ZGram - 12/28/2002 - "The Soviet Government's Holocaust"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

December 28, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

There is a glitch in this article - other than that, it is a needed 
and welcome addition to revising what has passed for history.  There 
is no such thing as a "national socialist Soviet".  The sadists 
responsible for mass murders of Katyn were Soviets.

Also, I am not sure what a "remnant columnist" is - I assume it is a 
branch of the Catholic church?  I didn't think that there were 
Catholic splinter groups - but be that as it may, that matter is not 
relevant to the article below.  It puts an important part of history 
into perspective:

[START]

The Soviet Government's Holocaust
By Michael Chapman
Remnant Columnist - Virginia
12-27-2

Many critics like to pick on big government. They say it's so huge 
and bureaucratic that it can't get anything done right. That may be 
true. But there's one thing that big government does well: kill 
people. The blood-soaked 20th century proved that.
 
Among the most brutal big government killers of that time was the 
communist Soviet Union. Ten years ago this month it marked the 
anniversary of its collapse. That remarkable event in 1991 will be 
remembered as a great victory for liberty, even if there is little 
evidence that a conversion to the true Faith is underway, as Our Lady 
of Fatima said there would be if her requests of 1917 were met. Of 
course, Russia today is no Eden-it's still in the early stages of 
recovery after 74 years of totalitarian self-destruction. But the 
terror and bleakness of communism no longer dominate every facet of 
life there.
 
And the dead? The millions murdered for the State? They are 
resurfacing, in photographs and documents from Soviet archives, and 
in countless mass graves being discovered all over the vast Russian 
land. A cold harvest of corpses.
 
They should not be forgotten. Tens of millions of people - women, 
children, fathers, families - were murdered by the biggest big 
government in history. The nationalized, planned economy - socialism 
in one country - ran itself on terror. A free market, a laissez faire 
economy, could not and has not done what the iron fist of the Soviet 
State did.  And we should - we hope - learn from this.
 
Hitler and the Nazis did not build the first concentration camps of 
the 20th century. Lenin and Stalin and the Bolsheviks built them. By 
the 1950s, hundreds of these camps - the Gulag Archipelago - darted 
[dotted?} the landscape. So-called enemies of the State, including 
religious (Jews, Catholics, Orthodox), were sent to the camps, along 
with criminals. There they were literally worked to death. A 
conservative estimate puts the number of camp deaths at 16 million. 
Many of the camps were still operating under Mikhail Gorbachev.
 
In 1919, hundreds of thousands of Cossacks, who had served as 
cavalrymen in the czarist army, were murdered by the Cheka, the 
forerunner of the KGB.
 
In Ukraine in 1932-33, an estimated 5 million peasants were 
intentionally starved to death because of a grain-quota system 
crafted by Soviet bureaucrats and Stalin. The people were 
deliberately killed as part of state planning.
 
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration - riddled 
with communist sympathizers and agents, as Soviet and U.S. documents 
now confirm - officially recognized the Soviet government. In the 
mid- to late-1930s, the infamous Soviet Show Trials began. This 
launched the Great Terror,in which an estimated one million Russians 
were killed. Stalin signed execution orders daily. In one, culled 
from Soviet archives and published in "The Black Book of Communism," 
Stalin signed an order authorizing the death of 6,600 political 
opponents.
 
Things got so bad, reported historian Robert Conquest, that sometimes 
up to 200 people a day were being shot at the Lubyanka prison in 
Moscow. At the same time, about 6.5 million kulaks - better off 
peasants opposed to the state policy of collectivization - were 
murdered by the Cheka, according to historian R.J. Rummel.
 
In 1939, the Soviets entered into a "non-aggression pact," i.e., 
treaty, with the Nazis and launched World War II. The German army 
invaded Poland from the west and the Red army invaded from the east. 
The national socialist Soviets (sic) brutalized Poland. They murdered 
some 15,000 Polish army officers and buried them in mass graves in 
the Katyn forest. They also marched more than one million Poles back 
to Russia and on to the Gulag. Rape was standard Soviet practice for 
soldiers, and countless Polish women and girls were violated and died 
from the brutality.
 
After Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941, President Roosevelt and his 
administration started to aid "Uncle Joe" and the Soviets. A lot of 
the military and material aid provided-paid for by American 
taxpayers-was used to enforce the terror and genocide in the USSR. 
The aid went to Soviet state officials and departments. It was used 
to defend and strengthen Stalin and the Soviet government. (Lenin and 
Stalin had already killed more than 12 million "enemies of the state" 
before Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933.)
 
By the time Stalin died in 1953, about 25-30 million people had died 
as a result of government policies in the USSR. From the 1950s and 
through the 1980s, countless Russians continued to suffer because of 
State policies. "Enemies" were still sent to the Gulag or to 
psychiatric hospitals for "treatment." And the people, in general, 
had to endure a near-Third World existence because socialist planning 
did not work. Even today, potable water is rationed in Moscow.
 
Neo-socialist critics, many of whom dominate America's universities 
and centers of influence, often complain that the invisible hand of 
capitalism is ruthless - that the less advantaged suffer because of 
it. But compare a free market, a laissez faire economy and limited 
government with a Soviet style socialist economy and what does one 
see?  Unlimited government is the most efficient killer.

[END]
 
Remnant columnist Michael Chapman is a writer in Washington, D.C. 
Send him email at fatima1917@hotmail.com.

(SOURCE:  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/REMNANT/