To
remember the German Invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, I will post four
articles on Vladimir Putin being compared to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Bear in mind, I do not know whether all these writers are correct in comparing Putin to those two
dictators but I will just post about what they wrote.
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Joseph
Stalin (left) & Adolf Hitler (right) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.agoravox.tv/IMG/jpg/tumblr_m9npybzZyk1qirhm0o1_500.jpg]
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NOTICE: The following Three
articles are written by the authors themselves and not by me, I am not trying
to violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.
PAGE TITLE: http://www.forbes.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf
Hitler?
DATE: April 16, 2014
AUTHOR: Paul Johnson
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Paul Bede
Johnson (born 2 November
1928) is an English journalist, historian, speechwriter and author. He was
educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen
College, Oxford. Johnson first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist
writing for, and later editing, the New Statesman magazine.
A
prolific writer, he has written over 40 books and contributed to numerous
magazines and newspapers. While associated with the left in his early career,
he is now a conservative popular historian. His sons are the journalist Daniel
Johnson, founder of Standpoint, and the businessman Luke Johnson, former
chairman of Channel 4.
As
Mein Kampf makes clear, Hitler sought to unite all the people of German speech
and culture into one state, or Reich, preferably by peaceful nego tiation,
otherwise by war and conquest.
To
do this Hitler needed to void the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which
Germany had signed after its defeat in the Great War of 1914-18. First he
marched into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized under the treaty,
stationing regular army divisions and tanks there. The Allies–Britain and
France–did nothing.
Next Hitler marched into
German-speaking Austria–an annexation known as the Anschluss. Having been
stripped of their empire and reduced to an insignificant small state, the
Austrians were glad to become part of a mighty Reich. Again, the Allies did
nothing.
Hitler’s
next claim was the Sudetenland. This was a territory on the border of
Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking people who were absorbed into the
new state against their will. The Allies allowed this landgrab to stand in an
agreement reached at a Munich summit meeting in September 1938. This was
regarded as a surrender to Hitler, but British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain,
who negotiated the agreement, argued that Hitler was merely asserting the rights
of the Sudeten Germans, who wanted to belong to his Reich.
The
falsity of Chamberlain’s position and Hitler’s deceit were proved within
months. The Sudetenland’s annexation had made the Czech frontier indefensible,
and in March 1939 Hitler invaded. The Czechs put up no resistance, and the rest
of the country fell into Hitler’s hands without a shot being fired.
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From left to right (front): Chamberlain,
Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Ciano pictured before signing the Munich
Agreement. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Alarmed,
the Allies signed a protective treaty with Poland. But Hitler also had claims
against the Poles, in particular the German-speaking port of Danzig,
which the Versailles Treaty had ceded to the Poles as their “outlet to
the sea.” When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Allies reluctantly
fought.
Had
the Allies stopped Hitler at the beginning, when he was remilitarizing the
Rhineland, he’d have been overthrown and World War II avoided. But the only one
pointing this out was Winston Churchill–and his was a lonely voice.
Today’s
drift toward war with Russia seems like a replay of the past. Putin is a
Russian nationalist, who believes in a strong Stalinist state. His goal is to
reverse the events of 1989–the end of the Soviet state and dissolution of its
enormous empire. He seeks to do this by using what remains of Russia’s
Stalinist heritage: the military, a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and
immense resources of natural gas and other forms of energy. These are powerful
tools to wield against the various weak states that were part of the U.S.S.R. None
has nuclear weapons, and most are dependent on the (relatively) cheap energy
Russia supplies. All have ethnic Russian minorities, who speak the language,
boast of their superior Russian culture and claim to have been relegated to
second-class citizenship. Putin can rely on these minorities to agitate for
Russian intervention whenever he wants–most importantly in the Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His successful annexation of Crimea is greatly
encouraging to his long-term plans, and it’s clear he’ll use everything in his
power, including military force, to reconstruct his empire.
