Was listening to Razorfist's arcade stream from last Friday - https://youtu.be/TmTY2d7nwAs
In it he talks a little bit about General Patton and how he was possibly assassinated due to his anti-Communist views.
Found that interesting and went to wikipedia where it doesn't talk about that - but has a whole section about "views on Race" where the writer declares him a racist. https://archive.ph/aww7m
Individually they were good soldiers, but I expressed my belief at the time, and have never found the necessity of changing it, that a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor.
And then the writer goes on with THIS nugget
He also stated that performance was more important than race or religious affiliation:
I don't give a damn who the man is. He can be a Nigger or a Jew, but if he has the stuff and does his duty, he can have anything I've got. By God! I love him.
Which sounds completely anti-racist to me and, gasp, someone who believes in the merit of a person!
The section goes on to say he's also an anti-Semite and anti-Russian
The obvious question is WTF does this have to do with an objective AND NEUTRAL historical scholarly article - answer is NOTHING. But this garbage is appearing on more and more figures pages to retcon history.
That led me to the next check - a copy of wikipedia was made about 6 years ago, Infogalactic.com precisely because of this revisionist history even then.
Here's the infogalactic page as it was originally pulled from wikipedia in 2016 (with a few minor edits earlier this year) https://archive.ph/wip/ZHdWA
Note there's no race section.
Note also the section about the assassination controversy for his anti-communist viewpoints that is now omitted from the wiki page.
Patton was, without question, assassinated, and it was a collaborative effort between the OSS and the NKVD. The soviets wanted him dead because he was the only man that Stalin feared. Patton could easily have brought the USSR to its knees and ended the Cold War before it started.
FDR and subsequently Truman wanted him dead because he was a clear and present political threat. Additionally, Eisenhower (who was a complete piece of garbage and caused the war to go on for a year longer than it should have because politics), was out to get Patton as well because Patton was a political roadblock to him.
On top of all of that, FDR was absolutely in love with Stalin and the executive branch was absolutely lousy with NKVD spies. So Patton was enemy number one. If you want to know more start with O’Reilly’s “Killing Patton,” then follow it up with Wilcox’s “Target: Patton.”
Smearing Patton as a racist and anti-Semite has been a favorite pastime of the communist media and government since Germany’s surrender. It is true that Patton was an asshole, and it is also true that he had some unkind things to say about certain European Jews based on his direct experience with some of their behavior. But he did not hate Jews at large, was sickened by their treatment by the Nazis, and welcomed them into his military formation. Neither did he hate black people. He welcomed them in his fighting formations, and his very best friend and valet was a black man who had nothing but the best memories of history’s finest general.
Part of the reason he got smeared as such was because he was rabidly anti-communist. He wanted to stand the German army back up and march on the USSR. The commies in American media hated him for this. Additionally, the plan to rule the conquered Germans at the time was called the Morganthau Plan, named after its developer the American secretary of the treasury. The Morganthau Plan called for the absolute subjugation of the Germans, to throw German citizens out of their homes to house displaced Jews. Patton, as military governor of Bavaria, refused to carry this out. It flew in the face of due process and Patton wouldn’t have it. Patton had learned from his grievous mistakes against the Bonus Army and refused to repeat them. Additionally, Patton would not throw known Nazis out of critical jobs when there was no one else competent to do them. So for these reasons he has been repeatedly smeared as a racist.
Had Patton not been murdered the world’s landscape today could potentially look very different. The Cold War might never have happened and perhaps he’d have handled the the enemies of the Constitution that have invaded the government. Patton and MacArthur were the last warrior generals. They’ve all been politicians since.
Thanks - that was part of the reason I was trying to do the research.
My knowledge of Patton was basically what I knew from the movie and a few historical stories bandied about and the whole assassination angle was new to me.
At face value though I don't see how they could've assassinated him with the car other than it being an accident. is the theory that they beat him up and made up the car story? (The original wiki article has the curious blurb that only his wife was allowed to see him for the 2 weeks as he lay dying - you'd think he would've at least told her?) EDIT: Nevermind, I see from another post that he was recovering from the wreck when he died of a heart problem while in the hospital... convenient.
The wreck is believed to be the initial attempt on his life. Given the state of things it wouldn’t have been hard to do. As I recall it was a Sunday morning, and no one was allowed out on the roads without a really good reason. I can’t remember the theory on how the assassins might have known his route, but the kid who was driving the other truck just up and disappeared like a fart in the wind. They think after the wreck he may have been shot with a high velocity air gun because he was the only one with any injuries. And I know that sounds kind of crazy, an air gun, but there have been some crazy powerful air guns for a long time.
Obviously he didn’t die there. He was on the road to recovery in the hospital. To what extent he would have recovered is hard to say, but he was doing very well, and then he just died. Likely poisoned, the soviets were the masters of that. And his wife would not allow an autopsy. Many think she was threatened over the autopsy, we’ll never know.
The successors to the Soviets still poison people. And "odd" weapons have a long history of being used by assassins. Crazy daggers, handheld crossbows, and cane guns.