tripartite pact wwii
Comment at end
26th July 2010
David Cameron, our so-called “leader”: ‘We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting against Hitler; we are the junior partner now. I think you shouldn’t pretend to be something you’re not.’
Catch-up time. I DO have another life. Honestly.
Yes, I realise Cameron’s lack of historical knowledge regarding WW2 dates made most of the headlines, as did Clegg’s lack of understanding of his place at PMQs as a responsible coalition leader. But to me there is an even more worrying issue.
I have been racking the grey cells to try to recall another example of a British prime minister travelling abroad – to ANY country – and then talking down our great nation.
I’ve agreed with Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen here before in connection to other issues that the left is now the right but they haven’t noticed. Hadn’t expected that the right would have slipped so effortlessly and nonchalantly into the vacated left’s [yes that IS the right word order] bolthole. But as is their wont so far the present ConDems have proved themselves one step ahead of me.
Good to see SOME at The Daily Maul screaming “blue murder”.
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Calamity Cleggerons
From: ukipwebmaster | 22 July 2010
“The Cleggeron coalition – Working in partnership to denigrate our country.”
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World War II was a global war in the first half of the 20th century. Though there are controversies over the causes of the war, consensus among historians blames Nazi leader Adolf Hitler for the war, specifically Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
A number of earlier wars are often seen as leading up to, or part of, World War II, including the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-40, the Italian invasions of Ethiopia in 1935 and Albania in 1939, and the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Germany, Italy, and Japan entered into a military alliance, the Tripartite Pact, in September 1940 and became known as the Axis Powers. Germany had also entered into a pact with the Soviet Union in 1939 just before the invasion of Poland, and Germany and the USSR remained allied until June 1941 when Germany broke the pact and invaded Russia. Great Britain and France had pledged to defend Poland if it were attacked, and entered the war in 1939 upon Germany's invasion of Poland, and this is usually used as the start date for World War II. The United States remained officially neutral until December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. There is some question as to how neutral the U.S. really was until then - the U.S. had already instituted its first peacetime draft by then and was openly aiding Britain - or how much was known about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor; nonetheless, the attack became the pretext for U.S. entry into the war.
During the war, racism played a significant role on all sides. Crude racial stereotyping and terms such as "Japs" and "Krauts" dominated the media. The United States government engaged in the internment of Japanese Americans solely because of their ancestry. The German Nazi government carried out a eugenics program and the internment of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled, political opponents and others into concentration camps; Hitler eventually spoke of a "final solution to the Jewish problem" and as many as 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the German state in what has since become known as the Holocaust. Japanese occupiers brutalized what they considered "inferior" races in occupied China and Korea. A fascist dictatorship in power in Croatia attempted a systematic extermination of Jews and ethnic Serbs. Even as the USSR was fighting the Nazis, Stalin carried out a mass deportation of ethnic minorities to Siberia from 1941-1949 during which up to 43% of them died of disease and starvation, and did so on the claim that these minorities (including Jews, Koreans, Kulaks, Poles, etc.) were collaborating with the Nazis.
The war in Europe ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with Mussolini hanged by a mob of angry Italian citizens and Hitler committing suicide within two days of each other in April 1945. The war in the Pacific lasted several months later until the United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 on the orders of President Harry Truman. The entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the side of the Allies after being double-crossed by Hitler in 1941 left half of Europe under Soviet occupation at the end of the war, who proceeded to set up Communist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe, setting the stage for the Cold War.