Wikipedia ("which anyone can edit"), articles on politics and 20th century history at least are firmly controlled by members of The Left, often citing as authoritative sources, newspapers. Give us a break. Those who try inserting the truth soon have their edits reverted. It is the newest and most damning source of disinformation of this age, hiding being neutral artiles on geography, plants etc. Please don't cite their **** to me, at least.
I have a copy of the Black Book of Communism. It has been "extensively criticised"? By whom? The Left? What a surprise!! I think the writer referred to is saying that there were no extermination camps like those the Nazis built from 1942 onwards. However, to say that the forcd labour camps in Russia, particularly those in the arctic circle, were not "Death Camps" when they murdered more people than any nazi camp is surely ridiculous.
Hahaha. I had to laugh when I read his comments there. In the last twenty years it has been shown that McCarthy was right. Many obituaries have appeared wih the full stories and almost of all of those hauled before the Senate Committee and who lied to them were in fact secretly active and mostly card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Because The Liberal-Left have control of the media they have spent decades demonising Senator McCarthy. To me he was a great hero of the fight against communism. Pity we hadn't had that sort of committee in this counrty. We could have cleaned out the education service and Civil Service before they destoryed our young and our country with their subversion.
No, that is not what is being said here at all. We were making peacetime comparisons about society in the relevant countries. Don't try the usual left-wing tactic of twisting what has been said.
No-one has for a moment stated that "fascism was an appropriate response". You are again twisting what has been said. Factual statements were made about communism world-wide in the 20th century which are irrefutable. Comparisons were made with fascism to demonstrate that they are so far behind in monstrosities and murder that you can't see them for the dust and that an element of balance was necessary to establish the major and worst 20th century evil. That's all. Anyone with the slightest understanding of British politics, particularly since World War II will recognise what socialism has done to this country. It may not have been introduced as dramatically as it was in Russia but the drip drip drip effect of this down-market pinko form of communism has virtually wrecked Britain.
I don't accept that wiki is particularly left wing, and if it is that can only reflect a left wing basis in the elite which is writing it and therefore the intellectual elite of the West itself. Wiki is the greatest assemblage of knowledge ever created, making even the most comprehensive of encyclopedias look like patchy and shallow pamphlets. A lot of people who have relied on access to private libraries and extensive eduction instinctively feel threatened by it as it undermines their advantages and democratizes knowledge.
Trying to dismiss wiki for being left wing is like trying to dismiss reality for being left wing, not that you would be the first to do that.
As for your argument about Russian labour camps Vs German death camps. Last year in Britain cars killed considerably more people than heroin, the difference being that cars were not designed to kill people and that they did was incidental to their otherwise useful purpose, heroin does not have the same justification. Which is why heroin is considered an evil and cars not. The same principle is why German atrocities, which were intrinsically senseless, are universally considered worse than Russian Communist ones which, while they might have been disgusting and abhorrent, at least had a useful purpose from some perspectives underlying them.
immanentize the eschaton!
Perhaps it would have been entirely reasonable to suppose the Second World War might have been a short lived affair. But is there any indication that any British politician or military commander of significance actually thought so.
The evidence would appear to point in the other direction. Prime Minister Chamberlain understood what it might actually cost Britain to become involved in another war against Germany - hence his preferred policy of appeasement.
On returning from one meeting with Hitler, he was said to have looked down from his aircraft at the River Thames below, which would always provide aerial guidance to any future German bomber, even if blackout precautions were imposed.
He believed - as many others did - that ´the bomber would always get through´.
Fear of the bomber aircraft was nearly as great as the fear of nuclear weapons now.
The general public watched the movie Things to Come in cinemas in 1937, with its predictive sci-fi portrayals of bombing raids. My mother said it terrified her (although in practice she actually enjoyed the war and being in the WAAFs..).
Germany was not of course ´fighting on two fronts´in 1939. Moreover, the Nazi-Soviet pact of that year would surely have put paid to any expectation that it was likely to do so.
´A war of mobility fought by armoured and motorised divisions backed by air power´ does indeed sound rather like the short, swift German campaigns of the time - especially the rapid progress German divisions made towards Paris once they had broken through in the Ardennes.
Surely, though, this calculation would not have applied to quite the same extent to any British forces dispatched to the Continent, who, after all, had to make the journey there, with all the logistical problems involved. The British would mainly have had to rely on the French army in their land war stage, and the French - as you say - were planning for a war of attrition along WWI lines.
And is there any evidence at all that the British expected resistance inside Germany from the ´supposedly substantial anti-Nazi German socialist/communist population´. Surely these troublemakers (trade unions, socialists & the like) had all been dealt with in 1933, during Hitler´s first few months in power.
They had certainly not shown any active signs of resistance from 1933 to 1939. Therefore the chances of them doing so after 1939 would have seemed pretty minimal, I would have thought.
I strongly doubt if the British expected any active resistance to come from the left that would have weakened Hitler´s position inside Germany.
I take your points about the balance of power in Europe having largely brought peace since 1815.
However there seemed to be no great enthusiasm for containing potential German power from 1919 to 1939, apart from the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which even Britain and France seemed ultimately unwilling to defend at various times during the 1930s when its terms were being overturned by Germany.
What supra-national organisations existed then to contain Germany. I was under the impression that Germany was even excluded from The League of Nations.
Germany may have been showing an aggressive disregard for the authority of Versailles, but they were surely assisted by the former allies who failed to enforce its terms. When Germany remilitarised the Rhineland in 1936, plenty of British people suggested that it was pointless to try and stop the Germans marching into their own backyard.
This cannot be rationalised by calling all those who did so Nazi sympathisers or the like.
The fact is that by the mid-1930s the clauses of Versailles meant next to nothing - even to the British, incuding those who were ´historically literate´.
If they had meant anything, the Brits and French would not have allowed (from 1936 to 1938) the occupation of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, the rest of Czechoslavakia, and then Austria.
Poland proved to be a tipping point, but it had no special significance. By 1939 the British, at least, no longer cared about Versailles.
I don´t recall anyone - politician or military leader - saying it would all be over by Christmas either. After 1939 the British seemed prepared to do whatever was necessary to win - regardless of how long it took. I just think they were wrong to have done so.
By the way, would it have been correct to have declared war on Germany in 1861 or 1866. Or perhaps the Franco-Prussian war should have developed into a wider European conflict involving Britain.
I mean, I wonder exactly how large Germany was permitted to become before the British decided it had grown large enough. In fact this position actually makes no sense. We ought to have been able to live with a more powerful Germany. We are forced to now, after all, despite our membership of the European Union.
Last edited by London Orbital; 12-01-2009 at 03:26 AM.
They are far for irrefutable, most people believe Fascism to have been a worse phenomenon than Communism. The only argument you have got is that the Communists killed more people but as I have demonstrated since that is not a universal characteristic of Communism then those deaths can not be attributed to it.
Moreover, as is instinctively recognized by the overwhelming majority of the population, morally communism was far more justified than fascism.
As for the decline of Britain, seems to me that most of the socialist impulse running from the Second World War has been beneficial for most of the population. The damage which has been done has been done by economic decline and by Progressivism, an entirely different, if related, phenomenon to socialism. The elite are not doing what they are doing because they believe in the ultimate victory of the Proletariat, they are doing it because "it's the future".
As for twisting what has been said, you offered Russia as an example of the fact Communism is worse under peacetime conditions the fascism. I offered an explanation for this phenomenon, cultural and economic legacy, and proved the point by offering Cuba as an alternative comparison to Russia. That is not twisting what has been said, that is successfully debating a proposition.
immanentize the eschaton!
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