You're Only Against The Obamacare Mandate Because There's A Black Man Living In The White House And You Want To See Faux Hispanic - White Jews Shoot Blacks Wearing Hoodies, Who Are Armed Only With Skittles & Iced Teas! Don't You Dare Claim Otherwise, You KKKrackers!

 A Tuesday Two-Fer Music for Reading:

Please allow me to present one of my all-time favourite singers in the history of music, Miss Nina Simone.  She's gonna tell ya what she wants in her bowl.

 And, then let's let Sir Mick Jagger talk about what he wants with some Brown Sugar of his own.

"You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become -- it's like showing Frankenstein's monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don't know, because their limbic brain, we've discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it's pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening"

- Janeane Garafalo

Remember Ohio's Issue 2 on collective bargaining? It was defeated with 63% of the vote. 81 of 88 counties voted to defeat it.

Do you know what else was on the ballot that day?

Issue 3, which was a referendum on an Ohio law that says no person in Ohio shall be compelled to purchase health insurance.

Do you know how it did?

It passed with 67% of the vote AND WON EVERY COUNTY IN THE STATE OF OHIO.

Were all of those that voted against Governor Kasich's collective bargaining reforms and for a law against Obama's individual mandate "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

 Do you remember Proposition C in Missouri?

The measure changed state law to bar any government entity from fining a person for failing to buy health insurance.

It passed with 71.1% of the vote.

Bear in mind that over 315,000 Democrats turned out to cast ballots in the primary that nominated Robin Carnahan, while over 577,000 Republicans hit the polls. That is about a 65/35 split — which means that a significant amount of Democrats either supported the ballot measure repudiating ObamaCare, or didn’t bother to cast a vote to defend the programme.

Were all of those Democrats that either supported the ballot measure repudiating Obamacare or couldn't be bothered to defend it "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

A new Reason-Rupe poll, which surveyed 1200 general-population adults, found that 62% believe that the individual mandate is unconstitutional while 30% think requiring health insurance is constitutional.

Are those 62%, who believe that the mandate is unconstitutional, all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

Reason-Rupe found that 54% of Americans think the health care law will result in the rationing of health care services. 

Are those 54%, who think that Obamacare will lead to rationing of health care services, all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

 

A new poll of 1,000 likely voters by The Hill found that 50% of Americans say that the Supreme Court should strike down Obamacare.

Are those 50% all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

A majority of both men and women want the law voided. 

By a 52-percent-to-39-percent margin, women are opposed to the law and want the Court to strike it down as unconstitutional.

Are 52% of women all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law, and think that their place is barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen so they are cosying on up to the Republicans and joining the "War on Women" that Democrats claim is raging?

By a 48-percent-to-45-percent margin (Exhibit A in the argument that there has been a Pussification of America), men are opposed to the law and want the Court to strike it down as unconstitutional.

Are 48% of men all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law, and that Obamacare would be an inconvenient battle in their War on Women? - TALES FROM THE WAR ON WOMEN™ is a great read into these barbarians' mindset!  :-)

By a 47-percent-to-42-percent margin, even the youngest of voters aged 18-39 oppose the law and believe it is unconstitutional.

Are those 47% of voters aged 18-39 all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

53% of voters aged 65 and older oppose Obamacare and believe that it is unconstitutional.

Are those 53% of voters aged 65 and older all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

According to The Hill poll, only 22% believe it will make the quality of health care better — twenty points lower than those who want the bill upheld.  42% believe it will make health care worse, and another 30% believe it will do nothing to improve or worsen health care, which makes nearly three-quarters of likely voters who believe ObamaCare will either be ineffective or worse.

Are the nearly three-quarters of likely voters who believe ObamaCare will either be ineffective or worse all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

According to The Hill poll, only blacks (74%), Democrats (71%) and liberals (75%) want the law upheld.

