Al Sal often tells his runners: "better PED than dead".
Al Sal often tells his runners: "better PED than dead".
General Patton felt we fought for the wrong side in World War 2.
In a letter to his wife of
September 14, 1945, he said:
* "I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. I am also opposed to sending POW's to work as slaves in foreign lands (i.e., the Soviet Union's Gulags), where many will be starved to death."
Despite his disagreement with official policy, Patton followed the rules laid down by Morgenthau and others back in
Washington as closely as his conscience would allow, but he tried to moderate the effect, and this brought him into
increasing conflict with Eisenhower and the other politically ambitious generals. In another letter to his wife he
commented:
* "I have been at Frankfurt for a civil government conference. If what we are doing (to the Germans) is 'Liberty, then give me death.' I can't see how Americans can sink so low. It is Semitic, and I am sure of it."
And in his diary he noted:,
* "Today we received orders . . . in which we were told to give the Jews special accommodations. If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc? . . . We are also turning over to the French several hundred thousand prisoners of war to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles."
His duties as military governor took Patton to all parts of Germany and intimately acquainted him with the German
people and their condition. He could not help but compare them with the French, the Italians, the Belgians, and even the
British. This comparison gradually forced him to the conclusion that World War II had been fought against the
wrong people.
After a visit to ruined Berlin, he wrote his wife on July 21, 1945:
* "Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what
could have been a good race, and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages. And all Europe will be communist. It's said that for the first week after they took it (Berlin), all women who ran were shot and those who did not were raped. I could have taken it (instead of the Soviets) had I been allowed."
This conviction, that the politicians had used him and the U.S. Army for a criminal purpose, grew in the following weeks. During a dinner with French General Alphonse Juin in August, Patton was surprised to find the Frenchman in agreement with him. His diary entry for August 18 quotes Gen. Juin: "It is indeed unfortunate, mon General, that the English and the Americans have destroyed in Europe the only sound country -- and I do not mean France. Therefore, the road is now open for the advent of Russian communism."
Later diary entries and letters to his wife reiterate this same conclusion. On August 31 he wrote: "Actually, the Germans are the only decent people left in Europe. it's a choice between them and the Russians. I prefer the Germans."
You'd hear 'kill a commie for mommy' sometimes.
But that was instantly dismissed as redneck jibberish.
Sweet Nell Fenwick wrote:
The phrase was quite common BITD. Most people, myself (at middle school age) included, just parroted it as a catchphrase, but we obviously didn't want to be nuked. As I got a few years older (late teens), I wondered if the phrase was nothing more than propaganda. But as I got older still (early 20s), I learned more about how a state-controlled economy prevents the price system from being rooted in consumer choice, thereby virtually rendering impossible the cost accounting in factors of production, in turn reducing production efficiency and the ability to accumulate wealth. The light came on. Central planning, at least in theory, reduced the standard of living for everyone except the central planners. But it wasn't until a decade later, when I actually met people who had come from the former USSR and heard their horror stories, that I realized how much worse off the average person actually is in a communist regime. Many people were without basic necessities such as toilet paper (this is often cited in criticism of communism, but it turns out it's actually true!) and of course they lived in fear, not daring to speak out against the state.
The early 20th-century writings of Mises concerning the unworkability of a planned economy were definitely on display in the Soviet Union. After Sputnik, we all were led to believe that the Soviets were ahead of the USA in all areas of production. But in retrospect, that wasn't the case. My acquaintances could vouch for that personally, and historians today generally agree. Virtually all of their efforts went toward military purposes to the detriment of the average Comrade in the street, and even those efforts squandered resources just as Mises outlined. Even as late as the 1980s, they were still producing huge amounts of stuff like concrete and steel (making their GDP figures look good), but in the meantime, the USA and Japan were producing computer chips and other technologies that improve the overall standard of living. In fact, I wondered how European communism lasted as long as it did, but it turns out that because the central planners did have access to Western prices through catalogs, etc., they had an inkling of what most consumer goods were worth relative to input factors. And they still couldn't provide a decent standard of living for their people.
The same appeared to be true when I visited East Berlin only a year after the fall of The Wall. Buildings everywhere were in disrepair (a few even looked as though they had been bombed the week before) and rusty 1961 cars were the norm. Only the center of the city (where foreign dignitaries would meet) had a modern appearance, with the television tower, the churches, etc. in a state of upkeep. An extremely poor standard of living was on display otherwise.
