Cheney, Obama and History Lessons From Poland | Newsweek International

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Posted By: rramjet @ 06/02/2009 4:33:53 PM

With Obama turning us communist, Russia looks pretty good!!!!
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  Posted By: Vigilance @ 06/03/2009 12:47:41 AM
  
  You obviously have no idea what goes in Russia under the name of politics if you think Obama's stimulus resembles Putin's murder of journalists with competing views.

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Posted By: Jim1348 @ 06/02/2009 5:28:13 PM

The recent PBS series on "Stalin, the Nazis and the West" points out that Stalin finally started listening to his generals in the latter part of WWII, which may be the only reason he defeated Hitler, who never did. And totalitarian states like Russia under Stalin and Hitler under Germany don't get to try out the "what if" scenarios that open debate provides, and so have to learn the hard way.

But Cheney's labeling everyone who did not agree with his policy mistakes as "unpatriotic" certainly did not help the debate in this country (as if he were an expert on the subject). And not to mention that withholding valid intelligence information from the public, while passing on only the fabricated stuff, was not too useful either. With Obama, there is hope that we can avoid such mistakes. As for Poland, they are caught between two big powers who routinely invade them, and the decisions are not so easy. For the U.S., there is no excuse for the past 8 years.

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Posted By: Cates @ 06/02/2009 11:46:29 AM

Germany had its Hitler, Italy its Musolini, Russia its Stalin, and now the US has had its Cheney.

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Posted By: Louis-Jacques Sereville @ 06/02/2009 4:47:47 AM

It is not only about the modern history of Poland. Without profoundly understanding the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Polish people and its history will remain abused by the totalitarians among the other peoples over any ideological question.

I present a few examples: What happened among King Zygmunt III, Chancellor Stanislaw Zolkiewski, the Parliament (Sejm), False Dmitry, the Muscovite boyars, Catholicism, the Jesuits, the Orthodox Church, democracy, tsardom, cultural pluralism and freedom of religion during the Polish-Moscovite War? What happened among the Commonwealth, the Teutonic Order and the city dwellers (especially, the merchants and the clergyman who did not belong to the Order in the cities that joined the Prussian Confederation), democracy and autocracy during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War? What happened among King Zygmunt III, King Wladyslaw IV, the Jesuits, the Parliament, Bohdan Khmielnitsky, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Turkey, Russia, democracy, absolutism, cultural pluralism and freedom of religion during Khmielnitsky???s rokosz (which Poles nowadays wrongly simplify as an uprising by the separatists) under the flag that, contrary to the modern common perception that it was a separatist movement, stated the mercy of the Polish King? What happened to King Stanislaw II, the Familia, the Bar Confederation, the Constitution of Poland, parliamentary democracy, constitutional monarchy, the Golden Liberty, liberum veto, majority vote, Prussia, Russia and the Hapsburgs during just before and during the Partition of Poland? What happened among Jozef Pilsudski, Roman Dmowski, the conceptual question of the Polish nation whether to include the Jewish people and others into the nation, the Sanation regime, the Jagiellon Ideology or the ideological legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth about ethnicity and religion, and the conflict between cultural pluralism and exclusivist nationalism, during the era between the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War?