Are the 26% of blacks, 29% of Democrats, and 25% of Liberals, who do NOT want the law upheld all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

A newly released USA Today/Gallup poll shows that, by a margin of 13 percentage points (53 to 40%), swing-state voters want Obamacare to be repealed. The poll included registered voters in 12 key states: FL, OH, VA, PA, WI, NV, CO, IA, NH, NC, NM, and MI.

Are the 53% of voters in 12 swing states, who do NOT want the law upheld all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

By a margin of 15 points (53 to 38%), registered voters in those states think it was “a bad thing” that President Obama’s signature legislation was passed.

Are the 53% of registered voters in those 12 swing-states, who do NOT want the law upheld, all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

When asked how Obamacare would affect their family’s “healthcare situation” in “the long run,” swing-state voters said Obamacare would make it “worse,” rather than “better,” by a margin of more than 2 to 1 (42% “worse,” to 20% “better”).

Are the 42% of swing-voters, who said that their family's healthcare situation would be made "worse" Obamacare, rather than “better," all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

By the overwhelming margin of 4 to 1 (76 to 19%), registered voters in these 12 states say that Obamacare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional. 

 

Are those 76% of registered voters in the 12 swing-states, who believe that the mandate is unconstitutional, all just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?

 

Nationwide (not just in the swing states), a clear majority of Democrats — 56% — agree that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. 

Are all 56% of the Democrats nationwide all of these people just "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law? 

And, now, The Greenies have joined the cause!

  

Candidates and leaders of the Green Party of the United States expressed hope that the Supreme Court will strike down the 'individual mandate' section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) when the court issues a ruling on its constitutionality in late March.

<Let's not forget, Cynthia McKinney ran on the Green ticket for President in 2008 so I think we can dismiss any racism there.   This might come as a shocker to the Obama Firsters, we hate the law, not the man.  We hate the individual mandate without a limiting principle.  Cynthia McKinney and I are in agreement on this subject.  Of course, I would never vote for her to be President.  No, the reasons have nothing to do with colour:

TOTALLY BATSHIT CRAZY: THE SIX MOST INSANE PEOPLE TO EVER RUN FOR PRESIDENT 

#6: CYNTHIA McKINNEY (If she is #6, just imagine who is on first).

   

Is the Green Party made up of "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate Obamacare because they "HATE THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law?  

And, we can't, of course, leave out labour.  That just wouldn't be fair.  So, take I'll turn it over to John Sweeney of the former AFL-CIO in 2006:

“Forcing uninsured workers to purchase health care coverage or face higher taxes and fines is the cornerstone of Mr. Gingrich’s health care reform proposals. And it is unconscionable that Massachusetts has adopted this misguided individual mandate.”

Are John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO made up of "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS," who only hate individual mandates because they are "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACISTS"?

And here we have the former Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean from December, 2009:

“This is not real reform.  You’re going to be forced to buy health insurance from a company that’s going to take on average 27 percent of your money so they can pay CEOs 20 million dollars a year…and there’s no choice about that. If you don’t buy that insurance, you’re going to get a fine. This is a bill that was fundamentally written by staffers who are friendly to the insurance industry, [endorsed] by Senators who take a lot of money from the insurance industry, and it’s not health care reform. And I think it’s too bad that it should come to this…I’d kill the bill entirely.”

Howard Dean: "Kill The Bill" Or We'll Lose Democrat Seats

 

And, then again:

“I do believe that it’s likely the individual mandate will be declared unconstitutional.  [Justice Anthony] Kennedy will probably side with the four right-wing justices. But I’d be very surprised if they — I think Kennedy will switch sides and it will be 5-4 in favor of severing that finding from the rest of the bill. The question is going to be, is this individual mandate question — can that be considered separately from the rest of the bill? And I think it will be.”  

- Howard Dean, 26 March 2012

Is Howard Dean a "WHITE, BIGOTED, CHRISTIAN, CONSERVATIVE RACIST," who only hates Obamacare because he "HATES THE BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE," who signed it into law? 

And lastly, President Obama attacked the Individual Mandate in 2008.

