@CB

Mobsters, all of them.

@riverlover

The first steamed greens!

Leaner and meaner is not the US. Fat and content is more like it. We exist by isolation, that is dealt with by ICBMs. Slap in face for us (US?). It could happen, we are certainly not making allies and friends to be counted on.

Daffs are nearing bloom, one month early. But major cold front, snow expected tomorrow. My broken foot and torn ligament defies the old wives' tale and hurts like hell today. Dr visit tomorrow. Getting on a month. Could be with no treatment another 6 mos. Feeling very depressed. I Shall Survive.

@MrWebster
growth of Hitler's war machine. I doubt Hitler could have built such a powerful military without their assistance.

excerpts from the book
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
p21
[The] build-up for European war [WWII] both before and after 1933 was in great part due to Wall Street financial assistance in the 1920s to create the German cartel system, and to technical assistance from well-known American firms ... to build the German Wehrmach.
... The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal.

Not much talked about in America and the West anymore, is that the (Slavic) Soviet Bolsheviks were considered a threat to Western civilization, if not thee greatest threat, at the very turn of the 20th century (not just post-WWII). And hand-in-hand leading this foreign threat to the West were Jews. My local paper ran an article on resistance to immigration awhile back on how Americans did not want Jews from Eastern Europe because of the foreign threat they posed--Reds. The Red Scare goes back a long way given the role communists and socialists in the union movement. I have read pervasive historical documents that Chamberlain did not see the threat from Germany, but from the Soviet Union and in fact encouraged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union. I get the sense that Chamberlain thought the Germans would turn east and not toward England.

In fact, much of the current anti-Russian rhetoric sounds like the real German Nazis in their propaganda war against the Soviet Union and the Jewish controlled Bolsheviks (as Hitler saw it). Jews/Russians are everywhere undermining our society, our elections, have infiltrated Western institutions (the Jewish banker theme, only now the Russian mafia)--and they are to be blamed for all social problems. Look into an issue, and you will find a Russian/Jew peering back at you. Hillary blamed anti-fracking demonstrations on Putin, and the New York Times pointed at Putin as the cause of anti-TPP sentiments. I was reading about the Nazi anti-Jewish film called The Eternal Jew and the Nazi iconography around it. Images of Putin play off the Nazi tradition of demonization of Jews. Time had front cover of Putin and emphasized and enhanced his nose. Guess one of the trademark stereotypes of Jews by the Nazis.

It seems to me that the US and Western Europe are repeating the racist notions of the Nazis toward the Russians. Ukrainian and Lithuanian Nazis are given a free pass in their antisemitism and their profitable to them hatreds.

And now like the Nazis the West has built a military on the border of Russia that will is going past being defensive toward being offensive. It seems from one point of view, that the West wants to finish the job Hitler started.

Only no Western troops will get even close to Moscow or St. Petersburg before Putin or any other Russian leader launches nukes.

@mimi My grandfather was shipped off to the United States from Poland at the age of 17 to avoid being drafted into the White Russian army. There's mutual animosity between Poland and Russia going back 1,000 years.

you have written, because you covered (with all the links given, which I all read) so many issues I had missed out while being in the US the last 35 years. I didn't know too much about them and I feel now how much I needed to understand them..

I learned only now, being in Germany and seeing some documentaries, I tried to point to in this comment, but knowing it wouldn't be helpful for English only speaking folks, about the historical events during the Russina Revolution against the Czar Nicholas II, the role of the Bolscheviks and much more of the times from 1905 til 1926.

I had not really understood (being in the US in 1989) the whole collapse of the Sovjet Union and the meaning of the German reunification for the Sovjet Union empire and the role NATO played during and after the collapse. I only now learned the different events happening in the former Sovjet republics that declared their independence. The map you showed in your article I saw (well explained) in one of the German documentaries I watched lately.

I also understood that the feelings of people from the Baltics and Poland towards Russia has long and old ethnic and tribal roots that I wouldn't have thought to be the case as they are 'bygone' for so long. But as everywhere else those ethnic and tribal feelings never go away and always are reborn from generation to generation. May be Americans have not that much understandig for it, because all those 'tribal' immigrants to the US over the decades had to put their own memories and feelings on the back burner in their minds to get along and integrate into the US. Their kids felt them, felt empathy for their parents' fate, and thus helped - unconsciously perhaps - to always be ready to stoke those ethnic and tribal fires on the backburner to light up.

I learned through Greenwald's article and the New Yorker article he talks about, that there was a difference between Obama and Clinton in the way they wanted to approach 'the Russian tiger'. AFter reading the details about that I have to say that I really would have preferred Obama's approach to prevail than Clinton's. What a disaster to begin with and in the end of it, both have had horrifying effects leading to the current situation.

I happened to have to return from the US to my home country Germany without planning it three weeks before the elections and certainly didn't expect Trump to win and truely hoped that wouldn't be the case. I admit that I couldn't quite follow those here that mentioned they were ready to vote for Trump, because of all the betrayals they knew about and saw in the Clinton and Obama Democrats. I really have a lot of empathy with the despair of many not to know how to vote or what to do, being forced into the duopoly that offers no choice at all. There is no democracy in all of it. And I would never blame anyone for the choices they made in that kind of situation.

All of the sudden I am immersed in German media coverage via documentaries that I would have never seen in the US. Lot's of "magazine books" about themes that help me understand the past from 1978 onwards. I also really didn't know enough about the Vietnam Era from the US point of views. Of course I realize also that reading similar longish reports in US magazine is a bit harder. I tend to often not finish them.

I am learning a lot and sorry to say way, way too late. But I can say that the material I read through the EB and on C99p help me a lot along the way.

Just wanted to thank you and all and also those commentators in here like CB, who posts so many additional links with explanations.

PS, well Carthage... I remember vaguely that my history teachers in seventh grade tried to incite some interest in that historical period in us kids, but as you can see, she (my teacher) failed miserably in that. Now those days are for real very bygone...