It was the Dunham’s who brought Obama over to Frank Marshall Davis to visit.

American Thinker writes:

The next year they relocated to Mercer Island specifically so their daughter, Obama’s future mother, Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island high school.

That school had very strong leftist tendencies. Perhaps they intentionally selected that?

And the Dunham’s church:

The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunham’s chosen church as “The Little Red Church on the Hill”. According to its own website, East Shore Unitarian Church got that name because of, “Well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China’ to the United Nations….” The fact that Mercer Island’s John Stenhouse, according to his 2000 obituary, once served as church president might also have contributed to the “red” label.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/07/what_barack_obama_learned_from.html

Thanks for answering my leading question, which I posed in case Geoffrey wanted to play lawyer and pettiflog NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Russian agreement signed in 1997.

Yeah, The Aral Sea had to die/dry in order for the USSR to grow cotton IIRC. There were some Soviet chemical/biological weapons facilities in that area as well that had some, adverse “incidents” IIRC. Worse than the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah by far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

It has happened before, the sea is, itself, kind of like the Salton Sea in California, a natural lake basin which is sometimes fed by the planet, and sometimes not.

But in the 60s, Soviet hydroprojects diverted the influx of water into the Aral Sea and it began to dry up, until it now has less than 10% of the area it once had and its salinity level is above that of the Dead Sea.

It’s now considered a serious case of ecosystem collapse.

I call attention to this, because, it’s… interesting.

Can you imagine the screams of the Greens if the US government had done something to cause Lake Michigan to dry up?

This, along with their toxin and nuclear dumping in the former Czechoslovakia, is what socialist governments DO. They destroy the environment as, when, and how they wish.

No matter how BAD you think the West is on the environment, Marxism will be much much worse.

Actually, yes, Ukraine IS in Eastern Europe. The Ural mountains, further to the east, are considered the dividing line between “Europe” and “Asia”. The Urals run approximately straight down to the landlocked Aral Sea. Ukraine, largely above the Black Sea (with the also landlocked Caspian Sea between it and the Aral sea) is decidedly to the west of the Urals… ergo and qed, as well as “bob’s your uncle”… Ukraine is a part of Eastern Europe.

The more fun argument is that the Ukraine was a State long before Russia was anything more than a bunch of towns under the control of a warlord who paid fealty to the Ukrainian polity. So doesn’t the Ukraine have more of a precedent claim on Russian territory than Russia does on Ukrainian territory?
😀

Well, there are some interesting … connections… which exist at both the development of the USSR and the development of Nazi Germany.

As I understand it (not a deep student, I ack), the Kerensky government was attempting to establish a republic, with a US style Constitution. Lenin was a nobody at that point, writing whackadoodle Marxist drivel in Canada, until someone financed him coming from Canada to Russia to foment the October Revolution, which began to create the USSR.

As I understand it, the main driver of that financing was the American brother of a German financier. As you might realize, Germany was hard-pressed in 1917, and getting the Russians completely out of the war was a major boon to their logistics and manpower issues, freeing up millions of men from the Eastern Front to move to the Western Front.

Someone’s Grand Plan? Probably not. But it certainly changed the course of events for most of a century.

Second point: The Soviet Bear was becoming a concern to Europe, as they slowly managed to industrialize and make more significant usage of their vast resources (no, the inevitable failure of centralized planning En Large was not as obvious in the 30s).

So the nations of the west tended to encourage Germany to re-arm, intending for them to attack the Soviets, their natural enemy (NatSoc and Soviets are just different versions of the same process…). Hitler, not a complete fool, instead made the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Stalin, so he could turn his main focus on the West. Both of them — Hitler AND Stalin — continued with plans to attack the other, but Hitler was shiftier and faster… he turned around and attacked the USSR. As I understand it, Stalin was actually hurt — he thought he and Hitler “had a deal”… (yeah, that HE himself was planning to break…LMAO).

It’s interesting, really. Had the Brits not wound up a very tough nut to crack, Hitler might have been able to devote more efforts to breaking the Soviets, and, given the closeness of which it was in both 41/2 and 42/3, he might have managed it. He got right to the outskirts of Moscow in 41/2, and he not only got into Stalingrad in 42/3, but he almost pushed the Soviets out. It is a Very Good Thing the world had Winston Churchill when they did.

See his book The End of Economic Man…his first book, not as well-written as his later works, but important and well worth reading.

Rubbish.

You had two fascist governments in Europe which arose out of domestic political processes – Germany and Italy. The Communist Party in Italy in 1922 accounted for about 4.5% of the electorate. The Communist vote in Germany during the Weimar Republic bounced around 12%. You’d have certainly had a large bloc of the German electorate looking for a bulwark against the Communist Party in 1932; what distinguished the Nazis in 1932 was not that they were antagonists of the Communists, but that they were the one part not implicated in the mismanagement of Germany’s affairs over the previous 18 years. The salient element was the bumbling of the German establishment.

Outside of those two, you had fascist movements in other countries. The most vigorous was to be found in Roumania. Roumania had no Communist Party of note during the inter-war period and even the local socialist party was quite small.

See Finland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Poland, and Hungary during the interwar period. If you needed to get medieval with the local communist parties, you weren’t limited in your options to fascist parties.

Fascism, i.e., national socialism, rose as a consequence of the atrocities the parties of the Third International, i.e., communists, international socialists, committed. They communists aligned with the Soviets were beaten back in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. But the fascists had no plan longterm and when the sociopaths of Hitler and cronies took over, conquest was what would keep them in power. We all know, for a time, they aligned with the international socialists, then attacked the Soviet Union. We all know the remnants of classical liberalism in the US, with the fascists of the New Deal, and similar in Britain, beat the national socialists back along with the international socialists. Post-war, the international socialists were given Eastern Europe.

But back home all those socialists who fled Europe took up tenure at US and British universities. They still preached their war against the west and promoted a hysterical hatred of capitalism as the German professors that inculcated what became Nazism into the educated Germans [von Mises, ‘Planned Chaos’], but now with internationalism instead of nationalism. They hate nationalism and patriotism because it interferes with the dreams of international socialism. Stalin wanted to run it out of Moscow, the EU wants to run it out of Brussels, in the US, they want to run it out of Harvard.

See my post from 2009, He’s Just Not That Into Us,’ where ‘he’ referred to Obama…but now applies to a whole lot of people.

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/9641.html