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Church of Virus BBS   General   Serious Business   The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « previous next » Pages: [1] 2      Author  Topic: The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler  (Read 7660 times) Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « on: 2008-07-03 11:59:05 » The Necessary War? Source: Antiwar.com Authors: William S. Lind Dated: 2008-07-03 William Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. He is a former Congressional Aide and the author of many books and articles on military strategy and war. Pat Buchanan's new book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, is causing a stir, which is a good thing. Buchanan argues that both World War I and World War II were unnecessary wars; that Britain bears at least as much responsibility for both as Germany; that Winston Churchill was "the indispensable man" in reducing Britain from a world-encircling empire to "a cottage by the sea­to live out her declining years;" and that the consequence of the Western civil war that encompassed both World Wars (I would add the Cold War as well) has been the fall of the West. Buchanan is correct on all counts. His book represents a counterattack in the necessary war, the war to introduce Americans to genuine history. At present, most Americans know only a comic-book version of history, one in which Germany deliberately started both World Wars as part of a drive to conquer the world, a drive stopped when valiant American armies defeated the German army. And, oh yes, some Brit named Churchill beat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Thanks to the victories of the freedom-loving allies, we now live in the best of all possible worlds, where everyone can be a "democracy." Nothing of the comic-book version of history is true, not even the Battle of Britain bit. Curiously, the key British records from the Battle of Britain remain classified "secret;" it seems the RAF was on the ropes. [ Hermit : In fact the Battle of Britain was almost lost before it began due to Churchill's insistence that the RAF ship fighters to France prior to Dunkirk. Air Chief Marshall Dowding ordered the squadrons to ship only obsolete aircraft and so prevented the loss of of the small number of Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mosquitoes which fought the "Battle of Britain" after Churchill ordered (illegal) indiscriminate attacks on German and occupied civilian centers and facilities as well as upon neutral shipping, and Germany reciprocated. ]. Buchanan goes after the rest of it with spirit and zest, demolishing it utterly. As Colonel House told Woodrow Wilson after talking extensively with Kaiser Wilhelm in 1915, the Kaiser neither wanted nor expected war. I have seen the last, desperate telegram he sent the Tsar, trying to avoid a general European war. He was mocked for years before the war by many Germans as the "Peace Kaiser" because in crisis after crisis he backed down. Kasier Wilhelm knew, as did Theodore Roosevelt, that a World War would cost the West its world dominance. Because World War I was unnecessary, so was World War II, which was really a resumption of World War I. Buchanan goes further and argues that had Britain and France not offered a wildly imprudent guarantee to Poland in the spring of 1939, there would have been no war in the West. Hitler wanted to fight Stalin, not the Western powers. [ Hermit : I'm not convinced that Hitler wanted to fight anyone. Certainly in 1939 the German military did not anticipate any  hostilities until (at least) 1945. ] That too is true, but Buchanan makes one assumption I am not so sure of, namely that Germany would have defeated the USSR. As it was, World War II was fought mostly in the east, and it was the Red Army, not the comparatively small British and American armies, that defeated the Wehrmact. Could Stalin have done it alone? Maybe. In both World Wars, the U.S. came out a winner because it left most of the fighting to others. In World War I, Germany was defeated by the (under international law, illegal) starvation blockade. The French army bore the brunt of the war in the west. Buchanan's debunking of Churchill is thorough and valuable. Churchill was brilliant, forceful, imprudent, and often wrong. [ Hermit : Usually wring would be more descriptive. On the few occasions when he was right, he was wrong for the wrong reasons. ] A howler for war both in 1914 and 1939 [ Hermit : Not to mention his use of chemical weapons on the Kurds and Iraqi, and support for Italy during its brutal Abyssinian campaign. ] , he may not have sought to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, but it was his own fault he did so. Prudence, which means evaluating prospective actions in terms of their probable long-term effects, [h]is conservatives' first political principle, and the debacles created by Churchill illustrate why. At heart, he was far more Whig than Tory. Burke would have loathed him. Buchanan's historical revisionism is welcome on several counts. The neocons have elevated an unhistorical Churchill into the patron of interventionism, selling him in Washington and elsewhere like saints' bones. It is a snare for the simple, with George W. Bush numbered among them. Debunking comic-book history and replacing it with the real thing is vital if America is to avoid the dual trap of cultural Marxism and Brave New World. As ideologues and totalitarians everywhere have long known, if you can cut a people off from their past, you can do whatever you want with them. We need a similar debunking of the comic book history of the Civil War now fed to Americans, in which it was all about slavery. Buchanan's relevance comes from the sad fact that America is now duplicating Churchill's central error, imprudence. We have entered into two wars with little thought for their long-term consequences. Washington hands out guarantees, similar to Britain's to Poland, all over the world like penny candy, with no consideration of where they may lead. We give less thought to the potential future consequences of our actions than the average Mayfly. All that matters is receiving the applause of dunces and pleasing the SMEC. Britain did the same thing twice, in 1914 and 1939. It is perhaps not too much to infer that Little England will be followed by Little America. « Last Edit: 2008-07-18 19:48:09 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Fritz Archon Gender: Posts: 1746 Reputation: 8.84 Rate Fritz Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #1 on: 2008-07-05 23:57:09 » Quote: [Hermit]The Necessary War? It still intrigues me that such a revisionist view, even discrediting the Nazi's goals of global empire building hasn't precipitated a response ?  It will be interesting to see how the history of <snip>Little America.<snip> will read and who tells it. Thx Hermit... it has been added to the next 'care package'. Cheers Wally Report to moderator   Logged Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon- Fritz Archon Gender: Posts: 1746 Reputation: 8.84 Rate Fritz Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #2 on: 2008-07-06 00:32:23 » [Fritz]It is interesting (and just) that the conclusions are being drawn that civilization keeps making the same mistakes. Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens Source: Daily Mail UK Author: PETER HITCHENS Date: April 2008 It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life. Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable. Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases. Heroism: Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944 With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor. I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours. I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now. After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the throat. This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set. So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me. When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did. I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB. They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars. And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were. They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein. Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America." And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country. When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson. Now here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry. I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness. Same story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict justified on the precedent of the Second World War They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War. We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938. Well, I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't. Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question. The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong. In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war? What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA? Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here. The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?" The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?" Don't read on if these questions rock your universe. The two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke. I know Pat Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for "America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the Second World War. As for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his phone-sex novel, Vox, was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky. Human Smoke is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times. Baker is a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with large navies. He has selected with care to suit his position, but many of the facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view. In his element: Churchill preferred war to peace. claims U.S. author Patrick Buchanan Here is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, allegedly railing against the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry. I say "allegedly" because I have not seen the original. I also say it because I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another Baker snippet which suggests that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University. Such things today would end a political career in an instant. Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief. If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident. Its outbreak halted the "Kindertransport" trains rescuing Jewish children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it. Baker is also keen to show that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder. The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing. A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism." Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane. Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace. As the First World War began in 1914, two observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man". Churchill also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars. It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against. Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did. Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits. Surveying Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions. The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict. Blood brothers: By Christmas 1940, Stalin (right) had murdered many more people than Hitler, and had invaded nearly as many countries We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA. We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war. This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941. After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable. Worse still is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war. I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes. That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: "Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations." He then even more wetly urged "Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw. Buchanan doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right. But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it. The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations. We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies. As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence. Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels? Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire? The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out. He was very narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead? But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned. Can it be true that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours. Of course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself. By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries. We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain. And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London. Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense. No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved. But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war. Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is published on May 13 by Crown Publishing. Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below? A Fascinating article, as a youngster I was weaned on the daring do of Englands military "heroes" and wanted , above all to serve in the Army. I did and saw some active service (Aden N Ireland). I have always seen the Second World War as an extension of the First and in spite of research I am still not sure why we decided to go to war in 1914. The only thing that seems to be true about the declaration is that it was a very popular announcement? There appears to have been no real opposition. I wonder what the world would look like today had we not got involved, but not too often there is little point in spending too much time on "what if". Of one thing I am sure, todays politicians know even less about history than yesterdays, and yesterdays level of knowledge was pretty abysmal. - Graham, Exmouth Devon, 20/4/2008 16:15 All wars are unnecessary. There are numerous books around which detail how wars start: read one or two of them then make up your own mind. War is simply nationalised-armed-robbery; just because governments sanction it , doesn't make it any less immoral. One of the greatest political con-tricks of all time is to make someone else do your fighting and killing while you sit and count up the ill-gotten-gains. - James Hudson, Stevenage, 20/4/2008 17:40 Fear not Peter, you are not alone. I, like many others lived through the 2nd world war and, just like you, revelled in our successes for many years after it was all over. But then came a bigger battle, this time not an attempt to save other nations, but to salvage our own Empire. To my mind losing that Empire, which for generations had improved the lives of millions (in spite of what is now preached) started a long, tortuous downward spiral for Great Britain and all that she had held dear. Pulling out of African nations left nothing but a void quickly filled by self-serving so called "Leaders" who had, and many still haven't, the expertise needed to run a roadside cafe. And being forced into leaving India left that Nation with many, many problems some of which have still to be sorted. Britain may no be longer "Great", but at least we can console ourselves with the thought that, just like an aged animal, we can still hold our collective head high, and make our mark when needed. - Jim, Newham, London, 20/4/2008 18:59 First Class as usual Peter. If my father could see what has happened to the country he fought for, he would be incandescent with rage. - Edwina Rigby, Blackburn England, 20/4/2008 18:59 Very good reading, and true! - John O`Meara, Wellington, NewZealand., 20/4/2008 19:21 Report to moderator   Logged Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon- Fritz Archon Gender: Posts: 1746 Reputation: 8.84 Rate Fritz Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #3 on: 2008-07-16 19:43:20 » [Fritz]The beat goes on .... German probes overlooked Nazi massacre in France Source: Associated Press Google Author: CHRISTIAN PANVERT Date: July 16, 2008 MAILLE, France (AP) — For most of France, Aug. 25, 1944, was the joyous day that Allied troops liberated Paris from the Nazis. For this village in the Loire valley, it was a day of horror. Retreating German troops massacred 124 of Maille's 500 residents then razed the town, possibly in retaliation for Resistance action in the region, according to local archives. Forty-four children were among the dead, the youngest just 4 months old. Now a German investigator is drawing new attention to the forgotten chapter of World War II. Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass began a three-day visit to Maille on Tuesday to interview survivors and dig through archives as part of his probe into the killings. "I am ashamed about what the Germans did here, and I apologize," Maass told townspeople. Mauricette Garnier, who was 9 at the time, recalled that when local people heard gunfire that day, many initially thought it was part of the celebrations as news traveled from Paris about the liberation. Her mother and two brothers were among those slain in the village. "I saw them slit the throat of my 20-month-old brother, and kill my mother at close range," she said. "I will never forgive. This inquiry comes much too late." A Nazi officer, Gustav Schlueter, was convicted in absentia for his role in the killings by a military court in Bordeaux in 1952. Maass, who has been investigating the case since 2004, said Schlueter died at home in Germany in 1965. Other soldiers' roles remain unclear. Philippe Varin, prosecutor in the nearby French city of Tours, said Maass and a police superintendent from the German city of Stuttgart would have help from French gendarmes as they try to identity Nazi units and any individuals with a role in the massacre. He said it was "the first time a German judicial delegation has come on French soil to carry out investigations into war crimes." In Germany, it is not unusual for investigators to probe crimes going back to Nazi days. In one current case, German prosecutors plan to seek the extradition of alleged former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk from the United States to prosecute him on charges that he was involved in killing Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor death camp. Any suspects in the Maille case could be charged with murder — the only World War II-era crime on which the statute of limitations has not elapsed in Germany. Townspeople have long said retaliation was the motive for the attack, and Maass said that was his main hypothesis. Claude Daumin, who was 10 at the time, said the event that triggered the massacre was the killing of an SS officer and his driver by local Resistance fighters. "For 64 years, everybody knows what happened — these were reprisals," he said. "And they are saying so only now. It doesn't do any good." The massacre in Maille was the second worst atrocity in Nazi-occupied France, after the Germans killed 642 men, women and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944 — four days after the D-Day landings in Normandy. Maille was rebuilt after the war, but Oradour-sur-Glane remains a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history. The town's fate is widely taught in French schools, while Maille's has largely been forgotten. "You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books that mention the massacre in Maille," said historian Sebastien Chevereau, who runs Maille's museum and archives. Now, "at least, the suffering of the inhabitants is being recognized." Report to moderator   Logged Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon- Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #4 on: 2008-08-04 04:40:20 » Seoul probes civilian `massacres' by US Korean commission finds indiscriminate killings of civilians by US military [ Hermit : Perhaps this is why the USA does not much like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Interesting to note that there is no statute of limitations for war crimes and that every signatory to the Geneva and Hague conventions has the duty, not just the right, to try people of any nationality for war crimes if their own government fails or refuses to try them. The USA, like other tinpot tyrannies seems to be veering more and more in this direction.] Source: AP Impact News Authors: Charles J. Hanley, Jae-Soon Chang, Randy Herschaft (AP investigative