Nuttin' to do with nuttin'

And, with thanks to Uncle Boboli:


Finally, since we're already way the heck off topic here, dad was trying to talk to Lil' Genghis about all sorts of stuff during her baths -- something about estimating densities greater than 1 turned into an example of using a rubber duckie to demonstrate kinetic energy penetrator impacts, for example. Somewhere in there he was reading from Chuikov's Berlin memoirs, which are phenomenally worse and more politicized than the incredible Stalingrad memoirs with the lessons on stormtrooper tactics. Witness this classical nugget of non-history:

When the hordes of Nazi invaders swept into Poland in 1939, it became clear that there was no one to defend the interests of the working people of Poland, except the masses of the people themselves, rallied around the Polish Communiists. They, the Communists, organized active struggle against the Nazis from the very first days of occupation onwards. At the same time those Polish communists who were in the Soviet Union initiated the Union of Polish Patriots. In April 1943 this body approached the Soviet government with a request for permission to form a Polish military unit to fight the Nazis. The Soviet government heeded the dcesire of Poles to fight Fascism arms in hand, and acceeded to this request. The formation of the First Polish Army started on 19 May 1943.

This entire quote only makes sense if you utterly ignore the fact that the noble Soviet Communists invaded half of Poland at the exact same time, and that the Polish Communist Party was, at that time, nothing but a puppet front worse than Vichy France became. It's a shame -- this book was apparently released well after Khruschev attacked the cult of Stalin, but it's more Stalinist than his earlier and better Stalingrad memoirs.

So, yeah, we're also talking to Lil' Genghis about the nature of evaluating historical sources in terms of self-interest, access to information, ideology and the like.

By the way, if you get a magnet this year, a hint: The quote on the Lil' Genghis, Future World Leader magnets was repeated by Iosef Stalin and can be found on his Wikiquote page, even though it was originally from Molotov.

Yeah yeah yeah we'll post some pictures of Bel sometime. Geesh.