Replies

“Don’t tell blatant lies.”

“Despite weeks of work by Turkish engineers, the engine would not start. The Turkish authorities abandoned the ship in the Black Sea, about 10 miles north of the Bosphorus, where she drifted helplessly.”

First, how did it get 10 miles north of the Bosphorus from its moorings in Istanbul. Wouldn’t it be the thing to do to allow the passengers and crew off at Istanbul if the engine didn’t work? Towing it with all on board into the Black Sea and then abandoning it was a death sentence for the passenger AND the crew!

“On the morning of 24 February there was a huge explosion, and the ship sank. Many years later it was revealed that the ship had been torpedoed by the Shchuka-class Soviet submarine Shch-213”

Let me guess. After those “many years,” the Captain and chief exec of the Shch-213 were no longer alive, were in Gulag, or could not be identified.

“ In 1964, a German historian discovered that Shch-213 had fired a torpedo, which sank the ship. That was later confirmed from several other Soviet sources. The submarine had been acting under secret orders to sink all neutral and enemy shipping entering the Black Sea to reduce the flow of strategic material to Nazi Germany.”

Oh, I see. A ship dead in the water, without even the engine power necessary to steer, let alone survive a gale, was going to bring strategic material to Nazi German.

I’m telling “blatant lies,” then? This smacks of a cover-up.

The British were strictly enforcing their White Paper, which Churchill spoke out against vociferously before he became PM, then quietly signed as PM, because they were worried about riling the Arabs, so they did not want Jewish refugees in Mandatory Palestine, and leaned on neutral countries such as Switzerland and Turkey not to admit them, but were not up to committing blatant murder themselves. But photography and all that.

So in 1942, they arranged for the Struma to be towed by Turkey into a place where they would be targeted by Russia, and nobody was “able” to discover that it was Russia until 1964, when those responsible were long gone.

It didn’t work, though. The Arabs in Iraq were “riled” enough that same year, that the Grand Mufti came to Iraq and incited an insurrection that threatened to cut off Britain’s oil supply, and could have cost them the war, sunken Struma or not. The insurrection failed, so instead they had a pogrom in Baghdad, 800 Jews murdered and thrown in a mass grave, while the British watched passively, happy to still have their oil, without which, in fairness, they would have lost.

Another example of British enlightened colonial rule, or as Churchill put it, feeding your neighbors to the crocodile in the hopes that he might eat you last, whether that crocodile is the briny deep or rioting Arabs, so long as the food of choice is Jews in a state of defenselessness.

Now where were these “blatant lies” I’m supposedly telling again?