Liverpool FC Forum

Top · by **tubby** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:20 pm

tonyeh wrote:and many who did so, were viewed as traitors by their own Countrymen. They considered (quite rightly) that the Army of the British Raj fought the war for British interests, not Indian interests. Britain had, after all, declared war on behalf of India without consulting any of the nonimal Indian "leaders".

That part is rubbish. I actually know several families who had people serving and none were thought of in that way. Maybe by some here and there but in no way could it be considered the general feeling.

Top · by **Reg** » Mon Oct 26, 2009 5:56 pm

tonyeh wrote:
Reg wrote:Germany had 800,000 'other' nationality soldiers in the Soviet campaign alone - Romanian, Italian etc.. they considered them totally useless.

That's not 100% correct Reg. The Germans considered the Romanians to be good troops, but they were very ineffectually led. Likewise, the Italians were considered to be good fighting stock too, but woefully ill equipped (and badly led too).

In fact, it's the British view of the bungling "Ities" in North Africa that has condemned the Italian Army of WWII to the stereotype we have today.

But the Hungarians, Finns, Norwiegians, Danes, Croats, Serbs and Spanish were considered by the Germans to be top class fighting men, as were the Don Cossacks and the Asiatic troops who fought alongside the Germans against Russia.

Toneh, my wife's (who is Italian) best friend back in Itay´s grandfather died on teh eastern front. They were herded off to the east without proper training nor equipment as you say however the 2 key points were: 1. They were on teh whole extremely simple countryside folk who werent as motivated or politically motivated as the Germans and 2. they didnt want to be there anyway. Add being untrained and without kit to fight the cold and you´ve got a recipe for disaster.

I believe it was only 30 years later the Italian authorities finally admitted to his family he´d been sent to the Russian front and killed. Until then he had always been 'missing whilst on duty' without saying where or confirming his death. Naturally the family were terribly upset.

Top · by **tonyeh** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:33 am

Reg wrote:
tonyeh wrote:
Reg wrote:Germany had 800,000 'other' nationality soldiers in the Soviet campaign alone - Romanian, Italian etc.. they considered them totally useless.

That's not 100% correct Reg. The Germans considered the Romanians to be good troops, but they were very ineffectually led. Likewise, the Italians were considered to be good fighting stock too, but woefully ill equipped (and badly led too).

In fact, it's the British view of the bungling "Ities" in North Africa that has condemned the Italian Army of WWII to the stereotype we have today.

But the Hungarians, Finns, Norwiegians, Danes, Croats, Serbs and Spanish were considered by the Germans to be top class fighting men, as were the Don Cossacks and the Asiatic troops who fought alongside the Germans against Russia.

Toneh, my wife's (who is Italian) best friend back in Itay´s grandfather died on teh eastern front. They were herded off to the east without proper training nor equipment as you say however the 2 key points were: 1. They were on teh whole extremely simple countryside folk who werent as motivated or politically motivated as the Germans and 2. they didnt want to be there anyway. Add being untrained and without kit to fight the cold and you´ve got a recipe for disaster.

I believe it was only 30 years later the Italian authorities finally admitted to his family he´d been sent to the Russian front and killed. Until then he had always been 'missing whilst on duty' without saying where or confirming his death. Naturally the family were terribly upset.

Then he was probably part of the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano, if he was sent there between July 41 and July 43, or if he went there in 1942 he was part of the Armata Italiana in Russia.

The first expiditionary force was part of the Italian Royal Army, who on the whole were very well trained.

You have to understand though, in the days of conscription, a large part of any army would have been made up of rural (and urban) folk, making uo the numbers because they were called up. It would have been no different for the Italians.

It's true, probably quite a few would have had no joy with being sent to Russia to fight Bolshevism, but that's also true of the average German solder too.

The problem is, they didn't have a choice. you went where you were sent and that was it. On the whole the vast majority of men fighting in WWII (as in most wars), wanted to be somewhere else.

As to the problem of identifying soldiers who were M(PK)IA, this was a common problem with armies that sent forces to far flung areas of the world. There are still many familes today who have no idea what happened to their loved ones during the war.

Top · by **tonyeh** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:59 am

bavlondon wrote:
tonyeh wrote:and many who did so, were viewed as traitors by their own Countrymen. They considered (quite rightly) that the Army of the British Raj fought the war for British interests, not Indian interests. Britain had, after all, declared war on behalf of India without consulting any of the nonimal Indian "leaders".

That part is rubbish. I actually know several families who had people serving and none were thought of in that way. Maybe by some here and there but in no way could it be considered the general feeling.

