Day: June 7, 2023

Who Lost Czechoslovakia?

That’s right boys and girls time for the old professor to drop some history.

No Irene this is not a pre-WW2 post about some misguided attempt to divert another massive war in Europe….but rather the aftermath of WW2 and the rise of the Iron Curtain.

After the war the Soviets and their lackeys marched through Eastern Europe to extend their influence to confront the Allies growing influence.  Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, the Baltics and then there was Czechoslovakia.

It is often taken for granted that all European nations involved in the early Cold War, save Germany, fell naturally onto one side of the Iron Curtain or the other. Yet Czechoslovakia was not pre-ordained to become part of the Soviet sphere. There were multiple opportunities for the United States to influence its position on the political map of Europe.

Czechoslovakia emerged from the Second World War unaligned. Hitler and Stalin had not allocated it in the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin and Churchill had not included it in their secret 1944 ‘percentages’ deal, which designated spheres of influence in eastern and southern Europe. The victorious Allies had not discussed its orientation at Yalta or Potsdam. Both the Soviets and the Americans had liberated it. But whatever cards Washington had to play, diplomatically and militarily, it gave most of them up in 1945.

‘I believe that Russia wants to and will cooperate’ in Czechoslovakia, President Roosevelt told the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a democrat unaffiliated with any party, in February 1944. Red Army officials, however, made clear to their Czech counterparts that the country would be brought within the Soviet sphere. What capacity the US Army had to countervail was circumscribed by the fateful decision of Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower to stop its own advance 50 miles west of Prague.

The Red Army, which had been 150 miles further from the Czech capital than General George Patton just before the war’s end, marched into Prague on 9 May 1945. It was one of its easier victories, but also one that had great subsequent historical significance. ‘We could have liberated Prague’, lamented one bitter US embassy official. ‘After the war we spent a lot of time trying to convince the Czechs that they weren’t part of the Eastern Bloc. But no matter what we said, the Soviets came to Prague first.’ The Czech Communists used this to their advantage, proclaiming it as evidence that only the Russians cared about the Prague citizens being brutalised by the Nazis.

In the months that followed, the US War Department agitated for a complete withdrawal of US troops from Czechoslovakia. There was, Ambassador Robert Murphy said from Germany on 31 August, no ‘overriding political necessity’ for their presence in the country. In Prague, the US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Laurence Steinhardt, was appalled. He argued that withdrawal would make the Czechs ‘feel that they had been morally as well as physically abandoned by the Americans at the very time they were just beginning to show signs of courage in standing up to the Russians’. No one knew for certain how many Soviet troops were in the country at the time, but estimates spanned from 165,000 to more than twice that. President Truman decided to write to Stalin on 2 November proposing a simultaneous US and Soviet withdrawal by 1 December. Given that such a deal would tip the military balance of power in the country overwhelmingly to the Soviets, who would have hundreds of thousands of soldiers available near its borders to smother the country as necessary, Stalin agreed.

https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/who-lost-czechoslovakia

Looks like Chamberlain was not the only ‘do-gooder’ that failed the Czechs.

The Czechs have been the butt of political games that failed them and made their lives so much more worse than before.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Dems Have Become The Party Of War

For decades the GOP was the party of strong defense (war)…..but these days  both parties serve the War Department…..

https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/analysis-both-parties-always-serve-the-military-industrial-complex/

For years the Dems were the party that tried and failed to lessen our dependence on war but those days are gone….they now have become the warmongers that I despise.

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires,arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

https://cgs-bd.com/article/10415/The-Democrats-are-Now-The-War-Party

There is a election on the horizon and so far there is little in both parties that appeals to my principles.

I will probably be one of those voters that gets the  blame for whoever losses the vote…..but that is nothing new for me.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”