researcher) Dated: 2008-08-03 Refer Also: South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War. A half-century later, the Seoul government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens' petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51. Concluding its first investigations, the 2 1/2-year-old commission is urging the government to seek U.S. compensation for victims. "Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation. It's the U.S. military's fault," said survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, who says he lost four family members among hundreds of refugees suffocated, burned and shot to death in a U.S. Air Force napalm attack on their cave shelter south of Seoul in 1951. Commission researchers have unearthed evidence of indiscriminate killings in the declassified U.S. archive, including a report by U.S. inspectors-general that pilots couldn't distinguish their South Korean civilian allies from North Korean enemy soldiers. South Korean legislators have asked a U.S. Senate committee to join them in investigating another long-classified document, one saying American ground commanders, fearing enemy infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting approaching refugees. The Associated Press has found that wartime pilots and declassified documents at the U.S. National Archives both confirm that refugees were deliberately targeted by U.S. forces. The U.S. government has been largely silent on the commission's work. The U.S. Embassy here says it has not yet been approached by the Seoul government about compensation. Spokesman Aaron Tarver also told the AP that the embassy is not monitoring commission findings. The commission's president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, said the U.S. Army helped defend South Korea in the 1950-53 war, but also "victimized" South Korean civilians. "We feel detailed investigation should be done by the U.S. government itself," he said. The citizen petitions have accumulated since 1999, when the AP, after tracing Army veterans who were there, confirmed the 1950 refugee killings at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 died at American hands, mostly women and children. In newly democratized South Korea, after decades of enforced silence under right-wing dictatorships, that report opened floodgates of memory, as families spoke out about other wartime mass killings. "The No Gun Ri incident became one of the milestones, to take on this kind of incident in the future," said Park Myung-lim of Seoul's Yonsei University, a Korean War historian and adviser to the truth commission. The National Assembly established the 15-member panel in December 2005 to investigate not only long-hidden Korean War incidents, including the southern regime's summary executions of thousands of suspected leftists, but also human rights violations by the Seoul government during the authoritarian postwar period. Findings are meant to "reconcile the past for the sake of national unity," says its legislative charter. The panel cannot compel testimony, prosecute or award compensation. Since the commission may shut down as early as 2010, the six investigators devoted to alleged cases of "civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers" are unlikely to examine all 215 cases fully. News reports at the time hinted at such killings after North Korea invaded the south in June 1950. But the extent wasn't known. Commission member Kim Dong-choon, in charge of investigating civilian mass killings, says there were large numbers of dead — between 50 and 400 — in many incidents. As at No Gun Ri, some involved U.S. ground troops, such as the reported killing of 82 civilians huddled in a village shrine outside the southern city of Masan in August 1950. But most were air attacks. In one of three initial findings, the commission held that a surprise U.S. air attack on east Wolmi island on Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the U.S. amphibious landing at nearby Incheon, was unjustified. Survivors estimate 100 or more South Korean civilians were killed. In clear weather from low altitude, "U.S. forces napalmed numerous small buildings, (and) strafed children, women and old people in the open area," the commission said. Investigator Kang Eun-ji said high priority is being given to reviewing attacks earlier in 1950 on refugees gathered in fields west of the Naktong River, in North Korean-occupied areas of the far south, while U.S. forces were dug in east of the river. One U.S. air attack on 2,000 refugees assembled Aug. 20, 1950, at Haman, near Masan, killed almost 200, survivors reported. "There were many similar incidents — refugees gathered in certain places, and there were air strikes," she said. The declassified record shows the Americans' fear that enemy troops were disguising themselves as civilians led to indiscriminate attacks on "people in white," the color worn by most Koreans, commission and AP research found. In the first case the commission confirmed, last November, its investigators found that an airborne Air Force observer had noted in the "Enemy" box of an after-mission report, "Many people in white in area." The area was the village of Sanseong-dong, in an upland valley 100 miles southeast of Seoul, attacked on Jan. 19, 1951, by three waves of Navy and Air Force planes. Declassified documents show the U.S. X Corps had issued an order to destroy South Korean villages within 5 miles of a mountain position held by North Korean troops. "Everybody came out of their houses to see these low-flying planes, and everyone was hit," farmer Ahn Shik-mo, 77, told AP reporters visiting the apple-growing village. "It appeared they were aiming at people." At least 51 were killed, the commission found, including Ahn's mother. Sixty-nine of 115 houses were destroyed in what the panel called "indiscriminate" bombing. "The U.S. Air Force regarded all people in white as possible enemy," it concluded. "There never were any North Koreans in the village," said villager Ahn Hee-duk, a 12-year-old boy at the time. The U.S. military itself said there were no enemy casualties, an acknowledgment made Feb. 13, 1951, in a joint Army-Air Force report on the Sanseong-dong bombing, an unusual review undertaken because Korean authorities questioned the attack. Classified for a half-century, that report included a candid admission: "Civilians in villages cannot normally be identified as either North Koreans, South Koreans, or guerrillas," wrote the inspectors-general, two colonels. The Eighth Army commander, Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, held, nonetheless, that Sanseong-dong's destruction was "amply justified," the AP found in a declassified document. Today's Korean commission held otherwise, recommending that the government negotiate for U.S. compensation. A U.S. airborne observer in that attack, traced by the AP, said it's "very possible" the Sanseong-dong mission could be judged indiscriminate. George P. Wolf, 88, of Arlington, Texas, also said he remembered orders to strafe refugees. "I'm very, very sorry about hitting civilians," said the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who flew with the 6147th Tactical Control Squadron. The day after the Sanseong-dong attack, the cave shelter at Yeongchun, 120 miles southeast of Seoul, came under repeated napalm and strafing attacks from 11 U.S. warplanes. Hundreds of South Korean civilians, fearing their villages would be bombed, had jammed inside the 85-yard-long cave, with farm animals and household goods outside. Around 10 a.m., Cho Byung-woo, then 9, was deep in the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel when he heard screams up front, and saw choking fumes billowing inside. Air Force F-51 Mustangs dropped napalm firebombs at the cave's entrance, a declassified mission report shows. "I ran forward and all I could hear were people coughing and screaming, and some were probably already dead," Cho recalled, revisiting the cave with AP reporters. His father flung the boy out the entrance, his hair singed. Outside, Cho saw more planes strafe people fleeing into surrounding fields. He and other survivors said surveillance planes had flown over for days beforehand. "There was no excuse," Cho said. "How could they not tell — the cows, the pieces of furniture?" Survivors said the villagers had tried days earlier to flee south, but were turned back at gunpoint at a U.S. Army roadblock, an account supported by a declassified 7th Infantry Division journal. Villagers believe 360 people were killed at the cave. In its May 20 finding, the commission estimated the dead numbered "well over 200." It found the U.S. had carried out an unnecessary, indiscriminate attack and had failed — with the roadblock — to meet its responsibility to safeguard refugees. The commission also pointed out that Ridgway — in a Jan. 3, 1951, order uncovered by AP archival research — had given units authority to fire at civilians to stop their movement. Five months earlier, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea confidentially informed Washington that the U.S. Army, fearing infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting South Korean refugees who approached its lines despite warnings. Ambassador John J. Muccio's letter was dated July 26, 1950, the day U.S. troops began shooting refugees at No Gun Ri. American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of the declassified Muccio letter in his 2006 book "Collateral Damage." But the Army had learned of the letter earlier, during its 1999-2001 No Gun Ri investigation, and had not disclosed its existence. The Army now asserts it omitted the letter from its 2001 No Gun Ri report because it discussed "a proposed policy," not an approved one. But the document unambiguously described the policy as among "decisions made" — not a proposal — at a high-level U.S.-South Korean meeting, and AP research found declassified documents in which U.S. commanders in subsequent weeks repeatedly ordered troops to fire on refugees. In a May 15 letter to Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the then-vice speaker of Seoul's National Assembly, Lee Yong-hee, called on Congress to investigate whether the Army intentionally suppressed the Muccio letter in its inquiry. Since targeting noncombatants is a war crime, "this is a matter of deep concern to the Korean people," wrote Lee, whose district includes No Gun Ri. Lee, who has since lost his leadership position as a result of elections, suggested a joint U.S.