"Let’s break down what she really means by a mandate. What’s meant by a mandate is that the government is forcing people to buy health insurance and so she’s suggesting a parent is not going to buy health insurance for themselves if they can afford it. Now, my belief is that most parents will choose to get health care for themselves and we make it affordable.

Here’s the concern. If you haven’t made it affordable, how are you going to enforce a mandate. I mean, if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house. The reason they don’t buy a house is they don’t have the money. And so, our focus has been on reducing costs, making it available. I am confident if people have a chance to buy high-quality health care that is affordable, they will do so. That’s what our plan does and nobody disputes that."

-Senator Barack Obama

Obama repeated the same comment on CNN a few days later.

As President, Obama also expressed doubts about the consitutionality of the mandate, but was too impressed with the numbers it would generate as presented by his healthcare adviser, Nancy DeParle, according to Ron Suskind.

Is Barack Obama a WHITE, CONSERVATIVE RACIST?

The fact that I HATE Obamacare is not based in any race.  It is based in Freedom and the colour green -- we can't afford another out-of-control entitlement programme.   If it makes you feel any better, I hate MittMare (Mitt's Nightmare) in Massachssetts, too!  You can cheque out how poorly it is going here (scroll down to Update #1)

And, for all of those, who STILL believe that we loathe Obamacare because it was the signature legislation of Barack Obama, you know, the "black man living in the White House" that you frequently feel the need to remind us of, just keep on smoking that crack, girlfriend.  We would've hated HillaryCare.  We didn't like Heritage Foundation's mandates before they admitted their idiocy years ago. We hate MittCare.  We would've hated NewtCare.  Barack Obama could have been the direct grandchild of George Washington and as white as a bunny rabbit on Easter morning AND HIS HEALTHCARE LAW WOULD STILL BE HATED.

IT. HAS. NOTHING. TO. DO. WITH. RACE.

"I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl"

I want a little sugar
in my bowl
I want a little sweetness
down in my soul
I could stand some lovin'
Oh so bad
feel so lonely and I feel so sad

I want a little steam
on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up
so they'll go
Whatsa matter Daddy
Come on, save my soul
Drop a little sugar in my bowl
I ain't foolin'
Drop a little sugar in my bowl

Well I want a little sugar in my bowl
I want a little sweetness down in my soul
You been acting strangely
I've been told
Mooove me Daddy
I want some sugar in my bowl

I wanna loose steam
on my clothes
Maybe I can fix things up so they'll go
Whatsa matter Daddy
Come on save my soul
Droppa little sugar in my bowl
I ain't foolin'
Drop some sugaaar - yeah - in my bowl.

Related Reading:

Derrick Bell:  The Original OccupyWallStreeter?

Joel Pollak:  6; Soledad O'Brien:  O

Who Was Derrick Bell?  Radical Racialist, and Anti-Semite  

Did Obama Throw A Beer Summit?  

Wikipedia Caught Trying To Change "Critical Race Theory" Page   

Derrick A. Bell: Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory?

Professor Obama's Radical Syllabus

Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica

Barack Obama: "Scapegoat the Rich!" 

Racial Sunset

NPR: "Repeal Obamacare" Is Code For "White People Want Black People Hanging From Trees" Or Something

 

Jesse Jackson Uses Trayvon Martin’s Death to Restore the Plantation

To Jesse Jackson, Trayvon Martin’s an opportunity to promote his vision of American, which curiously is the same one held by antebellum slave owners.

To recap, George Zimmerman shot and killed Black teenager Trayvon Martin, claiming self-defense. Sanford, Florida police agreed, prompting “civil rights activists” like Jackson to protest. (Bryan Preston covers it here and here.)

Jackson wants to use this incident to repeal Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Curiously, Jackson didn’t protest when Black, self-employed roofing contractor Hygens Labidou defended himself against two white racists who called him a “N—-r” while trying to pull him from his truck and murder him. In that incident, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office stated:

“These two men approached him with a deadly weapon in an aggressive manner…Clearly, he was inside his vehicle, and he was clearly within his right to defend himself.”

(Retrieved from Miami Herald, December 19, 2007. No longer available online.)

