Trump Wants National Guard To Dump Homeless ‘Far From Washington’
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on The Times.
On reading that title, I asked Google, what Adolf Hitler did with the homeless.
Wikipedia gave this answer.
In 1933, the Nazi Party passed a Law “against Habitual and Dangerous Criminals”, which allowed for the relocation of beggars, homeless, and the unemployed to concentration camps.
I know Trump has German ancestry, but!
Appeasement 2.0
The low point of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Trummkopf, has repeated Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich and presented Putin with Appeasement 2.0.
I wasn’t around in the days of Munich and Chamberlain, but my father was well-informed, as he was in Geneva doing something possibly at the League of Nations and heard a lot of the truth about what was going on in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine at first hand. He believed there was little to choose between Hitler and Stalin on the scale of evil.
In the 1970s, I worked with an Jewish Austrian engineer, who was called Samuels, at the GLC, who had escaped from Austria just before WW2 and then spent the war in the Royal Engineers in bomb disposal. After the war, he was an observer at Nuremberg.
He was one of the most amazing people, I’ve ever met and he taught me a lot about project management.
Aggregation In Artemis
One of the features of Artemis was aggregation, which enabled the project manager to total up the resources they’d need for a project.
I might have programmed the original aggregation for Mr. Samuels, but I can certainly remember discussing it with him. He needed it to check that particular sub-contractors weren’t overstreching themselves.
I lost contact with Mr. Samuels, when his wife died and he moved to CERN in Geneva. But he’s one of several people, who helped frame the design of Artemis.
Soviet War Crimes
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Soviet War Crimes.
This is the first paragraph.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country’s secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
As a teenager, my father used to tell me stories of atrocities by the Soviet Union and told me, he believed Stalin was on a level with Hitler.
One of the worst atrocities was the Katyn massacre in 1940, which is described in this Wikipedia entry and starts with this paragraph.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.
I haven’t found out, what my father was doing in 1940, but I am fairly sure he knew of the Katyn and other massacres, as he occasionally commented.
Note.
- The involvement of the NKVD.
- The Katyn massacre is a sub-plot in the film Enigma, which has this Wikipedia entry.
I took this picture of a memorial to Katyn in the centre of Birmingham.
I believe that we ignore the lessons of Soviet behaviour at Katyn, at our peril.
In Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry, there is this paragraph about his parents.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
It appears that Putin Senior left the NKVD destruction battalion before 1942. Does that mean he could have been at Katyn?
I do suspect, that Putin Senior told some interesting stories to his son, about the correct ways to deal with your opponents and wage a war.
Conclusion
We are treading a very similar path over eighty years later.
In My Fathers Footsteps
This article on the BBC is entitled Hundreds Gather In Trafalgar Square To Protest Ukraine Invasion.
My father, who was born on the first of January in 1904, described himself as a left-wing Tory.
- His great-great-grandfather had been a Jewish tailor, who possibly had been born in Konigsberg in East Prussia.
- In his politically-active years before World War Two, he had been an opponent of both extremes of the political spectrum.
- He had possibly been involved at the League of Nations in Geneva, which is something I aim to prove or disprove.
- A couple of times he talked about the horrors of the famines in Russia in 1931-33, but he never expanded on what he knew.
- He was mixed up in the stopping of a member of the British Union of Fascists getting elected in the 1935 Norwood By-Election.
- He was proud to have been at the Battle of Cable Street, when as he said, the whole of the East End, stopped Mosley and his blackshirts from marching through.
I heard him say a couple of times, that Stalin could have been worse than Hitler.
He would have approved that I went to the protest today, where I took these pictures.
It was all peaceful, as no supporters of Vlad the Mad turned up.
Ukraine Crisis: Fifa And Uefa Suspend All Russian Clubs And National Teams
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
This first paragraph says it all.
Russian football clubs and national teams have been suspended from all competitions by Fifa and Uefa after the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
It looks like it is a complete ban from both Fifa and Uefa.
Vlad the Invader/Mad/Poisoner (Delete as appropriate!), is reportedly not amused.
My father, who had something to do with the League of Nations, felt that we didn’t act soon enough over Hitler and Stalin and I could argue we should have acted with tough sanctions after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.
Kremlin Lets Women Drive The Trains
The title of this post is the same as that of an article in The Times on Friday.
This was the first two paragraphs.
For decades, Russian girls who have dreamt of becoming train drivers or mechanics or captaining a ship have been forced to abandon their ambitions.
Laws prohibiting women from physically demanding employment, or jobs that could harm their chances of bearing children, were introduced by the Soviet Union in 1974, and updated by President Putin in 2000.
No wonder Russia a basket case, as they are not making best use of their resources. As do countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria!
Remember, that during the Second World War, the Nazis didn’t let women work in the war effort.
I seem to remember they lost!
My Father Has Been Proved Right!
