Litwin
Platinum Member
was British government partly guilty for without number Stalinist crimes against humanity ?
When John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, told the prime minister on the morning of Sunday, June 22,1941, that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, Colville saw him respond with a “smile of satisfaction.” In a special radio address to the nation that evening, Churchill said, “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, its tragedies, flashes away.… The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for hearth and house is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.” Churchill then said that Britain would provide all possible military aid to the Soviet Union in its battle against Germany. It was a testament to the desperate situation confronting both nations that Churchill, a champion of democracy, would agree to an alliance with a tyrannical regime at least as bad as that of Nazi Germany.
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
– British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Churchill’s advisors were united in believing that the Soviet Union’s battle would be a short one. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill said it would collapse in six weeks. Gen. Alan Brooke, who would later that year succeed Dill as CIGS, said four months – the most optimistic prediction. But Churchill was having none of it. Using horse race betting parlance and giving 500:1 odds, he said, “I will bet you a Monkey to a Mousetrap that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.” (A Monkey being a £500 bet, and Mousetrap being a gold sovereign with the nominal value of £1.)
When John Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, told the prime minister on the morning of Sunday, June 22,1941, that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, Colville saw him respond with a “smile of satisfaction.” In a special radio address to the nation that evening, Churchill said, “No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, its tragedies, flashes away.… The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for hearth and house is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.” Churchill then said that Britain would provide all possible military aid to the Soviet Union in its battle against Germany. It was a testament to the desperate situation confronting both nations that Churchill, a champion of democracy, would agree to an alliance with a tyrannical regime at least as bad as that of Nazi Germany.
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
– British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Churchill’s advisors were united in believing that the Soviet Union’s battle would be a short one. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill said it would collapse in six weeks. Gen. Alan Brooke, who would later that year succeed Dill as CIGS, said four months – the most optimistic prediction. But Churchill was having none of it. Using horse race betting parlance and giving 500:1 odds, he said, “I will bet you a Monkey to a Mousetrap that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.” (A Monkey being a £500 bet, and Mousetrap being a gold sovereign with the nominal value of £1.)