Operation Keelhaul

“You’re the coach. Coach them so they’re as good as the dead team was. Or, I’ll have you killed, okay?” – The Death of Stalin

If you want some fun, read the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ letter to Sultan Mehmed IV.  It’s not family-friendly.

Pa Wilder was over during his 1942-1945 all-expense-paid trip to Europe, and only occasionally talked about his experiences.  One thing I remember him talking about was seeing the prisoners of war.  Mind you, he wasn’t telling me these stories, he was telling his buddies after a snifter or two of bourbon and branch water, as Pa called it.

What Pa mentioned was the ratio of guards to prisoners.  The Germans, Pa said, had a “guard for every 100 or so prisoners.  And the rifles were unloaded.”  The message I took away from this was:  for the Germans, the war was over.

The Soviets, Pa said, were different.  There was a guard for every three men, and they had machine gun emplacements continually manned watching the perimeter of the camps.

The first thing that puzzled me was this:  if they were on the same side, why did the Americans have prison camps filled with Soviets?  Why not just let them loose?  The second was:  why were the Soviets so dangerous?

The answer to these questions (which I discovered last week) is simple but horrifying.

The end of a war, any war, is messy.  That’s when massacres and atrocities happen:  the victorious troops decide that taking prisoners is optional, and the losers don’t have any way to fight back.  Of course, the looting and worse on now defenseless cities turn the tragedy of war even darker.

Sure, massacres occur during war, and throughout history, it’s been a bit of a risk to be taken prisoner – wars stress the systems that produce and distribute food.  The last people a country is interested in feeding are those who were fighting against it.  This has always been true.  It is the rule, rather than the exception, that horrible things happen to POWs.

At the end of World War II, however, there was a horror that I was unaware of, namely the forced repatriation of both Soviet and Russian citizens during and after the War.  Note that I wrote Soviet and Russian citizens, that distinction was on purpose.

The losers in the Russian Revolution, many of the White Russians and Cossacks left Russia twenty or more years before World War II, and were never, at any time, Soviet citizens.  Stalin desperately wanted these people back.  Why?

Because he couldn’t stand having anyone who opposed him breathing.

These force “repatriations” consisted of at least, (the numbers are fuzzy) tens of thousands of people who had never been Soviets to the Soviets.  Millions of prisoners of war held by the Germans, Soviet soldiers, were likewise sent back, though many didn’t want to return.  Why?  Many had put on German uniform and had fought alongside the Germans.

Stalin probably wouldn’t have approved of that.

At the Yalta conference, Stalin demanded every Soviet citizen, and every former Russian citizen be returned to him.  All of them.  And Churchill and Truman let him get his way.  Possibly that was due to revenge.  Stalin had executed generals for surrendering unless they were gravely injured.  What would he have cared for a common boy from Siberia who, surrounded by Germans, surrendered?

So, we have tens of thousands of Cossacks that were involuntarily repatriated.  How many others?

Probably millions.  These Soviet soldiers had seen the relative wealth of the West, and wanted to stay.  Obviously, the ones that fought in German uniform were especially keen not to head back East.  But it wasn’t just them – hundreds of thousands of regular folks fled to the West during the war, too.

It is likely that at least 2,000,000 if not more (I saw a number as large as 5,000,000) people were tossed back to the Soviets at the end of the war.

Many of these people didn’t want to go back.  At least 200,000 of these people went straight to the GULAG, and there is evidence that thousands of these people were summarily executed as soon as they ended up in Soviet hands.

This is a war crime – not a figurative war crime, but a “by the letter of the law” war crime.  People in the government of the United States went along with this.  Knowingly.

My takeaway is this:

Government is, at best, neutral.  In the United States, we intentionally formed our government to protect the individual.  George Washington said, “A government is like fire, a handy servant, but a fearful master.”  So, government was supposed to help the people.

Oops.  Guess that went off track.  And if you look at the manner in which the government interferes in your life today, it goes far beyond what it did in 1945.  It goes far, far beyond “the jab”.

We are living in a world where government teachers teach children that are forced to be there that:

  • government is the solution to all of their problems,
  • that Antifa® is good,
  • sexuality is the greatest god, and
  • the biggest problem is that government isn’t solving more of their problems through “charity” enforced by the barrel of a gun.

