moment when they faced horror 75 years ago.
By Susanne Beyer , Christian Esch and René Pfister
25.01.2020, 19:02
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There is an RT article today that features that self-same Ivan Martynushkin, one of the Red Army liberators of Auschwitz, who was interviewed by Spiegel (see above):
‘People want to know the truth’: Red Army veteran speaks out on liberation of Auschwitz & distortions of history
27 Jan, 2020 06:15 / Updated 1 hour ago
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Famous for its beautiful architecture, the Red Army was instructed to make sure it remained intact as much as possible.
Those RT translators and proofreaders want f**king!
The Red Army is famous many things, but I don’t think the it has ever been famous for its architecture!
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And the usual comments to the above, such as:
Another b.s. article trying to glorify jewish bolshevik red terror.
and:
murdered 15 million Christian Russians in their reign of terror and 4 million Ukrainians. WW2 was used by Rothschilde to decimated European Christians mostly and American whites. really wake up and look at the big picture
ad nauseam …
No doubt posted by citizens of the Exceptional Nation.
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Ugh! The RT comment forum can often be a cesspool of ultra-righties and Jew-haters. If one were blindfolded, one might think they were reading Unz and not RT.
The RT editors bring it on themselves, and I suspect that some of them are ideological fascists themselves. For example, whenever they decide to do a piece on American culture, they always hire some nauseating semi-racist ALT-Rightie, like the 4chan types, or whatever. And the tone is just plain nasty sometimes. And those are the articles, not even the comments, which are worse!
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Additionally, the site of Auschwitz itself – Auschwitz.org – reflects that the Red Army did not even know of the exact location or existence of Auschwitz-Birkenau until the liberation of Krakow. The Red Army therefore marched on Auschwitz as soon as it could.
“The Red Army obtained detailed information about Auschwitz only after the liberation of Cracow, and was therefore unable to reach the gates of Auschwitz before January 27, 1945.”
http://auschwitz.org/en/history/liberation/day-of-liberation/
The ancestors of the people who liberated Auschwitz are today spat upon and reviled, and their monuments torn down by self-important bubbleheads on the orders of know-nothing bureaucrats – while the ancestors of the people who staffed the camps and murdered hundreds of thousands by the most repugnant methods imaginable are among the most highly-regarded and respectable of Europe’s citizens.
Well, but they did apologize.
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From the above Auschwitz.org link:
It was a paradox of history that soldiers formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism brought freedom to the prisoners of Nazi totalitarianism.
Formally representing Stalinist totalitarianism?
Fighting in the defence of the USSR, I should have thought, or the Rodina — the Motherland [Родина].
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Those are powerful posters. Shows, once again, that the most powerful propaganda is when it represents the deeper Truth.
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Yes, I saw that little drop of poison in there, too – it’s comical sometimes how westerners are convinced they live in free countries, the whole time their governments are hoovering up their private information in a way that would make any true totalitarian ideologue proud. I saw a discussion this morning on the requirement now that smartphones and other such devices sold in Russia now must have Russian cultural and moral software installed. You don’t have to use it, goes the government line, but it must be available as an option.
I need hardly say the western commenters had a field day with that, speculating that it is tracing software used to identify and pinpoint the homos in Russia. This evolved to speculation of what a smartphone would be like if built in Russia – hospital green in colour, twice as big and heavy as western smartphones and with less than half the features, that sort of thing. Yandex is poised to launch its own smartphone (social media giants such as Facebook have tried to get into the market, but had to drop out on disappointing reception), and it sounded pretty techie. But of course westerners know better. Russia doesn’t make anything, and if it did, it would be crudely carved from wood.
https://gizmodo.com/report-russia-says-smartphones-sold-in-the-country-mus-1841223725
https://www.ft.com/content/025d31d6-f860-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c
I just started re-reading Richard Preston’s “The Cobra Event”, which I never forgot although I must have read it 20 years ago; I highly recommend it, it’s a ripping story with lots of real bio-warfare history in it. Anyway, on second reading and after my global attitudes have realigned, I’m noticing how the Russians and the Iraqis are the dissembling tricksters, ever trying to fool the honest Americans who are victims of their own trusting natures, having grown up free. I’m exaggerating a little for effect, but it really is a lot like that. I just never picked up on it before. In passages which purport to be historical fact, the author recounts how the US military found and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear program in the first Gulf War. Which they never did.
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It bears repeating that all the major death camps like the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex were located in very remote parts of Poland, often as in the case of Auschwitz itself at the end of a railway line. That way, there would be few external witnesses to what was going on inside the camps, and information about them could be controlled by the Nazi authorities.
No doubt if the Soviets had reached Auschwitz six months earlier, that would then be used by the likes of Morawiecki to damn them as invaders for liberating the inmates while the Nazis were still working them to death in the factories there or killing them at the Birkenau camp site.
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Germans who were adults during Willy Twice claim to this day that they believed Auschwitz was a sausage factory or some similar commercial enterprise.
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I can believe that some, maybe even most Germans, didn’t really know what was going on. Since the Hitlerites took some pains to conceal what they were doing. A lot of ordinary krauts probably thought the Jews and other undesirables were just being banished to other countries. Not that most of them would have even given a sh*t even if they knew what was really going on.
And even if they cared, there wasn’t much they could do about it anyhow. That’s why a dictatorship is a dictatorship.
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I’m sure there were rumors (railway people for starters) that no-one wanted to believe and were pushed further away when compared with dealing with daily life. I’m also sure all the allies knew it. Stalin had formidable intelligence services and the UK flew photo recon flights which would have picked up these isolated end-of line concentration/death camps. Those photos would have been analysed primarily to see if it had bearing on war materiel (could it be a secret underground factory for weapons for example) and when they realized it was probably something else, “Sir, these pictures are rather odd,” it would have been kicked upstairs and compartmentalized – “If you come across stuff like this again, just bring it straight to me.”
We forget that strict secrecy was taken very seriously and many said nothing about what they did, let alone saw. I would guess those photo-interpreters too.
This evidence and more is still secret (like the Hess files as mentioned earlier).
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FWIW Speer reported that he had been in von Papen’s office the day after and saw some blood in a corner that hadn’t been mopped up yet. He reports that he made the conscious decision to not look at it and to try and forget it. I think a lot of people carefully didn’t look in certain places.
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I read one of Speer’s books last century some time. Now thinking back about it and having had a quick internet look up, I do seem to recall that he claimed he was enthralled at his architechtural plans of building a Third Reich to last for a thousand years, huge boulevards, buildings etc. and didn’t let himself think further which he could have without much effort.
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So much of history is ‘who knew what, when?’ And most of it will always remain a secret, as might just about anything which cannot be proven. Poland’s embrace of the Nazis, however, is a matter of record and can be proven.
Yes, there were Russians among the German military formations which did not consist of Germans, just as there were Ukrainian and Polish battalions. But there were plenty of documentary references to Hitler’s loathing of the Russians. Had Hitler outlived Stalin, I’m pretty sure he would not have thrown a state funeral in Berlin for Stalin as he did for Pilsudsky, nor leave behind documentary references to Germany’s gratitude for such a loyal ally. The sad fact remains that most people cannot be bothered with history, and much prefer to adopt narratives which speak glowingly of the heroism of their own alongside the general falling-short of everyone else – who doesn’t like to think they are descended from wholesome goodness rather than villainy? Political forces which constantly seek greater wealth and influence for themselves and their own kind are well aware of the pitfalls of honest introspection and repentance, and seek to forestall their emergence with bracing bromides about heroism and benevolent values in their own military forces.
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In response to Et Al’s comment on whether Allied forces knew what was going on southern Poland:
From The New York Times archives:
1/ a wireless from Jerusalem on 25 November 1942 “Details Reaching Palestine”
JERUSALEM, Nov. 24 — Information received here of methods by which the Germans in Poland are carrying out the slaughter of Jews includes accounts of trainloads of adults and children taken to great crematoriums at Oswiencim, near Cracow.
2/ special cable also dated 25 November 1942 “HIMMLER PROGRAM KILLS POLISH JEWS; Slaughter of 250,000 in Plan to Wipe Out Half in Country This Year Is Reported REGIME IN LONDON ACTS Officials of Poland Publish Data — Dr. Wise Gets Check Here by State Department”
LONDON, Nov. 24 — Old persons, children, infants and cripples among the Jewish population of Poland are being shot, killed by various other methods or forced to undergo hardships that inevitably cause death as a means of carrying out an order by Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Gestapo chief, that half the remaining Polish Jews must be exterminated by the end of this year, according to a report issued today by the Polish Government in London.
To get access to the full reports in the archives you have to subscribe to the NYT.
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re the statement above about Albert Speer, whose memoirs written after his release from Spandau Gaol, Berlin, I read many, many years ago, which memoirs have long since been criticized as being “selective”:
… he [Speer] made the conscious decision to not look at it and to try and forget it.
Yes, the German Intelligentsia, of which Speer was a typical member, practised “Inner Emigration” [Innere Emigration auf Deutsch]: “a controversial concept of German writers who were opposed to Nazism, yet chose to remain in Germany after the Nazis seized power in 1933.”
They knew what was happening, or at least had serious reservations and suspicions about Nazi policies, but chose to look the other way.
And that quotation above from Wiki as regards the Nazis seizing power really pisses me off no end! It implies that the Germans suddenly woke up one morning, only to find that they had an Austrian arsehole as Chancellor.
Hitler was at first legally appointed as Chancellor by President Hindenburg and many voted for the Nazi Party, albeit that at the time of Hitler’s chancellorship, it seemed that the Nazi party was rapidly losing its popularity.
After the Nazis had got within the citadel, so to speak, and following Hindenburg’s death, Hitler then passed the enabling acts and became Chancellor/President with dictatorial powers.
Hitler became Chancellor because of the violence that his party had organized, which violence on the streets was equally matched by that of the Communist Party. Germany was in danger of falling into a state of civil war.
The election in 1932 resulted in the “anti-democratic” parties (the Nazis and the Communists) getting more than 50% of the seats, meaning that it was impossible to create a “democratic” majority government.
After one minority government had failed, another election had much the same result, and the conservative president Hindenburg finally, on the 30th of January 1933, accepted a government that was a coalition of the Nazi party and the Nationalist Party.
It was decided to hold a new election at the beginning of March 1933. Six days before that election the Reichstag building was set on fire.
Nobody knows for sure who did it, but in any case the fire was seized upon as an opportunity by the Nazis, who blamed the Communists and proposed an emergency decree that basically suspended all rights, such as habeas corpus, giving the new government temporary dictatorial powers.
As soon as the act was passed, most leading communists were arrested and the social democrat leadership went into exile (in Switzerland, as far as I recall), crippling them as well.
Despite all these decidedly undemocratic and openly violent goings on, the Nazis still only got 43% of the vote, making another coalition necessary.
At that point Hitler created the so called “Enabling Act”, which in practice made Germany a complete dictatorship.
When voting for this act was to be carried out, the Nazis arranged to have loads of SA thugs present as an intimidating gesture inside and outside the chamber (usual Nazi tactic) to make sure the act was passed.
Like most democracies in Europe, the German parliamentary system then as now does not use a first-past-the-post system of voting. It is, therefore, not at all uncommon for no one party in such a system of proportional representation, as the Germans have, to have an outright majority, so somebody becoming head of the government with barely a third of the vote (as Hitler did) is quite feasible.
Hitler made use of this fact. At the end of the last free elections held in the Weimar Republic, the Nazis and the Communists did so well that there was basically no way of forming a government without one of them. Not a great choice there, as both parties were against the very idea of the Weimar Republic. But the Nazis were deemed the lesser of the two evils, and there’s the rub!
Hitler’s price for being part of any coalition government was to be named Chancellor. That was deemed a relatively powerless position, so they, the movers and shakers, which included the top military, agreed. But then the Austrian layabout managed to scare President Hindenburg, who, by the way, detested the “Bohemian corporal” Hitler, into essentially declaring Martial Law, thereby disempowering the Reichstag. After that, it was all systems go for Hitler and chums.
So one could say that Hitler did initially achieve office democratically — and “democracy” comes in many flavours — though he never had the electoral support of a majority.
Hey, hang on though ….!
Isn’t that what’s happened in ….?
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I chanced upon this in the Russian blogosphere:
Мы больше так не будем, поляки!
17 January
We won’t do it again, Poles!
Today is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw from the fascists. From the German fascists, I mean: their own have remained there and are still alive. And on this significant date, a fireworks salute of 3,000 fireworks (I shall write down the number: THREE THOUSAND) will be let off over Moscow. And the Ministry of Defence has today declassified documents on the liberation of Warsaw from the Germans.
I just don’t get it!
First of all, I don’t understand why the documents on the liberation of Warsaw should have been kept secret. What could have been kept secret?!
Secondly, I don’t understand why we are celebrating “Warsaw’s liberation”, if the Poles themselves call this day “the change of occupation regimes”. We have to celebrate the “VICTORY of the Red Army over German troops at Warsaw”. Because, I repeat, we defeated only German fascists, and the Polish ones are still alive and well, as it turns out.
And I absolutely do not understand why we should arrange fireworks about the liberation of that city, which itself is not happy about this liberation, destroying monuments to the liberators and covering them with abusive words. Because under the Nazis they had concentration camps in Poland, and that meant a lot of needed jobs for Poles and Ukrainians. Ivan came, and he got rid of the concentration camps and deprived Poles and Ukrainians of their favorite jobs… The Poles got grief, and we are, like, happy.
It’s not nice, comrades. On the contrary – we should express condolences to the Poles on the liberation of Warsaw from the Nazis by the Red Army. And say to them “Forgive us, Poles, for our having to deprive you of your government and all that was nice and convenient for you so that we could get to Berlin. WE WON’T DO IT ANYMORE! Never again. And don’t even ask us to do it.”
That’s what they’ll understand and appreciate. For the time being…
Today we should congratulate our veterans, but no way Poland.