Labidou’s story is important because Sanford police interviewed a witness who reported that Martin was on top of Zimmerman and beating Zimmerman when the shooting occurred. Curiously, Jackson didn’t mention this even though he claims he wants justice, which used to mean innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sanford police say Zimmerman was bloody in his face and head, and the back of his shirt was wet and had grass stains, indicating a struggle took place before the shooting.

Jackson claims “Blacks are under attack.” But Labidou successfully repelled an attack because he was armed.

Anti-rights extremists like Jackson want America disarmed because so many people die of “gun violence.”

Jackson is either ignorant–or supportive–of what historically was one of the most brutally racist agendas to keep Blacks enslaved via terror: gun control. (I cover this in chapter 1 of Four Hundred Years of Gun Control.)

Jackson is also ignorant–or intentionally working against Black civil rights–by refusing to acknowledge that gun control remains racist: States with the most gun control have the highest rates of Black homicide.

Meet the new Uncle Tom: Jesse Jackson.

The Year Of Vengeance: How Neighbours Turned On Each Other As Anarchy Erupted In Europe In Aftermath Of WWII (Photo Essay)

 

Humiliated: A French woman accused of sleeping with Germans has her head shaved by neighbors in a village near Marseilles

 

By Dominic Sandbrook

Just imagine living in a world in which law and order have broken down completely: a world in which there is no authority, no rules and no sanctions.

In the bombed-out ruins of Europe’s cities, feral gangs scavenge for food. Old men are murdered for their clothes, their watches or even their boots. Women are mercilessly raped, many several times a night.

Neighbour turns on neighbour; old friends become deadly enemies. And the wrong surname, even the wrong accent, can get you killed.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares. But for hundreds of millions of Europeans, many of them now gentle, respectable pensioners, this was daily reality in the desperate months after the end of World War II.

 

Two Frenchmen train guns on a collaborator who kneels against a wooden fence with his hands raise while another cocks an arm to hit him, Rennes, France, in late August 1944

In Britain we remember the great crusade against the Nazis as our finest hour. But as the historian Keith Lowe shows in an extraordinary, disturbing and powerful new book, Savage Continent, it is time we thought again about the way the war ended.

For millions of people across the Continent, he argues, VE Day marked not the end of a bad dream, but the beginning of a new nightmare. In central Europe, the Iron Curtain was already descending; even in the West, the rituals of recrimination were being played out.

This is a story not of redemption but of revenge. And far from being ‘Zero Hour’, as the Germans call it, May 1945 marked the beginning of a terrible descent into anarchy.

Of course World War II was that rare thing, a genuinely moral struggle against a terrible enemy who had plumbed the very depths of human cruelty. But precisely because we in Britain escaped the shame and trauma of occupation, we rarely reflect on what happened next.

After years of bombing and bloodshed, much of Europe was physically and morally broken. Indeed, to contemplate the costs of war in Germany alone is simply mind-boggling.

Across the shattered remains of Hitler’s Reich, some 20 million people were homeless, while 17 million ‘displaced persons’, many of them former PoWs and slave labourers, were roaming the land.

Half of all houses in Berlin were in ruins; so were seven out of ten of those in Cologne.

Not all the Germans who survived the war had supported Hitler. But in the vast swathes of his former empire conquered by Stalin’s Red Army, the terrible vengeance of the victors fell on them all, irrespective of their past record.

In the little Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, the first German territory to fall to the Russians, every single man, woman and child was brutally murdered. ‘I will spare you the description of the mutilations and the ghastly condition of the corpses,’ a Swiss war correspondent told his readers.

‘These are impressions that go beyond even the wildest imagination.’

Near the East Prussian city of Königsberg — now the Russian city of Kaliningrad — the bodies of dead woman, who had been raped and then butchered, littered the roads. And in Gross Heydekrug, writes Keith Lowe, ‘a woman was crucified on the altar cross of the local church, with two German soldiers similarly strung up on either side’.

Many Russian historians still deny accounts of the atrocities. But the evidence is overwhelming.

