Basil Lambrou Quotes
You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans.
Basil Lambrou, *, Greek Police Official and Counter Intelligence Expert, Statement to arrested suspected Greek left wing revolutionists, ~1969, Quoted in James Becket, Report to Amnesty International, December 1969
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
During the Cold War and afterwards many Americans attributed the problems we were having with the Soviet Union emenated from the fact that they were Communists, and our focus was anti-communism. Kennen, however argued that it was not Communism that was the cause of the Aggression of the Soviet Union. It was an extension of the Russian Culture. After the Soviet Union collapsed, and Communism was rejected by the Russians, we still had a great deal of Russian aggression and Foreign Policy problems with Russia. Kennan was right. It was the Russian culture, history, values and traditions that were the primary cause of most of the problems with Russia.
This was an amazing prediction for the time. Most Europeans were not sure that the United States would even survive, and Russia was looked upon as the most backward nation in Europe. By the middle of the 20th century—over 100 years after Tocqueville wrote this—The United States and Russia were the two superpowers of the world.
He was right. Before WWII Russia was not considered a very important country in the world, but having emerged from WWII, Russia was stronger than ever and counties like Germany and Italy were in ruins.
The British suspected that the Turks of Anatolia were complicit with Bolshevism
Vladimir Lenin
Wright, like so many idealists had been a communist before the reality about Stalin and Russia was public knowledge. He then became a virulent anti-Communist and appeared in many international gatherings of Black artists and intellectuals. However, he felt that the CIA funding of an organization called the American Society for African Culture was undermining his message and integrity.’
Trout is one of the leading Madison Avenue experts on branding and image creation. He was hired by the State Department to help with its Public Diplomacy Crises of the George W. Bush administration during which even amongst our traditional allies public opinion turned from very pro America to strong anti American perception.
The then Attorney General had established a back channel to the Russian agent. There was genuine fear by the Russians and some in America that there were still many Nazis and German nationalists who would try and influence, if not take over, German politics to produce another aggressive German fascist state. The Russians had lost 22 million citizens to the Germans in the war and had faced a defeated Germany where virtually every German over the age of 30 had been cheering for and supporting Hitler a decade ago. Neither the Russians nor we and the other allies had not yet seen the remarkable turn-around that the German nation would make and the intense anti-fascist, non-military ethos that would be brought by the younger German generations. The direction of Germany was then very unpredictable.
Truman had to deal with Stalin for many years and over time he became more and more soured on the Russians. See {626411} for his view 22 years later,
This was only 6 years after the Russian Revolution. Communist Russia had extended its influence to much of the world without firing a shot. To many, communism looked like the future. The Russian inability to make communism work economically in the next 70 years destroyed most of its influence.