SHADES OF MUNICH
What’s
to stop Putin? The West is led by the modern equivalents of Chamberlain:
President François Hollande of France is a political nonentity repudiated by
his own compatriots; Prime Minister David Cameron of
Britain and Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany have both ruled out the use of force to stop Putin from
annexing Ukraine; and worst of all, President Barack Obama–the one man
who has the power to stop Putin in his tracks–does nothing. He makes Neville
Chamberlain seem like a bellicose activist.
The
U.S. is the richest country in the world. Thanks to the fracking revolution, it
has the means to meet the energy needs of all the former Soviet states. Its
fleets and armies make Russia’s much reduced military power seem puny. It could
move troops and aircraft into Ukraine within 24 hours, and its fleets could
ensure protection to the Baltic states in a way that Putin would find
unanswerable. Yet Obama makes no decisive moves. What ails the man? Is it
cowardice? Indecision? A kind of executive paralysis he tends to display when
firmness is called for? Clearly there’s something fundamentally wrong with the
U.S. President. Meanwhile, Putin, who runs what is, in essence, a second-rate
nation with a weak and declining demographic structure, behaves as if he rules
the Earth.
Sadly,
there is no Churchillian voice to sound the alarm and call the democratic world
to action.
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Vladimir Putin (left) & Adolf Hitler
(right)
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PAGE TITLE: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/
ARTICLE TITLE: 11 Prominent People Who Compared Putin To
Hitler
DATE: May 23, 2014
AUTHOR: Michael Kelley
Underscoring
the ongoing geopolitical crisis in eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin’s meddling
in Ukraine under the pretext of protecting Russian speakers has important
people invoking Hitler’s machinations before World War II.
Here
are 11 prominent instances where Putin has been compared to Hitler recently:
•
Prince
Charles to a woman whose ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust: “And now
Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.”
•
Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential contender Hillary
Clinton: “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the
30s. … Hitler kept saying [German citizens abroad were] not being treated
right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so
nervous.”
•
German Finance Minister Wolfgang
Schaeuble: “We know all about that from history. Those are the methods that
Hitler used to take over the Sudetenland.”
•
Vladislav Inozemtsev of The
Moscow Times: “Like Hitler before him, Putin has no new ideas on how to
create a stable global system in place of the current one. He only wants to
secure new territory as Hitler tried to guarantee a vast Lebensraum for the
German people.”
•
Former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezisnki called Putin “a partially comical imitation of (former Italian
Prime Minister Benito) Mussolini and a more menacing reminder of Hitler.”
•
Senator John
McCain (R-Ariz.): “”If Putin is allowed to go into a sovereign nation on
behalf of Russian-speaking people, this is the same thing that Hitler did prior
to World War II. “
•
Sen. Marco
Rubio (R-Fla.): “Claims that [Russia] needed to move into a neighbouring
country to protect an ethnic group tied to them is certainly similar to the
argument that Hitler made in the 1930s.”
•
Sen. Lindsey
Graham (R-S.C.): “If you could go back in time, would you have allowed
Adolf Hitler to host the Olympics in Germany? To have the propaganda coup of
inviting the world into Nazi Germany and putting on a false front?”
•
Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “We haven’t seen this kind of behaviour
since the Second World War.”
•
Russian activist and former chess champion Garry
Kasparov: “Intentionally or not, the Putin regime has followed the Berlin
1936 playbook quite closely for Sochi.”
•
Washington Post Editorial Writer Charles
Lane: “Superficially plausible though the Hitler-Putin comparison may be,
just how precisely does it fit? In some respects, alarmingly so.”
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Vladimir Putin (left) and Joseph Stalin (right)
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ARTICLE TITLE: Is Putin Worse Than Stalin?
DATE: July 25, 2014
AUTHOR: Pat Buchanan
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Patrick Joseph "Pat"
Buchanan (born November 2, 1938) is an American conservative political
commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster. Buchanan
was a senior advisor to American Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and
Ronald Reagan, and was an original host on CNN's Crossfire. He sought the
Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party
ticket in the 2000 presidential election. He co-founded The American
Conservative magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause. He
has been published in Human Events, National Review, The Nation and Rolling
Stone. He was a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network, including the
show Morning Joe until February 2012. Buchanan is a regular on The McLaughlin
Group and now appears on Fox News.