Across much of Germany, Lowe explains, ‘thousands of women were raped and then killed in an orgy of truly medieval violence’.

But the truth is that medieval warfare was nothing like as savage as what befell the German people in 1945. Wherever the Red Army came, women were gang-raped in their thousands.

One woman in Berlin, caught hiding behind a pile of coal, recalled being raped by ‘twenty-three soldiers one after the other. I had to be stitched up in hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again’.

Of course it is easy to say that the Germans, having perpetrated some of the most appalling atrocities in human history on the Eastern Front, had brought their suffering on themselves. Even so, no sane person could possibly read Lowe’s book without a shudder of horror.

Are we more immune to the atrocities that occurred after the war ended on the continent because we did not suffer the indignity and pain of occupation? 

German refugees, civilians and soldiers, crowd platforms of the Berlin train station after being driven from Poland and Czechoslovakia following the defeat of Germany by Allied forces

The truth is that World War II, which we remember as a great moral campaign, had wreaked incalculable damage on Europe’s ethical sensibilities. And in the desperate struggle for survival, many people would do whatever it took to get food and shelter.

In Allied-occupied Naples, the writer Norman Lewis watched as local women, their faces identifying them as ‘ordinary well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping housewives’, lined up to sell themselves to young American GIs for a few tins of food.

Another observer, the war correspondent Alan Moorehead, wrote that he had seen ‘the moral collapse’ of the Italian people, who had lost all pride in their ‘animal struggle for existence’.

Amid the trauma of war and occupation, the bounds of sexual decency had simply collapsed. In Holland one American soldier was propositioned by a 12-year-old girl. In Hungary scores of 13-year-old girls were admitted to hospital with venereal disease; in Greece, doctors treated VD-infected girls as young as ten.

What was more, even in those countries liberated by the British and Americans, a deep tide of hatred swept through national life.

Everybody had come out of the war with somebody to hate.

In northern Italy, some 20,000 people were summarily murdered by their own countrymen in the last weeks of the war. And in French town squares, women accused of sleeping with German soldiers were stripped and shaved, their breasts marked with swastikas while mobs of men stood and laughed. Yet even today, many Frenchmen pretend these appalling scenes never happened.

Her head shaved by angry neighbours, a tearful Corsican woman is stripped naked and taunted for consorting with German soldiers during their occupation

It is easy to say that the Germans, having perpetrated some of the most appalling atrocities in human history, had brought their suffering on themselves

The general rule, though, was that the further east you went, the worse the horror became.

In Prague, captured German soldiers were ‘beaten, doused in petrol and burned to death’. In the city’s sports stadium, Russian and Czech soldiers gang-raped German women.

In the villages of Bohemia and Moravia, hundreds of German families were brutally butchered. And in Polish prisons, German inmates were drowned face down in manure, and one man reportedly choked to death after being forced to swallow a live toad.

Yet at the time, many people saw this as just punishment for the Nazis’ crimes. Allied leaders refused to discuss the atrocities, far less condemn them, because they did not want to alienate public support.

‘When you chop wood,’ the future Czech president, Antonin Zapotocky, said dismissively, ‘the splinters fly.’

It is to Lowe’s great credit that he resists the temptation to sit in moral judgment. None of us can know how we would have behaved under similar circumstances; it is one of the great blessings of British history that, despite our sacrifice to beat the Nazis, our national experience was much less traumatic than that of our neighbours.

It is also true that repellent as we might find it, the desire for revenge was both instinctive and understandable — especially in those terrible places where the Nazis had slaughtered so many innocents. So it is  shocking, but not altogether surprising, to read that when the Americans liberated the Dachau death camp, a handful of GIs lined up scores of German guards and simply machine-gunned them. 

We in Britain are right to be proud of our record in the war. Yet it is time that we faced up to some of the unsettling moral ambiguities of those bloody, desperate years

By any standards this was a war crime; yet who among us can honestly say we would have behaved differently?

Lowe notes how ‘a very small number’ of Jewish prisoners wreaked a bloody revenge on their former captors.

