Or is it more like Mussolini’s invasion of Greece, but without a big brother who can go do the job that the Italian army couldn’t? Russia has been unable to take any of its major objectives in two months, and in some cases couldn’t take major cities whose outskirts were 12 to 20 miles from the Russian border. The deepest penetration has been about 100 miles, in very sparsely populated areas where there wasn’t much of anything except farmland. That would be an average advance rate of 1.6 miles per day. The Germans moved faster than that in 1941 using horses to pull their supply wagons.
The Spanish Civil War bequeathed me with an anecdote summarizing how I was raised. My Dad used to hang out at the St. Louis Press Club, where he often tossed back a few (okay, more than a few) with the journalist class. Dad was an avid student of history, and a voracious reader. He knew more about the Spanish Civil War than most historians. One night at the Press Club, he got into an argument with Patrick J. Buchanan, who at the time was a columnist for the St. Louis Globe Democrat. Buchanan was lambasting Franco as a fascist dictator, while my Dad’s passionate defense of him was that he saved Spain from communism.
At that point, Buchanan exclaimed: “Ray, you’re a right wing extremist!”
So I was raised by a man who was branded a right wing extremist by Patrick J. Buchanan. Kinda says it all.
There is a denouement to the story. A week after that argument, Buchanan’s column in the Globe hailed Generalissimo Francisco Franco (still dead) as the man who saved Spain from communism. No mention of my Dad, though.
Or is it more like Mussolini’s invasion of Greece, but without a big brother who can go do the job that the Italian army couldn’t? Russia has been unable to take any of its major objectives in two months, and in some cases couldn’t take major cities whose outskirts were 12 to 20 miles from the Russian border. The deepest penetration has been about 100 miles, in very sparsely populated areas where there wasn’t much of anything except farmland. That would be an average advance rate of 1.6 miles per day. The Germans moved faster than that in 1941 using horses to pull their supply wagons.
The Spanish Civil War bequeathed me with an anecdote summarizing how I was raised. My Dad used to hang out at the St. Louis Press Club, where he often tossed back a few (okay, more than a few) with the journalist class. Dad was an avid student of history, and a voracious reader. He knew more about the Spanish Civil War than most historians. One night at the Press Club, he got into an argument with Patrick J. Buchanan, who at the time was a columnist for the St. Louis Globe Democrat. Buchanan was lambasting Franco as a fascist dictator, while my Dad’s passionate defense of him was that he saved Spain from communism.
At that point, Buchanan exclaimed: “Ray, you’re a right wing extremist!”
So I was raised by a man who was branded a right wing extremist by Patrick J. Buchanan. Kinda says it all.
There is a denouement to the story. A week after that argument, Buchanan’s column in the Globe hailed Generalissimo Francisco Franco (still dead) as the man who saved Spain from communism. No mention of my Dad, though.
So we are basically this now.