Crimes That Need Be Remembered

[PoliticalChic]

1. I have often advised those of the Leftist persuasion to consider why, when one considers the relative depravities, why communism tends to accrue so very much less approbation than Nazism.
Calling one the latter is filled with vituperation; calling someone the former......never occurs.


Case in point, one of our resident leftists, when queried about his response to the hundred million men, women and children slaughtered by communists, provided this exchange:

' When I pointed out that your antecedents, the communists, slaughtered 100 million men, women and children.....you sneered at the deaths this wa:

"Sure it wasn't 100 billion?"'
FDR Admiration Society


Communism's crimes......met with a shrug.




The essay to which I am linking follows in that vein.....

2. ".... I discussed the neglect of communist atrocities. Although communist governments murdered and repressed even more people than the Nazis, their crimes have gotten only a tiny fraction of the public awareness and recognition extend to the latter.

....increasing recognition of communist crimes should be an important priority: providing justice for victims and perpetrators; alleviating the oppression of the unreformed communist governments that still exist today; and ensuring that comparable atrocities are never repeated.


3. ....the scale of communist crimes was so vast that complete compensation is impossible. However, the impossibility of perfect compensation is no excuse for doing nothing.... efforts at reparations for Nazi crimes surely have many shortcomings. But they far outstrip anything that has been done for the even more numerous victims of communism.


4. The Nuremberg trials punished some of the most important perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. Even after sixty years, US and European officials continue to hunt down Nazi criminals.

Yet very little has been done to bring to justice the perpetrators of communist atrocities. This is despite the fact that many of the communist atrocities are much more recent than the Nazi ones, and more relatively high-ranking perpetrators are still alive.... some of the worst communist criminals are protected by governments in nations where the communist party is still in power (China and North Korea, among others)." 3 Reasons We Must Remember Communist Crimes | Ilya Somin




5. The author reserves the term 'communist' and 'communism' for the Soviet regimes of Stalin and Lenin.....but, the following definition finds the term suited far closer to home: '...the Left's answer to society: collectivization, unquestioning lock-step adherence to government policies, over-regulation, and unlimited central command and control governance.....'

The shoe, it seems, fits contemporary Liberalism and Progressivism as comfortably as earllier, Bolshevik regimes.....



Often, the Left attempts to saddle all Americans with the guilt of slavery.....it seems appropriate, then, to apply the responsibility for the millions of communist murders to those who embrace the same views as Russian communists.

 

[PoliticalChic]

6. My thesis is that in America, communism is hidden behind a variation on the same theme, a mask called 'Liberalism.' This is not to say that American Liberals would all behave as Stalin's apparatchiks did....

September 11, 1932, Stalin wrote to his assistant, 'We must take steps so we do not lose the Ukraine.' So, 1932-1933,all food supplies in the Ukraine were confiscated.
Those who tried to leave were shot, those who remained,starved to death. Men, women, children. They died tortuously slowly.
NKVD squads collected the dead. They received 200 grams of bread for every dead body they delivered; often they didn't wait until the victim was dead.


'Lazar Kaganovich (together with Vyacheslav Molotov) participated with the All-Ukrainian Party Conference of 1930 and were given the task of implementation of the collectivization policy that caused a catastrophic 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor.He also personally oversaw grain confiscations during the same time periods.

'Similar policies also inflicted enormous suffering on the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, the Kuban region,Crimea, the lower Volga region, and other parts of the Soviet Union. As an emissary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Kaganovich traveled to Ukraine, the central regions of the USSR, the Northern Caucasus, and Siberiademanding the acceleration of collectivization and repressions against the Kulaks, who were generally blamed for the slow progress of collectivization.'
Lazar Kaganovich - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

"They were thrown into a hole in the ground...the ground was moving..." Many were buried alive.




But.....the demigod of our current Liberals, actually did confine American citizens in concentration camps......
....just sayin'.....

And the refusal to use "communist !" with the same vehemence as "Nazi !" or "Fascist !"....is understandable: one would wish to hide the iniquities of......a relative.

 

[LordBrownTrout]

I don't think one needs to look any farther than the west ceding over eastern europe to russia after ww2.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I don't think one needs to look any farther than the west ceding over eastern europe to russia after ww2.

We can be more specific: turning over half of Europe to Joseph Stalin's tender mercies was the plan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Evidence can be seen in a document which Harry Hopkins took with him to the Quebec conference in August, 1943, entitled "Russia's Position," quoted as follows in Robert Sherwood's book, "Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History,":
"Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces."

 

[PoliticalChic]

What???
Comparing Stalin's savages to American Liberals and Progressives?


On the one hand, the case is made that only the degree differs between the two....the desire for the final result, '... collectivization, unquestioning lock-step adherence to government policies, over-regulation, and unlimited central command and control governance.....'

....is exactly the same.




7. . It is only America's history and character that prevent our totalitarians from engaging in the genocide that other iterations have:

" The excesses of the European versions of fascism were mitigated by the specific history and culture of America, Jeffersonian individualism, heterogeneity of the population, butthe central theme is still an all-encompassing state that centralizes power to perfect human nature by controlling every aspect of life.,albeit at the loss of what had hitherfore been accepted as ‘inalienable human rights.’" Goldberg, "Liberal Fascism"




On the other hand, the author of the essay to which I've linked, clarifies his position:

8. "I suppose I should briefly rebut the silly but inevitable charge that my emphasis on the importance of recognizing communist atrocities is somehow a cover for attempts to discredit American liberals. This ploy is akin to saying that criticism of racists, anti-Semites, or Nazis is really just a ploy for discrediting American conservatives. I will say only that I have always carefullyavoided labeling domestic liberals as socialists(to say nothing of communists), have criticized such labeling by others, and have not used that charge myself in my various VC posts and other writings criticizing liberal domestic policies.