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“Because Poland itself hated Jews too and even took it to the official level, as the words of Poland’s ambassador to Nazi Germany prove. Poland is guilty because it until the last minute flirted with Nazi Germany, hoping to hit the USSR along with it. Poland is to blame for failing to provide decent resistance to Hitler.”
Hear hear! The Truth really hurts, don’t it, Poland?
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Как перед Мировой войной польская армия деградировала? Поляки готовились к войне с СССР, но жестоко ошиблись
How had the Polish army deteriorated before the World War? The Poles had been preparing for war against the USSR, but they had made a terrible mistake.
In the 1930s, while all the armies of Europe were moving ahead with the times, the Polish army was becoming out of date. At the end of the 1920s, both in tanks and artillery, Poland would still have been a serious opponent if there had been a war against the USSR.
In the next decade, however, the USSR and Germany made serious progress, while Poland was stuck in the past. An almost effortless defeat could already be guaranteed for the Polish army. The reason for this was, as always, a lack of money, resources, as well as the hope for support from their allies, France and Great Britain.
But the Polish army had simply not become focused on waging war against Germany, but against the USSR. This explains the prohibitive number of cavalry divisions for World War II. Another problem was the ethnic composition of the army, which included the Germans in the west, and Ukrainians and Belarussians in the east.
Alexei Isayev together with historian Yegor Yakovlev – more than 1 hour. [VIDEO]
Video discussion in Russian.
Historians Alexei Isayev and Yegor Yakovlev discuss the fate of Poland at the beginning of World War II. What were the chances for the Polish army after the Wehrmacht invasion? What did the military allies of Warsaw plan and behave like? Why is the claim that the Soviet Union hit the Poles in the back wrong? All this in a conversation between the founder of “Digital History” and one of the most authoritative experts on the history of World War II and the Great Patriotic War.
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Virtually all of modern history of the period is a dual campaign to invest the efforts of the western allies with nobility, and the efforts of the Soviet Union with shame and infamy.
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Polish troops entering Czech Cieszyn, 1938.
Springtime for Poland and Germany?
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Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie review – how Britain fell for a delusion
A gripping account of the nation’s greatest mistake is timely and relevant
Heil, mein Führer! Awfully glad to meet you, old chap! — Neville Chamberlainshakes hands with Adolf Hitler in Bad Godesberg, on 22 September 1938 during the Sudeten crisis.
One month later:
Polish Army entering enter Český Těšín (Czech)/Czeski Cieszyn (Polish)/Tschechisch-Teschen (German).
“Amid the general euphoria in Poland – the acquisition of Teschen was a very popular development – no one paid attention to the bitter comment of the Czechoslovak general who handed the region over to the incoming Poles. He predicted that it would not be long before the Poles would themselves be handing Teschen over to the Germans…” — Watt, Richard M. (1998): “Bitter Glory. Poland and its fate 1918–1939”, New York: Hippocrene Books, p. 511. ISBN 0-7818-0673-9.
Historically, the largest specified ethnic group inhabiting this area were Poles. Under Austrian rule, Cieszyn Silesia was initially divided into three (Bielitz, Friedek and Teschen), and later into four districts (plus Freistadt). One of them, Frýdek, had a mostly Czech population, the other three were mostly inhabited by Poles. During the 19th century the number of ethnic Germans grew. After declining at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century and later from 1920 to 1938, the Czech population grew significantly (mainly as a result of immigration and the assimilation of locals) and Poles became a minority, which they are to this day. Another significant ethnic group were the Jews, but almost the entire Jewish population was murdered during World War II by Nazi Germany.
See: Zaolzie
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Simply marvelous research ME. The Vatican was and is still in the forefront of anti-Russian/anti-SU/anti-Slav Orthodox in Europe. It goes back to the crusades. Of course, Croatia is the gold-standard for Catholic Slavs hating Orthodox Slavs.
Your research helped highlight this fundamentally important force in the war against the Orthodox Slavs. Thank you.
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Meanwhile, the Persians prove once again that they are a wise and ancient and intelligent race of people. Who are much smarter than nematodes.
For example: They refused to hand over to the Ukrainian government the “black box” of the Boeing that they themselves (the Persians) admitted to shooting down by accident.
Admitting that they can sometimes be dumb and make a dumb mistake, but that doesn’t mean that they are complete morons.
“The black box will remain in Iran and will be deciphered on Iranian territory,” the Iranian government announced.
Thus proving that they are smarter than worms learning to run a maze.
In scientific experiments, the worms needed hundreds of tries before they learned where were the obstacles in the maze, and what nefarious tricks they should avoid.
After only one example (=MH17), the Persians learned the key lesson: Never trust Ukrainian Nazis with your black box!
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You saying that Persians are smarter than my host nation?
I should let you know that my wife is a Russian and she ain’t dumb, albeit she married me!
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Your wife is a genius! I heard that she married you for your natty wardrobe, your choice of vintage wines, your posh British accent, and also for your money.
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I possess none of those above things that you assume she married me for!
She once confessed that before we wed, she saw me buy a taco at Lenin Library metro station, which edible I immediately and voraciously consumed in lightning quick time, unaware that I was being observed.
She felt sorry for me.
Mothering instinct, I suppose.
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Am guessing that the flight crew would have used Russian amongst themselves and English with ATC in Tehran so the Iranians need at least interpreters knowledgeable in both languages who also understand the terminology used by airline flight crews.
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Speaking of Poland – and we were, the whole post is about Poland – that truculent nation has announced it will not renew its gas contract with Gazprom under any circumstances. It has a cunning plan: it will replace Russian imports (63% of its annual consumption in 2017) with…American LNG (37%) and supply from Norway (43%) by 2022!! Its own production is forecast to decline from 26% in 2017 to 20% in 2022.
This is a recipe for catastrophe, and only a government of ideological eejits would try it. We have become so accustomed to lying from Poland lately that its announcement that it can buy American LNG cheaper than pipeline gas from Russia will come as no surprise – the Poles’ American brothers are going to transport it all the way across the sea for them and then sell it to them at a loss to themselves.
https://www.dw.com/en/us-trumps-russian-gas-as-poland-eyes-gazprom-exit/a-45981553
Of course the USA is touting this as a major victory, because it wants to get a toehold in Europe for gas that it really needs to sell. But if it sells at a loss, the relationship is not going to last long. Perhaps it hopes to sell at a break-even price until it has established a reputation as a reliable partner, and then incrementally increase its prices until it reaches a happy place. But it is not going to happen. In truth, there is lots of room in the European market for US LNG without inconveniencing Gazprom overmuch, but the major determining factor is the US can’t supply gas in any significant amounts and still make money, not if it is looking to present an alternative to Russian gas. Because as I have pointed out before, Russia’s production costs are in rubles while its sales are in Euros. No matter how low the market price goes, Russia can still make money.
But Poland must be encouraged to do it. Take the plunge, Poland, and get off the Gazprom tit!! Moreover, no matter what attempts at rapprochement may be made in the future, Moscow must not make a new gas deal with Poland. Fuck the Poles! It will not be very long before they are begging Europe to help them with their energy situation, and if Europe wants to buy Russian gas at market prices and sell it to Poland cheap, that is their affair. But Norway’s gas supplies are in permanent decline, and the USA cannot supply Poland at the price Poland wants to pay and make money.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Shrinking-Norwegian-Natural-Gas-Production-Puts-Europe-In-Dire-Situation.html
According to Oilprice.com, Norway’s gas production was forecast at 2014/15 to decline by more than 40% by 2025. To the best of my knowledge no major new Norwegian discoveries have been made since that time.
This is typical Polish stubbornness – it will plunge ahead, and the situation will magically rectify itself to Poland’s satisfaction. Except it won’t, and once again Poland will cut off its nose to spite its face.
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They’ll still claim their transit fees… Now if it were me, I’d pay them with bags of rouble notes!
Apparently Norway are leaders in decarbonizing natural gas but…
S&P Global Platts: EU gas sellers want to keep buying from Russia in low-CO₂ future
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/080119-eu-gas-sellers-want-to-keep-buying-from-russia-in-low-co2-future
01 Aug 2019
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If natural gas is decarbonized, the result in hydrogen gas and carbon in some form (most likely CO2). Hydrogen gas would have little potential to replace natural gas for many reasons. Or does decarbonizing mean something else?
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Natural gas/LNG to Hydrogen:
https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/gas-grid-conversion-hydrogen-decarbonise-homes-northern-england-2034
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eu-clarifies-fossil-fuel-stance-no-lock-in-into-natural-gas/
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Thanks for the links.
The report says that clean hydrogen can be produced from natural gas using existing technology, at a self-powered 12-gigawatt production facility with carbon capture technology.
Splitting methane into hydrogen and carbon takes energy so the process can not be “self-powered” unless the carbon is oxidized to CO2. The first link did mention sequestering the carbon (likely in the form of CO2) which in itself an energy intensive and expensive process.
Using hydrogen for space heating is simply dangerous and crazy expensive – invisible flame, pipe failures from hydrogen embrittlement, large leakage losses, etc.
I suppose an entirely new gas distribution system with entirely new heating systems could be developed but the ROI would liely be crazy bad. The more likely heating future in northern England involves lots of sweaters and hats. This story is a variation of the wunderwaffen shtick. Just an opinion.
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I would need convincing that ‘biomethane’ is a ‘green’ gas. LNG is mostly methane, and when it is burnt as a fuel it is almost completely consumed. When it is spilled into the sea, it boils away. But its release unburnt causes tremendous greenhouse-gas damage, methane is probably the worst. Use of it as a ship’s fuel is demonstrably much cleaner than the previous standby, marine diesel. It is the gas which escapes during extraction and at LNG terminals during regasification that make it overall just as much a pollutant. If escape of natural gas unburnt during those operations could be substantially tightened up, it’d be a winner.
I am suspicious of the process of ‘greening by labeling’, as we saw with ‘clean coal’.
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its more of a “brown” gas.
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Ha, ha! So it is.
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I’m pretty confident Poland cannot claim transit fees for gas which is delivered from Europe to Poland as a customer. And that is what they seem to be hoping will happen – that when they drop Gazprom, Europe and the Americans will come to the rescue with cheap gas, cheaper than they were getting it from the Russians. Of course the real intent may not be to drop Russian gas at all, merely to take a hard line so the filthy Russians will offer Poland a can’t-say-no deal. But Poland will be oh, so sorry if it goes through with it, especially if the door is firmly closed to ever resuming supply from Russia, because while Washington plainly regards these peelings-away of various countries from Russia as strategic triumphs, it equally plainly expects Europe to fund them. At some point Europe will tire of being saddled with poor Eastern-European ticks sucking its finances, and the charity will stop with a bump. Europe already has little cash to spare, and interest in subsidizing Ukraine is already well on the wane – Europe does not need to begin subsidizing Poland with cheap gas as well. If Europe has to buy Russian gas at market prices through Germany and then backhand it at a discount to Poland and Ukraine, I predict complaints will not be long in coming. If instead Poland and Ukraine have to pay market prices which are higher than they were paying for pipeline gas direct from Russia, well, that’s called ‘stupidity tax’.
Anyway, you can count on strong support from Washington for any policy which shifts away from hydrocarbons; the United States is not a major exporter or consumer of hydrocarbons.
Oh….wait…
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… it equally plainly expects Europe to fund them.
Brussels’s last mega tranch of ~EUR104b finishes this year, then Poland can only claim the usual. Looking up further info for the decarbonization links I posted above, I came across views that say much too much is being spent on gas infrastructure and is essentially a waste.
The thing is, Bru likes such projects because they show that they are doing something and makes it look good for PR brownie points. Who doesn’t like a reverse-flow gas interconnector or two in the neighborhood? And of course, once it is built no-one wants to take it away even if it isn’t used much.
Personally, I like pipelines, especially if you can travel through them like James Bond in The Living Daylights. It’s like a personal (and sexy) version of Elong Must’s Hyperloop poop! Maybe even Russias Great White Hope (aka A. Navalny) can use it in case he needs to make a quick get away in future from mobs of ripped off hamsters and kreakles…
https://www.entegrasolutions.com/2018/03/07/james-bond-pipeline-travel/
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Still some serious cash around:
Poland: €676 million worth of EU investments in better rails and roads
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_5552
13 September 2019
####
From a link at the bottom, ~EUR373 billion for 2021-2027 Cohesion Funds for the whole of the EU.
I was watching something (ARTE?) or read something that pointed out that Poland had taken practically no advantage of the Vitsula to shift heavy goods/reduce carbon emissions etc. etc. despite the significant impact it could have despite its long periods of low water:
https://www.maritimejournal.com/news101/marine-civils/port,-harbour-and-marine-construction/polands-inland-waterways-to-become-international-shipping-routes
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Ummm…Mark
You gotta keep up…all that stuff about the IMPOSSIBILITY of USA
LNG being capable of displacing
Gazprom in the EU market; that was proved flat out on this blog like two years ago…
USA Memory hole!!!
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Well, it could not displace it, but there is certainly room in the European market for the little bit of gas the USA could supply by sea. For anyone who wanted to pay more. Because molecules of freedom ain’t free.
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I have just come across a translation into Russian of Lucas’s article in the Times that appeared a couple of weeks ago and which rants on and on about how evil the M-R Pact was and how evil the Russians are for hypocritically allying themselves with Hitler and for aiding and abetting the Nazis until June 22 1941 etc., etc. , and how the wicked Putin is twisting history and arguing the Stalin line with a view to rebuilding Stalinism and an evil totalitarian, Stalinist Russian Empire … and they’re gonna take over the world, I tell yer! They really are!!!!! They’re EVIL!!! EVIL BEYOND BELIEF!!!! ….
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Taleban apparently shot down an airplane carrying US soldiers in Afghanistan. No confirmation yet though.
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In fact there are specific refutations of any indication that it was shot down by the Taliban forces. That, of course, does not mean it wasn’t and might only mean it suits their purposes for now to deny it – but it is thus far not ‘apparent’.
