Hitler was as authoritarian as they come. The "socialist" moniker was as descriptive as "conservative" is today
Russia Prepared To Fight War Over Ukraine, Senior Government Official Admits
- Thread starter Locutus
- Start date
So he's got a lot in common with other left-wing socialist leaders, like Pol Pot and Kim Jong-un.
The left have always been a bad lot.
EDWARD LUCAS ANALYSIS: Blood-soaked Crimea, crucible of war for centuries
The valley in Crimea where the charge took place
Back in the days when British schools taught history and poetry properly, every child knew about the Charge of the Light Brigade. The epitome of military foolishness, when the flower of the British cavalry attacked Russia’s artillery batteries in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854.
The blundering diplomacy which caused that war is less well known. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose poem immortalised the fiasco, would have struggled to versify the complex Anglo-French attempts to shore up the Ottoman empire, amid an obscure squabble about religious privileges in the Holy Land.
The Crimea, setting for that most infamous calamity, is a peninsula with a blood-soaked and tragic history.
Long contested by the great powers, it has been the crucible of many wars. Now it threatens to be the flashpoint for another one.
The Crimea has long been contested by the powers and has been the crucible of many wars, Lucas writes
Indeed, broadly speaking, the issues that led Queen Victoria’s government to dispatch an army are eerily similar today. Once again, a wider struggle between a resurgent Russian empire and its fragile neighbours is being played out in the streets of this long-neglected province.
Few may know or care about the intricacies of the region’s history – the long-forgotten Scythians, or the mighty Crimean Tartar Khanate, which ruled the northern Black Sea region for three centuries until it came under Russian rule in 1783.
But what is becoming blindingly clear is that on Crimea’s fate hangs Ukraine’s. And on Ukraine’s fate depends the whole edifice of European security, built up since the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991.
Crimea in the modern age has rarely determined its own future. For a few months following the Bolshevik Revolution, the indigenous Tartars, freed from the yoke of Tsarist rule, enjoyed a brief period of independence – a laudable but doomed attempt to establish a secular, modern-minded Muslim state.
For four brutal and chaotic years, control of this scenic sliver of land flip-flopped between German, Ukrainian, Bolshevik and ‘White’ (monarchist) Russian forces.
But under Soviet rule from 1921, communism was ruthlessly enforced. Like their Ukrainian neighbours to the north, Crimea’s Tartars were a particular object of Stalin’s wrath for their ‘bourgeois-nationalist’ outlook, foreign ties, and pious peasant values.
A deliberately engineered famine in the 1930s killed millions, amid heart-breaking suffering and grotesque scenes of cannibalism.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Crimean Tartars and Ukrainians, like many others who had experienced the horror of Soviet rule, believed life could only be better under their new Nazi masters. They were to pay cruelly for that deluded choice.
The peninsula was the scene of some of the fiercest battles of the Second World War. The Germans wrested control from the Soviets in 1942, only to be driven out by the Red Army in 1944.
Stalin’s revenge on the Tartars – only weeks later – stirs bitter resentment to this day. Nearly 200,000 people, mainly old men, women and children, were given 30 minutes to pack, and were deported to the wastes of Central Asia. Nearly half of them died, many from hunger, thirst and exposure.
'Putin’s Russia has seized Crimea under our noses. The dismemberment of Ukraine is under way.'
Edward Lucas
Their descendants returned to Crimea as Soviet rule loosened. They found the place names changed, their cemeteries obliterated, and their houses occupied by strangers. In four decades, the Soviet Union had wiped out centuries of history. The new majority of the inhabitants of Crimea were Russians – mainly military veterans fiercely loyal to the Kremlin.
Which is why the Tartars are now a minority in their own land, living in poverty in makeshift encampments, lacking compensation, land, jobs or even recognition of their suffering. For them, the only hope of justice is a strong and successful Ukraine; their nightmare is a return to Kremlin rule. For the Russians in Crimea, the Tartars are despicable traitors. These Russians also care little for Ukraine – for understandable reasons.
In a strange quirk of history, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954. But it meant little. Russia, Ukraine and the other Soviet Socialist Republics were of only nominal importance: real power lay with the Kremlin, the Communist Party and the KGB.
When that system collapsed in 1991, though, Khrushchev’s impetuous decision meant that Crimea was part of a newly independent state. The Tartars were jubilant, but the Russians living on the peninsula were bemused and sceptical. The new leaders of Ukraine trod cautiously. Russian was and is spoken freely in the east and south of the country.