In
1933, the Holodomor was playing out in Ukraine.
After
the “kulaks,” the independent farmers, had been liquidated in the forced
collectivization of Soviet agriculture, a genocidal famine was imposed on
Ukraine through seizure of her food production.
Estimates
of the dead range from two to nine million souls.
Walter
Duranty of the New York Times, who called reports of the famine “malignant
propaganda,” won a Pulitzer for his mendacity.
In
November 1933, during the Holodomor, the greatest liberal of them all, FDR,
invited Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to receive official U.S. recognition of
his master Stalin’s murderous regime.
On
August 1, 1991, just four months before Ukraine declared its independence of
Russia, George H. W. Bush warned Kiev’s legislature:
“Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”
In
short, Ukraine’s independence was never part of America’s agenda. From 1933 to
1991, it was never a U.S. vital interest. Bush I was against it.
When
then did this issue of whose flag flies over Donetsk or Crimea become so
crucial that we would arm Ukrainians to fight Russian-backed rebels and
consider giving a NATO war guarantee to Kiev, potentially bringing us to war
with a nuclear-armed Russia?
From
FDR on, U.S. presidents have felt that America could not remain isolated from
the rulers of the world’s largest nation.
Ike
invited Khrushchev to tour the USA after he had drowned the Hungarian
Revolution in blood. After Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba, JFK was soon
calling for a new detente at American University.
Within
weeks of Warsaw Pact armies crushing the Prague Spring in August 1968, LBJ was
seeking a summit with Premier Alexei Kosygin.
After
excoriating Moscow for the downing of KAL 007 in 1983, that old Cold Warrior
Ronald Reagan was fishing for a summit meeting.
The
point: Every president from FDR through George H. W. Bush, even after
collisions with Moscow far more serious than this clash over Ukraine, sought to
re-engage the men in the Kremlin.
Whatever
we thought of the Soviet dictators who blockaded Berlin, enslaved Eastern
Europe, put rockets in Cuba and armed Arabs to attack Israel, Ike, JFK, LBJ,
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush 1 all sought to engage Russia’s rulers.
Avoidance
of a catastrophic war demanded engagement.
How
then can we explain the clamor of today’s U.S. foreign policy elite to
confront, isolate, and cripple Russia, and make of Putin a moral and political
leper with whom honorable statesmen can never deal?
What
has Putin done to rival the forced famine in Ukraine that starved to death
millions, the slaughter of the Hungarian rebels or the Warsaw Pact’s crushing
of Czechoslovakia?
In
Ukraine, Putin responded to a U.S.-backed coup, which ousted a democratically
elected political ally of Russia, with a bloodless seizure of the pro-Russian
Crimea where Moscow has berthed its Black Sea fleet since the 18th century.
This is routine Big Power geopolitics.
And
though Putin put an army on Ukraine’s border, he did not order it to invade or
occupy Luhansk or Donetsk. Does this really look like a drive to reassemble
either the Russian Empire of the Romanovs or the Soviet Empire of Stalin that
reached to the Elbe?
As
for the downing of the Malaysian airliner, Putin did not order that. Sen. John
Cornyn says U.S. intelligence has not yet provided any “smoking gun” that ties
the missile-firing to Russia.
Intel
intercepts seem to indicate that Ukrainian rebels thought they had hit an
Antonov military transport plane.
Yet,
today, the leading foreign policy voice of the Republican Party, Sen. John
McCain, calls Obama’s White House “cowardly” for not arming the Ukrainians to
fight the Russian-backed separatists.
But
suppose Putin responded to the arrival of U.S. weapons in Kiev by occupying
Eastern Ukraine. What would we do then?
John
Bolton has the answer: Bring Ukraine into NATO.
