Lazarus
Part of the furniture
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2003
- Messages
- 2,874
Guys,
I saw Catsby's post about the Normandy invasion and was impressed - until the thread was hijacked and went WAYYYY off topic.
Hats off to Catsby for posting a stimulating topic - deserved bannage for those who took it too much off topic.
Anyway, something I found during my trawling around certain websites, is this
This was originally sourced from http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5742
I saw Catsby's post about the Normandy invasion and was impressed - until the thread was hijacked and went WAYYYY off topic.
Hats off to Catsby for posting a stimulating topic - deserved bannage for those who took it too much off topic.
Anyway, something I found during my trawling around certain websites, is this
Did Germany Win World War II?
By Lowell Ponte
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 24, 2003
Pontefications
During decades of its dismemberment, de-Nazification, apparent defeat and dependence on Western aid and armed NATO protection against the Soviet Union, such a question would have seemed absurd.
But in the wake of Soviet dissolution and Germany’s 1990 reunification, look at what is emerging in the world.
Adolf Hitler had declared that he would end 400 years of “civil war” among neighboring nations and turn Europe into a single, unified socialist power able to conquer the world. This unified Europe of Hitler’s vision would, of course, be dominated by Germany.
Before our eyes at this dawn of the 21st Century, Europe is emerging as a single, unified socialist power of more than 300 million people bent on conquering its sole serious rival, the United States.
These united states of Europe are dominated by the European Union’s most powerful member, Germany. Its new common currency, the Euro, is really just the Deutsche Mark in disguise, with EU fiscal and monetary policies effectively controlled by German bankers and bureaucrats.
And days ago Germany’s socialist ruler Gerhard Schroeder, only months after his reelection as a virulently anti-American candidate, declared that he would do all in his power to thwart any U.S. war against Iraqi dictator and mass murderer Saddam Hussein.
Chancellor Schroeder forced delay of a vote supporting America by NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And he vowed to use Germany’s February turn as chair of the United Nations Security Council as best he could to delay and stymie President George W. Bush’s policy towards Iraq.
Germany’s ally in promoting European against American interests, as it was during World War II, is France. Six decades ago a conquered and compliant France was all too eager to cooperate with Hitler, masking its occupation with the name of Vichy, a name shared with a resort spa mineral water said to bring health and long life.
Today the French drink another mineral water, Evian, whose name spelt backwards is “Naïve.” But make no mistake – the eagerness of French President Jacques Chirac to be Germany’s handmaiden in raising a unified, anti-American Europe means we are again facing Vichy France. The only European nation resisting a German-dominated united Europe is Great Britain, with neo-Laborite Prime Minister Tony Blair cast in the role of Winston Churchill. It’s déjà vu, and political deja voodoo, all over again.
The French role as Germany’s Sancho Panza might to an outsider seem strange. France, after all, declared itself liberated from an unwanted occupation following World War II – and depicted itself as one of America’s and Britain’s victorious allies.
As a “Great Power,” France was granted permanent membership and a permanent veto, just like the United States, on the Security Council of the United Nations. France became one of the first nations to possess nuclear weapons. Why, if Europe is to be united, should France play second fiddle to a revanchist Germany?
The French have an unlimited appetite for glory and grandeur. But their attempt to unify Europe under military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte two centuries ago failed. It died in the frozen retreat from Moscow and against British and Austrian guns at Waterloo.
France’s imperial ambition to rule Mexico was thwarted by President Abraham Lincoln and the barefoot guerrilla fighters of Benito Juarez. Its grab for India, like that for Canada, was bested by British skill at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham and India’s Pondicherry.
In this death of a thousand cuts to its pride, following World War II France would be driven from its colonies in Vietnam and Africa. It in humiliation surrendered that land on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean lake that Paris had declared not just a colony but a district of France itself – Algeria.
In military terms, France was defeated by Germany in 1872’s Franco-Prussian War. It was bled white by World War I, saved from defeat largely by British and American allies. (As one French statesman boasted to colleagues during that “war to end all wars” – a war started in part by French arrogance – France was “ready to fight to the last American.”)
