As to leftist imbecile Oliver Stone's claim that Stalin was not as bad as he is generally thought to be, I agree with it wholeheartedly. He is much, much worse than that. People like Stone are either infantile fools playing with fire or scumbags who willingly refuse to face reality and eagerly promote insidious lies. I wish millions of Stalin's GULAG slaves were able to stand up from their graves and haunt such people to their deathbed.
Among the Russo-Soviet propaganda myths, the World War II narrative is the most central one. This is the linchpin of all Soviet lies and half-truths. You can debate some issues with socialists and nationalists in a relatively civilized way but the war issue is off-limits. For them, the claim that the USSR's participation in the war was a noble "self-defense" cause aimed at liberating the peoples oppressed by the Nazis is an irrefutable, undeniable, sacred, absolute truth, a mystic revelation that can never be challenged. Everyone who dares to question this hype is branded as a heretic and blasphemer.
Come to think of it, this myth is an easy excuse for every atrocity committed by communist mass murderers. Why were the Soviet industrialization, collectivization and Great Purge (with their enormous death toll and plummeting living standards) necessary? The answer is easy: the USSR needed to transform into an industrialized economy in order to fight the Great Patriotic War (another false name, since the war was neither great nor patriotic). Why were living standards in the Soviet Union far below those in the West after the war? Pretty easy: it was exhausted by the war. All modern tyrannies have used similar justifications for their crimes.
The myth, however, is utterly false. First of all, the concept of a self-defensive war is totally inapplicable to a totalitarian regime. The purpose of national defense is to protect the individual rights of citizens from foreign aggression. If the regime itself regularly violates those rights, instead of protecting them, it can wage a war only for aggression or for remaining in power.
Second, the "sacrifices" allegedly made by the USSR to allegedly "prepare" for the war were worse than those made in many military conflicts. During the industrialization, collectivization and "GULAGization", more Russians died than during the First World War. A communist "peace" turned out to be worse than a capitalist war.
One of the myths is that World War II was started exclusively by Hitler. In reality both the Nazi and Soviet regimes equally share the blame for initiating the conflict. Contrary to the mainstream clichés, Stalin was as much of an aggressor in that war as Hitler. Stalin was smart enough to invade Poland later than Hitler but this temporal difference does not change the facts of the case. Due to Western intellectuals' blindness and leftist bias, Stalin managed to escape the name that he deserved perhaps even more than Hitler - an aggressor. Both Western socialist and Soviet propaganda would have us believe that, while Hitler's occupation of European countries was part of Hitler's WW2 aggressive campaigns, Stalin's occupation of parts of Finland, the Baltic States, eastern Poland and Bessarabia were not aggressive wars in the framework of WW2. But that is absolute nonsense.
But the most important part of WW2 mythology was blasted to pieces by Viktor Suvorov, a former agent of the USSR's Chief Intelligence Department (GRU) (his magnum opus is fully available online for free). Unable to tolerate Soviet lies, Suvorov fled to the U.K. in 1978. He was sentenced to death in absentia. Suvorov provided solid evidence proving that Stalin had planned to invade Germany long before Hitler started contemplating an attack on the Soviet Union. Most Soviet defense installations on the border with Germany were dismantled, and an unprecedented offensive was planned in minute detail. A gigantic army (according to Suvorov, it was the most powerful army in history) was moved to the border and there are many signs that its purpose was clearly aggressive, not defensive. The world's largest paratrooper army, as well as marines and mountain infantry - all indications of the offensive nature of the operation - were secretly transferred westward. Strangely enough, the Soviet navy left Baltic seaports before the German invasion started (sic!). According to Suvorov, Stalin planned the 20th century's biggest military campaign - a Soviet conquest of the entire European continent. He used Hitler as a "useful idiot" to clear the path for communist domination. It was, of course, part and parcel of the long-term communist strategy of the World Revolution. Hitler's invasion foiled Stalin's plans, and the conquest of Europe was postponed for several years, and even then he failed to annex the entire continent and had to be satisfied with the eastern part. Regardless of Hitler's atrocities, he was perhaps doing the world a great service by attacking Stalin, since if the General Secretary had implemented his grandiose geopolitical design, the communist shadow over the world would have been something much worse than the Holocaust.
The first part of the war demonstrated that Stalin was not indeed prepared for defense, since he was gearing up for an offensive, perhaps the largest in history. Moreover, even the defensive potential that existed was squandered. As Mark Solonin showed, Soviet slaves were often a good tool in offensive wars when goaded by their slave-drivers without a chance to escape, but, when a panic caused by the German invasion triggered a partial disintegration of the Soviet regime, they were reluctant to protect their masters and either fled or became POWs en masse.
The real war was, of course, as far from the Soviet mythological idyll as you can get. Barrier troops were used to shoot retreating soldiers, while GULAG slaves were assigned to penal battalions, which meant almost certain death, since the battalions were sent to the most difficult parts of the front.
Due to Stalin's destruction of Soviet defensive capabilities, his execution of generals and the regime's general disregard for individual human lives, the number of casualties was gigantic. Soviet generals, including Zhukov, treated human beings as expendable cannon fodder and made absolutely unnecessary sacrifices to carry out their grand political designs and achieve a faster conquest of Europe. A paradoxical situation emerged - the USSR, the victor, had a death toll of at least between 20 and 28 million people, while Germany, the vanquished enemy, lost a mere 6 million people. So perhaps the Soviet generals' "feats" were a much worse "war crime" than those of the Nazis.
The "liberated" parts of Europe, meanwhile, were handed over to Soviet-affiliated totalitarian regimes that oppressed the locals to a bigger extent than their pro-Nazi predecessors. Huge numbers of local residents and former Soviet POWs in Nazi labor camps were transported to the GULAG. Women were raped by Soviet soldiers en masse. For many, the "liberation" turned out to be indeed worse than the Nazi yoke.
Given these facts, imbecile nonsense sputtered by Russian Stalinists and their acolytes in the West should not even be taken into account.
1 comment:
Great counter-intuitive analysis here, ReaganX. I wouldn't have considered some of the claims you make here, due in large part to heavy academic conditioning. But nearly all of it makes a lot of sense and has legs (strong explanatory power).
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