-Korean congressional probe. Frank Jannuzi, the Senate committee's senior East Asia specialist, said its staff would seek Pentagon and State Department briefings on the matter. In 2001, the U.S. government rejected the No Gun Ri survivors' demand for an apology and compensation, and the Army's report claimed the No Gun Ri killings were "not deliberate." But at a Seoul news conference on May 15 with survivors of No Gun Ri and other incidents, their U.S.-based lawyers pointed out that powerful contrary evidence has long been available. "The killings of Korean civilians were extensive, intentional and indiscriminate," lawyers Michael Choi and Robert Swift said in a statement. In its 2001 report, the Army said it had learned of other civilian killings by U.S. forces, but it indicated they would not be investigated. Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #5 on: 2008-10-21 07:28:39 » The massacre that haunts Slovenia [ Hermit : As I have mentioned before, the Allies frequently made use of the same railroad cars as had been used by the Axis powers to ship people to concentration camps to ship, at gunpoint or through perfidy, their erstwhile enemies as well as people whose only sin was to be born or associated with those born in areas ceded to Stalin at Yalta, to their deaths. While this war crime involved far fewer people than the murder of the Sudetenland Germans it certainly qualifies as a near perfect example of how the Allies were no different to, and possibly worse than the Axis powers they supplanted. ] At the war's end, British troops lured 12,000 unarmed Slovenians into train wagons and sent them to their deaths. The massacre haunts a witness who says Britain should at last own up Source: The Independent Authors: Andy McSmith Dated: 2008-10-21 Almost nothing spoils the beauty of the little Adriatic republic of Slovenia, where the Queen and Prince Philip begin their first state visit today. It slipped out of the disintegrating communist republic of Yugoslavia 17 years ago, almost without bloodshed, to become the most untroubled and prosperous state in south-east Europe. And yet, there was a time when the woods and mountain slopes of this picture-postcard state concealed one of the murkiest secrets of the 20th century. There are hundreds of Slovenian families who lost relatives in a massacre committed under British eyes when the Second World War was supposed to be over. From the official British reaction, you might think the massacre never happened, but 85-year-old John Corsellis was there as a 22-year-old relief worker, and saw 12,000 unarmed Slovenian militiamen lured to their deaths by British Army officers who lied to them. His sense of rage at what he witnessed is undiminished, after more than six decades and he thinks it is time that the British owned up. "What to me is so shocking is that nobody in the government has ever admitted it has happened," he said yesterday. "We have consistently lied about it, so the least we can do is tell the truth now and express our regret. This is not a black and white issue. They were dressed in uniforms supplied by the Germans, though they were not part of the German army, and they had surrendered to the British. We had required them to hand over their arms, and they were entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. "They were told they were being moved to better accommodation in Italy, in a small town north-east of Venice. They were put in Army trucks, taken to the nearest station, and herded on to cattle wagons. The wagons were closed, and the British withdrew. When the men inside the trucks looked out through the grilles and saw the communists coming they howled, because they knew they were going to be killed, but there was nothing they could do." Slovenia is now a prosperous tourist destination, vastly different from the war-ravaged province it was in 1945. Living standards are higher than in any other former communist state. Britain's ambassador, Tim Simmons, has said that the two-day state visit by the Queen and Prince Philip will be a celebration of 17 successful years. During the years when it was part of communist Yugoslavia, nothing was said about the bloodbath in the weeks after Germany surrendered, as the communist partisans commanded by Josif Tito secured control. After independence, a special commission was formed to examine 383 mass graves. As Tito's reputation for ruthlessness spread through Yugoslavia, the mountain road from Slovenia to Austria was choked with hundreds of thousands of refugees, including German soldiers trying to get home, and large numbers of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs who had backed pro-German regimes and feared communist reprisals. The area of south Austria where they all sought refuge was controlled by 25,000 British soldiers from V Corps of the 8th Army. John Corsellis was working with the Friends Ambulance Unit, looking after 6,000 Slovenian civilians in Viktring, in south Austria. In an adjacent camp were 12,000 Slovenian men in uniform. When word spread that they were being moved to Italy, several hundred women and children under Mr Corsellis's care asked if they could go too. They were bundled into the wagons with the men, and sent to their deaths. The uniformed Slovenians were domobranci who had been supplied and armed by the Germans, but who claimed allegiance not to the Nazis but to the Catholic Church and an independent Slovenian state. They considered they had been fighting a civil war. Slovenian nationalists formed a short-lived separatist government in May 1945, in the vain hope that the British Army would occupy their homeland before the communists arrived. But Winston Churchill had struck a private deal with Stalin, under which the Soviet dictator undertook not to aid communist guerrillas in Greece, and Britain recognised Tito's partisans as allies in the war against fascism. The 8th Army also deported thousands of Serb and Croat collaborators, who ended up in the same mass graves as the Slovenes. About 40,000 Russians and Ukrainians who had fought for the Germans were handed over to Stalin's police. Their fate has been raised on the right of British politics, but never officially by the Conservative Party, partly because so many prominent Conservatives were involved. The future Tory MP Nigel Nicholson was an officer in V Corps, and admitted later that he had deliberately lied to the refugees to get them to go quietly. When they realised they had been betrayed, he said, they "began hammering on the inside of the wagon walls, shouting imprecations, not at the partisans but at us, who had betrayed them. This scene was repeated day after day, twice a day. It was the most horrible experience of my life." Another future Tory MP, Toby Low, was a brigadier in V Corps. He rose to be vice-chairman of the Conservative Party and was ennobled, as Lord Aldington. In 1989, he sued Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a Russian historian who had taken British citizenship, for writing a pamphlet accusing him of complicity in mass murder. His libel award, of £1.5m, was the highest in British legal history, but was overturned by the European Court of Appeal. An even more important figure on the spot was the future prime minister and Lord Stockton, Harold Macmillan, Churchill's envoy to the Balkans in 1945, who visited the headquarters of the 8th Army five days after VE day, just before the deportations began. Shortly before his death aged 92, in 1986, Lord Stockton made highly embarrassing criticisms of Margaret Thatcher's government, to which the Federation of Conservative Students retaliated with an article in their magazine suggesting Lord Stockton should be tried as a war criminal. This led to the FCS being disbanded. Marcus Ferrar, co-author of a book on the Slovenian massacre, said: "The trouble with Tolstoy was that he went over the top. Macmillan probably knew what was happening, and did not stop it, but mainly the action was by the Army who wanted to clear up. There is the question about why did these people collaborate. The British knew damn well they were going to be killed, and they just didn't care. "Slovenia's population is more or less divided half and half over this. There are a lot of people in Slovenia who lost a grandfather or an uncle in the massacres, and there are others who go along with the communists. Slovenes are our friends now. They don't deserve to be treated shabbily by failing to acknowledge what was done. A decent expression of regret would reflect well on Britons of today. The Queen's visit to Slovenia is the moment to put this right." Asked whether an "expression of regret" is in prospect, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "The short answer is, 'No'. I'm not aware there plans to do so." Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Fritz Archon Gender: Posts: 1746 Reputation: 8.84 Rate Fritz Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #6 on: 2008-10-23 08:51:33 » Quote: [Hermit]The massacre that haunts Slovenia Another interesting foot note underscoring that we aren't as lily white as the winning historians would have us believe. I shared it with a college who had the response below. I thought his last question was especially note worthy for CoV. Thx Hermit Fritz <snip>"The uniformed Slovenians were domobranci who had been supplied and armed by the Germans, but who claimed allegiance not to the Nazis but to the Catholic Church and an independent Slovenian state. Whatever cause they were fighting for or whoever they pled allegiance to was academic - they were supplied and armed by the Germans and shooting at the Allies. Their fate was sealed accordingly. I wonder if there were Slovenian elements at Stalingrad? There were 20,000 or so Romanians. Russians have long memories. Besides, Tito would have killed them during his consolidation anyway. Where was the church while this was going on, I wonder? Doubt it was just the Brits who were complicit."