He mentions Chris Patton who I think, on balance, is a good guy and Lady Jay (James Callaghan’s daughter) whose husband, Peter, I also consider good guy. I used to watch him present Weekend World fifty years ago.
I guess it"s just age, but it seems to me that back then there were far more serious, considered and trustworthy people in the public eye. People that were worth listening to. Now there’s unlimited dross like Johnson, Hancock, Hunt, Farage, Sunak, Truss, Patel, Braverman, Shapps, etc. most (if not all) of the Republican party etc. People. have nothing but contempt for. There are just so many of them, it’s the new(ish) norm.
Oh well
Dimbleby touches on a point I was uncomfortable with last week, the Russian contribution to WWII. I think there should have been a Russian representation at the D Day commemorations. Not an official government one, obviously, but some presence nevertheless. A tricky diplomatic matter I know but that’s what the highly paid senior diplomats and cvil servants are paid to do, solve these problems.
They should have been given the task of devising a way to honour the nine million Russians troops that died, while snubbing the corrupt dictatorship that runs the Country today. At a minimum, recognition of the vast number (27m inc. civilians) that lost their lives should have been made in the speeches. Maybe it was and I missed it?
The poor Russians having fought against one dictatorship and won, had to return home to live under another equally brutal, if not more so, one.
Hmm, food for thought there John. The 9 million Russians who died were not in Normandy on D-Day or at any other time in the war, apart from the slave labour captives that is, and the 6th of June is a celebration and commemoration of those who were and those who died. So not incongruous that there was no Russian presence.
Especially as, although the USA only joined the war when attacked (quite properly in my view) just as the Russians did, at least the Americans, despite some opposition at home, did support the Allied effort, the Russians did the exact opposite. They supported the Germans in all that they were doing, including to France and Britain, in order to do what Russians do, take a chance to stab a neighbour in the back by carving up Poland.
The reason 9 million Russians died was that that is the way Russian tyrants operate, and still do. They pack the bodies into the breach to stem the flow. To evil dictators like Stalin and Putin, true to their monarchist predecessors, ordinary people are cannon fodder to prolong their own survival and imperialist greed.
I think the Russian contribution to winning the war is much underrated in the West David. I suppose that’s at least partly because post 1945 the enemy quickly became the Soviet Union. Overnight in Patton’s case. It’s was then hard to finesse that the biggest threat to your existence now, was the biggest manpower contributor to your continuing existence before.
However, I think Dimbleby is making the point that this feeling of a lack of gratitude amongst ordinary Russians is useful to Putin in painting the West as the bad guys who always have it in for Russia.
Putin was invited to the 70th anniversary, which I’m sure wasn’t for his own edification but as an acknowledgement of the enormous contribution the people of Russia (USSR) had made to conquering Nazism. I think it would have been smart politics, and morally appropriate, if despite the fact that Putin had gone mad some way of acknowledging ordinary Russians had been found.
And all those killed while the Russians helped Hitler? The Russians played a part in the killing of French men and women, also in Britain. The comparative numbers don’t matter, Stalin pleaded for a 2nd front, pity he didn’t give us a 2nd front in 1940.
I have a claim to fame with Jonathan Dimbleby.
Blackpool 1989, we were attending a Federation of Master Builders conference held at the Imperial Hotel where we we staying. That same weekend it was the Labour Party conference and many of the politicians were staying at the Imperial.
We took the lift to our room and shared it with Roy Hattersley and Jonathan Dimbleby, the lift not our room!
Dimbleby was a short weasel of a man who at the time was an also ran to his brother David.
He was dressed very smartly unlike Hattersley who looked like he had just finished a spell of gardening wearing baggy corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket.
Neither spoke to each other or us.