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I will provide a link since Karl seems unwilling to do so:
https://www.rt.com/news/479303-taliban-claims-ghazni-plane-crash/
Various reports suggest 83 were on board and all were killed. The Taliban suggests high ranking CIA officials were on board. Since they have access to the crash site as evidenced by video, such claims are plausible.
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Sputnik has better coverage than RT:
https://sputniknews.com/asia/202001271078148595-ariana-afghan-airlines-plane-crashes-in-eastern-afghanistan—tv/
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Meanwhile the US want to replace the Afghan Air Force’s easy to maintain and operate Mi-17s with its CH-47 Chinooks which will be destined to become hangar queens once the corrupt authorites figure out how expensive they will be to maintain or the US pulls its support:
http://alert5.com/2020/01/26/u-s-plans-to-provide-ch-47s-to-afghanistan/
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Spare parts and maintenance business profit potential can exceed by several times the profit on the original sale. Yes, the Afghan government will be enslaved by those purchases.
Regarding the major air disaster in Afghanistan (83 US military personnel killed?), the Yahoo story was about 16th in ranking on Yahoo behind various impeachment stories, a better mousetrap and the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash.
If the plane were brought down by the Taliban, what would Trump do? As a guess, he would say it was a mechanical failure and ooze praise over the victims.
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He would threaten to sanction the Taliban ‘like they’ve never seen before’.
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Not according to those who fly them – they say it’s a workhorse that just keeps going and going.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14540/chinooks-over-afghanistan-the-unsung-workhorse-of-americas-never-ending-war
It is a Boeing product, though, and there’s an obvious interest in shunting money to Boeing. And it’s a perfectly valid point that any dependence on an American product is a vulnerability that casts an American shadow over one’s political decision-making. The ‘wrong’ decision could mean the termination of your spare-parts chain and the withdrawal of technical support.
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They could just flog them off to India or anyone else who want the parts or airframes. I don’t doubt that they are very reliable and robust, but Russian Mils are renoun for easy maintenance with a can of oil and wire even by lowly and not very educated maintainers.
Ironically, and we’ve mentioned this before, the US previously funded buys of Russian helicopters until it became politically incorrect and even then India (which has a large support base) conveniently picked up the slack and has even provided extra airframes. I don’t see India providing that level of support for CH-47s if at all. Local corruption is just as a big threat.
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Someone commented under that article that:
” Sadly it has been confirmed ,,,Mike Pompeo was NOT on board 😦 ”
😦
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That’s brilliant. Not everyone hates him, I’m sure, but quite a lot of people do.
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Its official:
US Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein has confirmed that the country has lost one of its Bombardier E-11A communications network aircraft in Afghanistan. He didn’t elaborate on the cause of the crash and said no information on casualties was available at the time.
https://sputniknews.com/world/202001271078154833-us-confirms-american-e-11a-aircraft-crashed-in-afgha
Also, the Taliban reported shooting down a helicopter in the region; possibly related to the plane crash.
I would imagine that the crew size would be on the order of 10-15 personnel.
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Pretty hard to imagine how that got confused with an airliner with 80-some people on board.
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MoA has already run a post which including data indicating a sharp rise in aircraft losses (4 or possibly 5 helicopters in January).
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/01/the-air-war-in-afghanistan-expands-on-both-sides.html#more
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I was listening to al-Beeb s’Allah this morning. A lady presenter led her interview with an Auschwitz survivor by revealing that it was liberated by the Soviet Army!* Well, as everyone knows, details look after themselves so no need to mention them when broad brushstrokes will do…, or as the British don’t say “If you look after the pounds, the pennies will look after themselves!”
* The Soviet Army was the main land-based branch of the Soviet Armed Forces between February 1946 and December 1991
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Army
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Little shit jumps on the bandwagon:
Zelensky Accused the USSR of Unleashing World War II and the Holocaust
January 27, 2020
Stalker Zone
The Ukraine is in solidarity with Poland that the Soviet Union is guilty of the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust.
This was stated on January 27th by the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during a briefing after a meeting with his Polish colleague Andrzej Duda during a visit to Warsaw.
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Yes, now that they’ve got their gas deal. But they deeply, deeply admire the United States, whose national mantra is ‘never apologize for anything, or you’ll never stop’. And it plainly does not offend the Ukrainian soul – or the Polish soul, comes to that – to have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, as both Poles and Ukrainians happily participated in pogroms of their Jewish citizens. No; if they could get Russia, as the inheritor of the Soviet Union, to admit to having started the Second World War, then the matter of reparations would arise, and the flow into the Ukrainian and Polish treasuries of some of that $557 Billion in reserves. All of it, if they had their way.
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Зеленский повесил вину за Холокост на СССР
Zelensky pins the blame for the Holocaust on the USSR
After Zelensky’s failed trip to Israel, during which he decided not to go to the Holocaust forum, where leaders from more than 40 countries had gathered, some social network wit predicted: “Now he can safely go to Poland, where there won’t be any Putin, and tell them that Auschwitz was liberated by the Ukrainians.”
And Vladimir Zelensky really went to visit Andrzej Duda on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of that concentration camp. And he didn’t let Internet forecasters down. In his speech, he spoke in all seriousness, about a Ukrainian tank commander who rammed the gates of Auschwitz, the soldiers of the 100th Lviv Division under the command of a Poltava resident, the soldiers of the First Ukrainian Front … The words “Red Army” or “Soviet troops” were not heard once. And, not knowing history, it could be assumed that a certain abstract Ukrainian Army had freed the world from fascism. Moreover, not even once did Duda utter such words thanking soldiers of the Ukrainian Front for the liberation.
[NOTE: “FRONT” as in “Ukrainian Front” is Russian and Polish terminology for what in British and US English would be called the “Ukraine Army Group”. The “Ukrainian Front” started off as the “Voronezh Front” and it was from that front line in the RSFSR, between Moskva to the north and Stalingrad to the south and on which the city of Voronezh stands, where the Nazi central thrust into the Russian heartland was halted at the Voronezh River. From this halt-line, that army group named the Voronezh Front began rolling back the Wehrmacht to Berlin. As the Voronezh Front approached the UkSSR, its name was changed to the “Ukrainian Front”. The army group was NOT a Ukrainian army! — ME]
The President of Poland, in turn, proposed that this year mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Warsaw. And Zelensky gladly accepted this proposal, although it looked a tad dumb. According to the Riga Peace Treaty, after the Soviet-Polish war, Poland took a piece of Western Ukraine as far as Zhytomyr, and fought against the Bolsheviks and with an undisguised anti-Semitic undertone, neither sparing its own Jews nor those of the Ukraine.
Yet according to Zelensky, amongst those who died later in the Holocaust, every fourth Jew was a Ukrainian. Towards the close of the show, the president of “Independent Ukraine” had an unhealthy and discouraging thought.
“Poland and the Polish people were the first to feel the collusion of totalitarian regimes. This led to the outbreak of World War II and allowed the deadly Holocaust flywheel to start spinning”, said the grandson of the commander of a rifle company in the 174th regiment of the 57th Guards Rifle Division. It was as if he was pinning the blame for the extermination of Jews on both Nazi Germany and the USSR. It seems that an epistolary saboteur had got into Zelensky’s speechwriter camp. But it is now clear why the president of the Ukraine fled the forum in Israel. Nobody would have understood him there.
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All the masks are slipping. As many have said, the Nazi heart is beating strongly throughout Europe. The end of WW II brought a high level management shakeup but the stakeholders remain the same. It would be easy to imagine Iron Curtain 2.0 on the way.
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The biggest stakeholders in Nazism are the Vatican and the Anglo empire. Israel is the swing vote in a sense. Just opining.
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In Poland, the President of the Ukraine presented with his colleague Andrzej Duda an alternative vision of the history of World War II …
… Stalin and Hitler concluded an “illegitimate pact,” from which “Poland and the Polish people were the first to suffer”. The Second World War immediately began, which “allowed the Nazis to launch the deadly flywheel of the Holocaust”.
Clear logical and temporary inconsistencies in this “historical reconstruction” are striking, but who pays attention to such trifles? The main thing is another: to indicate the indestructible unity of Poland and the Ukraine in countering the pronounced “Russian aggression”.
What urgently needs to be done? First of all, according to Zelensky, do not be silent. And who is silent? Europe and the world. They stupidly ignore the “real course of history”, show “indifference and inaction.” And only the the Ukrainian and Polish presidents, holding hands and “lowering the degree in bilateral relations,” have joined forces in bringing the world the true truth about 1939. Here is an alternative version of the Holocaust forum in Israel. Duda did not go there. Zelensky flew in, but handed in the tickets to “surviving victims of the tragedy”. I didn’t want to listen to “Putin’s version of World War II”.
In Poland, an “alternative political platform” was organized for the presentation of the concept of the “conspiracy of totalitarian regimes” (Germany and the USSR), from which the “Polish and Ukrainian nations” suffered. Duda and Zelensky called on “all states of the world to say resolutely no to totalitarian ideologies, aggression, repression, any manifestations of hatred and intolerance”. This, dear friends, is a serious bid for alternative leadership in the global world.
The former director of the Alzheimer’s Institute of National Remembrance, the deputy of the European Solidarity faction, Vyatrovich, should weep [with joy]: his “ideological reconstruction of history” from the time of Peter Alekseevich [first Russian Emperor Petr I — ME} has turned out to be in demand. Moreover, it has been the recipient of creative development. A new centre of “historical justice” has emerged on the basis of Poland and the the Ukraine, which will “dictate its will” to those very Jews, who have no idea how everything really happened and who exactly had “spun the Holocaust flywheel”.
It’s clear that this “construct” was whipped up by American strategists in the framework of “expanding opposition to the growing influence of the Kremlin”. Since millions of Ukrainians have become active participants in the “programme for the economic revival of Poland”, it is time to organize a “geopolitical alliance” from them. That’s how they are constantly … because of the Volyn massacre, the monuments of the OUN-UPA and other “historical misunderstandings”. The process has gone too far, and therefore it is necessary to combine them in a single anti-Russian project.
First, there was a “community of history,” which was closely implicated in a “joint struggle against the Bolsheviks.” Isn’t that pretty? Polish President Andrzej Duda suggested Zelensky “jointly honour the memory of Polish and Ukrainian soldiers who, in 1920, fought shoulder to shoulder against Bolshevism”; Petliura and Pilsudski as symbols of the new historical unity of the Ukraine and Poland.
Naturally, Zelensky gratefully accepted Duda’s proposal. You can even say that he was fired up with the idea. He called the “Battle of Warsaw, the centenary of which we will celebrate in August, a unifying page in our history”. Apparently, these guys are not shy at all. They play as if from a script “A common anti-Bolshevik history”, “a common enemy in the Second World War” and, finally, a common strategic goal of our time – “to stop the growing influence of the Russian Federation”.
I have no illusions about the long-term effectiveness of this alternative historical coalition. But the fact that the policy of Petro Poroshenko is being continued by the new president of the Ukraine is, as they say, obvious. True, Zelensky does not call himself the leader of the “world anti-Putin coalition.” He lacks the hysteria of his predecessor and the knowledge of the local language. Volodya still speaks Ukrainian with difficulty. Therefore, the palm in this case, it seems, goes to Poland. However, Zelensky is a talented comedian and therefore will show his best “qualities” already in May, when the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory will be held in Moscow …
source
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This is so painful to read. The Poles must be laughing hard at Zelensky and his grovelling. At what point does a person stop feeling pity for him?
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Groveling seems to be his natural style – remember his obsequious waffling to Trump during his phone call, telling him he was one thousand percent correct or some such flannel? He seems to have zero dignity, but instead to just leap all over everyone like a puppy.
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Тягнибок вслед за Качиньским затребовал от РФ «репарации» за Вторую мировую
28.01.20 AF-News
Following Kaczynski’, Tyagnibok has demanded from the Russian Federation “reparations” for the Second World War
28.01.20 AF-News
Above: an arsehole, metaphorically speaking.
Keiv should follow the example of Warsaw and demand from Moscow compensation for World War II.
This was written in the Telegram-channel by Oleg Tyagnibok, leader of the nationalist party “All-Ukrainian Union ‘Freedom'”
Tyagnibok reminded that the leader of the ruling Polish party “PiS” Jaroslaw Kaczynski had demanded from Russia “reparations” for World War II.
Tyagnibok is outraged that against a backdrop of similar claims made against Russia by the Baltic States Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the Ukrainian authorities “do not even mumble about mention such a thing”.
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Tyagnibok is an open, out-of-the-closet Nazi.
Since when does the losing side of a war demand reparations of the winners?
Only on Bizarro Planet, I reckon.
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As I’ve often said on here before, I’ve met weirdos such as he, and long before the shit hit the Maidan fan.
Having found out that I am British, they always started slagging off Russians in my presence, because they clearly thought I must be a tosser like certain of my fellow countrymen, e.g. Harding, Lucas, Walker-of-the Dill, and Higgins etc., etc.
Almost from day one after having first met these Svidomite freaks, I realized that their fundamental problem lies in the fact that they and ther team (Team Adolf) were well and truly defeated by what they consider to be subhumans, which results in what they have in replacement for brains short-circuiting.
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Smashing idea!! I hope it catches on!
Seriously, it will be just talk and will go nowhere. Because success would establish precedent. And then how long would it be before it occurred, say, to Iraq that it could and should sue the United States for reparations for a war the protagonist admits it fabricated the justifications for initiating?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline/
Or any of the other countries America leveled, wrecked or damaged in pursuit of corporate interests? Open and shut case, m’Lud; Paul Wolfowits said on the record that weapons of mess destruction was just a handy hook that everyone could hang their hats on; no such weapons were ever found in Iraq, despite occasional assurances from the Jackass American President Of The Moment that they were finding so much WMD, you wouldn’t even believe it.
https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/p/581.html
Dear God; I could win that case, and I’d work cheaper than a lawyer – did you hear me, Mr. Iraqi Ambassador?
Tyagnibok would say anything to see his name in print, but he is a nobody in Ukraine. If the Presidential Comedian takes it into his head to actually pursue such a claim, he will open such a bag of snakes that he will wish he had stuck to making people laugh for a living. Which, in a way, I guess he has.
