Comments on: Churchill and the Baltic States: From WW2 to Liberation http://localhost:8080/churchill-baltic-states Senior Fellow, Hillsdale College Churchill Project, Writer and Historian Sun, 31 Jul 2022 20:25:18 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 By: Richard Langworth http://localhost:8080/churchill-baltic-states#comment-17447 Mon, 29 Jan 2018 20:58:36 +0000 https://richardlangworth.com/?p=6495#comment-17447 A longtime colleague has written me thus: “You let the Mayor’s ringing comment stand as your sign off, suggesting you agree. I found it the kind of emotional chest-thumping that misdirects our understanding of history. Just what ‘trouble’ would have been avoided? More important, what trouble would have been created? Dreams about the future are to be encouraged. They can open new paths. I’m less convinced of the value of counter-factual history.”
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The “trouble” Mayor Eniņš referred to was fifty years of communism. But no—as I wrote, we argued with him, saying the Americans and British would have never stood for a preventive war with Russia in 1945. He wasn’t buying it. A brief addendum:

The Mayor met us for breakfast that day with the rain pouring down and nobody wanted to ride, so it was a leisurely chat. He recalled that as kids, he and his pals would often sneak down to the beaches at night. The Soviets had barb-wired the Baltic coast from end to end, with armed guards patrolling. Eniņš and his friends would slip through the wire and repeatedly walk backwards to the sea, and then forwards, their footprints making the beach guards think there had been an mini-invasion. (One of my friends quipped, “Amber waves of Danes.”)

We laughed about this until the Mayor suddenly pulled up his shirt and showed us the scars where they strafed him one night when he let the guards get too close. A slightly better shot and there would have been no Teodors Eniņš.

The moral I took away from that meeting was: How you think and dream depends a lot on when and where you grew up.

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