We are in a time which will be named by future historians.  If they are honest, they will call this period, “the Crazy Years,” or “the Turmoil,” or “the Years of Lies.”

The “jab” is the latest insanity.  Despite amazing amounts of growing evidence that the mRNA treatment is likely far more deadly than the ‘Rona in young people, the government is pushing it – mandating it.

But certainly government wouldn’t do something that wasn’t in the best interest of the people.

Right?

H/T TIC

 

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

50 thoughts on “Operation Keelhaul”

  1. I’d like to think that, in the future, this period will be referred to as “The Fuck-up”

  2. Don’t forget what the official State Department “Morgenthau” plan was for the defeated German populace – death by starvation. They (along with the British and the French) actually signed off on and demanded that the US Army implement a plan which, over five years, would starve to death at least 25 million Germans. The Army went along until mid-1947, when they finally had enough of watching decent people wither and die. An estimated 5.7 million Germans died as a result of deliberate policy.

    1. More German soldiers were killed by the allies after the war than during it. All of the prisoners from what became E Germany were handed over to the Soviets to be shipped directly to the gulag. After Stalin died the survivors were allowed to go home. Out of several million, only a few hundred were left. Our troops at the time knew this, as they wrote in their memoirs about how sick they felt handing over such prisoners to the Soviets.

    2. 1080 (average) calories a day, and that’s the Wikipedia number. First time I’d seen the Morgenthau Plan entry.

  3. The older I get, the more I realize that almost everything we “know” about the Second World War and everything surrounding it comes from a bovine and is useful as fertilizer. The fact that we were allied with the Soviets, who were far worse than the Nazis in almost every way, and that we are still finding Soviet era mass graves all over Eastern Europe tells you that we were far from the white hat wearing good guys. The women and children burned to death in Dresden, Tokyo and the two cities we nuked confirms it.

    1. WW2 never made much sense to me, even when I was in high school.

      Germany invaded half of Poland, which is why we had to ally with the USSR who had invaded the other half. Then after the war we gave all of Poland and most of E Europe to the Soviets. So… what was the war about again? (spoiler: international banking)

      After years of debate on twitter and gab I have yet to find anyone who can come up with 1 thing the nazis did that was worse than what the allies did, before during or after the war. Yet somehow we are the good guys.

    2. “The women and children burned to death in Dresden, Tokyo and the two cities we nuked confirms it.”

      Utter horseshit reasoning.
      Visit Auschwitz; read The Rape Of Nanking; consult the London casualty lists during the battle of Britain. Then get back to us.
      Only burning Dresden, and dropping only two nukes, was a gift.
      We should have used every one we had, and then made more. And the ashes of German cities should have been a carpet from the Rhine to the Vistula, and probably onward to the Volga.

      Boo effing Hoo for the collateral damage from explaining the concept of unrestricted warfare to two such pustulent regimes as Nazi Germany and fascist Tokyo. They both got off almost criminally lightly, and no amount of revisionist gainsaying 75 years later is worth a sack of sour piss.

      I hope that wasn’t too subtly put.

      1. Name one thing the nazis did that was worse than what the allies did, before and during the war.

      2. Note that Auschwitz was in the Soviet occupied zone (Poland). We only have their word on what happened there. Note further that no death camps were ever found by the Western Allies. Only by the Soviets. Who would never, ever lie to us. Note that death by starvation at the very end of the war, when nobody was getting any food, does not a death camp make. Nor does death by typhus – you know, a disease carried by lice, which killed hundreds of thousands of Germans during and after the war. (Anne Frank died of typhus, by the way.) Please note that Zyklon-B was a common delousing agent, used also by the Western Allies.

    3. I think, if we were to rate it, the United States actually still does come up to the top of the moral heap in that war. What Japan did to China was amazingly brutal, and were I commander-in-chief I would have gladly nuked even more cities to save American lives in an invasion. Net-net – this probably saved lives.

      I’ll have to read up on Dresden. Most of my reading there has been (at best) superficial and from biased sources. I think that every deal with Stalin was a deal with the devil – if you look at how he utterly infiltrated the United States government, well, he was certainly not a good guy.

      My real main focus was to point out that one should never assume that our government is benign – especially in 2021.