And, of course, France during World War II itself became little more than a German colony owned by Hitler’s Nazi regime. Who in Europe today would think of France as a political, economic or military power superior to a reunified Germany?
France’s last grasp for Glory came with General Charles De Gaulle, who resolved the bloody terror struggle over Algeria, visited Quebec to urge its independence from Canada, withdrew France from NATO’s force structure in 1965, and declared that France now targeted its nuclear weapons on “all azimuths” (aimed at Western as well as communist nations).
De Gaulle, long before Bill Clinton, sought to practice “triangulation.” He tried to position France as the great power between capitalist and communist power blocs to which Third World nations could turn. This cynical positioning aimed at a minimum to make France the gatekeeper and middleman on the new Silk Road between East and West, able to exact bribes and cooperation fees from both sides during the Cold War. By how France tilted, De Gaulle believed, it could maintain a profitable balance of power between the two sides of a bipolar world – and thereby force both sides to court France.
This arrogant Gaullist policy failed. Totalitarian Soviets could not keep up with America’s growing power and innovation. The English-speaking nations also won the global culture war, and new generations worldwide looked to Hollywood and London instead of Paris to find modernity.
And France, with its economy devastated by high taxes and bureaucratic regulations, has been reduced from global leader to global Disneyland – a place where tourists come to feast on tasty food and wine, see quaint peasants and admire century-old Impressionist paintings. But what industrial product made in France does anybody buy? (By contrast, the new British Rolls Royce and Bentley are now designed by German auto makers.)
Nowadays Gaullist politicians such as Chirac seek a new way to divide and conquer. France, whose Mirage jets helped Israel to victory in the 1967 Six Day War, has tilted to the side of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. It was a French Osirak reactor being built for Saddam Hussein on the outskirts of Baghdad that Israeli jets preemptively destroyed in 1981. France reportedly has extensive commercial deals involving Iraq’s oil and oilfields that would vanish if Hussein were overthrown.
France, too, has fear. Fifteen percent of its population is now Muslim, mostly immigrants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. (Remember whose Vichy government ran Casablanca – the “White House” – in what may be the best Hollywood movie of all time.) France is slowly being taken over by such immigrants making love, not war, while native French are having fewer than 1.4 children per couple.
But the anti-Semitism and synagogue attacks in France are not coming entirely from this growing Muslim population. Remember the Dreyfus Affair. And remember that during World War II Vichy France gleefully rounded up 75,000 French Jews and shipped them off to Hitler’s death camps. More than opportunism now seems to be driving France to side with 1.2 billion Muslims against the mere six million people of Israel.
This is the context in which Germany and its French pet poodle (from the German meaning “puddle,” the French poodle being a water dog of German origin) are opposing U.S. policy in Iraq. For their new European superpower to rise, America’s power in the world must sink. This is why, for example, both France and Germany are demanding that the U.S. sign the Kyoto global warming protocols – so that American industry can be shackled by the same tough regulations and high taxes that hobble France and Germany.
And this is why Germany and France now want an independent European military force. And European Union embassies around the world. And even their own European global positioning satellites to break their dependence on the current American-controlled GPS system. Their aim is nothing less than the creation of a unified Europe able to challenge and defeat the United States as an economic, military and cultural superpower.
“You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to a reporter asking about their behavior. “I don’t. I think that’s the old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members.” Those other nations, said Rumsfeld, “are with the United States.”
As you can imagine, France and Germany have reacted petulantly to Secretary Rumsfeld’s firm truth-telling.
President Bush on January 23 announced that France and Germany will be “held to account” if they refuse to back tough action to disarm Saddam Hussein. Mr. Bush may demand a unified Western policy.
As part of that accounting, America’s Security Council veto should be used as ardently to prevent German nuclear armament as our policy is now being used – despite short-sighted French and German opposition -- to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Unless the German people remove from office Leftist extremists like Gerhard Schroeder, America may face almost as great a long-term threat from Bonn as we do from Baghdad.
This was originally sourced from http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5742
