VICTORY IN EUROPE

[Stanley]

VICTORY IN EUROPE

9 May 2005

I see from the paper this morning that the veterans who attended the 'celebration' at the Cenotaph on Sunday are quite annoyed, and rightly so. No Queen, no PM just Chuck and John Reid as defence minister. Only one band and the vets weren't allowed to march behind it because of 'security problems'. One vet was refused entry to the area until his bag of medication for cancer etc. had been searched and verified by 'security'. He missed the ceremony.
What's going on here? I see the Queen was in Jersey today attending their VE celebrations. The official reason is that there is going to be a large ceremony combining VE and VJ days in July. So what? Couldn't anybody be bothered to arrange something more fitting? Were there no planes free for a fly-past like the one the French did? Or did someone decide that it wasn't worth the effort.
George Bush goes to Finland and Russia and gets right up the nose of Putin by criticising the Russians on the grounds that after the war they enslaved Eastern Europe. What has this got to do with the fact that a total of 28 million Russians died in WW2 and 75% of all German casualties were incurred fighting the Russians? I'm not defending the post-war events in Europe, just pleading for recognition that Russia bled Germany to death and made victory in the west possible. We can have opinions about the conduct of the war but let's not lose sight of honest people who made sacrifices that helped us. What happened after the war was as much due to political decisions made in secret at Yalta by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin as to any machinations by the Russians. (And how about a medal for the Murmansk convoys?)
Did you notice that Bush used his address at the war cemetery in Belgium to justify regime change by force in Iraq? There is absolutely no basis for comparison between WW2 and Iraq.
I've been reading Philip Jones Griffiths' book 'Vietnam at Peace' and looking at the pictures. Philip did a book called 'Vietnam Inc' and then one called 'Agent Orange' and they are all well worth looking at. Several things struck me in the book, there were facts that I didn't know about. At the end of the war Nixon and Kissinger promised the Vietnamese $3.25billion as a bribe to allow the evacuation of Saigon but on the day the war ended they confiscated $70million of Vietnamese assets in the US, suspended all trade with Vietnam and bullied their 'friends' into doing the same. They never paid any of the bribe. The embargo on trade was not lifted until 1993.
During the war the US dropped 8,000,000 tons of bombs plus 400,000 tons of napalm on the country, more than in all previous wars combined. A minimum of 5,000,000 people died. The 'Vietnam Wall' memorial in Washington is 140 metres long, built on the same scale, the equivalent for the Vietnamese would be 14 kilometres.
You can tell I'm upset. One last and very curious fact. A study was done which compared the health in later life of prisoners held in the infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison and a control group of comparable American men fed on a 'healthy American diet'. The inmates of the prison were better off, they had been fed the standard North Vietnamese diet of brown rice and vegetables. Ironic?

9 May 2005