I never mentioned "general feeling(s)". To do so would be rather silly in connection with a population that consists of 1/6 of the worlds population.

However, among Indian nationalists and people of the Independence movement, who were considerable in number...such a view would have been widespread.

Also, while the British Indian Army numbered 200,000 men, that number has to be placed side by side with the total population of well over 1.1 billion people.

In addition, there was much unrest among those serving in the British Indian forces, which came to a head shortly after the war ended with the Bombay Mutiny (or the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny). This series of actions and its subsequent ripples throughout, which saw Hindus and Muslims unite against British rule, prompted Clement Atlee to suggest it was one of the deciding factors for the British to leave India for good as he realised that the "...Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British."

Top · by **Madmax** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 1:03 am

Tonyeh are you a historian or a wikipedia expert.

Top · by **tonyeh** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:09 am

Madmax wrote:Tonyeh are you a historian or a wikipedia expert.

Don't trust Wiki. :;):

Top · by **Kharhaz** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:37 am

History is fascinating. I love the subject. My grandad, who fought in the second world war, told a few stories. He was also racist. He wasnt the only one. Many of the veterans I met when I worked in Laceby fought in the second world war, and a majority of them were racist. Although a few moved with the times, the majority were still stuck, mentally, back in the war, recollecting what happened and how they played their part. My point being, the ethnics may have played a part but the BS coming out of Jack Straws mouth and the rest on how they made a difference during the war doesnt wash with our grandparents who were there. Im not saying they sat back and did nothing, im saying they didnt play as big a part on the grand scale Jack Straw is feeding us.

Also Winston Churchill. He was leader throughout that war but he certainly was no saint.

Top · by **hello_red** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:44 am

Kharhaz wrote:History is fascinating. I love the subject. My grandad, who fought in the second world war, told a few stories. He was also racist. He wasnt the only one. Many of the veterans I met when I worked in Laceby fought in the second world war, and a majority of them were racist. Although a few moved with the times, the majority were still stuck, mentally, back in the war, recollecting what happened and how they played their part. My point being, the ethnics may have played a part but the BS coming out of Jack Straws mouth and the rest on how they made a difference during the war doesnt wash with our grandparents who were there. Im not saying they sat back and did nothing, im saying they didnt play as big a part on the grand scale Jack Straw is feeding us.

Also Winston Churchill. He was leader throughout that war but he certainly was no saint.

All Mr Straw was doing was trying to counter a very dangerous political party in light of modern history, that being 'war on terror' and 'the recession'.

My grandad fought in WW2 and did not have a bad word to say about anyone. It depends on the person, history shows, despite what people might say, that ethnic groups helped us in WW2. You cannot overlook this in our countries history. If we do we have a major problem on our hands.

Extreme political ideals filter through during times of hardship ie a strained world political climate or a world financial crisis.

This is exactly how Nazi Germany started!

Top · by **Kharhaz** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 4:01 am

hello_red wrote:All Mr Straw was doing was trying to counter a very dangerous political party in light of modern history, that being 'war on terror' and 'the recession'.

Dangerous? not likely. They are a party who are recieving more attention than they deserve. What Jack Straw is doing is feeding spin among the young people, trying to sway a vote in his parties favour.

As for your grandad, I have upmost respect for. Like I said as many veterans as I know who have remained racist, there are many who have moved with the times. But they all fought for what we have today.

Top · by **Dazzer** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:53 am

With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force

Link

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can't blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do-stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

"The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong," said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. "This is what this meeting is about."

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world's wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city's police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city's Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.

"It is de facto martial law," he said, "and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this."

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers-2 million in Mexico alone-bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.

But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance-from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution-on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. "Speculation," then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, "is the AIDS of our economies." We have reached the terminal stage.

"Each of Globalization's strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning," John Ralston Saul wrote in "The Collapse of Globalism." "The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class-the very basis of democracy-seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism's essential principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009."

The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.

"The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president," Holmes said. "It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it."

"Obama is in trouble," Holmes went on. "The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can't be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their :censored:

and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."

Thought I post this up just to show you what capitalism is doing to the world just as backup to comments I made earlyer in thread.I It also has some value in this topic due to the right wing trend atm around the world not just in uk and france.Its good read and might surprise some of you.

Top · by **SouthCoastShankly** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:56 am

Dazzer wrote:With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force

Link

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. ...

yada yada yada

...l unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."

Thought I post this up just to show you what capitalism is doing to the world just as backup to comments I made earlyer in thread.I It also has some value in this topic due to the right wing trend atm around the world not just in uk and france.Its good read and might surprise some of you.