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That’s a very good point about the naming conventions for these army groups. Since ancient times, these army groups have been named (sometimes informally) after the next geographical goal that has been assigned to them.
In the same way that military commanders are named after their most outstanding recent victory, e.g., Alexander Nevsky (after his victory on the Neva River), etc.
Hence, the “Ukraine Army Group” had nothing to do with Ukrainians per se, it was just their next target for victory, e.g., the Ukraine. The victors probably included ethnic Ukrainians, along with Russians and many other USSR peoples. Zelensky HAS to know this! Or is he just a complete low-IQ and low-informational idiot? (Possible, I suppose.)
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An eerie resemblance to Mr. Bean.
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He also stated that the parties “managed to reduce the degree of emotions relative to the common past”. Thus, the Ukrainian side lifted the moratorium on search operations.
That tells me that the Polish side achieved a main objective: heretore the Ukies were forbidding them to dig and poke around for Polish skeletons, victims of the Banderite pogroms.
So, now the Poles can resume their digging. Good for them! Let the Poles dig up as many graves as they can, even those liars won’t claim the Russians did it, everybody knows it was Bandera what dunnit.
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Ukrainian nationalists frequently attribute the crimes of the UPA to Soviet partisans in UPA uniforms.
Do you think Poles will never adopt this explanation, and lay the blame for the Volhynia genocide on Russia? Do you think that highly of them?
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Maybe the whole of the Wehrmacht was just Russians disguised in field grey, looking to pin the rap on the Germans. Maybe Hitler was secretly a Russian agent! Go big, or go home.
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The question as to whether or not the German population at large was aware of the unfolding
systematic mass murder of millions is ill posed. The only reasonable query is how could they NOT have known.
Fundamental characteristics of human nature dictate that there was simply no way that the German population could have remained oblivious to the fate of millions of their suddenly disappeared fellow Germans,with whom they had lived with as neighbors for centuries.
All of the people -civilian and military-who actually carried out the murders had friends, families, colleagues etc. to whom they surely divulged the enormity of depravity in which they had participated. Who in turn relayed the accounts to others ,who then in turn…and so on.
That’s human nature 101.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard
https://www.timesofisrael.com/what-did-germans-know-secret-anti-nazi-diary-gives-voice-to-man-in-the-street/
That the Reich was Mass Murder Inc. was apparent even before Wansee 20 January 1942.
https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/testimonies/life/backgd/before.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
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Yes, the question is how Joe Schmidt could claim not to have known. They knew of and were proud of the atrocities toward Russians committed by their army as evidenced by letters from the front.
We are dealing with civilizational values here and those tend to persist a very looong time. The Vatican is a repository of those values regenerated in successive generations, Russia and China should. act accordingly.
I like to think that the US is not as tainted but, that is only a hope.
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As I mentioned earlier, the death camps where Soviet PoWs, Jewish people, homosexuals, Roma / Sinti, people with inborn mental and physical disabilities and others – even people condemned for helping Jews – were killed were located in remote parts of Poland, at the ends of railway lines, so that entry into and exit out of these camps could be controlled by Nazi German authorities. That meant to a large extent information about these camps was also controlled by the Nazi government.
One big problem in knowing how much ordinary people in Germany knew what was happening is figuring out how much they were allowed to know about anything at all within Germany, and then working out how much they could know about things going on in neighbouring countries where the languages are very different. Especially as in Germany the government was secretive about its policies towards minority groups and deliberately used euphemistic language to describe policies that its own politicians and civil servants knew were murderous; the language effectively becomes a secret jargon to communicate ideas in public that to ordinary people would have been baffling.
Guards and others working at these camps were often either local people (Polish or Galician or other) or were recruited from the prisoners themselves. The people who disposed of the remains of those killed in gas chambers were camp prisoners themselves known as Sonderkommandos. Jewish Sonderkommandos were employed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The people who died in these camps came from all over central, eastern and southeastern Europe. About 45,000 Jews from the Jewish community in Thessaloniki (northern Greece) were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. From May 1944, two months after Germany occupied Hungary, up to January 1945, over half a million Jews from Hungary were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In addition the Nazis took advantage of local longstanding conflicts and prejudices between different groups to enlist collaborators (in western Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe) to their side in the areas they conquered. There are diaspora populations of ethnic groups from these areas in the Americas and Australia that still see nothing wrong in their collaboration with Nazis in killing or rounding up people they either despised or resented.
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“There are diaspora populations of ethnic groups from these areas in the Americas and Australia that still see nothing wrong in their collaboration with Nazis in killing or rounding up people they either despised or resented.”
Very very true. At the same time, these diaspora descendants know that their ancient resentments and hatreds, and particularly the heinous crimes committed by their grandparents, would not necessarily elicit sympathy or understanding among the mainstream populations. Which is why they have learned to be duplicitous and wear a mask as they were growing up.
The cunning and the duplicity are passed down from one generation to the other, it’s like a secret society, what these people say to each other in secret is very different from what they say in public.
I think I told the story once, how a Ukrainian pal of mine (this was a few years back) walked me into a Ukrainian National Home building in New York City, a place I would never dare to enter on my own. The old Banderites were friendly and didn’t actually care that I spoke Russian. The coffee tables were stacked with photo albums glorifying Nazi and Banderite graves, and suchlike. And I got, like, a tiny glimpse. of what these completely unregenerate Nazis were like when in their home base and thinking they were just among friends.
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Witness the Canadian Foreign Minister for the Ukraine, who, I believe, speaks Ukrainian at home so as not to forget “The Old country” and that it not be forgotten by her progeny. Yet some of her forebears on her paternal side are British — Scots, if I am not mistaken — which fact she makes use of when presenting her alter ego, publically expressing her pride in her grandfather’s contribution in overthrowing Nazism. She does not mean her grandpa Chomiak.
Freeland’s paternal grandfather (above) served in the air force during WWII. Her paternal grandmother was from Glasgow.
see: How Chrystia Freeland became Justin Trudeau’s first star
Above: PR for Freeland.
Michael Chomiak Freeland’s grandfather] was a lawyer and journalist before the Second World War, but “they knew the Soviets would invade western Ukraine (and) fled … and, like a lot of Ukrainians, ended up after the war in a displaced persons camp in Germany where my mother was born.”
Along the way Michael and Alexandra had six children, the last two born in Canada. They lived in poverty after they arrived; he couldn’t practise or go to law school and eventually worked for years as a lab assistant.
“(Their experience) had a very big effect on me,” Freeland says. “They had heated political discussions … They were also committed to the idea, like most in the (Ukrainian) diaspora, that Ukraine would one day be independent and that the community had a responsibility to the country they had been forced to flee … to keep that flame alive.”
Yes, Chomiak knew the Soviets would invade whilst chasing the USSR invading Nazis back to where they had come from in 1941 via Galicia, which the Poles had annexed in 1920 after having launched and won a war of aggression against the Ukraine and Belorussia and the proto-USSR, which seized by Poland territories the USSR re-occupied on September 17, 1939, after the Nazis had defeated Poland in that same month and the Polish state had ceased to exist.
Yes, Chomiak knew …
CANADIANS LOSE UKRAINE ELECTION — CHRYSTIA FREELAND FOR PRESIDENT OF GALICIA
As controversy has intensified in Canada over Freeland’s coverup for Chomiak [her maternal grandfather], she arranged in the parliament lobby for a reporter to ask the question Freeland’s staff had planted: “Recently, there has been a series of articles about you and your maternal grandparents making accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator in pro-Russian websites. I’d like to get your view on do you see this as a disinformation campaign by the Russians to try to smear you and discredit you? Which they have to have a tendency to have done.” In answer Freeland avoided the Chomiak evidence. Instead, she blamed Russian efforts “to destabilize” the US and Canadian political systems. “I am confident”, Freeland declared on March 6, “in our country’s democracy, and I am confident that we can stand up to and see through those efforts.” For the full story, click.
On March 9 Freeland was reported in the Washington Post as saying: “Russia should stop calling my grandfather a Nazi”.
In Warsaw, a file on Chomiak has been discovered at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN is the Polish acronym), which is part of the state’s Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. There are four items in the file, which have been photographed, and are published here for the first time. The IPN has tagged the Chomiak file No. Kr 010/5606.
THE IPN FILE NOTE FOR THE CHOMIAK FILE IN WARSAW
The three original documents in the file comprise Chomiak’s identity card of 1941, issued by the German authorities; and two later documents in Polish, indicating a Polish intelligence and police search for Chomiak.
CHOMIAK’S GERMAN IDENTITY CARD OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1941
The document shows that Chomiak, then 36 years old, was in Vienna at the time the German authorities issued his identification. He was no longer a reporter or journalist, but titled Hauptschriftleiter – Editor in Chief. The card also confirms that although a Ukrainian by nationality, and a native of Lemberg (the German name for Lvov), Chomiak had been living and working for some time in Cracow, then occupied Poland. Cracow was the administrative capital of the Generalgouvernment, whose governor-general was a German, Hans Frank. Gassner, whom Chomiak’s own papers identify as his boss, was Frank’s spokesman and head of press operations for the Galician region….
When exactly Chomiak arrived in Cracow, and how long he spent in training in Vienna aren’t revealed in the Polish file. The ID card suggests that Chomiak was in Vienna between July and September of 1941, before he was ordered back to Cracow, reporting there to Gassner. “This document destroys the narrative of the Chomiak apologists that he was just an administrative functionary and didn’t write much,” comments Stanislas Balcerac from Warsaw. “The card is very important evidence. Editor in Chief Chomiak was no mere small fish, caught in the tidal wave of the war. The Germans placed high value on him. Three months after the invasion [of the USSR] he was sent from Vienna to Cracow. With the title of Editor in Chief, I believe he was trained in Vienna; perhaps Vienna is the hidden part of his war record, with Cracow used initially as a cover for him during the first years of the German occupation of Poland, 1939-41.”
The papers Chomiak left behind at his death in Canada do not reveal what he was doing with the Germans in the 2-year interval. Polish sources suspect Chomiak arrived in Cracow soon after Frank became governor, offering himself as an agent of influence to inform the Germans on what fellow Ukrainians and anti-Russian nationalists then active in and around Lviv were thinking and planning. His work as a journalist was a cover for espionage on behalf of the Germans, Polish sources suspect.
There is no corroboration for this in the Polish files discovered to date. Two other documents in the IPN dossier, dating well after the German defeat and the end of the war, indicate that whatever Chomiak had been doing for the Germans became a fresh issue of interest to the Polish authorities in the mid-1960s.
WARSAW POLICE FILES ON CHOMIAK, APRIL 1966-MARCH 1980
source
Later, the Polish ambassador to Canada praised Freeland as a true friend of Poland, saying that the Polish investigation into her grandfather’s doings in Krakow were the result of a mistaken identity.
War is hell and Chrystia Freeland has nothing to be ashamed of: Paul Wells
The tales also appear to be founded in demonstrable fact. The truth of Chomiak’s stint at a Nazi-controlled newspaper in occupied Krakow has been known to Freeland for more than 20 years. Her uncle, historian John-Paul Himka, wrote about Chomiak in a 1996 journal article. Freeland helped edit the article.
There’s no evidence Chomiak wrote any of the anti-Jewish diatribes that flowed like sewage through the pages of the newspaper, Krakivski Visti. His state of mind at the time cannot be known to us. After the war he told his family he had worked with the anti-Nazi resistance, helping its members get false papers. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps it’s one of the stories people tell themselves later, as they try to live with the things they did to stay alive in hell.
What we know is that if Chomiak was still alive at the end of the war, it’s because he took pains to stay on the right side of the murderers who had occupied Ukraine and Poland for the war’s duration. Everyone did. Everyone had to. You might be a resister for three hours a day after collaborating the other 21. Those who didn’t manage to escape to the West, as Chomiak and his family did, stayed behind and spent generations staying on the right side of the new occupiers, the Stalinist murderers who took over from the Nazis.
Chrystia Freeland is in the business of helping societies — ours, Ukraine’s, the world’s — stay on the side of sanity. It makes her a target. The fact that her family existed in the damned 20th century gives her opponents ammunition. None of this takes away the legitimacy of her important work.
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I see. Excuses galore for poor Chomiak, who only did what he had to do to stay alive and protect his precious family – coming from the same people who insist the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a means of forging a partnership with Nazi Germany which would enable thievery on a grand scale and plunge the world into conflagration. Lots of slack for Chomiak (hey, that rhymes), but for Stalin, not so much. It is simply not possible to see him as a leader who had gone ’round the table looking for alliances against Germany, and been given the cold shoulder, and who made a non-aggression pact with Hitler after all his potential allies had already done so.
I’m certainly not a Stalin fan in any way, but the selectivity employed here is striking. Also, Freeland’s present Ukrainian-nationalist sentiments must be seen in context; she was raised to loathe the Russians and to make excuses for the Nazis, and her justifications are written by those cut from the same cloth.
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I suppose according to Paul Wells people who refused to collaborate with the Nazis – because they considered working with them a betrayal of their own values and those of their own people – and who ended up dying ghastly deaths are fools to be ignored and whose deeds are not worth remembering. Presumably if Wells found himself in a similar situation as Mihaylo Chomiak, he wouldn’t even think to hesitate in collaborating with a criminal regime. At least he, like Chomiak before him, gets to choose: other people would be denied even that opportunity.
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Yes, we have been privileged with a preview of which way Wells would break if he was under pressure; good to know.
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Iraqi ‘security forces’ using live ammo on protesters..12 dead thus far.
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I thought that flying a helicopter on instruments when the direct field of view of the pilot is obscured by fog would be more dangerous than a fixed wing aircraft that can fly over the mountainous terrain…thereby running the risk only of a midair collision.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/are-helicopters-safe-how-they-stack-up-against-planes-cars-and-trains/
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Gazprom supplies first billion cubic meters of gas over TurkStream pipeline
Commercial deliveries over the pipeline started on January 1, 2020
27 JAN, 19:22
MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. Gazprom has supplied the first billion cubic meters of natural gas over the TurkStream gas pipeline, the Russian gas holding said on Monday.
