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This is what you can expect of the ndp and certain other strains of less than loyal or courageous Canadian inteligensia.
What do you expect from a group whose greatest persons are the ole Rub and Tug taliban Jack and his social housing scamming wife.
Yep,the NDP sure distinguished themselves with that comment yesterday. Just one of many reasons they will never get my vote.
Slime always comes to the surface.
Great timing, at least.
Take a statement out of a 2007 blog and release it on the anniversary of Vimy Ridge.
Take a bow, Sun news.
You’re throwing the enemy’s tactics back in their faces.
The true colors of the NDP finally out in the open. I see white hot anger at his assertion that the communists are peaceful. Tell that to dozens of my relatives killed by these scum, and to the victims of the attempts by the Bolsheviks to create revolution in other countries, such as Hungary, Poland, Germany, during 1918-20.
NDP shows its true colors. They are all like that. Empty headed socialists eager to smear anything of value to its enemy.
No serious historian would make such an uninformed statement, on the causes and resultant ends of WWI. The realistic approach to the conflict has filled volumes and a ‘reductio ad absurdum’ is hardly the last word on the subject.
The proposition that WWI can be reduced to mere class warfare concepts hurtled out of the Russian Revolution is hardly a serious attempt at a studied analysis.
Perhaps the unlearned member should consult some real historians, like say Jack Granatstein or Sir Martin Gilbert and he may make some more intelligible statements; particularly on a day like the anniversary of Vimy Ridge.
The statement is grossly erroneous; and as a descendant of the dreaded HUNS is plain stupid.
The proposition that the communists of all people, were somehow peace loving flower children from day one, fly’s in the face of texts like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” which documents the grotesque killing of some 60 millions since the inception of Russian Revolution. The unlearned member is behaving in a grotesque manner and should be admonished as such.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Remember, at that time the commies were to busy overthrowing their first attempt at democracy and starting the slaughter of millions of their countrymen. Of course they couldn’t be bothered. Someone should tesch the ndp what their brothers in arms were doing.
Aside from his “Marxist” comments, I agree with the comments in so far as WWI was a STUPID waste of humanity. What purpose did it serve besides preparing Europe for an even worse (but justified) conflagration in WWII.
When the Dips turfed legitimate trade unionism and lower middle class interests from their caucus and agenda, and replaced it with the transnational collectivist radicalism of the public sector unionists who finance them, they lost touch with Canada and Canadians. They are now, for all intent and purpose, Globalists – pimping the agenda of global collectivism via the myriad of special interest NGOs from that fortress of global socialism/communism the UN.
Dipper policy is UN-world bank policy. Dipper economics are IMF global monopoly economics. Dipper policy comes from foreign globalist think tanks. Dipper agendas are UN agendas, – not Canada’s, not Canadian’s and not in our better interests as a sovereign nation-state.
Anyone who is past 35 and still a partisan NDP supporter/voter is either an aggressive technocrat looking for power and sinecure, a malicious authoritarian waiting for the police state to expand, a avaricious and treasonous public sector unionist engaged in institutional destabilization or a crony capitalist looking for government partnership/monopoly – in any event, they are the farthest thing from a working class trade union worker you can get. The NDP reflex voter (the zombie who waits to park his vote when he enters a polling booth)is a useful idiot who has drunk the zombie koolaid spread by affluent public sector union money, that the NDP are still the party of the “little guy” – no greater lie has been propagated in partisan politics. My how the NDP has taken to the corrupting special interest dollar once they shed their worker’s cloths for the slick 3 piece suit of the globalist kleptocrat. If they ever form a federal government this nation will be pillaged and sold to the transnational credit wolves in less than 4 years.
NDP = Transnational Globalism + International Financial monopolists. There is nothing for “the little guy” in that political alignment.
A ptiched battle like Vimy Ridge just isn’t the socialist way. They’d rather send thugs to an innocent’s house at two o’clock in the morning, torture them in a dark basement, then herd those innocents together in a gulag where they can be worked, beaten and starved to death. Armed opposition would send the ndp cowards scurrying for the protection of real men, like the ones they love to dump on from the safety of the democratic nations those men built.
SYF said: “Take a statement out of a 2007 blog and release it on the anniversary of Vimy Ridge.”
That’s the thing about the Intertubes though, right? Once you say something, its there forever and ever. And you’re right, the NDPee and their fellow travelers have made an art form of taking people out of context and viewing with alarm things said in jest. So its simple justice to have this NDP twerp’s disgusting views unearthed from 2007 and taken on parade in 2013 for the anniversary of the battle.
