Josip Broz Tito Quotes

Trieste was occupied by the British and Americans theoretically, but Tito’s Yugoslavian troops had done most of the WWII fighting and dying in the area and wanted control for the Russian Allies of which Tito was then one. There were frequent armed standoff’s of Anglo Americans and Yugoslav troops that could easily have evolved to full scale fighting. Nine months later, Tito broke with Stalin. An interesting historical fact is that Richard M. Nixon was one of the Congressional Delegation then visiting Trieste.

This is an example of what made the Cold War so difficult. The Italian Communists had great misgivings about the Russian version of Communism that tended to abuse human rights and try and control other countries. However, when the Russian Communists were under world attacks by the West, as with their incursion into Hungary, he urged that all the Communists stick together and defend the Russians even for policies that they thought wrong. On the West side, the same thing occurred. The United States tolerated and supported a number of terribly oppressive dictatorships that were virulently anti-Communist. Polarization was the international norm.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded to include some fo the former Soviet Nations thus moving NATO territiry to the East--closer to Russia, whose leaders percieved that the expansion was hostile and dangerous for the indpendence of Russia. What made the situation more complex is that the American Secretary of State, when the Soviet Union was very powerful, had made an agreement with the Soviets that in return for Russian aquiessance of NATO being extended to East Germany, NATO would not expand further West. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was quite weak and NATO expanded east despite the earleir comittment. The US and th eother NATO counties took the pozition the previous comitmnts were not binidng as they were never formally signed. The Russians then decided to take a hard line position and flaunt and use military force to which would stop the Western expansion closer to the Russian border.

Churchill was reported to be so angry and exasperated that his face turned red and he was sputtering. During World War II, Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian Nationalists were leading protests against British control of India. This not only bogged down British soldiers surprising the nationalists rather than fighting in Burma or in other war theaters, but India supplied a huge number of battalions to the British Army the world over and if that manpower dried up, the allied war effort would suffer. The American State Department wanted Churchill to announce that after Japan was defeated, there would be a process toward self-government. This way, they thought, the Indians would redouble their effort to defeat the Japanese and stop the then current protests and strikes. Churchill was strongly opposed to any diminution of the British Empire, but beyond that, he knew India quite well and realized that at any hint of Independence the large Muslim minority in India would insist on autonomy or a partition of the country and use sectarian violence and terror to intimidate the Indian Congress party and the British, but the major victims of the terror—the Hindus and the Sikhs would not remain passive, but would retaliate in kind. President Roosevelt was in the midst of planning the Normandy Landings of the D-Day invasion and did not want to pressure Churchill and the British at this point in time, so the door to independence was not opened during the war and Britain had to deal with the protests throughout. However, when, after the war, the Labor Government, started a process toward Indian independence which resulted in exactly what Churchill predicted. At least 2 million Indians were slaughtered in the internecine terrorist cycles of fear and retaliation motivated terror attacks what were so extensive that the British military could not really control it.

He was a brutal, sadistic war criminal who was assassinated by one of his many enemies in 2000 before he could be brought to trial.

The problems of Iraq regarding internecine ethnic struggles have not changed in 60 years. See {586486} for another example.

of the Cuban rebel provisional government

Towards the end of World War I, an expedition of 7,000 American troops was sent to Siberia with vague and confused instructions regarding the their role in the conflict between the "white" and "red" Russians:

At the end of WWII there was much tension between Russia and the Anglo-American alliance. This plan was developed but never implemented. See {613195} for Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s description of the invasion idea.