<snip> . Report to moderator   Logged Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon- Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #7 on: 2008-10-23 11:29:33 » Love the rationalization at work. If you look in our FAQ section, there is a protofaq about Hitler the Good Christian which I wrote in reply to a Catholic apologist so focusing on that religion. But the other Christian churches were equally supportive of their nations - all of which claimed "Go"tt mit uns" in one way or another. Roosevelt and Truman could not have been the racists they were without being the Christians they were. Particularly Truman. The linkages are clear and inescapable. Had they not been nasty, petty minded racists, China would not have suffered the ravages of war to nearly the same extent, and the war with Japan would not only not have terminated in the illegal deployment of nuclear devices against non-military targets, it probably wouldn't have been necessary at all. Our complicity in Stalins eradication of the White Russians, the Soviet block origin civilians, and of course the maltreatment of German soldiers and civilians - while executing German and Japanese for lesser crimes against humanity and the rules of war, cannot be so easily expunged as your friend would have it through murmurings of tu quoque. Particularly as we seem not to have ceased suffering from "exceptionalist amnesia" ever since. Kindest Regards Hermit Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 MoEnzyme Acolyte Gender: Posts: 2256 Reputation: 4.80 Rate MoEnzyme infidel lab animal Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #8 on: 2008-10-23 20:40:08 » Thank you for your irreverent positions, Hermit. If WW I and WW II were both unnecessary as you say, then our scribes and pundits will be busy for a while over those issues . . . congratulations on your make-work project for our academia. I wonder if perhaps "avoidable" would be the more functional word for my purposes. Whenever a technologically capable and demographically significant segment of humanity decides that their grievances demand global redress, it can be difficult to sort such things out on a regional basis. While the United States is far from sainthood in these issues, it does happen that we chose our allies well (or as well as reality allowed) at a time that it mattered most, and that we ultimately ended up on the side of the winners. And so it remains on our dance card to at least attempt to sort these things out with a sense of humility for a time anyway. It does however, behoove us to consider such things now and then before they become ancient history. While I'm personally of the opinion that WW I and II were unavoidable from the US perspective, I'm certainly open to what that may mean for the US identity and perspective for the forseeable future in world affairs. We certainly aren't the first empire, and we definitely won't be the last, so how we sort these issues out will likely have some historical impact on the future history of the US, and somewhat indirectly on the rest of the world. While I continue to remain a bit partisan in favor of the US political system working some of this out (I've got an Obama/Biden sticker on my pickup truck after all), I know that in the end, like every other empire, we will fail the world in some important respect and turn unapologetically inward in pursuit of our own self interest if we haven't already begun to do so anyway. Our time on the center stage is not yet done even if its half over or more . . . with current leadership we seem headed for a fast burnout -- I'll wait and see what the next election brings. -Mo Report to moderator   Logged I will fight your gods for food, Mo Enzyme (consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow) Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #9 on: 2008-10-24 12:29:43 » Mo, I'd love your reasoning on what specifically it was that makes you think of either of them as "necessary," even more fascinating, I'd love to know where "humility" came into the equation. Could you share with us what you recall as having been told of what necessitated them (have you read "The Lies My Teachers Told Me" yet?) and precisely what the American interest was in these wars? In your response, please don't attempt to argue that it was some inherent respect for the Westphalian system. America's activity in redrawing borders as it pleased, and repeated ignoring of sovereign boundaries while pursuing gunboat diplomacy utterly nullifiies any such claim. It might be helpful to you to think about how these wars were started, what the stated goals were at entry, and a determination as to whether those goals were achieved. To ease your task, here is a quick articulation of my position* vis a vis the USA (the case for the UK and Europeans is clearly different) , so you can focus on the areas of disagreement if any. WW I may be sold as a "necessary war" to the residents of the US, but it came right down to the wire as to which side it went in on; as the number of German speaking Americans was, to all intents and purposes, within a hair of being the same as the number of English speaking ones, and it is difficult to decide how the US determined that it should be allied with a Japan that it loathed and feared. I would say that the USA's tiny and incompetent** involvement in WW I (after massively breaching the laws relating to neutrality and even greater trade with both sides), resulted in a "victory" only to the most feverish imaginations. Had the US stayed out of WW I, the almost perfectly balanced man eating machine the Europeans had invented would have ground to an exhausted halt in which some kind of equitable peace could have been found - and the Russian Revolution would likely not have occurred and colonialism would have run-out its bitter course in the consequent collapse. US involvement, resulting in the horrible Armistice, simply made everything bloodier and WW II inevitable. Indeed, WW II in Europe was merely a continuation of WW I (and no matter how horrible WW II was (and it was), WW I was far worse). Subsequent to the war, the US declined to join the peace keeping body that the rest of the world founded with the hyperactive involvement of Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations, and actively conspired to render it meaningless, as the US pursued policies that resulted in massive destabilization and monstrous death tolls, particularly in Asia and Asia Minor. In WW II, after two decades of brutal economic warfare, the USA forced a fight onto its previous ally, Japan. Britain and the USA's decline of a treaty of non-aggression with Russia just prior to the war lead to the situation where, for a while Russia was allied with Germany and in consequence the war was greatly extended in time, in scope and in scale. As in WW I, the USA's horribly incompetent involvement*** resulted in much higher death tolls, civilian and military, than would otherwise have been necessary and her illegal actions in demanding unconditional surrenders (which extended the wars and loss of life by at least two years), followed by the destruction of much of the industrial capacity of Europe and Asia and through brutal treatment of the vanquished speaks more of malevolence than to any loftier ideals. It could, I think, be successfully argued that Truman was Bush writ victorious. Unlike WW I, after WW II the US was instrumental in establishing the United Nations but it then spent the following half century working on making it irrelevant, culminating in the appointment of Bonker's Bolton in a blatant effort to destabilize it completely. Today, unless we eliminate the Security Council veto, the UN will continue as a toothless and largely ineffective beast, neutered by competing interests at the Security Council level to the great detriment of humanity. How on earth was any of this in the American interest? As for "Whenever a technologically capable and demographically significant segment of humanity decides that their grievances demand global redress, it can be difficult to sort such things out on a regional basis." how does this gel with the unarguable fact that in both wars the US population voted against war and against involvement in elections that revolved on these issues just prior to her entry into the wars, elected leaders that ran on the platform that "these are not our wars" and this expressed desire was then overridden by the perfidy of the same leaders who history showed us were actively campaigning to enter the wars from before they were even elected. I'm sure your reply will be both enlightening and enlivening. Kind Regards Hermit * Mine vs the authors I have chose to mention in this thread. Bear in mind I have no row to hoe in this disagreement. My perspective is probably as non-partisan as it can get. **The judgement of the contemporaneous allied leaders. ***Again, the judgement of the contemporaneous allied leaders, reinforced as it was also the judgement of the extremely competent German and Japanese staff corps. « Last Edit: 2008-10-24 14:38:50 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #10 on: 2008-12-23 11:57:29 » Secret of the Lusitania: Arms find challenges Allied claims it was solely a passenger ship [ Hermit : Please note that 4 million rounds of .303 munition undoubtedly justified the sinking of the Lusitania as a ship bearing war materials, and places the liability for the deaths on the head of those who used a passenger vessel top transport munitions. Any further discoveries will merely affect the degree of culpability.] Source: Daily Wail Authors: Sam Greenhill Dated: 2008-12-20 Her sinking with the loss of almost 1,200 lives caused such outrage that it propelled the U.S. into the First World War. But now divers have revealed a dark secret about the cargo carried by the Lusitania on its final journey in May 1915. Munitions they found in the hold suggest that the Germans had been right all along in claiming the ship was carrying war materials and was a legitimate military target. Caption: Doomed: A contemporary view of the sinking of the Lusitania off Ireland in May 1915 The Cunard vessel, steaming from New York to Liverpool, was sunk eight miles off the Irish coast by a U-boat. Maintaining that the Lusitania was solely a passenger vessel, the British quickly accused the 'Pirate Hun' of slaughtering civilians. The disaster was used to whip up anti-German anger, especially in the U.S., where 128 of the 1,198 victims came from. A hundred of the dead were children, many of them under two. Robert Lansing, the U.S. secretary of state, later wrote that the sinking gave him the 'conviction we would ultimately become the ally of Britain'. Americans were even told, falsely, that German children were given a day off school to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania. The disaster inspired a multitude of recruitment posters demanding vengeance for the victims. One, famously showing a young mother slipping below the waves with her baby, carried the simple slogan 'Enlist'. Two years later, the Americans joined the Allies as an associated power  -  a decision that turned the war decisively against Germany. The diving team estimates that around four million rounds of U.S.