Most of the NDP apparatchiks and hangers-on that I’ve met over the years are genuinely frightening in their level of commitment to things which are obviously crazy, like the $20/hr minimum wage, windmills and gun bans. Some of them think both property and profit should be outlawed entirely, and they are cheered on.
Therefore any opportunity to expose that basic insanity is a public service. Its not even a smear. Telling people what a guy voluntarily said in public is just a bit of pointing and laughing. Pointing and laughing at the NDPee Clown Brigade is always good.
So would you have preferred the Kaiser and the Junkers dominating Europe instead of democratic governments? WWI was every bit as much about resisting tyranny as WWII was. And if you think that somehow the Kaiser’s Germany was more significantly more benign than Nazi Germany, you might do a bit of reading. In particular something called Case Black, which was Germany’s plan for war with the United States after the war in Europe had been settled.
Was the war a tragic waste of lives? Yes. Does that negate the necessity of fighting it at all? No. WWII was only a necessity if the PEACE, not the WAR, was botched by the victorious allies. The soldiers won the war, the politicians lost the peace. Please try to understand the difference.
jack said: “I agree with the comments in so far as WWI was a STUPID waste of humanity.”
If you think that’s true, then have a little read of history about the German and Ottoman empires. Consider what would have happened if they’d been allowed to do whatever they wanted in Europe. Run the thought experiment through and see if you like the result that pops out the other end.
Frankly I think it would have been a catastrophe that would make WWI -and- WWII look like a couple of garden parties. So I’m just as glad my Grandfather joined up to the First Canadian Contingent and merrily blew up Gerry until he was so seriously wounded he had to bribe somebody to stick him on the hospital train. He certainly thought it was worth it, wounds and all.
War is always ugly. Sometimes less ugly than the alternative. Consider North Korea as a case in point.
Hey Guys, go easy on Jack. He’s obviously a product of the same public education system that I went through! They teach that WW1 was nothing but a mass, collective stupidity. Hell, they don’t even teach much more nuance in university level history courses, which I also know a thing or two about — basically, if a war does not obviously fit into the Marxist who/whom, oppressor/oppressed, evil imperialism/heroic resistance framework then it must’ve been motivated by… iunno… rednecks or racists or something. Which is why we have to take the fighting out of hockey – it’s a dangerous training ground in ethnic/national chauvinism.
My relatives were in the Canadian Army in WWI and a great uncle died. WWI was a ridiculous waste of life and there was no moral high ground. In an accident of history, through no existence until 1870, Germany was the most homogenous and least imperialist of all the participants. I am not sure that the hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia that the UK ruled would have placed the British on a higher moral plane than the Germans. We can appreciate the deeds of our soldiers as honourable but it was a needless stupid war, the results of which have kept us repeatedly at war for 100 years.
Scar: I’ll second that one.
Yeah well, anybody who thinks they understand it…has not been properly briefed.
It has been long accepted that the War of Northern Aggression was the first modern war….where railways were first a signifigant factor.
WW1 reflected this although the Franco-Prussian War displayed aspects of Industrial influence. One could say that Krupp’s development of fabricating massive pieces of quality steel were a factor.
From a purely tactical standpoint…the Battle Of Vimy Ridge was a turning point. The Canadian battle plan laid the foundation for the Battle of Amiens which in turn lead to final victory. Combined operations…Blitzkeig.
However at this point in time, the salient point is the valour of our ancestors. It is worthy to note that the Vimy Memorial emerged undamaged from WW2. Guarded by Waffen SS…on direct order of the Fueher.
My comment “stupid waste of humanity” re WWI primarily has to do with tactics and technology – sending 100’s of thousands “over the top” into machine gun fire is INSANITY however you cut it. I don’t care what your politics on the matter is. If it had happened for six months or a year, followed by a tactical change I could accept that. But the idiots that were in charge couldn’t see past their tradition, views of valour or military training.
“If it had happened for six months or a year, followed by a tactical change I could accept that.”
The British introduced tanks in 1916. Fact is, they were a notable failure. It wasn’t until the fall of 1917 at Cambrai that they managed to figure out the proper conditions for their use. The Germans developed the artillery deluge in 1915 against the Russians which the British and French copied. Its success was limited to say the least. The Germans tried poison gas, so did the Allies. They tried underground mining. They tried increased patrol activities. They developed loose order infantry tactics.
Both sides spent just about every waking minute trying to find a way around the tactical deadlock. Nothing worked. The technology of WWII simply did not exist.