      1. We (UK & US) destroyed Dresden for two simple reasons – revenge against the German people as a whole, and (more importantly) as an object lesson to the advancing Soviets about what our air power could really do.

  4. A quote from Jefferson if I might:

    This quote is part of Jefferson’s annunciation of what he deemed “the essential principles of our government.” The quote in its context reads as follows:

    About to enter, fellow citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper that you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our government, and consequently those which ought to shape its administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people — a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of the revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority — the vital principle of republics, from which there is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia — our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trail by juries impartially selected — these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

    Goodness since we “disposed” of Honor Dueling and “Unpaid Public Service” (AKA Pre- Professional Politicians, Poly-Ticks Latin for Many Blood Suckers) we have STRAYED FAR from our Foundations eh?

    Ben Franklin was supposedly quoted as saying ” “No man’s life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session.” It does sit well with the other quote we know from Old Ben. Like the one “A Republic, IF you can keep it”.

    If by the Grace and Power of God and honest peoples we ever recover the reigns of power I pay and hope we REMEMBER our Foundations to rebuild upon. Otherwise like the French Revolution we shall fall into the mass hysteria of Madam Guillotine and be “Saved” by a series of Warlords like Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.

    1. Posted today on TBP:

      We don’t need a ‘president’ at this point. We need a general.

      Yes, I know all the stuff about the ‘strongman who promises to fix the problems if we give him the power’. Sadly, that is what we have left at this point. If we choose one and he becomes a tyrant, at least he’ll be our tyrant and not some spawn of TPTB.

      He would need to hit DC like a Cat5 hurricane and destroy wholesale the corrupt infrastructure centered there. Any elected president I can imagine fails in this, and most wouldn’t even make the attempt. We really are in the last inning.

      1. Trump could have been such a Caesar but he failed to cross that Rubicon. Instead he slunk back to Rome in the hopes that his enemies would be merciful in their prosecution. We’ll see how that turns out…

    2. Well said, x10. I wish I could be as eloquent as Jefferson for even an afternoon. But if that happened, I’d probably be writing a work email.

  5. John – – When I was Green-horn Lieutenant sent to Vietnam I was fortunate to have as my Platoon Sergeant, a former 82 nd Airborne Division combat veteran of World War Two. He had actually been an artillery man who made the D-Day assault riding a glider into Normandy with his cannon in the glider.

    After hostilities ended, his unit was sent to Vienna and he was in charge of marching former Soviet and Russian soldiers to a gate where they were turned over to the Soviet Army to be dealt with. It did not take him long to learn what the Soviets were doing to the men he turned over to them. So one day he called his squad together and told them that they were all participating in murder and he was not going to get caught up in any war crimes.

    He refused to take any more prisoners to the turn in point. He was given a court martial for his refusal, was busted in rank and sent to another unit where he would have no contact with prisoners.

    A man of honor and judgment. May God continue to bless us with men like Sergeant First Class John Toland, from Colorado.

    1. Yes and Lt. Col. Sheller who is now behind bars according to the webz.

      John thank you for that history, surprised I never heard or read that but then again a lot of my history is from documentaries and not enough books but I am working on that starting with the ones you mentioned before the ones on my waiting list shelf.

      All the comments here me makes me almost believe in two things more and more. All wars are bankers wars and “Some say we fought on the wrong side”.

      I beg to differ, the word Glorious will be in the title of our history. Keep the Faith and may God bless us all.

  6. I am pretty sure that former US military personnel who are dishonorably discharged for refusing a COVID vaccine could outdo the obscenities spewed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks in any letter to their former Commander in Chief….

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10018635/Biden-says-troops-dishonorably-discharged-fail-Covid-vaccine.html

    https://www.oleantimesherald.com/news/nation/potential-exodus-of-navy-seals-brings-backlash-on-vaccine-mandate/article_5200f83f-12fb-5dc8-a519-fae40fb46039.html

    “Being dishonorably discharged has implications for service members, including stripping their rights to own a firearm and use the GI Bill for education. A dishonorable discharge also prevents them from federal health and housing benefits normally available to veterans.”

