Hitler wanted to wipe the city off the face of the Earth.
Here s What You Need to Remember: It took another year until January 27, 1944 before the Leningrad-Novgorod Strategic Offensive finally ended the Germans’ iron grip on the city. Some estimates say that as many as 1,500,000 citizens of Leningrad died of starvation, disease, and German bombardment during the 872 days of siege.
Leningrad was the sacred city of Soviet Communism. The port city on the Neva River, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, began life in 1703 as Petrograd, or St. Petersburg, after its founder, Czar Peter the Great. For two centuries (1712-1918) it was the capital of the Russian Empire a place of stunning architectural beauty and historical significance, a city of czars and czarinas, of gold-domed cathedrals, breathtaking Baroque palaces, and rich political intrigue.
Chomsky Promoting Bumper Sticker History
Chomsky uses misconceptions about the history of German radicalism to argue for lesser evil voting.
Noam Chomsky has been a very important figure in my political development. As a teenager just being acquainted with Anarchism he supplied an influential public voice that identified with the Anarchist tradition. Today Chomsky is important to me for what one might call negative reasons. As I have acquainted myself more with Anarchism and the reality of the modern world I have found Chomsky s voice increasingly influential in the wrong directions. Chomsky, for me, has ceased to be a voice for a radical alternative to the status quo and more and more become a voice for the status quo s preservation, it s loyal opposition. His rhetoric around the 2016 and 2020 election cycles have fallowed this trend.
SCOTLAND SUPPLEMENT III - Separatism, federalism, centralism
Breaking apart existing states is not the road to socialism, but the road to defeat, writes Jack Conrad
Those who rigidly adhere to a moralistic, third-worldist anti-imperialism cannot possibly bring themselves to countenance self-determination for ‘unworthy’ peoples - the most obvious example being Israeli Jews and the British-Irish in the six counties of Northern Ireland.
1 Given its junior role in building, administering and maintaining what was a vast British empire, that must include Scotland too. After all, historically, even “left-of centre”
2 Scottish nationalists sought not an end to that empire, but, as a “mother nation”, equal rights with England to plunder and profit.
SCOTLAND SUPPLEMENT II - A joint oppressor
Left nationalists are in thrall to a bogus history, argues Jack Conrad. Scotland was not subject to an English takeover with the 1707 Act of Union. Nor does Scotland suffer from English cultural imperialism
Europe’s first nations had an embryonic existence, which for the sake of neatness is usually dated back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Here we have fertilisation, eg, Geoffrey Chaucer and his use of Middle English in works such as
Tales of Caunterbury (1400). At the time the prestigious languages in England were Norman-French and Latin. Chaucer’s Middle English reflected the growing importance of market relations: ie, circulation, and the rise of capitalism. He was the first author of standing to use many common English phrases and words: ‘add’, ‘agree’, ‘desk’, ‘dishonest’, etc. Because of the printing press, by the early 16th century, his writings gained a mass audience amongst the educated minority. All part of