A story my father told me: On September 1, 1939, my father with 18-month-old me were sitting in our olive green Studebaker parked outside our tourist cottage in Grand Lake, Colorado. My grandparents and mother were "under the weather "inside. Dad turned on the car radio, and out of the speaker came the news that Hitler had invaded Poland. Now, nearly 85 years later, I read the report that a predator nation was threatening a neighbor, Ukraine, with a takeover. inevitable if the West continued quibbling about whether to send more aid to that country bravely fighting a war against Russia. The isolationists in the USA are blind to the danger as the GOP House leadership puts a stranglehold on US aid to Ukraine. Those who have been victims in the line of fire in 1939 and the Cold War and now in 2024 know this is not the bloviating of the US libs. Poland would not be caught flat-footed again, so they have begun building bomb shelters. They are taking the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, at his word and his goal to reassemble the territory Russia once controlled in the Cold War. Poland sees itself as the next in line, and they and their immediate small neighbors of the Baltics are to be attacked if Ukraine fails to stop Russia from a takeover. It seems more than ironic, in fact frightening, that my life could be bookended to two world wars because of the fumbling, bumbling, and gridlock of those who should have been smarter to have learned the lesson of the late 1930s.
Years of appeasement and isolationism convinced Germany to set its sights on America and declare war against the US four days after Pearl Harbor in 1941. They saw our isolationism and the Nazi sympathizers that had become a large political force in the US as making it ripe for the pickings. Pearl Harbor had just verified the US weakness, failure of intelligence services, vulnerability, and the complications of fighting a two-front war worth declaring war on the US in the epic miscalculation that the US was an easy target that would be unwilling to put up much of a fight. This was before there was a NATO, and even if Trump's goal for the US to pull out of that mutual defense treaty, we would be back at September 1, 1939.
That the MAGA wing demands Europe pay their fair share need to update their information bank. Europe is. The MAGA wing needs to stop lying about this and keeping their followers ignorant.
Europe awoke as the zombies are sleepwalking in the MAGA House. https://mufticforumblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/stop-whining-isolaitonsists-europe.html
A footnote: That green Studebaker lasted until after WWII because all manufacturing was geared to the war effort. Ration cards, shortages of certain food, toys made of cardboard, paper dolls, and war surplus canteens, dim lights as we practiced air raid blackouts, a father constantly worried as his brother fought in Italy, and two of my mother's brothers were bomber gunners or staff in the Pacific theater. Dad, rarely home, was not in the military because he was essential services as the director of the "telephone exchanges" for an army camp, a POW camp, and a city of 40K throughout WWII. I wonder what it would be like with the aggressor and defenders now having nuclear weapons.
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