The first uses an event involving the second to illustrate a point about the third.
Less cryptically: Andrew points out that Rudolf Hess’s body was evicted from its grave after the lease ran out*, cremated, and the ashes scattered at sea – largely because Hess’s grave had become a magnet for neo-Nazis, and nobody wants those guys around. Which is largely why we threw Osama bin Laden’s rapidly cooling corpse into the Indian Ocean**; let jihadi-wannabes try to cover that in flowers.
No, actually, knowing human beings they probably won’t pick one spot and commemorate the SOB there. They’ll probably pick three or four, then fight with each other which is the ‘best’ one (hopefully, with live ammo).
Moe Lane
*Apparently you can lease grave space in Europe. Hell, for all I know that’s the worldwide industry standard.
**Not to mention the Soviets’ Russians’ notoriously tight-lipped non-response to any and all polite inquiries on what happened to Hitler’s body. I struck out ‘Soviets’ because while I no longer cut Commies any slack, I can’t say that I blame the Russians on this one…
You’re cutting the Russians too much slack. The Soviet Union has been dead for 2 decades now. If the Russians had any interest in purging the vestiges of the Soviet system, they would have made all these types of records public a long time ago.
My father, who was a long-time member of the intelligence community, told me when the Soviet Union “fell” that it was just another propaganda operations by the Russians. They were broke and needed the money from the West, so they engaged in subterfuge to convince the West to give it the money it needed to keep its authoritarian regime.
If you’ve watched Putin and Russian politics at all over the last decade, then you can’t help but come to the inescapable conclusion that my father was right 20 years ago, and he’s still right today. The KGB assassination squads are still operating. The arrest of political dissidents. The state control over the economy. And so on.
So. No. Russians don’t get, nor deserve any credit. They’re still Soviets, they just shed the name and they have a better PR department.
I first heard about graves being leased in Europe when I read something about Jim Morrison’s grave lease in Paris running out. Seems awfully weird to me as well.