Livadia Palace in Crimea, where the Yalta Conference between Britain, America and the USSR took place in 1945
Since Vladimir Putin's rise to power, Russia has systematically undermined Ukraine's security - the writer argues
Ukraine could be a success story, its leaders reckoned – a place like Switzerland or Belgium, where different languages, religions and cultures exist side-by-side. But only if outsiders refrained from meddling. To ensure that, they struck a deal with Britain, America and Russia to guarantee their country’s borders, and its freedom from threats or coercion. In the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, Ukraine agreed to give up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, in return for solemn pledges regarding its security.
Nobody then could have foreseen that a quiet ex-KGB officer in St Petersburg, burning with resentment at the collapse of the Soviet Union, would one day come to power in the Kremlin and seek to restore its lost realms.
But since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, Russia has systematically undermined Ukraine’s security, with a mixture of blackmail over energy supplies, economic sanctions and subversion. It has not been hard: Ukraine is woefully ill-run and corrupt. Western efforts to help have been haphazard and ineffective. Our promises in that accord of 20 years ago have proven shamefully hollow – no more effective than the ones we made to protect Belgium in 1914 or Poland in 1939.
Now we are reaping the harvest of our cowardice and complacency. Putin’s Russia has seized Crimea under our noses. The dismemberment of Ukraine is under way. The security arrangements which have kept Europe peaceful and prosperous since 1991 are perishing in Crimea right now – just as much of the Light Brigade did 160 years ago.
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I did and the reasons of it too. I just don't read the selective history like you do.
Yahoo! News
"
In Kyiv, a Ukrainian security official said the head of the Ukrainian navy — Adm. Denis Berezovsky — had been dismissed and faces a treason investigation after declaring his allegiance to the pro-Russian government in Crimea and offering no resistance to the Russian troops.
The speaker of Crimea's legislature, Vladimir Konstantinov, was quoted as saying local authorities do not recognize the new government in Kyiv. He said a planned referendum on March 30 would ask voters about the region's future status."
What do you do when the military and local governments are themselves giving their loyalties to Russia. Reminds me of Switzerland in WWII, they could not get involved since part of their own army was sympathetic to the Nazis.
When a nation is divided like that, it's best we stay outsince otherwise we won't even know which side we're fighting on anymore.
"
In Kyiv, a Ukrainian security official said the head of the Ukrainian navy — Adm. Denis Berezovsky — had been dismissed and faces a treason investigation after declaring his allegiance to the pro-Russian government in Crimea and offering no resistance to the Russian troops.
The speaker of Crimea's legislature, Vladimir Konstantinov, was quoted as saying local authorities do not recognize the new government in Kyiv. He said a planned referendum on March 30 would ask voters about the region's future status."
What do you do when the military and local governments are themselves giving their loyalties to Russia. Reminds me of Switzerland in WWII, they could not get involved since part of their own army was sympathetic to the Nazis.
When a nation is divided like that, it's best we stay outsince otherwise we won't even know which side we're fighting on anymore.
You believe the left wing mythology of WWII in the same way as others on the left believe in the Blackadder mythology of WWI.
Treaty of Versailles was so kind to Germans they just naturally wanted to embrace all of Europe. Gotcha....
A treaty which Germany wouldn't have received had it not started WWI; and a treaty which was much kinder to the Germans than the brutal treaty the Germans were planning on imposing on Britain and France in the event of Germany winning WWI (you only have to look at the harsh treaty the Germans imposed on Russia in March 1918 to see what sort of treaty the Germans would have imposed on the British and French).
You see, it's amazing what you learn when you actually learn history, rather than just accepting left wing mythologies as true.
Gang mentality (alliances) started WW1 - from a single gunshot. England was a turncoat who previously had been allied with Germany
I would also say the Treaty of Versailles was also mild compared to the ORIGINAL Treaty of Versailles that the Germans imposed on France after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
Germany - the only country which could have prevented WWI from happening - started WWI.
So typical of the modern left to ignore reality and put the blame on WWI on everybody else they can think of apart from those who really did start it - the Germans.
Germany - the only country which could have prevented WWI from happening - started WWI.
So typical of the modern left to ignore reality and put the blame on WWI on everybody else they can think of apart from those who really did start it - the Germans.