Such claims, inevitably, are deeply controversial. When the veteran American war correspondent John Sack, himself Jewish, wrote a book about it in the 1990s, he was accused of Holocaust denial and his publishers cancelled the contract.

Yet after the liberation of Theresienstadt camp, one Jewish man saw a mob of ex-inmates beating an SS man to death, and such scenes were not uncommon across the former Reich. ‘We all participated,’ another Jewish camp inmate, Szmulek Gontarz, remembered years later. ‘It was sweet. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t do more.’

Meanwhile, across great swathes of Eastern Europe, German communities who had lived quietly for centuries were being driven out. Some had blood on their hands; many others, though, were blameless. But they could not have paid a higher price for the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s imperial ambitions.

In the months after the war ended, a staggering 7 million Germans were driven out of Poland, another 3 million from Czechoslovakia and almost 2 million more from other central European countries, often in appalling conditions of hunger, thirst and disease.

Joyous: When we picture the end of the war, we imagine crowds in central London, cheering and singing

Today this looks like ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Yet at the time, conscious of all they had endured under the Nazi jackboot, Polish and Czech politicians saw the expulsions as ‘the least worst’ way to avoid another war.

Indeed, this ethnic savagery was not confined to the Germans. In eastern Poland and western Ukraine, rival nationalists carried out an undeclared war of horrifying brutality, raping and slaughtering women and children and forcing almost 2 million people to leave their homes.

What these men wanted was not, in the end, so different from Hitler’s own ambitions: an ethnically homogenous national fatherland, cleansed of the last taints of foreign contamination.

In 1947, in an enterprise nicknamed Operation Vistula, the Poles rounded up their remaining Ukrainian citizens and deported them to the far west of the country, which had formerly been part of Germany. There they were settled in deserted towns, whose old inhabitants had themselves been deported to West Germany.

It was, Lowe writes, ‘the final act in a racial war begun by Hitler, continued by Stalin and completed by the Polish authorities’.

To their immense credit, the Poles have had the courage to face up to what happened all those years ago. Indeed, ten years ago the Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, publicly apologised for Operation Vistula.

Yet the supreme irony of the war is that in Poland, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, VE Day marked the end of one tyranny and the beginning of another. 

Justifiable: Conscious of all they had endured under the Nazi jackboot, Polish and Czech politicians saw the expulsion of Germans as 'the least worst' way to avoid another war

Here in Britain, we too often forget that although we went to war to save Poland, we actually ended it by allowing Poland to fall under Stalin’s cruel despotism.

Perhaps we had no choice; there was no appetite for a war with the Russians in 1945, and we were exhausted in any case. Yet not everybody was prepared to accept surrender so meekly.

In one of the final chapters in Lowe’s deeply moving book, he reminds us that between 1944 and 1950 some 400,000 people were involved in anti-Soviet resistance activities in Ukraine.

What was more, in the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which Stalin had brutally absorbed into the Soviet Union, tens of thousands of nationalist guerillas known as the Forest Brothers struggled vainly for their independence, even fighting pitched battles against the Red Army and attacking government buildings in major cities.

We think of the Cold War in Europe as a stalemate. Yet as late as 1965, Lithuanian partisans were still fighting gun battles with the Soviet police, while the last Estonian resistance fighter, the 69-year-old August Sabbe, was not killed until 1978, more than 30 years after the World War II had supposedly ended.

We in Britain are right to be proud of our record in the war. Yet it is time, as this book shows, that we faced up to some of the unsettling moral ambiguities of those bloody, desperate years.

When we picture the end of the war, we imagine crowds in central London, cheering and singing.

We rarely think of the terrible suffering and slaughter that marked most Europeans’ daily lives at that time.

But almost 70 years after the end of the conflict, it is time we acknowledged the hidden realities of perhaps the darkest chapter in all human history.

Savage Continent: Europe In The Aftermath Of World War II by Keith Lowe is published by Viking at £25. To order a copy for £20 (p&p free), call 0843 382 0000.

Photo Essay Links - Page I