What else do you want them to try?
Why is there no major movie about Vimy Ridge? How many decades and billions have been squandered producing “Canadian Content” that nobody wants to watch? How about we take $100 million out of the CBC budget this year to make a very good, very historically accurate Vimy Ridge movie that people all over the world will want to watch?
My grandfather fought at Vimy Ridge too bad he and his army buddies couldn’t get 15 minutes alone with this POS
I can recommend Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900” (London: Weidenfild and Nicolson, 2006). A couple of little tidbits of relevance to this discussion (Roberts categorizes “Prussian Militarism” as the first of four major assaults on the English-speaking peoples during the twentieth century — the others being Nazism, Communism and Islamic extremism):
– p. 128: “Only 4.7% of men eligible from Quebec volunteered by 1917…compared with 15.%% of those from western Canada and 14.4% from Ontario. (This despite the fact that the war was being fought largely to protect metropolitan France).”
– p. 132: “A wide-ranging French report entitled “The Black Book of Communism”, published in 1999, put the numbers killed by Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian and all other communist regimes in the twentieth century at 100 million people.”
– p. 141: “Whilst is is easy, and indeed understandable, to mourn the extinction of the Habsburg, Romanov and certainly the Ottoman Empires, no such sympathy can really be extended to the Hohenzollern one. The true nature of the Kaiser can be discerned in the letters and especially the proto-Nazi postcards he sent from his exile in Doorn…’Democracy=Bolshevism!’…’The Hebrew race…are the most inveterate enemies at home and abroad…forgers of lies and the masterminds governing unrest, revolution, upheaval by spreading infamy with the help of their poisoned caustic, satyrical spirit. If the world wakes up it should mete out to them the punishment in store for them, which they deserve.’…’For such infernal criminals a sound, regular, international, all world’s Pogrom a la Russe would be the best cure.'”
In any event, this story is just another building block in our understanding of the alternative universe inhabited by the NDP. “Not ready for prime time” is the understatement of the current age; Ed Broadbent complaining that Tom Mulcair is a third-way figure of the Tony Blair sort is theatre of the absurd.
JERK.
After the Battle of the Somme (WWI), Canada was in desperate need to replenish its supply of soldiers; however, there were very few volunteers to replace them. The recruiting effort in Quebec had failed, and Canada turned to its only unused option: conscription.
Almost all French Canadians opposed conscription: they felt that they had no particular loyalty to either Britain or France. Led by Henri Bourassa, they felt their only loyalty was to Quebec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C…
Has very much changed with maudits Quebecois like Bouleric? I’m truly sick of their taking advantage of the ROC — including my grandfathers’ risking their lives in WWI for these ingrates and wastrels — and daring to criticize the war effort that saved their sorry asses.
My Canada doesn’t necessarily include Quebec — especially those who support and agree with New Democrat MP Alexandre Bouleric.
Merde!
I’m angry.
Not just in Candad, US Army brands Catholics and Evangelical CHristians as extremists.
Tank tank.
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/lawmakers-want-army-to-apologize-for-attacks-on-christians.html
What can one expect of a traitor? This is their reason to live. The destruction of even the founding of our Nation. Its varied institutions. Mocking God. The Family. Law, along with fair courts. All for their own puny ego’s connected with a systematic political killing machine.
Communists are the termites in the house of liberty.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/w1frm.htm
Well, scratch an NDPer and half the time you’ll find a communist, and this guy has demonstrated he is hard-core. The fact that this slimy little worm had the effrontery to essentially mock the sacrifices in an unfortune war in which Canada alone lost nearly 65,000 trroops is nothing short of outrageous.
Someone, whose name I cannot recall, described the British (read Commonwealth instead) troops were incredibly brave men led by idiots. History seems to have demonstrated that was true, but it doesn’t mean the war itself was uneccessary.
Every once ina while, I’ll read a news item and wish that the person making the statements in question was in front of me in order that I could punch him into unconsciousness. This is one those times.
It is worth noting that about 3600 Canadian troops were killed at Vimy, which by the standards of WW I is light. For instance, the French army lost about 120,000 in its attempts to take Vimy Ridge.
Whatever the standards of leadership were in general (I have seen Haig called a bloody butcher) the Canadian forces at Vimy were well led, by Sir Arthur Currie and Sir Julian Byng.
