Then there's the Soviet statue in Seattle.
Posted on 07/20/2018 5:16:51 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Matthew Luxmoore’s article (Poles apart: the bitter conflict over a nation’s history, The long read, 13 July) contains a gross error likely to lead readers to misunderstand the Soviet Union’s true intentions during the second world war.
There were 1.5 million Poles deported to Siberia, not “hundreds of thousands” as the article states, with no mention of their fate. They were forcibly taken from their homes in eastern Poland to gulags. Most died of starvation and disease under forced labour. To misrepresent this suffering, which took place on a colossal scale, is a crime akin to Holocaust denial.
My grandfather was one of the few who survived. To him and his contemporaries, the hostile Soviet invaders’ motivation was not liberation but conquest. Any such conquest is more successful if it has collaborators, which explains the motivations of the highly selective sample of people cited in the article.
It should be clearly stated that the Soviets and Nazis had agreed to jointly invade and carve up Poland. When Hitler went back on the deal, they fought each other for control of Poland. The Soviets won, and history was rewritten by the winners. They did this with decades of deceit propagated through the Polish school system, denying not just the Katyn massacre but also the bravery of those who, like my grandfather, fought at Monte Cassino, the 1st Armoured Polish Division, which won critical battles in the D-Day landings, and the 303 Squadron pilots who made all the difference in the Battle of Britain. These were disgracefully branded “traitors” by the puppet government of postwar Poland, installed by Stalin in a brazen breach of the agreement reached at Yalta.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The present-day nationalist backlash is a result of decades of communist lies and brainwashing. Unfortunately, such an aggressive attempt to erase the communist past is likely to ratchet up tensions and make conflict more likely. Much better to let these monuments decay naturally, to symbolise the decline and fall of the aggressively imperialistic but inherently rotten and mendacious USSR.
Christopher Cytera
Cambridge
Keep the monuments - use them as teaching points.
This stuff happened.
The Soviets didn’t liberate anything or anyone. But the Russian people made enormous sacrifices and the Red Army took staggering losses to kick the Germans out of their country. It’s too bad they did so only in the service of Stalin’s godless anthill. Keep the soldier’s graves but let the monuments rot.
Then there's the Soviet statue in Seattle.
I wish the world went after the Communists with as much passion as we’ve gone after the Nazis the past 75 years.
To be fair, we could keep the monuments, but instead of using them to “honor” the Communists, we’d use them to remind them of the lack of respect for life the Communists had, depicting the soldiers as in the wrong, yet at the same time victims of Communism in a way (since several of them largely did their actions because they were essentially forced to, not because they actually wanted it). At least it’s not a statue of Stalin or, God forbid, Lenin that they’re keeping up as a monument.
Of course that being said, it’s probably for the best if we just tear them down, history or not. After all, Karl Marx learned quite a bit about the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, and I’d suspect from his comments about “not caring less” if they’re viewed as monsters upon reenacting 1793 after taking the helm that he was at least familiar with various barbaric stuff they did including the Vendee and General Louis Grignon’s infamous torch operations there, yet he not only advocated reenacting the Reign of Terror, but even going as far as to make it even more gory than back then. Sartre made similar remarks when voicing his support for the death penalty as well. And Foucault arguably took it even further than them and advocated instead that they reenact of all things the September Massacres to allow for popular justice. Man, those guys really seem to make the old saying “those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it” seem like meaningless dreck, especially when they clearly knew history yet STILL aimed for repeating it anyway.
To give the former mayor of Seattle (you know, the one who got ousted over raping little boys) some credit, at least he was right to denounce the Lenin statue and demand for its removal (besides, why would he be part of American history anyway?). Too bad he also advocated for the removal of some Confederate Statues in turn.
Me too. I mean, we did fight a couple of wars against them directly, and indirectly we fought them off in various areas. Unfortunately, we didn’t do much more to actually EXPOSE just how worse they really were compared to the Nazis.
My Dad fought in the Liri Valley during the 4th assault on Cassino, May 1944. He had great admiration for the Polish soldiers who were fighting in Italy. I’m sure they hoped that the western alliance would keep Russia honest, but that they were not surprised by the Russia betrayal that came in August. Russia delayed its advance into Warsaw so that the Nazis could crush the Warsaw uprising,making it easier for them to subjugate the Poles. President Trump did not collide with Russia, but the Russian government is filled with corrupt murderous thugs led by a empire-building sociopath. Not unlike the Democratic Party. Never trust a Russian or a Democrat.
Nazis = national socialists
Communists = international socialists
Competing brands of the same product.
Of course we have Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's iconic written accounts too. But the visuals of Baldaev's illustrations really shock you to the core.
Often, when the police tried to break up the communist/nazi brawls, they'd band together to fight the cops.
Yeah, I know. But unfortunately thanks to the Frankfurt School and Stalin, most people think they’re polar opposites when they weren’t.
Well, never trust a so-called ex-KGB agent or a Democrat, anyway. I’m pretty sure that some of the Russians who arrived here who were explicit immigrants/refugees/defectors are alright.
And your dad did well. Such a shame we naïvely thought the Soviets would just leave the Poles alone. Oh well. At least now we don’t have to worry about making that mistake again, we’ll make sure of it.
And yeah, Trump definitely can’t have been colluding with Russia/Putin (I mean, for goodness sakes, assuming Putin DID want to interfere with the election, why would he pick Trump, a guy who wants to make America great again, especially knowing how Putin’s a massive Russian nationalist at least on the outside. That wouldn’t make a lick of sense especially when he’d more likely consider America a threat and would want to weaken it, not strengthen it. That’s like trying to use a rat trap to kill a Great Dane). If anything, Hillary and Obama were colluding with him.
Meh, just horrifying, really. And they say anal probing is done by space aliens...
This...
Honestly, this is arguably even worse than the Nazi camps, certainly just as bad as them.
Honor among thieves (or lack thereof), and besides, Karl Marx pretty much indicated that killing each other was going to be inevitable and in fact exactly what they should do when they take power akin to the Reign of Terror in France (and based on what Grignon stated about how they are to kill everyone they find even if they were fellow Republicans, it’s pretty clear they were going to kill even their own allies for a sheer laugh).
And yeah, they definitely would fight against law enforcement, since they hate the law.
Actually, that reminds me, nowhere in the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars did they really get into that kind of thing with the Commie/Nazi brawls regarding similar analogues.
Lech Walesa knew too well about the Soviet atrocities. He had to walk on egg shells in order to win Poland it’s freedom during the Soviet collapse, especially with the communist puppet Wojciech Jaruzelski, who should have been executed for treason by Polish patriots.
Respect the graves of those Soviet soldiers who died pushing the Nazis out of Poland. Most of those poor souls were simple peasants. They were caught up in a conflict not of their making.
And leave alone any monument marking their sacrifice. But tear down - at once - any monument glorifying Stalin or communism.
F-the Soviets. They should have been kicked back to their borders when Germany fell. Roosevelt giving Stalin a huge chunk of Europe was asinine and criminal.
> the communist puppet Wojciech Jaruzelski <
I’ve read a lot about him. And I’ve come to the conclusion that he was not such a bad guy. True, he was a communist. But he was trying to maneuver in such a way as to prevent a Soviet invasion of Poland.
Recall that the Soviets intervened Hungary in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both of these invasions stamped out freedom movements. But Poland was never invaded during the rise of Solidarity. I’ll give Jaruzelski credit for that. He could have called for Soviet tanks. But he didn’t.
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