Opinion – Lessons on the Holocaust, From Warsaw’s No 35 Tram – Op Ed – NYT – John Gelmini

Dr Alf is right.

The Poles cannot whitewash their history vis-a-vis the Holocaust but neither can the British and American governments which deliberately failed to order the bombing of the railway lines leading to the extermination camps. Churchill, the wartime leader so lionised in British history, and Roosevelt were both responsible for this but very little is taught in either British or American schools about this policy.

My own father saw the policy in action, as a young conscript in the Italian Army, at the age of 20, in German occupied France. He rescued three cattle cars packed with Jewish people and led them to safety in French stone church. He knew enough German to get these people to run with him, whilst a Lancaster bomber circled overhead and then dropped its payload of 500 pound bombs on the station where SS guards and fierce dogs were waiting to escort the death train and the unfortunates in the cattle cars.

Dr Alf and others can look at the records of World War II and see that in six years not one set of railway lines to a concentration camp or extermination camp was ever bombed or mined or attacked, thus allowing six million Jews and one million gypsies to be gassed and killed preceding cremation.

John Gelmini

Opinion – The United States and Turkey should fix their relationship – Brookings

Here’s a strongly recommended read from international think-tank, the Brookings Institute. As I read the article, I thought that once again, US foreign policy has missed the strategic objective. Like Iraq, US involvement in Syria has been enormously costly but the end-game is far from clear. For a while, Russia looked to be out-foxing the US but the real strategic winner in the Middle East seems to be Iran. Turkey’s continued   strategic importance to the US is questionable and probably directly proportional to Turkey’s capacity to curtail Iran’s geopolitical influence. Thoughts?