    Speaking of letters, something called the COVID Spartacus Letter is going, heh, viral…

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_c_up9dwiT3_-rTfsG2tGo6XJCOju3SW/view?usp=sharing

    1. I just followed your link and read the Spartacus letter. 15 pages of text followed by 26 pages of links. Have your medical thesaurus handy if you are not a doctor, virologist, or immunologist. This is the most frightening thing I’ve ever read. Ok, the mind control part, with the neuro-wires and the reprogramming is a bit out there, but to be fair it’s not something I’ve ever looked into, aside from reading about a fictional version in those Jane Hawk horror novels by Dean Koontz. The rest of it lines up exactly with everything I have read about this virus since the very beginning. Oh, and that Level 2 lab is Wuhan was just a couple hundred yards from the market. One of the UK papers ran that story with a map. That lab was shut down and erased from all online maps and searches.

  7. LOL.

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

    LOL. Thanks for the humor, John, I had not heard of this before.

    Gutter humor amid slaughter. Sounds like the newly-released blockbuster Netflix series Squid Game. I’ve just finished binge-watching all 9 brilliant episodes. Tagline: a Korean Hunger Games, an epic allegorical takedown of what capitalism has become in the West. Eleven out of ten stars and highly, highly recommended.

  8. I would suggest you investigate the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustlav in 1945… it would seem that a substantial proportion of what we were taught about WW2 was… inaccurate.
    I started my own researches soon after I learned to read (which event took place embarrassingly early), and the contrast between what I learned then and what has been allowed to come out since is startling. Given that the horrors of the Nazi regime have been heavily documented, what happened to the population of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war is no less terrible.
    There are lessons to be learned, for certain.

  10. Atrocities are swept under the rug. They are a reminder of the brutality of war, the plundering by the victors, and how little human life is cherished by those that chose power as their drug. The most powerful contain the information, their lackeys hide all the evidence they can, and those that survive the atrocities are presented as liars, or insane. They were on a grand scale during the world wars, and a much smaller scale in the siege in Waco. Whether it’s a handful, or millions murdered, the horror is the same.

  11. How about the novel concept of getting the vaccines run through the regular approval process? That would remove for many a reason of hesitancy. ‘Course, if it can’t pass, then I guess it opens them up to a whole can of liability whoopass.
    But let’s be honest. Time. Time is now on the side of “doing it the right way”. It’s no longer the Emergency it was a year ago without a vaccine (to lie about).
    We could feel much better about demanding our soldiers having to take it.
    If only it were Honest.

    1. It is not about science, if so this drug would have been removed from the market months ago. I prefer to stay in the Control Group.

  12. John, I would love to believe there will be history written after this. Given the apparent disregard and destruction of our own, I suspect the only history saved will be that written away and hidden or smuggled somewhere else.

  13. “We are in a time which will be named by future historians. If they are honest, they will call this period, “the Crazy Years,” or “the Turmoil,” or “the Years of Lies.””

    Future historians will refer to it as, “the before-times when giants ruled the earth, building massive structures and even flying to the moon using magic.”

  14. Hardly any of the German prisoners from Stalingrad made it back alive.
    Stalin’s own son was taken prisoner and it didn’t end well for him.
    The NSDAP appartachiks could have drafted all kinds of allies from Russia who didn’t care for Stalin or the commies but they went with the untermenschen (subhuman) route instead.
    Big Guy comrades are in league with the devil and plot to burn down the world because utopian egalitarian horseshit is just a means to an end.
    Utopia was never on the menu for the burn it all down better brigades.

    1. They offered to trade Stalin’s kid back, but he turned them down.

      (I hope we don’t, but fear we will) see such dark times again.

    2. About 300,000 Ukrainians joined the German army and formed their own units, including the 14th SS Division. It didn’t go well for them or their families after the Soviets won.

  15. Robert A. Heinlein wrote about “The Crazy Years” back in 1987.

    “So many casual killings in public streets and public parks and public transports that most lawful citizens avoided going out after dark…

    Public school teachers and state university professors who taught that patriotism was an obsolete concept, that marriage was an obsolete concept, that sin was an obsolete concept, that politeness was an obsolete concept – that the United States itself was an obsolete concept…

    Hmm, sounds kind of familiar.

    1. The first chart was in the 1940s, and the final chart was in 1967.

      Yup, he got that right . . . and I picked The Crazy Years because of that . . .

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