My father described himself as a left-wing Tory. Today, he would probably have approved of the views of the likes of Michael Hesseltine or Kenneth Clarke.
I’m not sure what he actually did in politics, but I do know that he once worked at the League of Nations in Geneva before the Second World War. During the war, he was for some time a Civil Servant, but apart from one or two clues, I don’t know much. I should have a look at Kew and the web site.
I also know that I never heard him say anything racist and when someone questioned why he actually printed letterheads and wedding stationery for the local black community in Wood Green, he rebuked them by saying that as long as their money had the Queen’s head on it, he’d do business with everyone.
I also know that he was firmly anti-fascist and was at the Battle of Cable Street, where as he said, all the East End stopped Mosley and his Blackshirt thugs, marching through.
Recently, I took a taxi, where the driver had had talks with his Jewish grandfather, who had also been at Cable Street. His grandfather, like my father was adamant that it was not just the communists who stopped Mosley, but a wide alliance of right-thinking people in the East End.
I use the term London Mongrel to describe myself and my father used it himself, in my presence a couple of times, which is where I picked it up. You have to remember that the Nazis referred to people who were part-Jewish as mischling, which roughly means mongrel or half-breed. My father wasn’t Jewish but his great-great-grandfather, who I refer to as the Tailor of Bexley, was probably a Prussian Jew, who had run away from Napoleon.
As the term dates from the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it would very much have been a term of the time my father was on the fringe of politics, so it is no surprise that he used it.
Incidentally, I’m probably more of a mongrel than my father, as my mother’s father was a Huguenot engraver and her mother was a posh lady born in Dalston Junction from Devonian yeoman stock with the surname of Upcott. Cullompton Museum told me that the family were very much involved in the development of worsted serge and made a fortune from it. This section in the Cullumpton Wikipedia entry, says more about the cloth trade and the Upcotts.
I once asked my father, if he’d ever wanted to stand as an MP and he replied that he’d been asked to put his name forward as a candidate for a by-election, but a young Duncan Sandys was chosen instead, which my father thought was probably the right choice.
Searching Wikipedia says that this was the Norwood By-election of 1935. Wikipedia says this.
The by-election was held due to the resignation of the incumbent Conservative MP, Walter Greaves-Lord. It was won by the Conservative candidate Duncan Sandys.
An Independent Conservative candidate was fielded at the by-election by Randolph Churchill, who sponsored Richard Findlay, a member of the British Union of Fascists to stand. This got no support from the press or from any Members of Parliament, despite Randolph being the son of Winston Churchill. Ironically, in September that year, Duncan Sandys became son-in-law of Winston and brother-in-law of Randolph by marrying Diana, the former’s daughter.
Knowing my father’s strong anti-fascist views, it fits with his version of the tale. The other thing that fits, is that although my father had met and liked Winston Churchill, he had no time for his son, Randolph.
Indirectly, I think I benefited from my father’s political contacts, as after the war, when he rebuilt his printing business in Wood Green, his largest customer was Enfield Rolling Mills, whose Managing Director was John Grimston, the Earl of Veralem, who was eight years younger than my father and had been MP for St. Albans a couple of times.
When in the early sixties I needed a summer job to earn money and I couldn’t have my usual one in his print works, as my father’s business was bad, my father phoned the Earl and asked if he had something that would suit.
The Earl of Veralem said yes and I had a very good job in the Electronics Laboratory for two summers, where I learned an amazing amount about life and making things.
I have no idea of the Earl’s politics except that he was a Conservative MP and very much thought to be a good boss of the company, by those with whom I worked.
One view of my father’s though, was that as he hated the likes of Hitler and Stalin equally, he said several times to me, that the extreme left are no different to the extreme right.
Reading this article on the BBC entitled Livingstone Stands By Hitler Comments, I can only conclude that the Labour Party has proved my father to be right.
Stalin and Hitler
Gareth Jones was a journalist, who visited the Ukraine and Germany before the Second World War. What he reported was accurate, although it was rubbished by Stalin’s apologists. Read more about Gareth Jones in The Times.
There is an exhibition in the Wren Library at Cambridge University.
I shall be going.
An Interview with Bernie Ecclestone
There is a revealing interview with Bernie Ecclestone in The Times today.
Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”.
He might have done but if you have read Adam Tooze’s book, The Wages of Destruction, about the economic history of the Nazis like I have, you may have a different view to Mr. Ecclestone.
The comments on The Times web site on the whole are hostile.
But if there is a problem that he can do something about it is Formula One. I like it on the television and am old enough to remember the greatest Formula One drive of all when the great Stirling Moss in an underpowered Lotus, outdrove three Ferraris at Monaco.
I went to Spa last year and to say it is boring for those that pay a lot of money to see it is an understatement. Organisation and commentaries were bad and we were very much left in the dark with what happened at the end, when Lewis Hamilton won and was then disqualified.
Compare that with the sort of service you get at horse racing at a gaff track like Yarmouth.
The Anonymous Widower 