Wikipedia has this photo of Byng from during the battle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Julian_Byng_(April_1917).jpg
John, well said. I am familiar with Currie’s history, not so much with Byng. I have to remind myself that generalized statements are often unfair….I was thinking more of a number of the British commanders who, according to the records, were novices in terms of military tactics, having simply purchased their commissions, and sent their troops to unnecessary slaughter.
Yes, stupid waste of humanity. Those Generals deserved to be hung.
The problem the generals had was that their previous experience had misled them greatly about what the war would be like. In August 1914, they thought in terms of wars of maneuver. This was what the Franco-Prussian War had been like in 1870.
What no one envisaged was what was essentially siege warfare on a front hundreds of miles long. And the reason for that was that ALL European powers ignored what had happened in the American Civil War. That one started out as a Napoleonic style war of maneuver, but by the fall of 1864 at the siege of Petersburg it degenerated into trench warfare with machine guns, trenches, barbed wire and all the other trimmings.
The Europeans ignored it because as far as they were concerned the Americans were a bunch of amateurs who didn’t know what they were doing. (Which was in large part true. The Americans had their own share of bloody slaughters. For sheer incompetence, Ambrose Burnside’s Battle of the Crater is nearly unprecedented in human history.) And the Franco-Prussian War appeared to confirm that the Europeans were right.
It was a mistake that would cost them dreadfully 50 years later.
Think of this: enough people voted for this dickhead to get him elected.
What do you think the IQ of anybody who would vote for a tit like him would be?
Above, or below that of a McGuinty supporter?
cgh: You are dead right. And Vimy proved your point. Currie and his staff meticulously over a number of weeks debriefed the French as to their previous experiences in their attempts to take the ridge, and they learned valuable lessons. They came up with this brilliant plan of using light artillery, apparently 1400 guns, to establish a massive rolling barrage just 100 yards ahead of the troops, while using the heavier pieces to take out strategic positions. Unless I am mistaken, I believe that the concept of a progressive rolling barrage was a new idea. By anyone’s account, the tactics used to take Vimy were brilliant.
I am positive that the planning process that went into the Vimy operation are still probably subject of case studies at various military colleges, simply to demonstrate how effective planning can lead to success.
Sorry,they spent the money that should have gone to “Vimy” on another movie,called ,”Jack”.
It was apparently about another type of hero.
There, arguably, was more of a moral imperative in the Second World War than in the First World War. Was the First World War a waste of humanity? Quite. How many Newfoundlanders were killed in one battle alone? The Australians have a very definite view of the value of the First World War. Nevertheless, the Kaiser had to be stopped. Alexandre Boulerice’s comments were not borne of serious academic study or even disgust but of juvenile flirtation with Marxism. The “good communists” withdrew from the “unjust” war only to put all their energies into killing their own population. Is that bloodbath better than Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele or Ypres?
Bruce, I believe you nailed it.
First, I believe a Canadian Artillery general developed a method of plotting the German artillery locations which took a toll on the German artillery defending Vimy. I can’t remember his name. I also believe that both Currie and this other general had risen from Militia ranks and were not hidebound by orthodox military doctrine.
Then it was Currie’s rolling artillery barrage just in front of the troops that did a lot of damage to the German trenches and made them keep their heads down. At the same time, the Canadians copied the storm troop tactics that Irwin Rommel, I think a major at the time, developed on the Eastern Front and used the storm assault methods to crack strong points.
The storm troop methods were used successfully by the Wehrmacht in WW II, and the rolling barrage was copied by all forces in WW II. After the war, the German Reichswehr realized the significance of the tank, as did the British General Fuller (?). I also believe that an American realized the power that air forces could wield.
I am open to corrections where I have erred.
As a general statement, most generals always prepare to fight the previous war, and WW I was no different, but the killing tools had been developed to a degree that troops advancing in huge formations in the open were slaughtered. The American civil war should have woken them up, but generally it takes major blunders to shift military doctrine.
It was generals like Currie that if given a chance win battles and wars.
That being said, WW I was indeed a slaughter and we are still paying for the peace terms struck in 1919.
scar also had it right @ 2:28. WW I began to be brewed when Bismarck united Germany in the 1860s.
I will add to my post @ 10:04. There are too many filthy Marxists like this fellow that have infiltrated our high schools and universities for decades now. We wonder why there are so many anarchists running around chipping away at liberal democracy.
“Alexandre Boulerice’s comments were not borne of serious academic study or even disgust but of juvenile flirtation with Marxism.”
Maybe, but how about simple shame?
I mean, when it came to supplying combat troops to stop Kaiser Bill or Hitler, Quebec’s contribution from les habitants ranked slightly ahead of the Vatican and Iceland.
