LIBERATION DAY

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JRT

JRT

Me on the left.
Today, May 5, is Liberation Day in Holland. 75 years ago today the German Army in Holland surrendered to the Canadian Army. The link between Holland and Canada has been powerful ever since. This probably the first year since that Canadian veterans have not returned for the celebration.
 
I have had the benefit of hearing the story from two Dutch people who lived through the liberation and subsequently immigrated to Canada.

One was a United Church minister who was at my family's church for a time as an assistant minister. I am quite sure he used the story in a children's story once.

The other was a senior member of the UU fellowship when I was a member. Again, she told her story during a Remembrance Day service or something like that.
 
A few days ago was a memorial day of the sinking of a ship that had been bombed and sunk by the British. It had 7000 prisoners from a concentration camp on it that the Nazis had loaded and shipped out to sea. The Britsh didn’t know it had prisoners on it. Most of them drowned, even being shot at as they swam in the water -tragic, so close to being liberated....
 
I have a close friend from the Netherlands. She totally remembers being a child in the war and the liberation. The soldiers. The chocolate. The parades every year after
 
Memories are what we make them. I taught for a year in The Netherlands. Yes, there was enthusiasm for Canadians. But the older ones also remembered the days of the Boer War when British and Canadians murdered Dutch settlers in South Africa so the British could steal the gold mines. Canadians were remembered in particular for the high death rates of Boer women and children and the elderly in concentration camps run by Canadian troops. I forget the concentration camp death score, but I think it was something like 20,000.
Of course, the Blacks of South Africa hated all three of the British, Dutch and Canadians.
 
Ah, yes - the death figure for the concentration camps was some 28,000. The Canadians also specialized in the burning of whole settlements - houses, churches, schools, including everything within them.

In Russia, just after World War 1, Canada also fought Lenin who was trying to free Russia from the dreadful rule of the Czar. (The world's capitalists were determined to keep Russia as a murderous and enslaving state. The result of this intervention? It brought Stalin to power.
 
Cheerful as ever, I see, @Graeme Decarie. ;)

And do you have a cite for that last statement. I have never heard it suggested that the British intervention on behalf of the White Russians helped bring Stalin to power. It's quite possible, but I have heard it before so I am curious of your source.
 
Why do you call them White Russians? That suggests a niceness they didn't have.

Lenin was the key figure in those early days -and he was very much in the rise. The impact of the western interventions was to seriously delay the revolution - and that gave Lenin time to become ill and to die.

At the time of western intervention, Stalin was a very minor figure. And Lenin was a very ill one. However, by 1924, Stalin had risen - and Lenin died.
I didn't say that the west deliberately chose that outcome. If they had, then a source would be required. Of course, the west didn't want Stalin, either. But the death of Lenin changed the whole direction of the revolution.
There are lots of things in history for which you won't find any source.
The idea of checking for sources sounds good - except that the sources can be very.....absent.
In the case of Russia, it was one of the most brutal and savage nations in history, ruled by a savage aristocracy.. But in world War 1, it was a good guy on our side.

The British empire, for example, was perhaps the most vicious, cruel, and murderous in world history. It killed over 400,000,000 people, millions by starvation. It enslaved even more. One of the most brutal of its killers was Winston Churchill a man who made Hitler look like a saint. I've never seen a source for that. ( Churchill deliberately starved millions to deah in India - though the food was available. In the 1920s, in a war of British greed, he ordered the RAF to bomb ONLY completely defenceless villages and towns in the middle east.

George Washington? He didn't give a damn for democracy. He was a big time landowner. He rebelled against Britain because it would not consent to his desire to slaughter native tribes then outside the U.S. and to steal their land. He was very much a man of the British upper class of his time. Like them, he had contempt for the poor, and frequently denied them the vote. You won't find a whole lot of sources on that.