Translation:
The U.S. and NATO should go to war with Russia, if necessary, over Luhansk,
Donetsk and Crimea, though no U.S. president has ever thought Ukraine itself
was worth a war with Russia.
What
motivates Putin seems simple and understandable. He wants the respect due a
world power. He sees himself as protector of the Russians left behind in his
“near abroad.” He relishes playing Big Power politics. History is full of such
men.
He
allows U.S. overflights to Afghanistan, cooperates in the P5+1 on Iran, helped
us rid Syria of chemical weapons, launches our astronauts into orbit,
collaborates in the war on terror and disagrees on Crimea and Syria.
But
what motivates those on our side who seek every opportunity to restart the Cold
War?
Is
it not a desperate desire to appear once again Churchillian, once again heroic,
once again relevant, as they saw themselves in the Cold War that ended so long
ago?
Who
is the real problem here?
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Joseph Stalin (left) & Vladimir Putin (right)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.politico.com/gallery/2014/03/how-well-do-you-know-vladimir-putin/001674-023782.html] |
PAGE TITLE: http://townhall.com/
ARTICLE TITLE: Vladimir Putin: The Return of the
CommuNazi
DATE: August 28, 2014
AUTHOR: Austin Bay
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Austin Bay is the author of three
novels. His third novel, The Wrong Side of Brightness, was published by
Putnam/Jove in June 2003. He has also co-authored four non-fiction books, to
include A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: Third Edition (with James Dunnigan,
Morrow, 1996).
Bay
writes a syndicated column on international affairs for Creators Syndicate. He
is a commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, covering foreign
affairs but often addressing issues in Texas that have a national interest. Bay
has appeared as a guest commentator on Fox News Channel, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC and
ABC News' "Nightline," as well as on numerous regional radio and TV
shows. As a journalist, he has filed reports from throughout Europe, Central
America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is a contributing
editor to FYEO, an Internet foreign affairs newsletter found at
www.StrategyPage.com, and writes a weblog on his home page, www.austinbay.net.
Bay,
who has had two commercial wargames published, worked for four years as a
special consultant in wargaming in the Office of the Secretary of Defense
(1989-1993). He is a colonel (retired) in the U.S. Army Reserve. In 2004, he
was recalled to active duty and served in Iraq as chief of strategic
initiatives, Multi-National Corps-Iraq (May-September 2004). He received the
Bronze Star for meritorious service in Iraq.
Bay
also served on active duty in the Pentagon during Operation Desert Storm
(1991). On active duty in the 1970s, Bay served in Germany as a tank platoon
leader in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and as an assistant operations and
chemical/nuclear defense officer in the headquarters of 1st Infantry Division's
forward brigade group. (Goeppingen, Germany). While with 1st Infantry Division,
his duties included liaison work with NATO allied units - in particular with
West German, Canadian, and French forces. In 1995, the Ballistic Missile
Defense Organization sent him to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to observe
anti-ballistic missile training exercises. In 1999, Bay accepted a special
reserve tour in Guatemala, where he was deputy commander of a Hurricane Mitch
recovery operation and medical relief mission. In October 2001, Bay served a
two-week tour with Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base,
Florida.
Bay
has a bachelor of arts from Rice University (1973) and has a Ph.D. in English
and comparative literature from Columbia University (1987). He is a graduate of
the U.S. Army Command and General Staff School and the U.S. Army War College.
He currently teaches a course in strategy and strategic theory for the
University of Texas' PLAN 2 undergraduate honors program. Recent projects
include organizing a micro-development aid project for the Episcopal Church's
Diocese of Texas.
Bay
is a member of The Authors Guild, Mystery Writers of America, The Modern
Language Association, The Reserve Officers Association, The National Conference
of Editorial Writers and The Society of Professional Journalists.
In August 1939 -- 75 years ago this week -- Adolf
Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. In the wake of the
Russo-German alliance, newspaper wits coined the term "ComunNazi."
Communist-Nazi. Yes, "red" and "brown" entwined as the
dictatorships they are.
