Sunday, May 10, 2015

Any Excuse For More Putin Love.

The celebrations in Moscow on the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Germany is notable for both the absence of any American presence (or even our own separate celebrations) but also for Russia's and China's failure to acknowledge the US logistical contributions in becoming the arsenal to the world without which the Red Army would have been forced back to the Urals or beyond.

Neither is their any mention that after the war, even as the Soviets and the Chinese became our implacable enemies, the US forgave the world over 90% of the debts owed us for all those ships and planes and tanks and trucks and tires and bullets and bombs they fought with, even though we could have easily used those debts as economic and political weapons that would have crushed their ability to trade with the rest of the world.

I'd suggest they pay us now with those stashes of gold they have accumulated but the assholes in Washington would just squander it bailing out the banks again.  But hey if Germany has just recently finished paying of the reparations from WWI and Greece is clamoring for WWII German reparations to cover for their decades of wasteful spending, why shouldn't we make our claims against all we provided them by simply declaring a specific amount of the US debt they hold null and void?

Bottom line is Russians can't eat or make vodka out of oil and natural gas and the Chinese can't eat happy meal toys either.  We can live without either but the Chinese can't keep their billion or so locked up in factories forever when we stop buying plastic junk and cheap tools at Harbor Freight.

Just as our militarized police and National Guard would be stretched thin by inner city riots, so would the Russians and even more so the Chinese.  The Russian's problem is that that billion or so Chinese are right next door.

So in the meantime the world gets bombarded with propaganda about how the Russians defeated the Germans all by themselves and without China we could not have defeated Japan. Both notions are absurd on their face.

Putin had to put up the Stalin posters because the bloodstains of the past are beginning to leak through the layers of paint. Poor Putin, seeing all those red  communist Chinese flags must have made his nostalgic for the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union.