Bear the Guilt

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

-- 


(My comment:  Margolis has it ALMOST right...At least it's a 
beginning placing the blame where it belongs!)







November 4, 2007

Bear the guilt

Time to hear an apology for the Great Terror in the Soviet Union

By <mailto:margolis at foreigncorrespondent.com>ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN

This seems to be historic guilt month. Germany just opened a new 
memorial to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Armenians demand 
Turkey admit Ottoman-era massacres were genocide. Japan is being 
blasted anew for denying wartime atrocities.

Yet the greatest crime in modern history, and bloodiest genocide, 
have almost vanished from our collective memory. Last week marked the 
70th anniversary of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in which 
tens of millions were murdered or imprisoned.

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, at least commemorated for the 
first time what he termed "colossal" Soviet crimes by attending a 
memorial this week for its victims.

It was interesting watching Putin, former head of the FSB security 
service, denouncing crimes of its direct predecessors, KGB and NKVD. 
The same Putin who recently called the Soviet Union's collapse a 
"tragedy." Still, we applaud his long-overdue recognition of 
Communist-era crimes.

The Soviet terror began in the 1920s when Lenin ordered the 
extermination of Cossacks and opponents of the Bolsheviks. Next came 
Catholics of White Russia, and resisters to communism in the Baltic 
states and Moldova. Stalin then ordered liquidation of two million 
small farmers, known as "Kulaks."

In 1932-33, Stalin unleashed genocide against Ukraine's 
independent-minded farmers.

Six to seven million Ukrainians were shot or purposely starved to 
death. The man who directed this genocide, Lazar Kaganovich was made 
Hero of the Soviet Union and died in Moscow in 1991.

ATTENTION GRABBER

When Communist Party bureaucrats delayed Stalin's plans to transform 
the Soviet Union from a backward rural society into a modern 
industrial powerhouse, "Koba," as he was called, had NKVD shoot 
700,000 party members. Thereafter, his orders were promptly obeyed.

Almost all the party and military hierarchy were executed during the 
Great Purges of 1937-38, which culminated in the Moscow Show Trials.

 From 1934-1941 alone, some seven million victims were sent to the 
system of concentration camps known as the "gulag," including one 
million Poles, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians and 
Estonians, and half the entire Chechen and Ingush people. Volga 
Germans, Crimean Tatars, Bashkirs, Kalmyks followed. Stalin's gulag 
did not need gas chambers: Cold, disease and overwork killed 30% of 
inmates yearly.

To this day, Russian and foreign historians are unsure of the full 
number of Lenin and Stalin's victims. Estimates range from 20-40 
million total deaths from 1922 to 1953.

Stalin committed his worst crimes well before Hitler's major 
atrocities got under way.

We have forgotten that Germany alone did not spark the Second World 
War. Germany and the U.S.S.R. jointly invaded Poland in 1939; Stalin 
then attacked Finland. Two years later, Britain and the U.S.S.R. 
invaded neutral Iran. History indeed remains the propaganda of the 
victors.

If we keep hectoring Germany and Japan to admit guilt for events of 
the 1940s, is it not time the United States, Britain and Canada admit 
their own culpability in allying themselves to Stalin, a monster who 
killed over four times the number of Hitler's victims?

After all, Stalin's concentration camps were up and running a decade 
ahead of Germany's. The murder of millions of Ukrainians and Balts 
took place before the world's gaze -- six or seven years before the 
Second World War.

'UNCLE JOE'

The foolish Roosevelt, who hailed Stalin as "Uncle Joe," and the 
cannier Winston Churchill both knew they were allied to the biggest 
mass murderer since Genghis Khan.

They used a larger devil to fight a smaller, less dangerous one -- 
then paid his price by handing over half of Europe to Moscow.

Remember this when today's warmongers wax poetic about the glories of 
World War II -- and call for WW III.

Western powers should practise what they piously preach to Germany, 
Japan and, lately, Turkey, by at least apologizing for their sordid 
deal with Stalin, which was every bit as immoral as if they had made 
a deal with Hitler, as Stalin long feared they would, to destroy the 
Soviet Union.