From the BBC:
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has described Nicholas II's reported comparison of him with future German Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler as "unacceptable".
One of 22,000 Polish officers later murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest, who met the Tsar of Russia during a royal tour to Canada said he had likened some future Nazi actions in Ukraine to those of Mr Lenin.
The leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, who has faced criticism in the West for signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, said if the Tsar had made such comments they were "wrong" and "not royal behaviour".
The Winter Palace declined to comment.
Even China Isn't That Heartless...
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14 comments:
If Henry VIII had had 1940s technology he'd have put Catholics in gas chambers. And with his daughter, it would have been protestants. The Harrying of the North was basically genocide.
Putin's clearly a bastard, but these were Prince Charles' family.
...and one of his more recent family members was quite fond of Mr Hitler.
His granny and George VI were pretty fond of Chamberlain and favoured Lord Halifax to take over rather than Churchill.
Churchill hardly harried the Nazis from the West when they invaded Russia: he waited years to open the Second Front when the Russians were losing hundreds of thousands of troops. Lets hope Putin raises the question of why Churchill waited so long for D-day and perhaps the German treaty Hess was supposed to have brought over previously will finally see the light of day.
DBC,
I don't think D-Day could have been done much earlier. The effect of the Eastern Front (and especially Stalingrad) was that Hitler brought forces from the Western Front to try to win in the East. Without that, we might have got up the beaches and inland and then been stuck fighting a more bloody battle with the Germans.
TS, exactly, we could the Mediaeval version of this article to highlight the hypocrisy of a variety of pots and kettles calling each other black.
P156, exactly!
B/TS, most people agree that D-Day couldn't have been done much earlier, i tend to concur.
Being fair to the western Allies, they did supply Russia with plenty of stuff during the war, and kept up the pressure on Germany in other ways.
And if Stalin hadn't been such a complete and utter bastard, then maybe the west would have helped him a bit more?
"If Henry VIII had had 1940s technology he'd have put Catholics in gas chambers."
I think they would probably have preferred that over being burnt alive, or was that Mary I and protestants? Not so much of a public spectacle, though.
B,
Henry did a bit of both IIRC. Pre-wanting legover with Anne Boleyn = burn everyone not catholic. Post-legover with Anne Boleyn = burn catholics.
Mary didn't buy into it and turned the country catholic only for Elizabeth to come along and reverse it.
And you're right - the burning of heretics was done publicly as a warning to others. You could renounce your faith and be OK, whereas the Jews in WW2 and the Tutsi in Rwanda was genocide.
What was the deal Hess brought across (under cover of an air raid that brought London to a standstill)? Most likely : don't attack us in France while we are polishing off the Commies whom you (Churchill ) don't like either and we'll let you keep the Empire which you got bilked out of in the Atlantic Charter before the Americans carried off ship loads of Brit gold to the States.Why else would Hess make the journey just before they started Barbarossa?
Peter Hitchens in The Mail gets a lot right in recent pieces like"Shoulder to Shoulder" .
It would be interesting if the Cambridge spies had leaked the text of any written treaty carried by Hess back to Stalin.
DBC, OK, let's assume that those were the terms of Hess' Treaty and he was acting on Hitler's orders.
Mainstream view is that Hess was slightly mad and acting on his own volition; Hitler sent fighters after him to try and shoot him down.
But whichever version you believe, Hess wanted to negotiate peace with the Brits.
So anyway, the ending to both version is the same = Churchill turned Hess down.
No evidence that Hitler put up fighters to shoot Hess down.
The problem is that Churchill did not turn the Hess offer down : he sent masses of troops and materiel to North Africa where there were n't any Germans when England was facing imminent invasion (supposedly); he needed Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union and control Europe from sea to shining sea in return for keeping the Empire and in particular the Imperial Preference trade system that the Americans took so seriously that getting rid of it was more or less a war aim.This could have formed the basis of an alternative Common Market based on the Commonwealth.
Soon as the war was over Churchill took the lead in trying to destroy Russia again with a Cold War.
We are still fighting this war now: the Thirties have never ended.
( I was told most of the above as fact by genuine old Jewish Commies in the Dublin Castle pub in Camden after EU refendum activities.We were often menaced by Mosleyites who were fanatically pro-Europe, hence their name Union Movement.The Jewish Commies thought that Enoch Powell was the only politician onside (He was incredibly anti-American like them.)
Things are a lot more complex than the "mainstream view" I think you'll find.
DBC, you are missing the point.
Firstly, Hitler did try to have Hess shot down.
Secondly, there was no peace treaty between the UK and Germany in 1940, there just wasn't. No amount of conspiracy theory can convince me there was.
And Stalin brought the Cold War on himself, he started it.
Where's your evidence that Hitler tried to have Hess shot down?
Dunno why you're talking about 1940; the Hess flight was in 1941.
You disparage literature above but its all words assembled into narratives and the Hess-mad- disowned-by-Hitler narrative is a carefully constructed " legend" that falls apart when "deconstructed".(Stalin thought that British secret service had got at Hess to fly to the Duke of Hamilton's place - see Laurence Rees "Behind Closed Doors" p319 - not a conspiracy theory potboiler.)
DBC, OK 1941 not 1940, sorry.
"Where's my evidence"? I saw it on telly once.
But more to the point, where is your evidence that Churchill signed a non-agression treaty with Hitler in 1941?
In the unlikely event that there is such a highly secret treaty, neither side seems to have stuck to it.
What Stalin thinks is nigh on irrelevant as he was a paranoid lunatic who didn't even believe his own spies when they told him about Ansatz Barbarossa.
Stalin sees to have been convinced that the Brits were trying to destabilise his precious non aggression pact with Hitler and lure the Germans into a non-aggression agreement with them.Laurence Rees describes in his book pp87/88 how Stalin received a note from Stafford Cripps, who was British Ambassador, warning him that people in Britain could organise a peace deal.Then Stalin heard about the Hess flight and went ballistic thinking that it had been set up by pro-peace British Intelligence.
He treated all messages that Germany was treacherously preparing to attack him as subversive propaganda trying to ruin the non-aggression pact.
You might like to read "Hess,Hitler and Churchill" (2013 by Peter Padfield) or a long review or even publisher's description.This book dumps the lone madman junk and see the flight as pre-planned and serious
with some kind of typed agreement in transit.
What night was Hess's flight?: 10th May 1941 .What night was the Longest or Hardest of the Blitz?10-11th May 1941.
Too many strange coincidences for the official Hess Myth to hold up.
How and why did a 93 year old man commit suicide by hanging?
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