Member-only story
Is It Time to Revive the Berlin Airlift for Ukraine?
Leaving millions to starve & freeze to death is nothing less than complicity in the genocidal war crime Russia is currently committing — hopefully President Biden has the courage President Truman did
This is not the first time Russia has tried freezing and starving people to death to get them to submit. They’ve done it at least twice before, once successfully in 1932 and once unsuccessfully in 1949.
Although I wouldn’t be born for another two years, I “remember” the Berlin Airlift of 1948/1949. It was part of the story of my growing up: my mother’s first fiancée was killed fighting the Germans and my father volunteered for the war as soon as he got out of high school, returning from Japan, I believe, in 1948.
My parents felt so strongly that their kids should understand the hell their generation had lived through that today I have what seem like memories of those planes landing, one after another, at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport. They were probably formed by documentaries and conversations with my parents when I was a child.
Much like Vladimir Putin is doing now to Ukraine, in 1948/1949 the Russian soviets tried to starve and then freeze to death the…