[quote]communist experiment failed wrote:
An authoritarian regime is the inevitable result of communism as defined by Marx. It happened repeatedly every time, every place it was tried.
[quote]DiscoGary wrote:
This is all very bizarre. You are taking 100 years of history of the world's largest country/empire and reducing it to a moment in time when your friend could not buy toilet paper.
My belief is that Communism in the USSR was a necessary stepping stone to capitalism and democracy. It took a feudal empire populated by illiterate peasants and indentured servants and catapulted it into a world power with gender and racial equality in the workforce far before it happened in the US.
There is no doubt it was total carnage on a number of levels and at a number of points in time, but a number of things did eventually come out of it that could be considered positive. Such as widespread literacy for instance. Or the infrastructure in far flung regions being put in place that is now sustained by commercial interests.
In any case, I can tell you first hand that while it was very, very challenging on a number of levels it was not all bad and there are things about life in Soviet Russia that were actually really cool (free access to sports facilities, the arts, inexpensive public transit, etc.)
Would I want to live in those conditions now? No. Would I want to live in downtown Baltimore right now? No. The world is not perfect anywhere and it never has been. You should always be suspicious of any authority that is telling you that it is.
The one thing I do want to say, that no one ever talks about in these conversations, is that in Russia up to the 90's there was still no concept of personal debt. No one needed a mortgage and no one had a car loan. There was no such thing as a student loan. There was nothing to facilitate you to have things that you didn't need and when no one else had them, it did not occur to you that these were the things that you needed to be happy. Those days are long gone now, but I do wonder if sometimes less is more.
Anyway, I never did not have toilet paper. People found a way to get what they needed, most of the time.
DiscoGary wrote:
As a Reagan supporter in college [...]
I love people who don't realize they should be ashamed by this. Do you refuse to scrape a faded "Bush 2000" sticker off your bumper as an unintentionally hilarious badge of courage?
Boston wrote:
"He told me red means run son numbers add up to nothing, and when the first shot hit the dog I saw it coming "
shot hit the dock...not the dog. He's standing on a dock on the side of a river. Dig?
It was those Russians, aka Mongol Savages, who exterminated more Jews in open fields than the Germans did.
One idea is that the cold war isn't actually over but merely dormant for now.
Sure the capitalists think they won and we're all now slaves to the market but the cracks are there as we all witnessed back in 2008. Capitalism, just like that weird brand of corrupt so called communism in the 20th century, will also collapse. Growth cannot go on forever but nobody listens. 7 billion and rising fast - how many can we sustain to keep the super rich at the top? How long before mother nature says 'back the fu*k down you greedy ba*tards'.
We need a new model and we'll be forced into it sooner or later.
stanislavsky wrote:Anyway, I never did not have toilet paper. People found a way to get what they needed, most of the time.Lol! Trying to praise the soviet union you ending up indicting it!
Back in the USSR wrote:
stanislavsky wrote:Anyway, I never did not have toilet paper. People found a way to get what they needed, most of the time.Lol! Trying to praise the soviet union you ending up indicting it!
Lol indeed. I think you missed the point. Like I said, there were challenges. The idea that you could put up with such things were all supposed to be sacrifices being made in the name of achieving some greater than what was before.
I just always find it funny that the judgment of what has passed is always based on thing so trivial.
Anyway, this is always hard to express to Americans. it is almost impossible to put aside the concept of personal wealth if you have never experienced life without it. People here are entitled to never have to be without. It is a very different mode of thinking to have focus only on the individual. Not better or worse according to me, just very different.
I will give up explaining now and we will see what the world will become in all these places next anyway.
Here's the one I remember dating back to the seventies: I'd rather be dead as a log than have red on my head like a d*ck on a dog!
Back in the USSR wrote:
stanislavsky wrote:Anyway, I never did not have toilet paper. People found a way to get what they needed, most of the time.Lol! Trying to praise the soviet union you ending up indicting it!
How so?
Street talking wrote:
You'd hear 'kill a commie for mommy' sometimes.
Sorry ST, I have never heard that before. But I like it.