What a load of tripe!

Capitalism has paid the every growing salaries in this world, has allowed growth in wealth. There is understandably a unbalanced distribution of wealth but since when do you see the socialist and communist regiemes distribute their wealth equally?

When I think of countries like China, Cuba, North Korea, etc - I makes me glad that I live in a democratic society based on capitalism. It allows me the freedom to earn what I want, become what I want.

Capitalism is a system where the economy is driven and traded privately, by opposing capitalism you are advocating government control!! Have you seen our government recently?

Top · by **7_Kewell** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:01 pm

Kharhaz wrote:History is fascinating. I love the subject. My grandad, who fought in the second world war, told a few stories. He was also racist. He wasnt the only one. Many of the veterans I met when I worked in Laceby fought in the second world war, and a majority of them were racist. Although a few moved with the times, the majority were still stuck, mentally, back in the war, recollecting what happened and how they played their part. My point being, the ethnics may have played a part but the BS coming out of Jack Straws mouth and the rest on how they made a difference during the war doesnt wash with our grandparents who were there. Im not saying they sat back and did nothing, im saying they didnt play as big a part on the grand scale Jack Straw is feeding us.

Also Winston Churchill. He was leader throughout that war but he certainly was no saint.

maybe so, but your Grandad would have probably been horrified that people are trying to deny the holocaust ever happened.

Trust me, if Nick Griffin got into power he would CHANGE the history books in the this country.

Top · by **Dazzer** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:15 pm

SouthCoastShankly wrote:
Dazzer wrote:With Global Capitalism Exposed as a Sham, All the Global Elite Have Left Is Pure Force

Link

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. ...

yada yada yada

...l unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster."

Thought I post this up just to show you what capitalism is doing to the world just as backup to comments I made earlyer in thread.I It also has some value in this topic due to the right wing trend atm around the world not just in uk and france.Its good read and might surprise some of you.

What a load of tripe!

Capitalism has paid the every growing salaries in this world, has allowed growth in wealth. There is understandably a unbalanced distribution of wealth but since when do you see the socialist and communist regiemes distribute their wealth equally?

When I think of countries like China, Cuba, North Korea, etc - I makes me glad that I live in a democratic society based on capitalism. It allows me the freedom to earn what I want, become what I want.

Capitalism is a system where the economy is driven and traded privately, by opposing capitalism you are advocating government control!! Have you seen our government recently?

Daft lad really daft don't speak about this you clearly have no idea.Its ruining world if you knew how the central banking system worked you know capitalism has been doomed since day one.Think of a pyramid scheme on a world stage only so long untill there is too much debt and the system implodeds on its self.But no its fine you just keep dreaming that every thing is going to be ok forever like a good little puppet.

Top · by **heimdall** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:17 pm

hello_red wrote:
Kharhaz wrote:History is fascinating. I love the subject. My grandad, who fought in the second world war, told a few stories. He was also racist. He wasnt the only one. Many of the veterans I met when I worked in Laceby fought in the second world war, and a majority of them were racist. Although a few moved with the times, the majority were still stuck, mentally, back in the war, recollecting what happened and how they played their part. My point being, the ethnics may have played a part but the BS coming out of Jack Straws mouth and the rest on how they made a difference during the war doesnt wash with our grandparents who were there. Im not saying they sat back and did nothing, im saying they didnt play as big a part on the grand scale Jack Straw is feeding us.

Also Winston Churchill. He was leader throughout that war but he certainly was no saint.

All Mr Straw was doing was trying to counter a very dangerous political party in light of modern history, that being 'war on terror' and 'the recession'.

My grandad fought in WW2 and did not have a bad word to say about anyone. It depends on the person, history shows, despite what people might say, that ethnic groups helped us in WW2. You cannot overlook this in our countries history. If we do we have a major problem on our hands.

Extreme political ideals filter through during times of hardship ie a strained world political climate or a world financial crisis.

This is exactly how Nazi Germany started!

True, Nazi Germany came out becuase of the greed of countries like France who raped Germany for all its resources, a terrible decision and one which England should have had the balls to oppose, just like it shold have had the balls to move in and take out Mugabe, fecking Tony Blair. England promised to protect Zimbabwe but has done feck all, it's a disgrace really.

Top · by **Benny The Noon** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:20 pm

What exactly would you like us to do about Zimbabwe ? What about all the other countries in the world just sitting and watching ?

And Dazzer your a brave little puppy going round insulting and having a pop at anyone who dares disagree with you .

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