“About 54% of this volume were delivered to the Turkish gas market and around 46% — to the Turkish-Bulgarian border,” the company says.
Commercial deliveries over the pipeline started on January 1, 2020. Presidents of Russia and Turkey held the official opening ceremony of the TurkStream on January 8 in Istanbul.
Throughput capacity of the 930-km long gas pipeline is 31.5 bln cubic meters of gas per year. The first line with the capacity of 15.75 bln cubic meters of gas is intended for consumers in Turkey and the other one for Southern and Southeastern European nations.
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The asshole President of Bulgaria Borissov is pulling a Ukraine, i.e. now that he has Russian gas passing through a stretch of pipeline on Bulgaria’s soil, he’s suddenly finding RUSSIAN SPIES! everywhere. It must be to please Washington.
Euractiv: Bulgaria accuses two more Russian diplomats of spying
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/bulgaria-accuses-two-more-russian-diplomats-of-spying/
Jan 24, 2020
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Euractiv: Bulgaria indicts three Russian nationals for Skripal-type attempted murder
https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/bulgaria-indicts-three-russian-nationals-for-skripal-type-attempted-murder/
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Oh what would the world do without global intelligence and anal-cyst leaders like Bell-End-Crap? We’re luck to have them. I propose that they offer franchises for launderettes at a very reasonable rate. After all, they are part of the intel-circlejerk with the Pork Pie News Networks, Wanktanks and various Intel PsyOp units.
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According to Evgeny Satanovsky [cool name!] of the Russian Middle East Institute, Zelensky, after his stand-up show in Israel, might as well just go and shoot himself:
“Zelensky no longer exists. He is a dead man. At least in the Jewish world. After the way he behaved in Israel, he might as well just go and shoot himself.”
Satanovsky, a Russian Jew and noted spokesperson for Russian Jews, continues ironically: “Nothing remains of Zelensky. Not his name, not his reputation. He is a nobody. Previously he declared that a quarter of the Holocaust victims were Ukrainians. And then, with his behavior, he spat in the face of both Ukrainians and Jews. To be sure, there were two types of Ukrainians: some helped the Jews, and others murdered them.”
“In any case, this is not even important any more. Zelensky is no more, he has ceased to exist. At least in the Jewish world – 100%. And it’s all about the way he behaved in Israel. First he demanded a meeting in Israel with Russian President Putin, and then he refused to take part in the events comemmorating the victims of the Holocaust. As if the President of Russia had nothing better to do than meet with a regional clown.”
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His name begins with “Satan”.
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I know! That’s why it’s a cool name. His mother should have named him Lucifer instead of Evgeny.
Lucifer Devilovich Satanovsky!
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And speaking of the devil…
There is some breaking news that NuttyYahoo is on his way to Moscow even as we speak, fresh off his trip to Washington DC.
Nutty says he just talked to Trump and they have concocted “the deal of the century” – wow!
For Middle East peace. Is reckoned to be a feather in everybody’s cap, if they can pull this shit off. Our intrepid “cub reporter” will follow this story closely, as it breaks…
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Just heard that Satanyahu has been formally indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust by Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit after he withdrew his request for immunity.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-indicted-for-corruption-in-three-cases-in-first-for-a-sitting-pm/
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Oh no! If Yahoo is indicted, then how, oh how, will he be able to pull off this amazing peace deal with the Palestinians? (Which, by the way, is looking to be same old same old… with an archpelago type Palestine, each chunk surrounded by Israel.) Palestinians have already said No Deal! They may be desperate, but they’re not THAT desperate.
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Mahmoud Abbas rejected it out of hand – “a thousand no’s” seems very negative to me. Jared Kushner (who the hell is that guy, anyway?) tried to recover by suggesting the Palestinians hadn’t even read it before rejecting it (which is true; they based their rejection on America’s obvious pro-Israel bias), and once they calmed down and read it, they would see how good it was. Then, presumably, they would be beating Trump’s door down in their eagerness to sign.
Details are sketchy, but apparently the ‘deal’ would allow Israel to annex all its west-bank settlements, and while it would let the Palestinians establish Jerusalem as their capital, they would have control only of the outer fringes of the city while Israel would control the bulk of it.
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EXTRY! EXTRY! Breaking news!
Russian press is reporting that the CIA officer responsible for the Solemani assassination, was one of the “victims” of the Afghanistan airplane shoot-down (by the Taliban).
Oh wait, here is something in English. The man’s name was Michael D’ Andrea. The Taliban took him down in the Ghazni Province.
This is either (1) coincidence, (2) karma, or (3) a deliberate act of justice
YOU be the judge!
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OBVIOUSLY, Trump offered Bolton but Iran wanted the trigger man. Everything even-steven. (just kidding, or am I?)
The fact that the number of victims much less their names have yet to be released suggests it was a major disaster with ongoing efforts to sort out the implications and how to spin the story.
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They even managed to work in a dig against Russia there, too – the intelligence which led to the shoot-down came from the Russians (no substantiation provided), and the Iranian news source is known to be ‘pro-Kremlin’. Which has come to mean ‘not pro-American’. You’re either with us, or you’re with the Kremlin.
If this were a novel, Washington would have rubbed him out itself to remove the possibility of some journo getting to him, considering the flak the USA was getting on its definition of ‘imminent’.
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The reports of Michael D’Andrea being aboard the USAF Bombardier airliner are as yet unconfirmed by non-Russian / non-Iranian sources. Even the cause of the accident is not fully understood, whether it really was shot down or it crash-landed in Taliban-held territory.
According to Iranian Front Page, Russian intel sources confirm D’Andrea was on board and the plane was shot down:
https://ifpnews.com/murderer-of-soleimani-killed-in-us-plane-downing-in-afghanistan-sources
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Odds are if D’Andrea was the trigger man and he was killed in the crash, then the plane was either shot down or brought down by sabotage.
I would assume he was doing his duty guiding more drone strikes against wedding parties and funerals. He must been feel’n pretty good about his big success. I hope his miserable life flashed in front of his eyes as he died and felt the pain of every one of his victims. May he rest in pieces.
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If the cone of silence over who was on board is any indication, then it would be an impossible situation for the US and MSM on how to spin this as anything other than just retribution. Best wait for the impeachment soap opera to take center stage before acknowledging anything (unless bad actors spoil the timing).
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“May he rest in pieces.”
Haha! that’s a good one…
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Ah, but that’s according to the ‘pro-Kremlin’ press. News reported there, therefore, is likely to be ‘fake news’. Because until you hear it from the New York Times or WaPo, it isn’t real.
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The current claim is that there were only 2 crew members. That would be the pilot and co-pilot. So the plane crammed with communications gear, computers and the like have zero (0) technicians, zero (0) equipment operators, zero (0) officers, zero (0) etc?
Whoever else on that plane may quietly disappear down the memory hole.
A story (can’t find the link) indicated that the plane was 6 miles from its base when it went down (in Taliban territory!). So, it may have been on approach and at a relatively low altitude. Modern Igla variants have an “all-aspect” engagement meaning it can lock onto aircraft approaching the launcher. So, a shot down is possible. The aircraft did suffer extensive damage to the front while the midsection and tail were relativity undamaged. Impact with the ground could cause such damage but so could a missile hit.
Back when the Ukraine had an air force, the Igla seemed to have no trouble taking down various Uke aircraft. It would be easy to imagine a few well-trained operators equipped with a modern Igla variant and with foreknowledge of whom may be in the plane could stage a successful ambush. It could take just a few weeks to set up the operation. I would not bet money on it but still a possibility.
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Russian and Ukrainian pundits react to Zelensky’s horrific speech blaming the USSR for WWII and the Holocaust.
Best quote comes from a sociologist named Sergei Belashko:
“A typical failure of the speechwriters, who used either a Poroshenko or Yatseniuk speech, not even bothering to adapt it to the fact that the man who is supposed to pronounce is, is a Jew and the grandson of a WWII veteran [yalensis: Zel’s grandpa fought on the correct side of the front, in the Soviet army]. Zelensky read the speech with pauses, clearly this was the first time he had even seen it and probably didn’t understand at times what he was even reading. In conclusion he presented himself, once again, as an idiot, for the third time in 3 foreign visits, in the course of a single week.”
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Yeah, it was noticed at the time that he hadn’t sunk to the depths that Yatsenpuke previously had, who had he said outright that Ukrainian soldiers liberated Auschwitz: Zelensky spoke only of the Ukrainian Front. “”Yats” even pushed the idea that those in the Red Army that gave victory to the USSR were all Yukies, men and officers.
Nuland’s Yats really went over the top in Germany though, when he said on TV there that Germans knew full well what it was like to be invaded by Russians, just as Yukies did.
He got absolutely lambasted by the Fritzes for saying that.
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Yep, I think the bloom is off the Zelensky rose for good, and he has run out of slack. Whatever high hopes were vested in his accession to office are toast as well, though, unfortunately. He’s just going to be a mildly-embarrassing placeholder until the next ‘opposition firebrand’ comes along. Oddly – but unsurprisingly – the west generally still thinks he’s doing a pretty good job, since he will demonstrably read aloud anything that is put in front of him. But he has made no progress on corruption – it is arguably flourishing more vigorously than ever – and grows every day more beholden to the west for its next breath. Chiefly Europe, since most American support consists of fiery rhetoric, and you can’t eat that the last time I checked.
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Dedicated to the lying piece of shit above:
https://yandex.ru/video/search?from=tabbar&text=%D1%81%D0%B2%D1%8F%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F%20%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B0%20%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8F%20youtube
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Der Spiegel Twitter page, Thursday, 23 January 2020 :
Auschwitz was the biggest Nazi extermination camp
They murdered there at least 1.1 million people
75 years ago it was liberated by the American army
Spiegel has since apologised for its little mistake.
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A disgusting ploy to establish the ‘fact’ in the public consciousness. Nobody reads retractions. What will we have come to if history means nothing, and can be rewritten as politics dictates? We would actually be better off without any governments than we are with the lying sacks of shit we are stuck with.
Needless to say, a ‘mistake’ Washington is delighted with. A couple more ‘mistakes’ like that, and it’ll be a fact to everyone who didn’t live through it.
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Two small items I’ve seen in the last day or so: 1: India becomes the world’s second largest smart phone market after China – displacing the USA; 2: Despite Washington’s threats, Huawei is in more or less in the UK.* Another interesting piece in the Asia Times.**
While both these bits on news may not elicit much public response, they are yet two more empiracle examples of the unstoppable shift of global to the East.
The EU’s model of husbanding the poor peasants down south (Mercusor/Africa – Cotonu Agreement) has failed miserably and have essentially been told to f/k off. This is finally recognized with Brussel’s plans to increase their protectionizm – aka France & German whinging about being blocked from mega-mergers that would make u-Rope more competitively global (sic Siemens-Alsthom ties up).
Washinton’s is still S**tingTheBed and is even less along the five stages of grief. t-Rump and co see themselves as the last great stand before the ‘Indians’ laugh at them, throw them a few crumbs (on/off Chinese imports for example) and let them wallow in their future misery – short of a gigantic war… It’s real history played out in real time!
* https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/article/did-the-us-just-concede-defeat-in-china-tech-war/
** https://www.asiatimes.com/2020/01/opinion/east-is-digital-west-is-analog-the-twain-must-meet/
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That’s actually quite a catch; well done. I wonder where that leaves Canada (AKA Suckerland), with its lofty mulling-over of whether or not to use Huawei, after giving Nokia a $40-million contract to explore the possibility of building our 5G network (and it would be quite surprising if the work went to someone else after Nokia had done all the heavy lifting), to say nothing of the ongoing extradition trial of Meng. It would be beyond comical if we ended up the only western country with a Nokia 5G network, amid our ‘intelligence’ agencies’ essentially mirroring the concerns of the Americans. Institutional spinelessness rarely pays dividends, although it’s a lesson that clearly is slow to gain a foothold. We seem to be the slowest country to see Trump’s reversals coming, and we’re probably already committed and will end up with the clunkiest network in the west, probably at twice the cost. You have to laugh, or you’d never stop screaming.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4884541/ottawa-nokia-deal-5g-technology/
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Boris Johnson risks wrath of Trump by approving Huawei to help build UK 5G network
Chinese firm will only be involved in ‘periphery of the network’, officials insist – and its market share capped at 35 per cent
7 hours ago
Republican senator Tom Cotton said the UK opening the door to Huawei was “like allowing the KGB to build its telephone network during the Cold War” and called for an official review of US/UK intelligence-sharing, while Democrat Ruben Gallego said it was “irresponsible for our British friends to risk their national security and ours… for the sake of a few bucks”.
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Or like Canada letting the USA build the secure telephone units it uses to talk to international leaders and among senior government ministers.
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Someone better remind King Klown BoJo that January 31 coming up very soon.
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Shutting down nukes in Germany kill 10,000:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/01/german-nuclear-phase-out-boosted-emissions-by-5-and-caused-over-10000-deaths.html
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First rate articles on Russian military capabilities in the event of NATO aggression.
e.g.
“It is also worth mentioning that the proliferation of Russian over the horizon radar systems pose a challenge for launching an aerospace attack undetected at any altitude. The relatively short range Podsolnukh-E, which uses the ocean as a conducting surface can see 450km out and being deployed with every Russian fleet. Strategic OTH systems like Container are located deep inside Russia and can see most of Europe’s airspace at ~3000km range. This simply means that Russian VKS will see an aerospace attack coming whether it is high, medium, or low altitude and without that element of surprise you get more attrition.
The last problem is that by avoiding VKS IADS an aircraft may quickly become best friends with Russia’s PVO-SV.
