KurtGodel77

I guess anyone who holds an historical opinion you disagree with must be a hack. However, there are others who do not share your opinion of Toland: Newsweek, the Houston Chronicle, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Library Journal, the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, and the Pulitzer Prize committee. I guess they all must be hacks too, eh? [sarcasm] We all know that the NY Times is very tolerant of right-wing nutcases. [/sarcasm] But a small minority of people on these boards may fail to appreciate your full brilliance, and may actually find credibility in an historian endorsed by Newsweek, the Houston Chronicle, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Library Journal, the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, and the Pulizer Prize committee.

My coach told me to use my head. This is what he meant, right?

You have a point that other historians focus more on the military aspect than Toland did in his work about Hitler. That doesn't make him a lousy historian, it just means he focused a greater percentage of his time on the political and diplomatic situation. But if you don't like Toland, perhaps you'd care for William Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a 1400 page tome about Nazi Germany. Shirer went into more detail about the Alpine situation in 1945 than Toland did. Assuming you're as well-read as you claim, you already know that in 1945, the Nazis claimed to have impregnable mountain fortresses in which they planned to hold out indefinitely. The American army was diverted to pursuing these pipe-dream fortresses instead of securing control over the population of central Europe. A president interested either in the humanitarian goal of preserving Germans from mass murder, or the patriotic goal of securing strength for America in the coming Cold War, would have grabbed what he could in central Europe, while letting the Soviets deal with whatever "impregnable" fortresses the Nazis had been able to build.

Finally you've managed to write a complete sentence that doesn't involve the name Ilya Ehrenburg. I'm impressed. As for whether the Americans could have gone to Berlin first, John Toland wrote they could have in his book Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was praised by the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and other major media organizations. Adolf Hitler the book that is; not the human being.

This is getting ridiculous. I doubt that most of those reading this thread care about whether Ehrenburg had or didn't have the official title "Soviet propaganda minister." If you've actually read the Soviet newsletters--which is what you seem to be implying--then you already know the Soviet propaganda machine helped engineer genocide against the German people. It would be nice if you actually, just once, showed the slightest ounce of compassion for those the Soviet army brutally murdered. On the other hand, are you prepared to argue that FDR's foreign policy wasn't pro-Soviet? If so, you'll have to show a single example of FDR doing something other than appeasing the Soviet Union and acting in Soviet interest. Good luck in finding an example like that.

I'm saying that if you have a specific objection to something I've written you should come out and say it. You're hiding behind vague generalities.

Can you give a link?

Talk like this is cheap. I won't believe you can back up your wild accusations unless you start being more specific.

I'll be happy to address his specific objections as soon as he makes any. I've now found what appears to be a highly credible source for calling Ilya Ehrenburg the propaganda minister. http://www.explore-anthropology.com/anthro...st_of_Jews.html Their main website http://www.explore-anthropology.com/ gives the impression these people are just interested in learning about the world around them, and aren't out to promote any particular ideology. If anything they may be pro-Jewish, as shown by the ad for "the chosen T-shirt for the chosen people" over on the left side of their list of Jews.

My ideas are non-liberal, and he's calling me an idiot for expressing them. If I were him I'd shy away from that definition, because he hasn't backed up a single thing he's written in this thread. There are a few Republicans out there who use those tactics, but such use is not nearly as widespread as it is on the other side of the aisle.

I did actually find some sources which indicated Ehrenburg was the propaganda minister, but none of the sources were big enough names for me to quote in this thread. On the other hand, I didn't see any big names that denied he was propaganda minister either. Either way, his anti-German hate speach was going out to Soviet soldiers in state-sponsored political pamphlets.

You keep throwing words like "misinformation" around. But it seems you lack the courage to say anything more specific than that, or to identify a particular part of my post that you disagree with.

Actually, you haven't raised a single objection to any of my views, beyond the fact that you disagree with them. You're entitled to your opinion, but I don't know how many people you'll convince if you're unwilling or unable to arrive at specific objections you can back up.

1. He's dismissing non-liberal ideas by calling them "stupid" without saying a single thing to back up this point of view. 2. He's made it clear that in his eyes, anyone who disagrees with his political views is an idiot. 3. He's misrepresented several of my positions, a typical liberal tactic. If this guy isn't a liberal yet, he needs to become one, because conservatives don't want to be associated with tactics like these.

I'm not familiar with DC Tom's political views in general, but in the context of this discussion he's acting like a liberal.

Well, you sure sound arrogant enough to be a liberal. Your unsupported characterization of non-liberal points of view as "stupid" is typical of liberals. If you don't like being called a liberal, stop acting like one.

That's a pretty broad statement, and it's not clear what exactly you're disputing. The NY Times admits the Soviets engaged in genocide, and that the paper denied the genocide took place. If you're as familiar with history as you claim, you'll know that FDR's foreign policy was consistently pro-Soviet, and that Truman didn't engage in even "moderate" anti-communism until put under pressure from the Republican right. Lenin himself saw liberals as "useful idiots." Based on your signature and on some of the comments you've made, you seem to think that this discussion is beneath you, and that anyone who disagrees with any opinion you've formed must be an imbecile. Typical liberal arrogance.

I never talked about whether you were "judging." My point was simple: the Soviets engaged in genocide, the liberals helped them, and you don't seem to care.

Funny, I don't remember calling Stalin anyone's puppet. I did say that the liberals in this country helped him--which they did. I'm sure you'd feel the same way about FDR's appeasement of the Soviet Union if you yourself had come to the brink of starvation in the Ukraine, or if you'd been a German woman who'd watched the Soviets murder her children.

You sure seem fixated on that whole Ilya Ehrenburg/propaganda minister thing. Are you prepared to argue that Stalin wasn't the Soviet dictator, because he lacked the title "Ruthless Dictator?"

