Europeans mark two contrasting anniversaries
Posted by admin978 on February 16, 2023 · Leave a Comment
H&D‘s friends and comrades in Europe have marked two contrasting anniversaries in recent days.
In Dresden commemorations were held for the greatest crime of the Second World War – the terror bombing that destroyed this ancient city in February 1945. As discussed in a new article by our assistant editor Peter Rushton at the Real History blog, no one knows the true death toll at Dresden, partly because the city was packed with refugees who had fled from Stalin’s Red Army as it advanced into eastern Germany. Based on his detailed archival research, the British historian David Irving has estimated 135,000 deaths.
Dresden was the culmination of a deliberate policy of terror bombing – a deliberate decision to flout pre-war agreements (and to abandon the policies of the British government at the start of the war, maintained until Churchill took office).
The most famous British military historian, J.F.C. Fuller wrote in 1948:
“It may seem a little strange, nevertheless it is a fact, that this reversion to wars of primitive savagery was made by Britain and the United States, the two great democracies… With the disappearance of the gentleman as the back-bone of the ruling class in England, political power rapidly passed into the hands of demagogues who, by playing upon the emotions and ignorance of the masses, created a permanent war-psychosis.”
Fuller went on to acknowledge that as a consequence of the seizure of power in Britain by such “demagogues”, notably Churchill, “the obliteration of cities by bombing was probably the most devastating blow ever struck at civilisation”. Fuller wrote of “the moral decline which characterised the war.”
The Spanish nationalist group Devenir Europeo carried out a campaign of leaflets and posters targeting universities and military academies in an effort to raise awareness of the events of the Second World War and how they shaped our world. Our correspondent Isabel Peralta was very much involved in this campaign: she also marked this week’s other important historic anniversary.
In February 1943, 4,000 Spanish anti-communist volunteers – the División Azul (‘Blue Division’) – successfully fought off a vastly greater force of Stalin’s Red Army at the Battle of Krasny Bor, near Leningrad, allowing their German allies to regroup and maintain the Leningrad front.
Speaking beside the División Azul memorial at the Almudena cemetery, Madrid, this week, Isabel pointed out that her compatriots won at Krasny Bor not because they had greater numbers or greater weapons, but because they had greater faith in their cause – the noble ideals of the true Europe.
Spain is now at the front line of the struggle to maintain freedom of research and freedom of speech on historical and political questions. Under their new ‘democratic memory law’ some forms of historical revisionism are now illegal, although in other respects Spanish laws on ‘incitement of racial hatred’ are less restrictive than in the UK.
Isabel herself is presently facing trial in Madrid for a speech at an anti-immigration rally outside the Spanish Embassy last year.