The PVO-SV problem for low or medium altitude
Air defense units belonging to the Russian land forces (PVO-SV) do not need VKS IADS, because they carry a thicket of their own air defense systems to cover the maneuver formations. These include Tor-M1, Buk-M2, various radar assisted gun systems, and MANPADS. The problem with attempting low altitude penetration or close air support against Russian ground forces is that they have a very high density of short range air defense systems able to reach to medium altitude.”
https://www.anti-empire.com/western-military-thought-persists-in-self-comforting-delusions-on-russian-a2-ad/
https://www.anti-empire.com/fixation-on-a2-ad-totally-misunderstands-russian-military-strategy-for-conflict-with-nato/
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That is pretty interesting. It’s true that western analysis tends to assume that if you do not organize your air defenses the way the west does, then you don’t really have any. Russia has had plenty of opportunity to evolve its tactics and strategy, while America frequently goes up against opponents who don’t even have an air force, or if they do it is annihilated on the first day and American air superiority firmly established. I think the USA would be quite surprised what a tough nut a protected Russian position would be to crack. And the debacles involving Russian-made systems operated by other countries in the last couple of years have led to conclusions that they are unreliable, unstable and frequently engage targets the operators did not mean to hit.
I suspect American pilots, particularly those whose employment is in the ground-attack role, are not nearly so cavalier and dismissive of Russian systems. A longstanding saying has it that there are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are none who are both. Russian systems are live-fire tested at a rate at least triple the frequency of their western counterparts – missiles are expensive, and many western users only fire a real missile once every couple of years. When they do, the primary objective of the shot is data collection so the entire process can be analyzed post-firing, and consequently it is not really practice under operational conditions – the eggheads are swarming all over the gear and telling you how you must conduct the shot to optimize data-collection efforts.
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“China under Xi remains strikingly faithful to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. Russia under Putin has reverted to tsarism.”
https://www.anti-empire.com/niall-ferguson-donald-trump-must-split-up-putin-and-xi/
As for his somewhat simplistic encapsulation of the Chinese economic structure , that seems to be of considerable debate:
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/05/20/chinese-capitalism-is-an-oxymoron/
WTF is “Tsarism”????
The comments fairly well sum up Niall: clueless and supremely ignorant
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“Tsarism” is a term Ferguson may have invented because he does not know how to describe the Russian system. He’s right that Russia abandoned the hardcore Communist ideal with its slogans and lectures, but it by no means abandoned the principles of socialism. And Putin is not a “Tsar”. The west cannot see Russia as democratic, because it wants Putin out so badly and yet he is still there. The only explanation must be that he has seized power from his terrified subjects. It cannot be that they keep electing him because they like his performance.
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And now we have been give further evidence, without evidence of course, of the perfidious nature of the Russia …
Кравчук рассказал о «встрече» Гитлера и Сталина во Львове
01:50
The First Ukrainian President, Leonid Kravchuk, has said that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin allegedly met in Lvov before the start of World War II.
“Hitler and Stalin met in Lvov. This is a documented: it is not a secret. “They tried to negotiate… Instead of stopping Hitler, his hands were untied”, he said on the programme “60 minutes” on “Russia 1”.
According to Kravchuk, Hitler later “turned everything against the Soviet Union,” resulting in the suffering of the peoples of the USSR.
With this statement, the former Ukrainian president explained the words of the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who put some blame on the Soviet Union for unleashing World War II.
Адольф Гитлер и Иосиф Сталин якобы встречались во Львове перед началом Второй мировой войны.
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin allegedly met in Lvov before the start of World War II.
якобы — allegedly
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A city that was under Polish rule at the time.
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Well, obviously if it is documented, he will have no trouble proving it. Otherwise it’s pretty much like Rad Sikorski’s declaration that he was present when Putin said Ukraine was ‘not a real country’. And then named a date when Putin was not present. But Sikorski knew he WOULD HAVE said it, if he’d been there.
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Yes, if you take September 1st 1939 as the kick-off date.
He’s trying to make out that Stalin met Hitler before the signing of the M-R Pact, or during the period between the signing of that pact on 23rd August and the Nazi attack against the “Hyena of Europe” on September 1st or before 17 September, when the Red Army occupied eastern Polish territory that the Poles had annexed from Belorussia and the Ukraine in 1920.
The Yukie retard is talking through his arse.
I’ve seen plenty of photos of Stalin meeting Ribbentrop, though, but none such as this (below), when the British Prime Minister met Hitler and his pal Mussolini in 1938.
or when the uncrowned King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, Edward VIII (he abdicated before his coronation) and his woman friend Wallis Simpson gushed over the Führer when they were his guest in October 1938.
That old Austrian charm!
— Gnädige Frau, es ist mir eine große Ehre, Ihre Bekanntschaft zu machen. Würde die gnädige Frau gerne mit mir einen echten österreichischen Apfelstrudel essen?
— Cut the crap, Kraut! Just gimme a shot of rye and a hotdog!
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Moscow Exile, for once in my life, I must correct your German. I don’t know much German, certainly not as much as you. But I do know that the correct verb that Hitler would have used, would be fressen, not essen!
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Richtig! Menschen essen: Tiere fressen!
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For once in his shitty life Benito had the edge on the Austrian corporal at the Munich sell-out because he could speak German and passable English. Hitler on the other hand, uneducated Austrian shitkicker that he was, spoke only Austrian German with a strong bumpkin accent. So Mussolini was made up at Munich acting as interpreter, as you can see above:
Chamberlain: Be so kind, signor Mussolini, and recount to me what Chancellor Hitler has just said.
Benito: ‘E justa say dat you no come da crafty fakker wid eem and youda better shatta da face if you know whatsa good for you. Capice?
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Hahaha!
(You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Whatsa matter you? Gotta no respect?)
It’s capisce, incidentally.
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Said with thick Noo Yawk accent, of course.
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You bedda shaddapa you face!
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He should have offered Viennese Sachertorte with whipped cream instead, not plain old apple strudel. Although the Duke might have objected, thinking Hitler was propositioning the missus.
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Or he could have offered a napoleon.
(Think about it…)
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Hint: What do Hitler and Napoleon have in common, besides their mutual love of pastries?
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One curious thing Hitler and Napoleon had in common – besides attempting and failing to conquer Russia / the USSR – was that neither was a native of the country he came to rule.
Hitler was a native of the old Austro-Hungarian empire who went to live in Germany in 1913 or 1914. Napoleon was a native of Corsica, born a year after the Republic of Genoa sold the island to France in the Treaty of Versailles (1768). In a parallel universe, if the Genoese had been able to hang onto Corsica, Napoleon might have unified Italy using Genoa and Liguria as his base and then gone on to invade France and march through Paris.
Quelle horreur!
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Nor was Stalin. He was a Georgian. From a state of the overall union he came to rule, I suppose, but not a Russian. Those three are often featured in a vignette which muses that dictators are almost never from the country they eventually dominate. I guess they consider Napoleon a dictator, which I guess in some ways he was.
You could say the same of activists, though, I’ll bet – an easy example is Mustafa Nayyem, the ‘father of the Maidan’, who hails from Afghanistan.
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Yes, but as to the theory that the best dictators come from outside their own country, there are counter-examples galore: Franco. Mussolini. Hirohito. Trump. Just to name a few…
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Oliver Cromwell was Welsh. His paternal forebears’ family name was Williams. One of them, a brewer from Cardiff, married one of Thomas “The Hammer of the Monks” Cromwell’s sisters. Ollie’s granddad, I think, started using “Cromwell” as it had more kudos.
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And the lies keep coming!”
First it’s the Stolen Valor case of the Americans claiming they liberated Auschwitz when it was really the Soviet army what done that.
Next we have Ukrainian ex-President Kravchuk claiming (in an episode of “60 minutes”) that Stalin and Hitler met person-to-person in Lvov in 1939.
Russian Historian Mikhail Myagkov rebuts that claim. Says it never happened, and nobody could ever prove it did, even though that particular libel has been around for a while.
Myagkov also points out that it’s more like a case of projection: History does record that Hitler met in-person with Westie leaders such as Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier. The former appeasing and latter plotting, as always.
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Ooops! didn’t see Moscow Exile in his thread above, scooping me on this nugget.
Sorry, ME!
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BMPD: Первое официальное признание наличия «Искандера-М» в ядерном снаряжении
The first official recognition of the presence of Iskander-M in nuclear equipment
https://bmpd.livejournal.com/3912162.html
Как сообщила 22 января 2020 года пресс-служба Восточного военного округа (ВВО), в Бурятии военнослужащие ракетного соединения ВВО отработали вопросы доставки специальных боеприпасов в условный район. Основной задачей таких занятий является, отработка слаженных действий подразделений транспортировки с экипажами транспортно-заряжающих машин комплексов «Искандер-М» по доставке и перегрузке изделий, а также их дальнейшей отправке в заданные районы….
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More at the link.
In Buratiya at the moment…
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FlightGlobal: Irkut plans Russian-built avionics suite for PD-14-powered MC-21s
https://www.flightglobal.com/systems-and-interiors/irkut-plans-russian-built-avionics-suite-for-pd-14-powered-mc-21s/136422.article
Russian authorities have detailed an extensive procurement scheme to replace the foreign-manufactured avionics of Irkut MC-21s with domestically-sourced alternatives.
The procurement contract is valued at Rb1.7 billion ($27 million) is part of the Russian government’s import substitution scheme intended to reduce dependence on overseas suppliers…
…Procurement of the avionics is one of the most significant of the import-substitution efforts undertaken for the MC-21, which have covered multiple aspects of the twinjet’s overall design.
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There’s plenty more to replace…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irkut_MC-21
Systems
In August 2009, Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of United Technologies, announced it will provide electric power generation and distribution equipment for $2.3 billion over 20 years of production.[63] Rockwell Collins and its Russian partner Avionika were selected to supply the MC-21’s avionics.[64] Honeywell, Thales and Elbit Systems supplies avionics with 9 X 12 in multifunction displays, electronic flight bags, synthetic vision and enhanced vision systems. The MC-21 will be the first airliner with active sidesticks, supplied by UTC Aerospace Systems.[9] It has Fly-By-Wire controls.[54] It has a glass cockpit with side-stick controls and an optional Head-up display.
Goodrich Corporation, also a subsidiary of United Technologies, along with Aviapribor was selected to provide the flight control system actuators.[65] Zodiac Aerospace, Eaton and Meggitt provide other components.[9] Interior furnishings will come from Zodiac Aerospace, coordinated from C&D Zodiac in Huntington Beach, California. Innovations from Zodiac Aerospace in Carson, California, will be incorporated in the water and waste systems.
There are two types of auxiliary power units (APU) designed with specifications suitable for MC-21: HGT750 from Honeywell Aerospace[66] and TA18-200 developed by Aerosila.
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What are they going to do with the stuff that’s already fitted? Or is it? Can they just send it back and say “No, thanks”, and get their money back? Or has the foreign equipment not been delivered yet?
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It’s going to be messy either way. I think this announcement is also part warning shot and jab in the ribs to US partners that Russia is not going to wait out the slings and arrows of Outrageous Orange. After all and despite all his boasting, other very large US corporations have privately told the t-Rump administration to **** off. Boing is still selling aircraft to Russia and as we have noted here before, despite the relative low level of trade between the two compared to that of Russia and the US, trade has been growing with the US even with sanctions.
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Antiwar.com: US Stops All Arms Deliveries to Iraq
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/01/27/us-stops-arms-deliveries-to-iraq/
Last delivery of missiles was made in November
The Trump Administration has suspended all weapons deliveries to Iraq, including the delivery of Sidewinder and Maverick missiles, which were part of a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2016. The last shipment was delivered in November.
A US Air Force spokesman confirmed the pause, citing security concerns. Iraq has yet to comment on the matter…
…Since at least some of those airstrikes are likely by the US, it’s not surprising they’d want to limit Iraq’s ability to respond or attempt to control their airspace…
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Have they pulled the plug on i-Racki F-16 support yet? I guess they’ll be doing it in ratcheting steps. Message to everyone else, don’t buy American!
In other nudes, quelle suprise:
Antiwar.com:
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Seems like a good opportunity for Russia.
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Antiwar.com: Pentagon Now Says 50 Suffered Brain Injuries in January 8 Iran Missile Attack
https://news.antiwar.com/2020/01/28/pentagon-now-says-50-suffered-brain-injuries-in-january-8-iran-missile-attack/
Many were diagnosed since last official tally
…This is an increase from the 34 injured reported just days. The Pentagon says that 15 of the 50 were diagnosed since they made the 34 announcement. They say it is not unusual for concussion symptoms to take awhile to present.
Of the 50, the Pentagon says 31 of them were treated within Iraq and have returned to duty already, while 18 others were sent to Germany for further evaluation and treatment. Another was sent to Germany for unrelated reasons and got symptoms while there…
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Oink! Oink! Even with significant warning, how is this possible or are they now inflating figures to add to their list of ‘Wot i-Ran dun wrong.’
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FlightGlobal Boeing to reduce 787 production to 10 aircraft per month in 2021
https://www.flightglobal.com/air-transport/boeing-to-reduce-787-production-to-10-aircraft-per-month-in-2021/136431.article
In November 2019, Boeing disclosed plans to reduce 787 production from 14 to 12 aircraft monthly in late 2020 and remain at that rate for two years.
But in a full-year earnings release on 29 January, the company said it would trim production further, to 10 Dreamliners per month in “early 2021”, returning to 12 aircraft per month in 2023…
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More at the link about how China has no influence. Just when is the cent going to drop in Washington?
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This is getting serious. I still don’t think Boeing will go under, because it has too many fingers in too many pies in Washington. If the phrase “too big to fail” was coined with anyone specific in mind, it’d be Boeing or General Motors. I guess Apple is probably the USA’s most-profitable company now. But anyway, the company just seems to go from stumble to stumble. Using all their liquid assets to buy back their own stock is looking like a dumb play now, and Boeing has taken out enormous loans, billions at the same time it is announcing line cutbacks. Boeing is in big trouble. If Airbus plays this smart, Boeing will never catch up.