As people like Harry Truman, JFK, and Henry Jackson recognized, there is no necessary contradiction between being a liberal on domestic policy and a strong opponent of communism."




The weakness in that position is that current Liberals, Progressives, Democrats can't point to any Truman, JFK, or Scoop Jackson in their party.

The fact is that, arguably, the most popular candidate for President among Democrats is a communist.

 

[PoliticalChic]

If anything, the author of the essay, Professor Somin, weakens his defense of Liberals/Democrats in the following:


9. "Most of the world’s communist regimes have either collapsed or reformed. However, at least two unreformed communist governments still remain: Cuba and North Korea. North Korea, in particular, is probably the world’s most oppressive regime, havingstarved to death at least 1 million of its own people as recently as the 1990s. It also maintains a system of Gulags and secret police that is, if anything, even more draconian than that of the USSR under Stalin.

Despite the good press it enjoys among some Western leftists, Castro’s Cuba is only modestly better. Since coming to power in 1959, Castro’s governmenthas executed some 1.5% of Cuba’s population for “political” dissent, while incarcerating another 5.6% in concentration camps. These figures would be even higher if not for the proximity of the United States, which enabled a large part of Cuba’s population to flee. Nonlethal political repression in Cuba is less severe than in North Korea, but still worse than in all but a tiny handful of other governments.

Despite these atrocities, Cuba and North Korea receive only a tiny fraction of the attention that human rights groups and the international community pay to much lesser offenses committed by democratic governments or non-leftist dictatorships." Fee. Op. Cit.



So.....who rewarded Cuba?

Right....Barack Hussein Obama.

I call Obama's actions vis-a-vis Cuba, with no benefits to any except the dictators, an inadvertent indictment of Barack Obama and every apparatchik....er, supporter.

 

[Penelope]

Isn't it funny how things are, the father of Communism , yes your know who in Russia, are now nationalist and even a Jewish country. I guess what goes around , comes around. They didn't have an issue trying to take over other countries, but how dare you evan say anything about them taking over the land of Palestine.

Read about Stalin's Jews.

 

[PoliticalChic]

So.....why wasn't Stalin's nation held responsible for its crimes???


10. "Imagine if, after the fall of Hitler, an unreconstructed Nazi-like regime had remained in place in some small European country, and continued to run concentration camps, a Gestapo-like secret police, and so on. Would not that regime be an international pariah constantly targeted by human rights groups and subjected to severe sanctions by all self-respecting democratic states?" Fee, Op. Cit.



FDR, well-known sponsor of Stalin's regime, had willingly supplied Stalin with all sorts of accoutrements via Lend Lease.....much of which American civilians and soldiers needed..... supplies didn't just "flow" to the Soviet Union, they flooded it, including non-military supplies:

'...a tire plant, an oil refinery, pipe-fabricating works, over a million miles of copper wire, switchboard-panels, lathes and power tools, textile machinery, woodworking, typesetting, cranes hoists, derricks, air compressors, $152 million in women's 'dress goods,' 18.4 million pounds of writing paper, cigarette cases, jeweled watches, lipstick, liquor, bathtubs, and pianos." Diana West, "American Betrayal," p. 43



WWII ended in Europe May 7, 1945.

At that juncture, Stalin's crimes were well known....and, in fact, he refused to return some 20,000 US soldiers......

....so, did the US subject the Soviet regime "to severe sanctions"???
Not in the slightest!


"The original Lend-Lease act provided that, unless sooner terminated by a concurrent resolution by Congress, the authority to enter into lend-lease agreements would end 30 June 1943, and the authority to carry out contracts or agreements with foreign governments would continue until 1 July 1946.

Congress then made one-year extensions of the agreements three times so that the final date for making lend-lease agreements was 30 June 1946, with authority to carry them out until 1 July 1949."
Film Study


Roosevelt knew of the atrocities committed by 'Uncle Joe'....but carried on as though communism wasn't worse than the Nazis.
Once advanced by Franklin Roosevelt, communism has held fast to American society like a pit bull.

 

[PoliticalChic]

11. " The extensive attention paid to the Nazi crimes has helped sensitize people to the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and extreme nationalism. These evils have not disappeared. But at least the need to oppose them is widely accepted throughout the democratic world.

A similar focus on communist crimes might increase recognition of the dangers created by ideologies based on class warfare and socialism (by which I mean full-blown state domination of the economy, not merely government regulation of private industry or a welfare state).




It is unlikely that communism will reappear in the exact form practiced by Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. However, the core ideas of socialism and class warfare are still advocated by various political movements and governments,...." 3 Reasons We Must Remember Communist Crimes | Ilya Somin


Guess where.



"...the combination of class warfare and socialism doesn’t inevitably lead to mass murder on the scale committed in the USSR, China, and Cambodia. However, they do greatly increase its likelihood. "
Ibid.


A warning....a cautionary tale for all who adhere to :'...the Left's answer for society: collectivization, unquestioning lock-step adherence to government policies, over-regulation, and unlimited central command and control governance.....'





Beware.

 

[Picaro]

So how do 'Libertarians' wave away the fact that their 'party' and 'movement' are funded by a billionaire who got his billions by doing business with Joseph Stalin for decades? Why isn't that somehow not suspicious to the conspiritard circus here?

 

[jasonnfree]

So how do 'Libertarians' wave away the fact that their 'party' and 'movement' are funded by a billionaire who got his billions by doing business with Joseph Stalin for decades? Why isn't that somehow not suspicious to the conspiritard circus here?

Sounds like the father of the freedom loving koch brothers who are now supporting hillary. Good job, demorats and so called libertarians.