Posted on 04/04/2008 1:47:47 AM PDT by Dawnsblood
Who says San Francisco doesn't honor veterans?
Last weekend, the city, which voted in 2005 to ban military recruiters from public high schools and colleges, unveiled a memorial to fighting men and women in uniform. The uniforms they donned, however, were not those familiar to American soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines.
The city honored American Communists and their fellow travelers who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. The $400,000 monument, donated from private funds but hosted on public land, extends 40-feet long and eight feet high.
Media accounts of the tribute uniformly noted that members of what has become known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought against Francisco Franco. But those reports were conspicuously silent about the man they fought for: Joseph Stalin. Similarly absent was the word "Communist," a party with which roughly eighty percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were officially affiliated.
The few surviving veterans are quick to point out that they fought fascists, but "fascist" in the Communist lexicon of the 1930s was applied to everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Leon Trotsky to Francisco Franco. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, so many American members of the International Brigades in Spain partook in, and others fell victim to, purges of suspected deviationists among the "republican" armies.
ONE ORGANIZER called San Francisco's monument "an antidote to amnesia," but a more apt description would be "a product of amnesia." Communists who shamed themselves by serving Stalin have time on their side. Short memories, particularly on a subject as seemingly distant as Communism, enable the servants of an evil cause to reinvent themselves as history's heroes rather than its villains.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanprowler.com ...
I’m still waiting for “The Big One” (9.0 Richter) that separates San Fran from the mainland and sinks it into the ocean.
Funny I keep hoping for the 10.5 that provides me a glass bottom boat tour business from Rodeo Dr to the space needle.
You mean the one where everything east of Oakland sinks into the Atlantic?
Sounds like you may be living on the dark side.
> The few surviving veterans are quick to point out that they fought fascists, but “fascist” in the Communist lexicon of the 1930s was applied to everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Leon Trotsky to Francisco Franco.
Francisco Franco’s allies were Hitler and Mussolini. In my books, the Communists in Spain were on the right side for a change.
I am newly convinced once more that when Almighty God decides that America needs an enema, that the nozzle will be inserted in San Francrisco.
For the West Coast anyway, although Seattle is also a contender.
And then Molotov and von Ribbentrop had a little meeting, and poof! the useful idiots were on Hitler's side after all.
-ccm
> I’ll bet you miss ol’ Uncle Joe don’t ya?
What a stupid thing to say.
> And then Molotov and von Ribbentrop had a little meeting, and poof! the useful idiots were on Hitler’s side after all.
Those were strange times for certain. Let’s hope that China and Islam don’t go the same way else the West is in real trouble.
Neither were. There were a few “good guys” on the side of the Republicans, and they got purged out by the Stalinists. See my previous.
> Saying the Communists were on the right side of anything is the height of stupidity.
That’s an even stupider thing to say.
There were a fair few communists fighting on the side of the Free French. There were even more fighting with Tito against the Nazis. Were they on the wrong side?
And why was it that the US sent untold bucketloads of weaponry to prop up Stalin against Hitler? Was the US supporting the wrong side?
> Look in the mirror, clown.
You first, Bozo.
> My point was always that Nazi and Fascist support of the Nationalists had been over-emphasized by history.
How so? Hitler got to road-test his war methodologies like blitzkrieg during the Spanish Civil war (he wasn’t even supposed to have war making capability at the time!) and the Luftwaffe was able to road-test their Stuka dive-bombing skills against relatively-benign targets. All of this was to stand the Nazis in good stead in 1939, 1940 and 1941 — the years that America played hooky from WW-II.
Franco and his tin-pot Fascist dictatorship was the sidebar to the main event, which was the build-up of the military capabilities of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and the conquest of Europe. The West could have kiboshed that in Spain.
It’s fine for Americans to blame Chamberlain for Hitler being able to make the gains he did thru British indecisiveness and appeasement. Fair enough: Chamberlain deserved a fair bit of criticism for that.
That said, it’s not like America did anything to stop Hitler during that time. Only a few communist volunteers saw the threat for what it was.
Well, looks like we’ve got a live one here.
You fail to understand that Communists in the 20’s and 30’s were nothing more than sockpuppets of their ideological masters in Moscow, i.e., Lenin and Stalin. If they were ‘aligned’ with the Free French, it was pure opportunism and you ought to know that. As for Tito, he was a Communist first, his alleged ‘independence’ from Moscow not withstanding.
The Communists you cite were ALL on the wrong side, because at their core they were on STALIN’s side, and that IS the wrong side if you’ll give your head a shake and wake up those slumbering neurons up there.
As for the U.S. supporting Stalin against Hitler? You better damn well believe that was a mistake, we should have hung Stalin out to dry because the historical record demonstrates that Stalin was in fact even more of a genocidal murderer than Hitler was, something that doesn’t get talked about very much. The fact is, Hitler screwed up after launching Operation Barbarossa by not treating the Soviet civilians with even a minimum of respect, because many Russians welcomed the invading German troops as liberators, not as conquerers. Naturally, once the Nazis started butchering them they rallied to Uncle Joe and ‘Mother Russia’ and the rest is history. The reason the U.S. opened the floodgates of lend lease to the Soviet Union was because FDR’s administration was shot through with Communists, and his own Vice President (Henry Wallace) was the epitome of a ‘useful idiot’ (as Communists define the term), thank God that f’in goofball got dropped from the ticket in ‘44.
What you need pal, is to refresh yourself with the history of Communism, which ranks right up there with Islamofascism as the deadliest man-made political virus ever unleashed upon the Earth.
The only good Communist is a dead Communist. Learn it. Know it. Don’t forget it.
Doubtful, our friend is in New Zealand, not in the Peoples Republic Enclave of San Francrisco.
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