I’m sure everyone is capable of basic math, but just the same I feel I must point out that 4 less Dreamliners per month is an incredible 48 aircraft a year, worth $5.568 Billion. That’s at its 2016 price of $116 Million, and back then it was costing $200 Million to produce, so they were losing money on every airframe although probably making up much of it on training and maintenance contracts.
If there was another airline company capable of a hostile takeover, I think Boeing would have to call in the government to protect it.
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The stock buyback started in 2012 when the share price was $74. The share price peaked at about $440 in Feb 2019 and is now at about $322. The book value is now zero so its price is based on expectations of good times ahead.
I would imagine that Boeing has yet to be hit by multi-billion law suits from airlines and victims. Perhaps a reserve was created on the books.
Boeing may follow the path of General Electric – selling off lucrative assets trying to protect its core business. Their current CEO was a Jack Welch acolyte who missed out on the wild growth phase and is now holding the bag.
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Forgot to mention that Calhoun would likely be a poor turnaround CEO given his prior business experience.
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Now, to pop it in the old translation machine:
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 75 years ago, American soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. #WeRemember
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Not to worry, the commenters set them straight.
American lies and Stolen Valor, galore.
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I think that the ambassador actually believed what was posted. These appointees are that stupid. I really doubt it is part of a deep plan to rewrite more or less official history,
We should take comfort in just how stupid and ultimately ineffective they are.
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I notice the Americans make no effort to correct them.
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True. Any halfway decent person would go, “Er, no, much as I would like to, I cannot take the credit..”
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It’s easy – anything good or important was done by Americans. Anything nasty or evil was done by Russians.
It’s a pity Russia can’t take back their action in support of Warsaw in 1944, with the result that everyone in it was either killed or enslaved by the Nazis. See if they liked that better, or if history remembered it more kindly.
From “Auschwitz-Birkenau; History of a Man-Made Hell”;
“The Auschwitz main camp, the Birkenau death camp and the Monowitz labor camp were liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union in the First Army of the Ukrainian Front, under the command of Marshal Koniev, on January 27, 1945.”
https://www.scrapbookpages.com/AuschwitzScrapbook/History/Articles/Liberation.html
But gratitude is a fleeting thing, and when the urgency of the moment has passed, people begin to ponder alternative histories based on hearsay.
“In a film produced by the Auschwitz Museum, which I purchased in a bookstore there, one of the museum administrators said that he had heard that the camp was not liberated, but rather “it was happened upon by the Red Army when they were marching by.” He also mentioned that some people have said that the survivors liberated themselves. Binjamin Wilkomirski, who claimed to be a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in his book, “Fragments,” that there was no liberation. “We just ran away without permission,” he wrote. “No joyous celebration. I never heard the word ‘liberation’ back then, I didn’t even know there was such a word.”
Isn’t that something? They just ‘ran away without permission’. From a death camp, heavily guarded, which the prisoners were never expected to leave and consequently were not fed the kind of diet which would allow prisoners to sprint away from guards who would shoot anyone who got too close to the wire. The alleged ‘author’ – and I use the term loosely – Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose real name was Bruno Dössekker, completely fabricated his “Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood”; it was taken apart by Swiss journalist and writer Daniel Ganzfried in August 1998. 1998!! More than 20 years ago, yet his lying ‘recollections’ are still hanging around on historical sites, and some people prefer to believe what some shopkeeper ‘heard’ happened.
https://peoplepill.com/people/binjamin-wilkomirski/
This is how history gets rewritten – with the tacit consent of useless pricks who believe whatever narrative lets them feel better about themselves. Because that’s what history is really all about – feeling good about yourself and the role your countrymen played in it.
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I had read some accounts of other camps, not necessarily Auschwitz, where the guards sort of melted away as the Red Army approached; and so there may have been some cases where prisoners also just started, sort of, wandering off. Maybe in search of food. So there may be a tiny grain of truth in that.
But basically, the smarter prisoners knew to stay put and cohesive as a group until the new authorities arrived to take care of them. Those who just wandered off into the Polish countryside risked being murdered by the Polish Home Army types and other murderous degenerate para-militaries. There were lots of them around, who were busy trying to finish off the few remaining Jews who had survived the Nazi camps.
I mentioned before the case of Leon Feldhendler , one of the heroes of the Sobibor Uprising, who was murdered after the Liberation, allegedly by Polish nationalists.
American wiki disputes this version of history and posits the ALT-theory that Feldhendler was just shot in a routine burglary by people looking for gold in his flat. This wiki was obviously heavily edited by pro-Polacks. But even they have to note that Feldhendler’s killing was one of at least 118 violent deaths of Jews in the Lublin district between the summer of 1944 and the fall of 1946.
See, the Polish nationalists made it Über-clear that they would not accept the surviving Jews back into their society. From their POV, Hitler did them a big favor.
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And P.S. – as to that whole issue, whether the Soviet Army should have been making a bee-line to liberate Auschwitz, or just happened to encounter it in their march-by, it’s an absurd distinction. The strategic goal of the Soviet army was to destroy the Nazi army. Anything else was just gravy.
It’s like the “active defense/armed intruder” training that we are forced to take at my workplace. We are taught that if there is any kind of armed intruder or hostage situation, that when the cops storm the place, we are supposed to just like flat on the floor with our hands in the air, while the cops sweep past us, in their hot pursuit of the gunman.
We are told: The first wave of the storm troopers will not stop to aid the injured, they will just stomp over any injured or dead bodies in their pursuit of the intruder. So, don’t call out for medical attention, or expect anything from them.
It’s only the second wave that might stop to render first aid.
Do you see what I’m getting at? The Soviet soldiers had no obligation to stop and render aid to the civilians in Auschwitz. But they did anyhow, because they were good people, and they couldn’t stand to see fellow human beings suffering like that.
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Perhaps, but that would not have been true of Auschwitz – as you correctly noted – where the Soviets lost a couple of hundred soldiers in combat in the operation; someone obviously resisted.
You cannot have ALT-endings in history like it was a novel, and the outcome might be happy or sad; what happened, happened. And as one of the former Soviet soldiers pointed out in an interview someone linked earlier, the 60-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz just passed, with no questions at all over who was responsible. The shift in opinion has taken place since. Of course the Poles want to flatter America, because they want a powerful rich friend and to give the Russians one in the eye at the same time. And of course the Ukrainians trail along, itching with Poland-envy because Poland was taken up by the west, forgiven all its debts and made rich by their standards, and Ukraine is led by a marshmallow. Pence’s behavior, illustrated by his coy recollection that ‘soldiers’, apparently of no discernible nationality, liberated Auschwitz, suggests that while America is not necessarily driving the whole scam, it is benefiting from it and enjoying the attention.
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Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over
After World War II, Jewish refugees found they could never return to their native land—a sentiment that some echo today
The Epilogue
By RUTH FRANKLIN
October 2, 2006
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz
By Jan T. Gross
(Random House, 303 pp., $25.95)
As Jan T. Gross recounts in his harrowing new book, Polish Jews who had the amazing fortune to survive the camps were “unwelcomed” upon their return home with brutal violence. In June 1945, several Jews traveling by train in eastern Poland were murdered by their fellow passengers. In August, a mob attacked the synagogue in Krakow and then pursued Jews throughout the city, killing several and wounding dozens. The writer Zofia Nalkowska, visiting a Jewish orphanage that fall, noted that the children were unable to enroll in public school because of “beatings and persecution.” The following spring, the French Catholic intellectual Emmanuel Mounier reported that more than a thousand Jews had been killed in the Polish countryside over the past nine months. And on July 4, 1946, scores of Jews were killed and hundreds injured in a day-long city-wide bloodbath in Kielce that has become notorious as the deadliest peacetime pogrom in modern Europe.
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Like the section here, which is mostly about how wonderful and enlightened Poles are compared to the rest of Eastern Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce#Kielce_pogrom
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!!! Will this be widely reported in civilizationland?
RT.com: Former Moscow Police officers arrested over framing of Russian journalist Ivan Golunov
https://www.rt.com/russia/479477-golunov-case-police-arrested/
…Now, investigators have detained five ex-police officers who are accused of fabricating the case against Ivan Golunov, a reporter for Riga-based online publication Meduza.
The former members of the Moscow Police’s drug trafficking control department are currently being interrogated, according to Svetlana Petrenko, the official representative of Russia’s Investigative Committee. The detainees were removed from their posts last July in the immediate fallout from the controversial incident. President Vladimir Putin also dismissed two high-ranking Interior Ministry officials over the case…
…The five detainees have been named as former Moscow drug cops Denis Konovalov, Akbar Sergaliev, Roman Feofanov, and Maxim Umetbaev, as well as the former head of the department Igor Lyakhovets.
####
Hopefully other corrupt cops will take note.
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I always find it curious that western journalists like to harp on about ‘Ex-KGB’ for hire to do absolutely anything yet remain so quiet about ex-westie intelligence officers doing the same? Is one more respectable than the other, being hired to dig up dirt/bs/whatever for $$$? It’s the STRATFOR disease, i.e. noobs with $$$ get exicted by the scent of ‘hush-hush’ and will pay for almost any recycled, watered down barely basic intel. Then again, lots of ‘smart’ people plowed $$$ in to Dot.Com that became Not.Coms.
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Lots of positive news from Russian economy lately.
After Decline and Stagnation, Russian Income Growth Hits Six-Year High:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/01/29/russian-income-growth-hits-six-year-high-a69080
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If you actually read the article, it is a schadenfreude-rich mockery of the Russian government from the viewpoint that it cannot lift Russian incomes back to what they were in 2013, before American sanctions crippled the country and reduced Russians to angry tears. In typical Moscow Times headline-says-one-thing-story-says-another, the body of the article proceeds to cast the current rise in incomes in a suspicious light, as if the government is simply making up the numbers.
There actually is lots of good economic news out of Russia, and most of it is actions which are being taken to insulate the country against the west so that the next time Washington decides to lean on Russia to try to gain political concessions, Russia can just ignore it and the actions will have zero effect on Russian commerce or suppliers.
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All true plus Russia is insulating itself from a possible collapse of Western economies. FWIW, people who seem to know what they are talking about estimate 2 years before the tsunami of debt overwhelms the financial systems. Russia’s import substitution could be helpful in such a scenario. Selling energy to China will also help assuming European demand seriously slackens or the Euro or dollar tanks.
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I remember my workmates and I used to joke, when I was in the military and since then in my present job, that first gay relationships were ordered to be tolerated, then they were encouraged, and if you wait long enough, they’ll be mandatory. Well, I be go to hell if someone hasn’t gone there.
The provincial government funding for Quebec’s Federation des Femmes de Quebec is under review after its president – incensed at news that a man out on parole after being convicted of killing his female partner had been arrested in the slaying last week of a 22-year-old woman in Quebec City – tweeted out on the asshole of social media that heterosexual relationships are violent, based on religion and perhaps should be banned.
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/funding-for-womens-group-under-review-after-call-for-ban-on-man-woman-relationships-567368752.html
There’s a good example, right there, of what kind of leadership you might expect from a President Bouchard. There is absolutely no reason at all to believe that women are by nature more benevolent than men are, more reasoned and deliberate than men are, or less likely to misuse their power to get their licks in at groups they despise than men are. The right set of circumstances, and women act just as much the jerk as men, and all that rubbish about the world will be a more peaceful, gentle and progressive place when it is run by women leaders is just that – rubbish.
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And now pin back your ears to the latest trials and tribulations that I suffer here as a result, I suspect, of the Exceptional Nation’s №1 lickspittle acting at its behest through the agency of one of the biggest of the “Big Five” UK banks, NatWest:
My NatWest debit card expires in August. I tried to contact NatWest in order to have a new one sent to me. No way! Try as I might, I could not fathom out how I could do this online. I had done it before, but now … nothing! No online instructions as regards ordering a new card.
So at last I managed to contact NatWest customer complaints and asked them why I could not order a new card online.
Here’s the lengthy response I received a couple of days ago:
Dear Mr. Exile
Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention in your email and for your patience whilst I have been investigating your complaint. I fully understand your frustration and I can only ask you to accept my utmost apologies for the inconvenience and upset that you have suffered.
Based on what you have told us, my understanding of your complaint is that:
• You are unhappy that you are unable to order a new debit card via online banking
• You are unhappy that you have been unable to contact us
My Investigation
Here is a summary of what I have investigated:
• I have checked our records and can confirm that it is not possible to order a debit card to your address in Russia as it is now classed as a high risk country. The Bank will not dispatch high value items such as debit cards to any High Risk and no exceptions will be made.
• Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find an explanation as to why you have been unable to contact us. Please accept my sincere apologies for this and the inconvenience caused.
My Response
Mr Exile, first and foremost I would like to offer my personal apology for the trouble and assure you that it is not in NatWest’s intention to cause you any upset and inconvenience. Having reviewed all of the information available to me, I agree with your complaint that you have been unable to contact us. However, I am unable to agree with your complaint about your debit card, as this is a Bank decision.
To summarise, here are the main points of my resolution:
• I understand that you have been living in Russia for many years and you have had cards in the past, however this is our current position.
• Customers who live outside of the UK may not have full access to all banking services and in your case, it may be even more limited as you live in Russia. However, we do have solutions which can help customers in your situation:
o We can arrange for a new card to be dispatched to a residential or business UK address. To do this, we would need to update your address and then order a new card.
o Alternatively, we can order a new card and dispatch it to a branch in the UK for you to pick up whenever you are next in the UK.
• You mentioned that you have struggled to contact us in the past. I can confirm that there are various ways of reaching us:
o NatWest Telephone banking team – +44 3457 888 444
o Twitter – @NatWest_Help
o On our homepage, there is a chat button in the bottom right-hand corner.
o You can send a letter to your home branch ******* * **********, ****, ****** ***** UK.
• I have also taken feedback so that our website and online banking can have clear information on this for our customers to read.
• If there have been any costs incurred as a result of this complaint, then please do let me know and I will review the information provided.