-manufactured Remington .303 bullets lie in the Lusitania's hold at a depth of 300ft. The Germans had insisted the Lusitania  -  the fastest liner in the North Atlantic  -  was being used as a weapons ship to break the blockade Berlin had been trying to impose around Britain since the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Winston Churchill, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and has long been suspected of knowing more about the circumstances of the attack than he let on in public, wrote in a confidential letter shortly before the sinking that some German submarine attacks were to be welcomed. Caption: Last voyage and resting place of the Lusitania He said: 'It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the U.S. with Germany. 'For our part we want the traffic  -  the more the better and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.' Hampton Sides, a writer with Men's Vogue in the U.S., witnessed the divers' discovery. He said: 'They are bullets that were expressly manufactured to kill Germans in World War I  -  bullets that British officials in Whitehall, and American officials in Washington, have long denied were aboard the Lusitania.' The discovery may help explain why the 787ft Lusitania sank within 18 minutes of a single German torpedo slamming into its hull. Some of the 764 survivors reported a second explosion which might have been munitions going off. Gregg Bemis, an American businessman who owns the rights to the wreck and is funding its exploration, said: 'Those four million rounds of .303s were not just some private hunter's stash. 'Now that we've found it, the British can't deny any more that there was ammunition on board. That raises the question of what else was on board. 'There were literally tons and tons of stuff stored in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters. 'I've always felt there were some significant high explosives in the holds  -  shells, powder, gun cotton  -  that were set off by the torpedo and the inflow of water. That's what sank the ship.' Mr Bemis is planning to commission further dives next year in a full-scale forensic examination of the wreck off County Cork. [ Hermit : Also worth noting that the same day as the US entered WW II they launched unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans and China Sea.] « Last Edit: 2008-12-23 12:15:47 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #11 on: 2009-04-06 11:03:47 » Paris liberation made 'whites only' Source: BBC Authors: Mike Thomson (Presenter, Document, BBC Radio 4) Dated: 2009-04-06 Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a "whites only" victory. Many who fought Nazi Germany during World War II did so to defeat the vicious racism that left millions of Jews dead. Yet the BBC's Document programme has seen evidence that black colonial soldiers - who made up around two-thirds of Free French forces - were deliberately removed from the unit that led the Allied advance into the French capital. By the time France fell in June 1940, 17,000 of its black, mainly West African colonial troops, known as the Tirailleurs Senegalais, lay dead. Many of them were simply shot where they stood soon after surrendering to German troops who often regarded them as sub-human savages. Their chance for revenge came in August 1944 as Allied troops prepared to retake Paris. But despite their overwhelming numbers, they were not to get it. 'More desirable' The leader of the Free French forces, Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris. Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle's division must not contain any black soldiers. In January 1944 Eisenhower's Chief of Staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, was to write in a memo stamped, "confidential": "It is more desirable that the division mentioned above consist of white personnel. "This would indicate the Second Armoured Division, which with only one fourth native personnel, is the only French division operationally available that could be made one hundred percent white." At the time America segregated its own troops along racial lines and did not allow black GIs to fight alongside their white comrades until the late stages of the war. Morocco division Given the fact that Britain did not segregate its forces and had a large and valued Indian army, one might have expected London to object to such a racist policy. Yet this does not appear to have been the case. A document written by the British General, Frederick Morgan, to Allied Supreme Command stated: "It is unfortunate that the only French formation that is 100% white is an armoured division in Morocco. "Every other French division is only about 40% white. I have told Colonel de Chevene that his chances of getting what he wants will be vastly improved if he can produce a white infantry division." Finding an all-white division that was available proved to be impossible due to the enormous contribution made to the French Army by West African conscripts. So, Allied Command insisted that all black soldiers be taken out and replaced by white ones from other units. When it became clear that there were not enough white soldiers to fill the gaps, soldiers from parts of North Africa and the Middle East were used instead. Pensions cut In the end, nearly everyone was happy. De Gaulle got his wish to have a French division lead the liberation of Paris, even though the shortage of white troops meant that many of his men were actually Spanish. The British and Americans got their "Whites Only" Liberation even though many of the troops involved were North African or Syrian. For France's West African Tirailleurs Senegalais, however, there was little to celebrate. Despite forming 65% of Free French Forces and dying in large numbers for France, they were to have no heroes' welcome in Paris. After the liberation of the French capital many were simply stripped of their uniforms and sent home. To make matters even worse, in 1959 their pensions were cut. Former French colonial soldier, Issa Cisse from Senegal, who is now 87 years-old, looks back on it all with sadness and evident resentment. "We, the Senegalese, were commanded by the white French chiefs," he said. "We were colonised by the French. We were forced to go to war. Forced to follow the orders that said, do this, do that, and we did. France has not been grateful. Not at all." « Last Edit: 2009-04-07 14:17:06 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #12 on: 2009-04-07 13:28:56 » March Madness, 1939 Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Patrick J. Buchanan Dated: 2009-04-07 On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler’s Panzers smashed into Poland. Two days later, an anguished Neville Chamberlain declared war, the most awful war in all of history. Was the war inevitable? No. No war is inevitable until it has begun. Was it a necessary war? Hearken to Churchill: “One day, President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world….” But if the war need not have happened, what caused it? Let us go back to Munich. On Sept. 30, 1938, at Munich, Chamberlain signed away the Sudetenland rather than fight to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule imposed upon them at the Paris peace conference in violation of Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Why did Britain not fight? Because Britain had no alliance with Prague and Chamberlain did not “give two hoots” who ruled the Sudetenland. Also, Britain had no draft, no divisions to send to France, no Spitfires, no support from America or her dominions, no ally save France, who had been told that, if war came, the United States would not deliver the planes France had purchased. U.S. neutrality laws forbade it. In his meetings with Chamberlain, Hitler had warned that Poland and Hungary would also be entering claims for ancestral lands ceded to the Czechs at Paris in 1919. Thus, after Munich, Warsaw had seized coal-rich Teschen, which held tens of thousands of Poles. Hungary, in the “Vienna Award” of Nov. 2, 1938, got back lands in Slovakia and Ruthenia where Hungarians were the majority and Budapest had ruled before 1919. Neither Britain nor France resisted these border revisions. Came then March 1939, when Czechoslovakia began to crumble. On March 10, to crush a Slovakian push for independence, Czech President Emil Hacha ousted Slovak Prime Minister Father Tiso, occupied Bratislava, and installed a pro-Prague regime. On March 11, Tiso fled to Vienna and appealed to Berlin. On March 13, Tiso met Hitler, who told him that if he did not declare independence immediately, Germany would not interfere with Hungary’s re-annexation of Slovakia. Budapest was moving troops to the border. On March 14, Slovakia declared independence. Ruthenia followed, dissolving what was left of Czechoslovakia. Adm. Horthy, told by Hitler he could re-annex Ruthenia but must keep his hands off Slovakia, occupied Ruthenia. Hacha now asked to meet with Hitler to get the same guarantee of independence Slovakia had gotten. But Hitler bullied Hacha into making the Czech remnant a protectorate of Germany. Thus, six months after Munich, the Germans of Czechoslovakia were where they wished to be, under German rule. The Poles were under Polish rule. The Hungarians were under Hungarian rule. And the Slovaks were under Slovak rule in their new nation. But 500,000 Ruthenians were back under Budapest, and 7 million Czechs were back under German rule – this time Berlin, not Vienna. Ethnonationalism had torn Czechoslovakia apart as it had the parent Hapsburg Empire. Yet, no vital British interest was imperiled. And though Hitler had used brutal Bismarckian diplomacy, not force, Chamberlain was humiliated. The altarpiece of his career, the Munich accord, was now an object of mockery. Made a fool of by Hitler, baited by his backbenchers, goaded by Lord Halifax, facing a vote of no confidence, on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain made the greatest blunder in British diplomatic history. He handed an unsolicited war guarantee to the Polish colonels who had just bitten off a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Lunacy, raged Lloyd George, who was echoed by British leaders and almost every historian since. With the British Empire behind it, Warsaw now refused even to discuss a return of Danzig, the Baltic town, 95 percent German, which even Chamberlain thought should be returned. Hitler did not want a war with Poland. Had he wanted war, he would have demanded the return of the entire Polish Corridor taken from Germany in 1919. He wanted Danzig back and Poland as an ally in his anti-Comintern Pact. Nor did he want war with a Britain he admired and always saw as a natural ally. Nor did he want war with France, or he would have demanded the return of Alsace. But Hitler was out on a limb with Danzig and could not crawl back. Repeatedly, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. Repeatedly, the Poles rebuffed him. Seeing the Allies courting Josef Stalin, Hitler decided to cut his own deal with the detested Bolsheviks and settle the Polish issue by force. Though Britain had no plans to aid Poland, no intention of aiding Poland, and would do nothing to aid Poland – Churchill would cede half that nation to Stalin and the other half to Stalin’s stooges – Britain declared war for Poland. The most awful war in all of history followed, which would bankrupt Britain, bring down her empire and bring Stalin’s Red Army into Prague, Berlin, and Vienna. But Hitler was dead and Germany in ashes. Cost: 50 million lives. “But ’twas a famous victory.” Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #13 on: 2009-06-26 08:14:31 » The weapon Britain hoped would defeat the Nazis... Sewing machine needle tipped with anthrax was developed for war effort Source: Independent Authors: Cahal Milmo Dated: 2009-06-26 Tipped with a sewing machine needle and finished with a tail made from a drinking straw, they looked more like a schoolboy's toy than a terrifying weapon. For Britain's wartime scientists, however, these tiny projectiles were the sharp end of a chilling project to secure victory over the Nazis by bombarding German troops with poisoned darts. A secret file that details British research to develop the lethal anti-personnel darts, carrying a toxin likely to have been anthrax or ricin, casts rare light on the work that was carried out by the Allies during the Second World War into chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed against Hitler's forces. The document, released at the National Archives in Kew, London, reveals how scientists at Porton Down in Wiltshire, the site of Britain's top secret weapons laboratory, worked between 1941 and 1944 to perfect the projectiles to ensure the maximum number of casualties and the quickest death for enemy soldiers. Entitled Research Into Use of Anthrax and Other Poisons for Biological Warfare, the report said the idea of using darts dated back to the First World War but the novelty of adding a poison, either coated on to a grooved point or injected through a hollow needle, meant that a viable weapon to cause "death or disablement" had been created. A memo written in 1945 summarising the project said: "The use of poison enables a much lighter dart to be used, since a slight penetration without necessarily piercing a vital organ is all that is required to implant the poison ... It seems most unlikely that any first aid measure or medical treatment could be devised which would prevent the death of a man who has received a lethal dose." The researchers, working in conjunction with Canadian colleagues, developed a dart weighing no more than four grams which could be loaded into bombs carrying 30,600 of the projectiles at a time. The researchers carried out multiple tests and calculations to work out the chances of hitting troops, ranging from 90 per cent for a soldier lying flat on open ground to just 17 per cent for one lying in a slit trench. The consequences of being struck were dire. If a victim failed to pluck out each dart within 30 seconds, he was condemned to a grisly death. Detailing the effects of ricin, codenamed T1123, in tests on sheep and goats, one researcher reported: "The symptoms produced are: twitching of the muscles, profuse salivation and sweating, acute defecation, micturition and retching. The pulse becomes very slow and the blood pressure falls. The subject collapses and lies on its side with twitching muscles. Where the dose is lethal, death occurs in 30 minutes, usually preceded by convulsions." Attempts by the scientists to perfect their projectile took on a darkly comical dimension when they approached Singer Sewing Machines Ltd, based in Bristol, to supply a variety of differently shaped needles without stating their purpose. The request was met with bemusement by the company. In one letter sent in 1941, an executive wrote: "We are afraid we do not quite understand your requirements. From your remarks it would seem that the needles are required for some purpose other than sewing machines." Despite the assertion of the researchers that their weapon was both more lethal and cheaper to make than conventional bullets, the darts never made it into mass production. Noting that the projectiles were useless against any form of cover, a senior officer wrote them off as "highly uneconomical" and unlikely to cause mass casualties. Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Hermit Archon Posts: 4287 Reputation: 8.94 Rate Hermit Prime example of a practically perfect person Re:The Unnecessary War - Churchill as Hitler « Reply #14 on: 2009-09-05 09:58:04 » Revenge on Ethnic Germans Czech Town Divided over How to Commemorate 1945 Massacre [ Hermit : Important to maintain perspective. These were a small part of the 3 to 6 million German Sudetenlanders exiled or massacred in the vast ethnic cleansing programme instituted in the aftermath of the war and not included in the 20 to 25 million Eastern Europeans executed or worked to death by Stalin after being handed over to the tender mercies of the USSR by the British, Americans and French. These numbers include only the German-Czechs and do not include the vast numbers of non-communist partisan allies who were murdered by the communist partisan allies in the days immediately following the war. This is the first of 4 analytic articles I consider significant which have been published recently, due in part to significant  important anniversaries of WW II and more on the fact that time and the deaths of many who were involved in these horrors have allowed a more balanced revisit to the history of the war, exposing and demythologising the events leading up to and during the war, which I will be adding to this thread this weekend.] Source: Spiegel Online Authors: Hans-Ulrich Stoldt Dated: 2009-09-04 Photo Gallery: Massacre in the Sudetenland More than six decades after the end of World War II, long-suppressed information about a massacre of around 2,000 Sudeten Germans in June 1945 is dividing the Czech town of Postoloprty. Supporters of a memorial to the incident are clashing with those who want to forget all about the murders. Nobody could really say why the five boys had joined the fatigue party of men on that fateful summer's day in 1945. Some thought they were hungry, others that they were trying to flee the wrath of the Czechoslovakian army. Hundreds of Germans had been herded together on the parade ground in the Czech town of Postoloprty (known in German as Postelberg) on June 6, 1945, just a month after the end of World War II in Europe. They could clearly see the fatigue party heading off. The five boys who had hidden among the men were discovered and led back. "Mr Marek wanted the boys to be flogged," recalls 81-year-old Peter Klepsch, an eye-witness. "But Captain Cerny, the commander of the Czech troops, said the boys should be shot." The boys' names were Horst, Eduard, Hans, Walter, and Heinz. The oldest was 15, the youngest 12. They were flogged and then shot dead -- in full view of the others, who were held back at gunpoint. The Czechs didn't use machine guns, but their rifles, so it took a long time to kill all five. "One of the boys who hadn't been mortally wounded by the gunfire ran up to the marksmen begging to be allowed to go to his mother," recalls 80-year-old Heinrich Giebitz. "They just carried on shooting." A Series of Tragic Events Fully 64 years later, Czech prosecutors have now pinned the blame for this terrible atrocity on policeman Bohuslav Marek and Vojtech Cerny, an army captain. The two men are long dead, so the boys' murders will remain unpunished. And yet this was only one chapter in the brutal massacre of some 2,000 Sudeten Germans in the space of a few days in 1945 in Postoloprty and nearby Zatec, about 60 kilometers northwest of the capital, Prague. "This was undoubtedly the worst in a series of tragic events that took part in Bohemia in May and June 1945," wrote Czech historian Tomas Stanek in the mid-1990s. The truth was long in coming to light, and even cautious attempts to look into the crimes by legal means proved fruitless. The matter was only addressed in earnest in 2007 when prosecutors in the Bavarian town of Hof asked their Czech colleagues for assistance in investigating the killing of the five boys. Survivors, bereaved family members, and conscientious Czechs now want to erect a monument to the victims of this post-war massacre -- but are meeting stiff resistance from many of Postoloprty's 5,000 inhabitants. "Most of the locals are completely opposed to it," says historian Michal Pehr, a member of a German-Czech committee set up by the municipal authorities. The committee was supposed to put forward its suggestions for a compromise this week. "The entire story was taboo for many people for decades," Pehr says. 