It’s the most natural thing in the world to lash out at institutions that constantly remind you of your failures. Especially moral failures.
Trudeau had the same disease. Couldn’t stand the military because it was a constant reminder of his lonely days and nights spent behind trees.
Bruce, all true your comment. Just a few additional nuances. The British and French had tried to achieve this sort of thing earlier. The weaknesses were always in co-ordinating the infantry and the artillery. Currie and his staff solved this. Currie also had a very large field engineering component built into the plant in a co-ordinated way; this too had been missing from previous such set-piece battles.
Much has been made of the Canadian success in suppressing German artillery prior to the battle. In large part this was the result of much better aerial observation techniques and technology than was available in 1916 or earlier.
And to prove it was no fluke the Canadian Army would continue to use this kind of detailed planning for the remaining 18 months of the war. It was Currie and the Canadians who took Passchendaele, and Currie predicted precisely just what it would cost and how long it would take. It was the Canadian Corps which spearheaded the British armies for much of 1918 during the great summer offensive. And if you think Vimy was great, the Canadians crossing of the Canal du Nord under Currie was one of the most spectacular feats of the war. Currie’s methods of careful planning worked just as well during the relatively mobile phase of the 1918 summer offensive as it had during the trench warfare period.
Arthur Currie is without question the greatest fighting general Canada has ever produced.
Jamie, I would like to agree with you but I can’t. These people are shameless in this regard. Their hostility to the military doesn’t come from a sense of shame over their own personal failures. It comes from the progressive liberal pathology.
Progressives and communists have one very important difference. Progressives believe that all the world’s problems can be solved if we talk things over. That reason can always prevail. Hence, to their view, military establishments of any kind are always anachronisms. Primitive thinking, say the progressives, that has no place in a modern, rational society. You see this all the time in modern times, just as it existed in the 19th century. The answer to North Korea’s threats of war? Negotiate. Nuclear weapon threats of annihilation from Iran? Negotiate.
This is why progressivism and communism must never be confused. The communists are not nearly so naive. Communism correctly sees social and political change coming about through conflict, not despite it as the progressives believe.
It was this kind of progressive thinking which led Chamberlain to meet with Hitler at Munich. It was this kind of progressive thinking which convinced Washington to believe that, contrary to any evidence, Japan would never attack. What is even more astonishing is that we keep trying this progressive strategy even though appeasement has failed every single time in human history to solve differences between peoples and nations. We tried giving North Korea two nuclear power reactors in the 1990s as a bribe to end their weapons program. Israel has repeatedly surrendered land after 1973. The Romans tried bribing the Goths. Alaric took the money and went to Rome anyway.
This is why Trudeau and Axworthy and the rest are so truly dangerous. Not because of any moral deficiency, but because their understanding of human society was so utterly blinkered.
“a purely capitalist war on the backs of the workers and peasants.”
It wasn’t?
Very well said. I had never looked at this in the way you differentiate between progressives and communists. As you say, communists are always quite willing to use military force to export revolution, and there is more than enough evidence of that in the 20th century to indict the whole movement.
Alaric was not alone in deceiving the Romans. The Cheruscan nobleman Arminius also took money from the Romans as an allied Auxiliary commander and led his commander, the Legate Varus into an ambush and slaughtered three Legions and other auxiliaries. Which of the groups around the world that we are funding will turn on us at some point?
There are no “capitalist wars”. The notion that the individual belongs to the state and can at times be sent off to invade his neighbours is a socialist one. Always.
As for the Communists, they have been responsible for plenty of butchery inside and outside of war over the past century, as Boulerice and everyone else surely knows.
I want to live in the alternate universe where WWII ended after nuking the Kremlin while cleaning the globe of various commies and where “socialist” carries the same connotation as “nazi”.
There’s a very simple solution to morons like this – give them a one way ticket to N. Korea. Obviously the type of people he prefers to be around. I’m sure there are a lot of other solutions to dealing with his kind most of which involve 15 minutes in a deserted dark alley and steel toed boots.
“Their hostility to the military doesn’t come from a sense of shame over their own personal failures. It comes from the progressive liberal pathology.”
Well, I think we’re making the same points from different angles. A symptom of Progressive Liberal pathology is progressive (regressive?) cowardice. So it’s not just personal failures, but a moral failing of the culture and its institutions to do the ‘right’ thing.
Lefties like Boulerice have long made a practice of standing on the wrong side of nearly every issue, and apologia for evil is commonplace among them.