You don’t need to take any further action now, but please let me know if you have any questions or if you feel that there is anything that I may not have considered. I do hope that my response has met your expectations but if you decide that you’re unhappy with any aspect of our solution, please do contact me, so that I can have the opportunity to put things right. You can speak to me or a member of our team on 0800 161 5126 or 07719086153 between 8am and 6pm, Monday to Friday. Alternatively, if you are calling from abroad please call +44 1204 464 425. Calls may be recorded. You can also email any additional information in relation to your complaint to customer.relations@natwest.com.
Although I hope it won’t be necessary, you have the right to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, free of charge – but you must do so within six months of the date of this email. If you do not refer your complaint in time, the Ombudsman will not have our permission to consider your complaint and so will only be able to do so in very limited circumstances (for example, if the Ombudsman believes that the delay was as a result of exceptional circumstances). I have enclosed the attachment to a leaflet providing further details of the FOS http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/publications/consumer-leaflet.htm. Further information is available on their website http://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Thank you again for contacting me and please let me know if I can be of any further help.
Yours sincerely
** ****** *******
Complaint Specialist
What an unbelievable situation!!!!
So I wrote back the following:
Dear ** ****** ******* ,
Thank you for your letter explaining why I cannot get a new debit card.
So the situation now is that either (a) I fly out to the UK, where I can order a new debit card before my present one expires in August of this year or (b) NatWest can arrange for a new card to be dispatched to a residential or business UK address and the recipient of my new card at that address can then forward the card to me.
As regards (a), I very seldom visit the UK, to say nothing of the expense flying there and back in order to get a debit card. I have visited the UK 5 times in the past 25 years. The last time was in August 2017, when I got my present debit card. My previous card I had posted to me by NatWest to my home address in Russia; the card before that one I had sent from NatWest to my sister’s address in Manchester, which I had used as my forwarding address following my departure for Russia many years ago. However, because my forwarding address was in the the UK, after many years of residence in Russia, I began to have problems using my debit card there, namely, using my debit card in Russia, I was unable to buy I flight ticket to the UK in 2016 for me and my family.
In the end, I used my wife’s Russian bank card in 2016 to purchase the flight tickets on line. Having then arrived in the UK, I enquired at my NatWest branch how these problems had come about. I was advised to update my address to that were I have lived in Moscow these past 22 years. The explanation given as regards my card payments being refused was that the data on my card had a UK address, but the payment orders were made from Russia and therefore fell under suspicion.
I followed the advice that NatWest gave me in the UK and changed the personal data for my debit card so that the address of the holder is my Moscow one, where I have lived these past 22 years and where I am registered as a permanent foreign resident in Russia. I did this in the UK in August 2016.
Now, however, it seems much has changed. Basically, NatWest is no longer of any use to me: I now enjoy limited banking services if, indeed, I now have any, and I cannot order a new debit card in Russia before the validity of my present one expires, nor if I could order a new card online, Natwest would not send it to me because my address is a Russian one and Russia is a “high risk” country and: “The Bank will not dispatch high value items such as debit cards to any High Risk and no exceptions will be made”.
How can it be arranged for a new card to be forwarded to my sister’s home address again, so that she, in turn, can forward a new debit card to me, as she used to do up to about 9 years ago? I have written back and asked NatWest this question and, so far, have not received a reply. However, I must add that if I have the address in the personal data of my debit card changed once again to my sister’s UK address, then payments ordered in Russia by means of my card will be refused again, simply because the order comes from Russia but the card holder’s address is in the UK, ergo, the card must hve been stolen. That, I presume, is the reasoning for NatWest’s refusal to carry out payments for flight tickets in 2016 that I requested in 2016.
I really do think this is a ludicrous state of affairs. I have been a Natwest customer for over 30 years; I have never overdrawn. And now, simply because of where I live, I cannot access my NatWest account.
I need a new debit card before August 2020. I last used it in Moscow at New Year to buy presents. If I do not get a new card before August 2020, I shall not be able to make purchases anywhere.
Perhaps the best option for me now is to buy a flight ticket to the UK using my debit card while I can, and having arrived there, to withdraw my money from NatWest and close my account.
I have an account in Moscow with UniCredit, an Italian bank. I opened the UniCredit bank account here 2 years ago in order to have money transferred to Russia in order to pay for my son and elder daughter’s university fees. And the writing was already on the wall then, in 2017, when I opened the UniCredit account in order to do this, as at first I had requested that NatWest make a transfer to my account in the Russian national savings bank: NatWest refused to do that; then I requested that money be transferred to an account that I have with VTB, the biggest bank in Russia and a subsidiary of Bank of Russia: again, NatWest refused to make the transfer. Having given NatWest my newly opened UniCredit account number, the transfer was made. …
What a bloody waste of time NatWest is!
Such are the trials of living in “High Risk” Russia!
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Not high-risk when British companies are making money there, though.
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And Moscow as a city is nowhere near as high risk as London is now, it seems, where there seem to take place fatal knifings almost daily.
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Oh, they don’t care a fig about personal safety – investors don’t have to live in the places where their money is making money. They care about economic safety; the safety of the money, against the possibility it will be stolen. London is still reckoned to be quite a safe place if you are a dollar, or a euro. You’re much less likely to be wiped out by American sanctions in London. Investments in Russia are not safe, because you never know when the Grand Pooh-Bah in Washington might order the company to up sticks and move out overnight.
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That lump of faecal matter Browder thought ’90s Russia was top hole!
Now he is a British citizen resident in the world’s top money laundering city.
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I guess this is one signal to cut any remaining apron strings to Mother England and go full-on Orc. You’ll probably be getting others from any other banks, companies or govt departments you may still have dealings with in the UK. Probably best to unmoor yourself completely before taking out Russian citizenship if you plan on doing that.
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I very seldom use my NatWest debit card in Russia. As I mentioned above, I last used it to buy an iPhone in December of last year, and before that, to buy flight tickets to the UK in August 2017. The only reason I have kept the account open is that into it are paid my British state pension and my pension from the British miners’ pension fund.
When I reached pensionable age, they asked me where I should like to have my pensions paid into. That was a small victory for me, by the way, because I had stuck it out to the end, namely I had waited until I was 65 before claiming my pension. The bastards had been trying to persuade me to accept an earlier pension age, whereby I would receive a lump sum payment but a smaller pension. I refused and kept on going with my head down. The sly bastards know that most miners are usually long dead before they can reach 65 years of age, and so many retired miners fall sucker for an earlier lump sum payment and a reduced pension. But I beat them at their crafty game! I got the full pension due to me, and it is still being paid out more than 5 years after my 65th birthday.
They, the pension wallahs, know I live in Moscow: apparently no problem as regards the UK pension bureaucrats as regards that matter. They asked if I preferred to use a Russian or British bank. I told them to use my NatWest account. The person who telephoned me from the UK as regards this matter expressed relief on receiving this information from me, saying that they sometimes have difficulties sending pension payments to Russian banks. I said to him: “So there are other UK pensioners living in Russia?” and he replied: “Yes, you’d be surprised to learn how many there are!”
I suspect now that the difficulties in making UK pension payments into Russian banks do not originate here but with them, with those bastards in Merry England, who always play fair and keep everything above board.
I asked the miners’ pension fund if, following my call to Asgard, my wife would receive a miner’s widow’s pension. They, at the miners’ pension fund, assured me that she would. I told them that my wife is a Russian citizen. They said that did not matter at all, that the pay out miners’ widows’ pensions all over the world to widows who are not British citizens. Many retired miners must go in for shagging abroad, it seems.
Be that as it may, having been told the other day all this shit about “High Risk” Russia from those people at NatWest, I bet when I toss-tail over they’ll make it very hard for my wife to receive a widow’s pension from the UK.
If I close the NatWest account, which was my immediate intent after having read that recent shite that I got the other day from NatWest, I should have to open another account somewhere for my pension payments. When I croak, my state pension stops, but my miner’s pension will become my widow’s pension and continue to be paid into NatWest. But I want nothing to do with those NatWest bastards now. If I close the NatWest account, I shall have to open another account into which my pensions will be paid and , after my death, my wife’s widow’s pension. And I bet I’ll get no joy off other British banks as regards making money transfers to the Evil Empire.
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The Saker website provides a thorough summary of the Iranian missile strike on US forces in Iraq. The analysis largely parallels what has been said here; to wit:
– Iran provided advanced notice to the US through multiple channels prior to missile launch
– The missile accuracy was exceptionally good. The message delivered that Iran can devastate US logistics centers and bases formally thought safe
– US missile defenses are weak to non-existent
– The downplaying of US casualties was to allow Trump to climb down from threats of massive retaliation which, given newly discovered Iranian capabilities would have triggered a punishing response
– The US/West could launch punishing airstrikes against Iran but an invasion would be impossible.
– The article mention possible use of nuclear weapons but did not explore the global implications.
– The ultimate Iranian objective is the removal of the US military from the Middle East; starting with Iraq and Syria.
The analysis did not appear to fully consider the precarious position of KSA (large Shia population in the oil regions) and UAE (an economy highly dependent on foreign investment). A full-on war with Iran would like bring down the monarchies of both countries. As mentioned, if Iran targeted the major desalination plants, the human catastrophe would be biblical.
Further, world oil prices could, according to some, hit reveal hundred dollars bbl. A global depression could develop except for Russia.
Hence, the US will not start a major war with Iran any more than with N Korea.
https://thesaker.is/u-s-posture-in-the-middle-east-preparing-for-disaster/
Another article provided a detailed assessment of the accuracy of the missiles. The conclusion was that the accuracy, depending on assumption ranged from a few meters to perhaps 10 meters. The article mentioned GPS guidance but more likely GLONASS guidance.
https://thesaker.is/analysis-of-the-iranian-missile-strikes-on-ayn-al-asad-airbase/
My take is the failure of the Syrian invasion was the first major defeat and the Iranian strike on the US forces was the second. The US/West is now in a fighting retreat mode. It ain’t over by any means however, the odds favor the axis of resistance.
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The BTL comments to the article are just as informative. Hassan Carim suggests that the Iranians targeted the assets, facilities and infrastructures of non-military government (think: US intel agencies) and contractor agencies.
One of the targeted sites at Ayn al Assad airbase was a taxiway that could have been used by drones. Drones can be replaced but the taxiway may not be. There could have been communications and power cables running under the taxiway as well and those may have been the real targets of the missile attacks. Why would parts of the taxiway be targeted and not other parts?
Butte Bill links to an article by Byron King who analysed the missile attacks as well and provided overhead photos of the attacks:
https://stpaulresearch.com/2020/01/11/the-real-target-of-irans-missiles-revealed-hint-it-was-a-direct-hit/
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Least we forget the other holocaust -more brutal, more depraved than anything coming out of a German Nazi mind. I present to you the first and only death camp for children (extremely graphic and upsetting):
https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/01/the-croatian-invention-nazi-concentration-camps-for-serbian-children-extremely-graphic/
Anyone notice the common denominator between the Jewish and Serbian holocaust?
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Reading that dreadful account of the incarceration of Serbian Orthodox Christian children in the camp, I was struck how there was hardly much difference, except perhaps in degree, between the way it was run (by Roman Catholic priests and nuns) and the way the Roman Catholic Church ran orphanages in other countries in the decades following WWII.
The saving grace (if we can call it that) for the Serbian infants who died is that at least they escaped sexual abuse which would have been inevitable had they not been regarded as subhuman and therefore destined to go to hell (just as Jewish people had been regarded as subhuman in Nazi ideology) and thus allowed to survive on the minimum rations required for survival.
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Thank you Jen for reading and feeling it was worth commenting. A key difference with the Jewish holocaust was the recognition and memorialization not to mention enormous reparations. In contrast, the Serbian holocaust is denied and the survivors ignored.
I say this without bitterness, most commentators on this blog really don’t care while providing endless commentary on the other holocaust. Yet, they struggle why the West hates Russia. The answer is staring them in the face. Now, back to the regularly scheduled programming.
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Dear Patient Observer: I don’t think that you should think that “most commentators” don’t care about the Serbian Holocaust. Of course we care. We care quite a lot.
It’s just that the Jewish Holocaust is the weapon du jour, and a great tactical move for Russia vs. Poland, in the current situation.
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Another major WWII-era holocaust, initiated by the Nazis and made worse by the British (through a naval blockade), was the mass starvation of some 300,000+ people in Nazi-occupied Greece from June 1941 to June 1945. During this period, the Nazis took away all of the country’s machinery and factory equipment, all of its transport machinery and equipment (including even donkeys, apparently) and food supplies in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The result that over the winter of 1942 – 1943, thousands starved to death.
https://www.ahistoryofgreece.com/worldwarII.htm
As was their wont in other parts of Europe they occupied, the Nazis punished entire villages by razing them to the ground and killing all their inhabitants if someone or a few people in those villages thumped some German soldiers or if the village folk resisted having German soldiers stationed in their buildings. A typical example was the way in which the Germans punished the village of Kalavryta for the lynching deaths of 78 German soldiers: the entire town was set on fire and the village’s male population was machine-gunned to death. The women and children managed to escape from the burning school building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Kalavryta
https://greekcitytimes.com/2019/12/13/commemorating-kalavryta-massacre-1943/?amp
In this context, the entire Jewish community in Thessaloniki, one of the largest Sefardic Jewish communities in southeast Europe if not the largest, was destroyed. Thousands died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex. Other Jewish communities in Greece which were better integrated with the local population (they had longer histories, some dating back to Roman times, for one thing and spoke Greek) did not lose so many of their people.
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Forgot to mention that Jen found the common denominator..
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Common denominator.
Key date: 1054 AD.
Now you can you see why “The Ukraine” means “The Borderland”, and the definite article before “Ukraine”, does not reduce the status of that place as some definable territory belonging to another state: it indicates that the place is the definable “borderland” about which everyone knows.
Similarly, when I say to my wife: “How are the kids?” she doesn’t answer: “Which kids?” She knows which bloody kids I’m talking about.
Similarly, when I speak of “The Borders” or “The Marches” (“marches” means “borders”) in the UK, no one says to me: “Which borders, which marches?”
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