snicker [none/use name]
This actually is a really good question. Mussolini ruled Italy for 20 years! His word was law. How, after all this, did Italy fold like a cheap shirt?
France was ripe to fall. The Third Republic was a dumpster fire. Even at utmost need, the ministers cared more about protecting their seats in the cabinet than the fate of France.
Even when the UK made the extraordinary offer to join both nations in a union to keep France in the war, the government snidely rejected it as an attempt by Britain to seize their colonies. They preferred life as a Nazi province to “fusion with a corpse”.
The British and French had agreed beforehand not to seek an armistice without the other’s consent. Once the French started losing, the British abandoned them to run for Dunkirk and the French wanted to quit. The British wanted to fight to the last Frenchman so they proposed the union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-British_Union#World_War_II_(1940)
France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France.
TIME magazine in 1996 bragging about how we interfered in the Russian election.
https://i.redd.it/isllgiy7ch9z.jpg
The outcome was by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin’s approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign.
Braynin began a series of confidential discussions with Yeltsin’s aides, including one with First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, who at the time was in charge of the President’s nascent re-election effort. Finally, in early February, Braynin was instructed to “find some Americans” but to proceed discreetly. “Secrecy was paramount,” says Braynin. “Everyone realized that if the Communists knew about this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as an American tool. We badly needed the team, but having them was a big risk.”
For two days the supersecretive Yeltsin high command avoided Dresner, and none of the team ever actually met the President. “There are too many factions and too many leaks to risk your dealing with him directly,” Braynin explained to Dresner. “You are our biggest secret.”
A good somewhat recent example of US meddling in Russian elections was US support of a very unpopular Yeltsin and his neo liberal “shock therapy” ideas that left Russia even worse off economically.
That is literally western neoliberal ideology. Actual, physical US economists were living in the Kremlin guiding the drunk Yeltsin to destroy Russia and kill millions of Russians through economic collapse at the behest of Western oligarchs who got in bed with Russia’s organized criminals.
They have real ones in Libya.
Thanks Obama.
I will never understand why parents give their kids stupid names.
Acquaintance of mine’s wife is pregnant and he’s going to name the child “Loki”. :deeper-sadness:
