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24 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
"It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest … There is no substitute for victory" - letter from Douglas MacArthur, read on the floor of the House, 5 April 1951
MacArthur was entirely correct that Truman's Europe-focused strategy and his limited war aims in Korea misunderstood the Communist menace. Shame MacArthur was not heeded.
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More from @KyleWOrton

Kyle Orton Profile picture
24 Oct
Avrom Sutzkever was sworn in as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials on 27 FEB 1946. Sutzkever was the only Jew to testify, despite the centrality of the Holocaust to the charge-sheet, and he had to testify in Russian (he was a Soviet witness), despite wanting to speak in Yiddish.
Sutzkever had said ten days earlier: "I want to speak in Yiddish … I wish to speak in the language of the people whom the accused attempted to exterminate. I wish to speak our mameloshn [mother tongue]. … May my language triumph at Nuremberg"
Sutzkever had been in Lithuania when the Soviets took it over with a Nazi green-light and was still there and interred in a ghetto when Stalin's allies betrayed him before he was ready. Sutzkever escaped in 1943, reached Soviet lines, and became a Partisan.
Read 8 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
22 Oct
"Many of the NKVD ... personnel decorated during the [Second World] War received their medals not for valor against the enemy, but for crimes against humanity", including deporting entire nations within the Soviet Union and terrorising captive populations into submission.
"The Sword and the Shield", p. 102
Soviet official history gave a lot of credit to spies like the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) for their success on the Eastern Front, but the real turning point was after the Rote Kapelle was rolled up by the Nazis, and came about due to British and American SIGINT passed to Moscow ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
29 Sep
#Russia's civil war was to all intents and purposes over by autumn 1919, though the main phase of fighting only ended a year later. A pocket of resistance against the Bolsheviks held out until June 1923, however <Thread>
The defeat of #Denikin's offensive on Moscow in the west and #Kolchak's offensive from the east in late 1919 ended any serious threat to the Bolsheviks. Kolchak was murdered in FEB 1920 and the remnants of Denikin's Army, now under #Wrangel, evacuated from Crimea in NOV 1920.
In Sept. 1921, Yakutia rose in revolt and a Volunteer Army commander, Mikhail Korobeinikov took the lead, expanding the pocket, and in March 1922 announced the establishment of an interim administration, the "Provisional Yakut Regional People's Government".
Read 13 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
28 Sep
During the trial of the final #Nazi defendant at Nuremberg, Hans Fritzsche, the #Soviet prosecutor brought up Fritzsche's radio broadcast justifying the attack on Poland. Fritzsche responded: it had been "a matter of great satisfaction" that the Soviet press said the same thing.
#pt: from Francine Hirsch's wonderful book, "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" (2020), pp. 322-23.
Hans Fritzsche was only on trial at Nuremberg in the first place because the Soviets demanded it as a substitute for Goebbels. Everyone understood that Fritzsche just did not measure up in terms of responsibility to the other Nazis being tried.
Read 7 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
27 Sep
Great piece by @Levitt_Matt: "The Assad Regime’s Business Model for Supporting the Islamic State" lawfareblog.com/assad-regimes-…
One of the first things I wrote in 2014, and kept updated for a while as a rolling compilation of evidence, at a time when it was regarded as something of a conspiracy theory: "The Assad Regime's Collusion With ISIS and al-Qaeda: Assessing The Evidence" kyleorton.co.uk/2014/03/24/ass…
Wrote about this a couple of times since then:

"Provocation and the Islamic State: Why Assad Strengthened the Jihadists" kyleorton.co.uk/2014/09/03/pro…

"Partners in Terror: The Assad Regime and the Islamic State" kyleorton.co.uk/2016/03/10/par…
Read 8 tweets
Kyle Orton Profile picture
15 Sep
In Sept. 1971, the KGB's Oleg Lyalin defected from the London Embassy and told the British government about the really alarming (and some quite bizarre) "special actions" the Soviets had been planning on the West, precipitating the mass expulsion Soviet spies in Operation FOOT.
The interesting thing is that this meant the West was quite well aware, from near the beginning of Andropov's renewed campaign, that Soviet terrorism was a very real phenomenon, and yet down to the end most in the West considered it a "conspiracy theory"
The KGB recruitment of Wadi Haddad of the PFLP in 1970 was the turning point: his Palestinian group was given weapons that even Eastern Bloc states hadn't received and given tasks as various as kidnapping CIA officers and assassinating Soviet defectors.
Read 7 tweets

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