World Wars one and two were really the same war. The cause of World War One, on both sides, was the desire of European capitalists to dominate each other. That's why, at the end of the war, the surrender terms did not punish anybody.
But the British and French broke those terms and force Germany into a profound poverty so it could not compete with British and French capitalists. That is what led to the rise of Hitler.
At first,, the British and French tolerated Hitler because they saw him as a barrier against Russia. Very late, they saw the threat of Hitler's Germany as an economic competitor. That - NOT his treatment of the Jews - is why Britain and France declared war. (Indeed, all of the allies were as bad as the Germans in their treatment of Jews. That includes Canada.)

And the U.S. in World War Two? Why the long wait?
That was because most Americans didn't want a war. But American capitalists did. They saw their chance to nab the British Empire in Asia, and to seize British oil fields in the middle east. They lost the eastern empire, but did better in the middle east.

Then there was the big, big story that to this day has never made the news.

In the 1950s, The U.S. using an army of hired thugs from all over the world (an army led, from a distance by George Bush Sr.) murdered at least 200,000 Guatemalans. It specialized in killing priests, nuns, missionaries. One of those missionaires was a Canadian whose body was brought to Montreal about 1990, then buried in his home churchyard in New Brunswick.
That 'war' was never reported in our news media. I learned about it only by tracking the Montreal doctor who had dealt with his body. When the body was sent to New Brunswick, the New Brunswick government, to this day, has never admitted it or reported it.
The only evidence I know of it today is a film by the NFB.

The idea of checking sources sounds good. But you never learn much that way.
 
Graeme Decarie said:
Why do you call them White Russians?
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Because that's what they called them to distinguish them from the "Reds". I'm sorry, Graeme, but if this is just your pet theory based on your interpretation of history, I'm out. If it was an actual hypothesis that had been published and debated by actual historians, then I might buy it.
 
The Russian Revolution brought the Mensheviks to power. These were moderate communists but very shortly the radical communists, known as Bolsheviks, under Lenin attempted to seize power. This led to a civil war with the White Army (Mensheviks) fighting the Red Army (Bolsheviks). The Allied powers intervened to assist the White Army. Canada actually sent a small contingent to Siberia. It saw very little action before being recalled. The Red Army won and the rest is history. If the Mensheviks had prevailed history might have been quite different.
 
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Possibly. The fact remains Lenin's death opened the door to Stalin.
Anyway, don't kid yourself about Historians giving us the real truth about history. If you read Canadian history for example, the historians in the field are alway kind to Canada's troops. Indeed, it's virtually impossible to say anything critical about the Canadian army. That's why you'll have a hard job learning anything about CAnadians in the Boer War.
I well remember appearing before the Senate that was (supposedly) studying a TV series that was critical of Canada in parts of World War Two. CAnadian historians were th to deny it all - oh, along with the Legion. The Senate had no capacity to make judgements but, of course, it made them on the side of the legion.

Canada's military record since 1945 has been one of shameful ass-kissing of American wars - as Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti. Canadians should be embarassed that we are bum boys for the U.S. forces. But the ' authorities' are silent.
As for George Washington, it's quite clear that he used the revolution as a device for the mass slaughter of native peoples. (Even Hitler knew about it and gave high honour to what Washington had done. In fact, it was Hitler's model for the holocaust.) Read any good books about that? The only one I've seen on it was Mein Kampf.
I lived in Quebec through the Quiet Revolution and was heavily involved in it. And I can assure you that you would have a hard time getting French and English historians to agree on that.

You want agreement on the reaction of Canadian, British and American governments to the holocaust? Good luck.
Canadians, Brits and Americans were as vicious as any when it came to Jews. And, yes, we knew about the holocaust even before the war. And we refused to accept Jews who escaped. (I came to know a few of the survivors, and they well knew of our refusal to give them shelter even before the war. (Funny how that became a big, fat, self-righteous surprise after 1944. Churchill, Roosevelt, and King.)