'Let Nobody Survive' It all began in the weeks and months after the end of the war. It was the time of the so-called "wild expulsions," when ethnic Germans were being hunted down in various parts of Czechoslovakia. The fascists had been beaten. Now the Czechs wanted to rid themselves of their despised countrymen as quickly as possible. Though most of the Nazi perpetrators had long-since fled, the rage and the lust for revenge knew no bounds. Ethnic Germans had lived on the Czech side of the border for centuries, so when Hitler annexed the area in 1938, they had lined the streets to cheer the soldiers. The rest of Bohemia and Moravia was soon a brutal Nazi protectorate, and in the years that followed more than 300,000 Czechs died at the hands of their German overlords. Theresienstadt concentration camp and the village of Lidice, which was burnt down by the SS, will forever serve as symbols of Nazi barbarism. At the Potsdam conference in August 1945, the Allies authorized the expulsion of more than 3 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, albeit on the proviso that "any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner." But by that time people had already taken matters into their own hands in many areas. As early as October 1943, Edvard Benes, who would become the president of Czechoslovakia after the war, had threatened from exile in London that "what the Germans have done in our lands since 1938 will be revenged on them multifold and mercilessly." And speaking during a radio broadcast in November 1944, Sergej Ingr, the commander-in-chief of Czech forces in England, issued his fellow countrymen with the following order: "Beat them, kill them, let nobody survive." Forced to Run and Sing Demands such as these were eagerly received in places like Postoloprty and Zatec. When the Soviet army pulled out of the newly-liberated area, soldiers of the 1st Czechoslovakian Corps moved in and immediately set about "concentrating" the region's ethnic German population. On Sunday June 3, 1945 the army ordered some 5,000 ethnic German men in Zatec to assemble on the market square, from where they were marched the 15 kilometers to Postoloprty to a hail of threats, beatings, and gunfire. "On Monday evening we were all forced to run around the square and sing Nazi songs or whatever passed as such," Peter Klepsch recalls. "All those who didn't run or sing right were flogged." The next night he saw a group of men being led off for execution. It wasn't to be the last. He also repeatedly heard volleys of gunfire during the day. Part 2: Made to Dig Their Own Graves Klepsch, who had opposed the Nazis and finished the war in prison for trying to help three Frenchman flee, was eventually permitted to leave the scene of the atrocity on the fifth day. An unknown number of men remained behind. Most were methodically and systematically shot dead, many near the barracks, others by the local school. The largest mass grave, containing almost 500 bodies, was later discovered in the Pheasant Garden, a former pheasant farm out of town. "Two hundred and fifty men were taken one day, another 250 the next, and a layer of earth was thrown in between," a policeman told a parliamentary inquiry in 1947. "They weren't all executed in a single night, but rather in stages." Often enough the condemned men were given a pick and shovel, and made to dig their own graves. The perpetrators didn't have many scruples. After all, they were sure they had high-level military backing. Jan Cupka, the head of the defense intelligence service, remembers General Spaniel, the commander of the 1st Czechoslovakian Division, recommending they "clean" the region of its ethnic Germans. "The general told us, 'The fewer of them that remain, the fewer enemies we'll have.'" 'I Gave the Order' But enough people survived to tell the world about the massacre. Survivors exiled to Germany reported what they had witnessed, and even in Postoloprty and Zatec the stories and rumors about the horrific goings-on refused to go away. In July 1947 the Czech parliament in Prague felt obliged to launch an official inquiry into the matter. Countless soldiers and local residents were interviewed, including Captain Vojtech Cerny, who immediately assumed responsibility for the killing of the five boys on the parade ground. "I gave the order for their execution," he declared. The statements from witnesses were all documented together with the findings of an Interior Ministry delegation, which investigated on site and promptly declared that "members of the army were primarily to blame for this bestiality and these executions." However it added that the soldiers' actions had met with widespread approval from the local population, who considered them "justified retribution for German brutality." The officials sent a report back to their minister recommending that the bodies be exhumed and burnt so that "Germans should have no memorials to which they could point as a source of suffering by their people." In a top-secret operation in August 1947, several mass graves were dug up, and 763 bodies were removed, most of which were then cremated. There is little doubt that there were more victims whose bodies were never found. Asked to Drop the Story Meanwhile, the official documents about "the events in Postoloprty" were classified as confidential and disappeared into the Interior Ministry archives. That suited the postwar residents of Postoloprty and Zatec, who now lived in the houses of the killed or displaced former inhabitants. They weren't the only ones who feared a reassessment of the past. Quite a few non-Germans first willingly collaborated with the occupying forces, only to then reinvent themselves as the great avengers of Czech maltreatment when the time was right. Silence therefore became the order of the day. As a result, it was only by chance that Czech reporter David Hertl stumbled upon the crime in the mid-90s when he and a colleague were putting together a series of portraits of local towns for his regional newspaper. The plan was to write about past and present-day life in these communities, but when they got to Postoloprty, they hit a brick wall. "People either didn't know anything about their past or didn't want to talk about it," Hertl says. "And when we asked them about the Germans, they simply said they'd ended up in the Pheasant Garden." Their suspicions aroused, the two reporters began investigating -- and met mainly with opposition. "If at all, people would only speak to us anonymously," Hertl says. "They were afraid, and asked us to drop the story." 'You're Going to Hang for This' When the regional newspaper printed a couple of articles on the matter, with headlines such as "Where are the thousands of Germans from Zatec and Postoloprty?" and "We know the names of the murderers," the threats started pouring in. Anonymous letters with swastikas scrawled across them arrived at the editorial offices, and every morning the answering machine was full of insults like "You're going to hang for this, you swine." Some things have changed in the time since then, Hertl says today. "More people now know that this crime really took place. Nonetheless most still believe the Germans deserved it." People would prefer this dark chapter of their past to finally be forgotten once and for all. After all, what if the former inhabitants began returning and claiming their houses back? Hertl calls this fear "a kind of paranoia." Yet it persists -- which is why the project to erect a monument is such a touchy issue. Split over Wording "We already decided against building a monument four years ago," says Ludvik Mlcuch, a communist member of the Postoloprty town council. "I see no reason to change our minds. End of story." Petr Riha runs a small electrical goods store in Postoloprty. He has nothing against a monument. "The important thing is what's on the inscription," he says. Riha would like a memorial to all the victims of the Nazi era and its aftermath, not just to the Germans. "That wouldn't be enough for me," says Walter Urban, who was born in Postoloprty in 1942 and is one of the few ethnic Germans still living there. His house is in the side street on the edge of town that leads toward the Pheasant Garden. Urban doesn't know whether his father was killed there, by the barracks or by the school. All he wants is a memorial where he can lay some flowers. And that's what he's been doggedly promoting in the small committee that must now present its proposed compromise to the municipal authorities in Postoloprty. Everyone agrees that the town needs a monument. But the committee is split on the wording for the plaque. Opponents of a memorial to the murdered Germans always point to the context, namely that the postwar excesses would not have happened were it not for the Nazi terror that preceded them. "That may be true, but every crime has its origins and its causality," says Otokar Löbl, president of Friends of the Town of Saaz/Zatec, a Frankfurt-based association that has long campaigned for an investigation of the crime. "However it's also true that most of the Germans living in Zatec at the time supported the Nazis." Even so, their murder was a crime that should not only be acknowledged as such but for which people must also accept responsibility. 'A Mental Balancing Act' Löbl comes from a Jewish German-Czech family. His father's family was killed in a concentration camp. Löbl was born in Zatec in 1950, but left the country in 1970 following the Soviet Union's crushing of the Prague Spring. He has long campaigned for better understanding between Germans and Czechs, and he is the initiator of the "Saaz Way," a declaration of reconciliation signed by people from both sides. "No future without the past" is the motto of the Saaz Way. It's a statement that Peter Klepsch wholeheartedly agrees with. Klepsch now lives in Spalt near Nuremberg, where he chairs the Heimatkreis Saaz, an association for Sudeten Germans from Zatec. The association's Web site contains the formerly confidential reports and statements of the 1947 parliamentary inquiry. Once or twice a year the Czech exile travels to his former home, an activity he describes as "a mental balancing act." "People often ask me if we've come to take their houses away from them," Klepsch says. "But I could never expect anyone to leave their home." His family's former home is now used by the criminal investigation bureau; the same police department that has now finally solved the case of the murder of Horst, Eduard, Hans, Walter, and Heinz on the parade ground in Postoloprty on June 6, 1945. « Last Edit: 2009-09-05 09:59:56 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999 Pages: [1] 2   Jump to:Please select a destination: ----------------------------- General ----------------------------- =>Announcements =>Evolution and Memetics =>FAQ =>Church Doctrine =>Science & Technology =>Society & Culture =>Arts & Entertainment =>Philosophy & Religion =>Humor & Satire =>Creative Endeavors =>Serious Business =>Virian Book Club =>Second Life =>Free For All =>Infections =>Suggestion Box =>Test Area ----------------------------- Mailing List ----------------------------- =>Virus 2006 =>Virus 2005 =>Virus 2004 =>Virus 2003

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