It was conservatives who were the driving force behind welfare reform; something many Democrats didn't want. You ask how the welfare system should work. Fair enough. First, there should be no incentives for a family to get a divorce. Under the welfare system LBJ created, a woman had to divorce her husband to get full welfare benefits. If the husband hung around after the divorce, or spent a lot of time with the kids, the family could expect to be prosecuted for welfare fraud. Simply ignoring marital status when considering a welfare application would have ended this form of institutional brutality. This aspect of the system was reformed by California governor Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, and by the Republican Congress in the 1990s. The way that LBJ set up the welfare system, you would lose your benefits if you worked a full time job. So you were worse off working than sitting around collecting a check. Clearly this was not necessary. A better way would have been to tell people that for every dollar they earn, they lose $0.50 in welfare benefits. That way people would always be better off working; thus helping to end the cycle of poverty Democrats did so much to create. There are two separate issues here: drug addiction, and gang-related crime. Legalization would eliminate the latter, while increasing the former. My main point was that often, inner city parents are unfit because they are addicted to recreational substances. I remember quite clearly which political group was most responsible for saying that recreational substances were okay. I seem to remember John Kerry favoring a liberal immigration policy in the presidential debates. I also seem to remember Democrats calling Bush Sr. a racist for not wanting Haitian immigrants to come into this country, even though the unemployment rate among unskilled blacks was 25% at the time. LBJ was the one who passed the law allowing massive immigration from the Third World in the first place, and I haven't seen a lot of other liberals opposing him on that. Have you? I agree that from a social justice perspective, a more equal distribution of wealth makes sense. However, it's not clear to me how the government could accomplish that goal without major interference with the free market system. Moving jobs to the Third World countries increases profits because they can make the same goods cheaper. The way to combat this is for the U.S. to become more economically efficient. It should allow investments in equipment, buildings, and R&D to be expensed immediately, causing a more long-term corporate focus. It should reform employment laws, making it easier for corporations to hire and fire without being sued. It should end the NEA's involvement in setting educational policy, leading to a competitive American workforce. Tort reform would help, as would the elimination of the software patent (copyright yes, patent no). Agreed. I agree that corporations often don't have this country's best interests at heart, and allowing them too much power would be mistaken. For example, corporations have played a large role in U.S. immigration policy, so as to drive down wages and increase unemployment. Why would a corporation prefer 10,000 people working and 1,000 unemployed to 10,000 people working and 0 unemployed? Because when you're unemployed or fearful of becoming so, you'll put up with more. Jumping back 50 years and drawing conclusions from genocides is exactly what Jewish groups do all the time. I assume you say the same things to them that you do to me. However, there are people who have no problem with talking about the lessons we learned from the Holocaust. Considering that far more people were killed by the communists than the Nazis, shouldn't we also be learning lessons from the Soviet genocide too?

My source for the original Ehrenburg quote was Jackboot, published by Barnes and Noble, and written by John Laffin. The source for the second Ehrenburg quote was indeed IHR. I realize that the ADL may have a problem with the IHR, so it really depends on whether you think the ADL is unbiased. The ADL has concocted a list of mass murders; the list includes the Holocaust (of course), the U.S. attacks on Native Americans, Australia's war against the aboriginees, and other crimes (real or alleged) committed by Western governments. Absent, however, is any mention of the worst mass murder in human history: the Soviet genocide. The second-worst mass murder in human history--the Chinese genocide--was also not important enough to make the ADL's list. The ADL appears to have a political agenda which goes far beyond the protection of the Jewish people.

Ilya Ehrenburg frequently contributed to Pravda, and to the Soviet military daily. In addition, he authored leaflets broadly distributed to troops at the front. He served the functions of a propaganda minister, regardless of whatever official title he may have had. In one of Ehrenburg's leaflets, he told the Soviet soldiers: "The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day ... If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another -- there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German -- that is your grandmother's request. Kill the German -- that is your child's prayer. Kill the German -- that is your motherland's loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill." Ehrenburg received the Stalin Prize in 1952.

You hit the nail on the head. My original post pointed out that the consequences of liberalism had been catastrophic for tens of millions of people. Instead of showing concern for these victims of liberalism--which is what these people would have done if they had bleeding hearts--they responded by calling me names. Western liberals played an important role in perpetrating Soviet genocide. Consider that FDR and Truman chose to appease the Soviet Union in 1944-1948. Historians agree that the American army could have taken large sections of heavily-populated central Germany that instead fell into Soviet hands. "Kill! There is nothing innocent that is German. Neither in the living nor in the unborn. Follow the directive of Comrade Stalin and trample into the ground for ever the Fascist beast in his cave. Break by force the racial haughtiness of German women. Take them as your lawful prey! Kill you brave advancing Red soldiers!" Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet propaganda minister, addressing the Soviet army as it began its invasion of Germany. Sadly, most liberals have chosen to ignore the Soviet genocide against the Germans; just as they've ignored their own role in perpetrating this genocide. Not FDR and Truman only are responsible for this tragedy. The mass media, by ignoring the Ukrainian genocide in the 1930s, made it politically possible for FDR and Truman to allow other sections of Europe to fall into Soviet hands in the mid '40s. The NY Times has apologized for its role in whitewashing the Ukrainian genocide: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p...2&notFound=true Liberals claim their intentions are good. Whether this is true or not I don't know. What I do know is that when the consequences of their actions are pointed out, they do not express sympathy for the victims of their own policies. Instead, they attack the person pointing out the problem.

The next time you call someone stupid, you should try using proper grammar. Nonsense is one word not two. You're supposed to put a question mark at the end of a question, even if it's a rhetorical question.