Indeed, twenty years AFTER the war, I was invited to the holday region of Montreal's wealthiest, families like the Birks and the Molsons. I was running a camp for the YMHA at the time, and I was wearing my YMHA T shirt. After I left to get back to my camp, there was an emergency meeting of montreal's finest Christians to find out who had invited the Jew.
You don't learn the truth by quizzing authorities. You have to do your own reading and draw your own conclusions.

Oh! The Korean War? I'll bet you think we went to the aid of the South because the North was Evil. In fact, it wasn't about that at all. For openers the government of the south was as as evil as t hey come. It was composed of a dictatorship made up of thugs who had cooperated with Japan. The real purpose of that war was to establish a U.S. base to attack China and reconquer that former British colony.

No. If you want to learn you have to do your own research and your own thinking.
 
The North Koreans were the clear aggressors in the Korean War. They came very close to winning it when they had the Americans and the ROK trapped in the Pusan Perimeter. That was some plan "to establish a U.S. base to attack China and reconquer that former British colony". And BTW, China was never a British colony.
 
Do you seriously think that anybody gives a damn about 'clear aggressions"? The U.S. has 'clearly aggressed' at least 50 countries since 1945. It has invaded most of Latin America,Korea, AFghanistan (Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11 and the U.S. knew that), Syria, Lybia, Iraq Iran, Vietnam,...it routinely bombs countries and uses drones to kill innocent people on the ground. It has made a point of murdering civilians and children- a theme of war that goes back to the allied bombing of Dresden in WW2.

When the Koreans trapped allied troops that proves that the U.S. was not planning an invasion of China? Want to think hard about that? In fact it was soon clear that McArthur was aiming at China. That's why the Chinese moved in.

China was never a British colony? Are you sure you know what a colony is? The British occupied, ruled, abused and plundered China for well over a century. It forced the drug trade on China. What do you think the word colony means? Britain had absolute control of China until quite recently.

The U.S. may not have had a "good plan" to conquer China. But that's what the Korean war was about. The UN moved in to support a vicious and stunningly corrupt government in South Korea, a government made up of Japanese WW2 collaborators.
It continued that support long after the Korean war.

The North Koreans were clear aggressors? Quite so. The British empire was a clear aggressor all over the world for centuries. The U.S. was a clear agressor in murdering men, women and children native peoples in order to steal their land. It was then a clear aggressor in murdering Mexicans in order to steal what is now Texas and California etc. And it was several times an aggressor in attacking Canada. Few nations have a bloodier history of murder and theft than Britain and the U.S. - the most recent being right after the U.S. civil war.

Gee. I'll bet that you think the U.S. wants to bring democracy to Cuba.
 
Graeme Decarie said:
Oh, Mendalla. I am an actual historian PhD and the whole schmeer.
Click to expand...

You could have just mentioned that, then. I probably knew that given how long we've been on boards together, but I tend to think of you as a journalist. And, really, you should be able to provide citations with that background.
 
We've been on boards together? That soundsmostly like Alliance Quebec. Though I can't remember a gorilla on it. Were you only a monkey then?
 
Graeme Decarie said:
We've been on boards together? That soundsmostly like Alliance Quebec. Though I can't remember a gorilla on it. Were you only a monkey then?
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Har har. Monkeys are not baby apes and I am sure you know that. Wondercafe2 is a "board" in Internet parlance (derived from the old computer bulletin boards of the eighties). So was Wondercafe, the original. Each discussion area on a board is a "forum".

So we've been on two Internet boards together in the past decade or so.
 
JRT said:
Today, May 5, is Liberation Day in Holland. 75 years ago today the German Army in Holland surrendered to the Canadian Army. The link between Holland and Canada has been powerful ever since. This probably the first year since that Canadian veterans have not returned for the celebration.
Click to expand...

Hello past JRT
W00T!

do you ever partake of Boerenkool? I heard a rumour that the sausage used to be horsemeat???

Tot Morgen

#MutualAid
#BeNotAfraid
#SystemicWhimsey
#JoyPrivilege
 
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