The two dictators' legions of liars hailed the deal
as a peace treaty. Peace? Eastern Europeans in the dictators' gun sights scorned
the falsehood.
"Peace in our time, " Neville Chamberlain
had proclaimed after the wretched Munich deal of 1938, which gave Hitler
permission to annex slices of Czechoslovakia. Of course, when given a slice,
Hitler annexed the whole.
Expansionist dictators take until stopped by
superior power. For these beasts, peace is war by other means, and the other
means always involve deception.
On Aug. 31, 1939, with the ink barely dry on the
dictators' peace pact, for the sake of expansionist war, Germany conducted a
"false flag" operation. Pretending to be Poles, German soldiers
launched a fake assault on a German border station. For dictators, falsehood
serves. On Sept. 1, Hitler's panzers began to roll toward Warsaw. On, Sept. 17,
without a formal declaration of war, Stalin's Red Army "forces of
international socialism" attacked Poland from the east.
In fall 1939, after the German and Russian invasion
of Poland, the Nazis and Communists absorbed Polish territory into their
respective states.
Lies, vehement denial, propaganda, plausible
deniability, a "so what" shrug -- the tools Hitler and Stalin used
are not artifacts of 1939. 2014 provides us with a bitter example. "In our
time," former KGB colonel and Stalin heir, Vladimir Putin, is invading
Ukraine by increment. As his troops infiltrate, Putin lies, denies, dangles
prospects for peace and then threatens to cut off natural gas shipments.
Thanks to him, annexation is not a 1930s artifact.
In March 2014 Putin's Kremlin annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.
"CommunNazi" disappeared in 1941 when
Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. We need to resurrect
it and apply it to Putin. The Russian president has resuscitated and combined
ultra-nationalist and ultra-statist (communists) anti-liberal ideologies.
Whether he governs as a "national socialist" or simply runs the
Kremlin as a criminal oligarchy is of little matter; he has effective control
of the Russian economy. He also exercises state control of culture and media.
Until the July 2014 shoot-down of Malaysian
Airlines Flight 17, Kremlin spin managed to confuse just enough people in the
West to prevent the formation of an anti-Putin front. German Chancellor Angela
Merkel claims that will change.
After the MH17 disaster, the Kremlin claimed that
Ukrainians fired the missile and perhaps -- just perhaps -- they were trying to
shoot down an airliner carrying President Putin!
Outlandish? Of course. However, dictators employ
"the big lie of the moment" because, with certain groups of useful
idiots, it works. Often, the bolder and more outlandish the "big
lie," the better. Conspiracy theorists lap it up.
Twenty-first-century useful idiots and conspiracy
theorists lap the flapdoodle despite 21st-century communications technology.
Digital radar records exposed the Russian lie regarding MH17. Civilians with
cell phone cameras have repeatedly taken pictures of Russian vehicles
infiltrating Eastern Ukraine.
However, the lies continue. When an infiltrating
column of armor vehicles was intercepted this past week (Aug. 25, 2014), the
Kremlin tried a kind-of-big lie.
Ukrainian security forces captured 10 Russian
paratroopers who were in an armored vehicle column and released on video the
statement of a Russian corporal. According to the Voice of America, the
corporal told his captors he served in the Russian Army's elite, special
operations-capable 331st Airborne Regiment. He described a common infiltration
tactic: "We traveled here (i.e., Ukraine) in columns not along the roads
but across the fields."
Whether moving on roads or cross country, Russian
military units, elite and shmuck, can access the Kremlin's global navigation
satellite system, GLONASS.
Kremlin propagandists, however, blamed a navigation
error. The Russian Army column had been patrolling the border zone and crossed
section "into Ukraine by accident." An "aw, shucks, no big
deal" big lie. Or perhaps a play on Peter Pan -- you know, Lost Boys?
Tsk. Once again, Putin's Kremlin is caught
"red-and-brown" handed.
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Vladimir Putin 8
Vladimir Putin (left) & Adolf Hitler
(right)
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.slaq.am/eng/news/182173/]
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