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Liberal Lunatic of the Day (5/8/2005) Alexander Cockburn
Liberal Lunacy ^ | 5/8/2005 | Beckwith

Posted on 05/08/2005 8:19:45 AM PDT by Beckwith

Alexander Cockburn, in his essay, "Who Beat Hitler", writes, "Monday, May 9, brings us the sixtieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe. I remember the first Victory in Europe (VE) Day in 1945, sitting on my father's shoulders on the side of some London street, watching the tanks rumble by and a soldier in a tin hat popping up and down in the hatch."

Cockburn continues, "Each time May 9 rolls around Americans have to be reminded who did most of the fighting and who bore most of the losses.  In 1944 the Allied forces commanded by Eisenhower faced 53 German divisions in western Europe.  The Red Army had to deal with 180 German divisions in the east.  The US lost about 400,000 in its armed forces and Britain, 260,000.  Historians have been revising upwards Soviet military deaths, to a level as high as 14 million and beyond, with estimates of civilian casualties ranging from 7 to 20 million."

You can say ­ and many do ­ that many among these millions died because Stalin's generals were willing to sacrifice division upon divisions in order to obey the schedules demanded by a psychotic tyrant.  True no doubt, but that doesn't alter the sacrifice or the immensity of the numbers lost on the eastern front in the defeat of fascism, or the fact that it was the Soviet Union that played the prime role in defeating Hitler.

Cockburn then quotes Roberta Manning, professor of history at Boston College, who comments:

"For Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians and many Caucasians and Central Asians, like the Jews, World War II was a Holocaust, given the magnitude of the sheer human sacrifice now estimated to range for the former USSR anywhere from 28 to35 million war dead.  If Israel can mourn the loss of six million of people without having anyone throwing the ongoing plight of the Palestinians in their face, surely Russia and the Soviet successor states have the right to do the same.

"There is no Putin problem.  The problem is Bush, whose advisors finally realized that it is easier to divide the EU over anti-Russianism than over Iraq.  Dividing the EU over Russia is essential to the global strategy of the Republican Party's increasingly powerful and ever more totalitarian Neo-Conservative-Born-Again Ideologues who openly espouse US-Evangelical domination of the world and its resources in the 21st Century.  A unified EU that develops close ties to a democratic Russia would prove a potent obstacle to these plans.  The real problem of the world today is to manage America's decline while dealing with an ideologically driven US leadership that lives in a world of fantasy and cannot deal with the rise of China and India much less a real European Union no longer under its political control.  We should remember that United States never once criticized Yeltsin's dictatorship."

link:  Who Beat Hitler


TOPICS: History; Politics
KEYWORDS: alexandercockburn; cockburn; hitler; loonyleft; nazi; soviet; stalin; thirdreich; wwii
The commie-loving, American hating Cockburn and fellow-traveler Manning, in writing their revisionist history forget to address the Soviet Union's role in the lead-up to World War II.

The Soviet Union began commercial and military cooperation with Germany in 1936 and grew these relationships until 1941 when the Soviet Union signed the the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.  If this treaty had never been signed, there is good reason to believe there never would have been a World War II.  The Soviet Union, led by that brutal dictator and murderer old Joe Stalin, was the principal enabler and facilitator of Hitler and the Third Reich.  Not surprisingly, since both men were influenced by the notoriously anti-Semitic Karl Marx (and add Roberta Manning to that list of anti-Semites).

The non-aggression treaty lasted until Operation Barbarossa of June 22, 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.  The treaty was signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by then Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, just after Stalin's speech on Aug 19, 1939, where he asserted that a great war between the western powers was necessary for the spread of World Revolution.

In a secret appendix to the pact, the border states Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania were divided in spheres of interest of the parties that within the year would destroy their sovereignty.  Finland, Estonia and Latvia were apportioned to the Soviet sphere.  Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its "political rearrangement"—the areas east of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San going to the Soviet Union while the Germans would occupy the west.  Lithuania, adjacent to East-Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence.

Upon signing the pact, Molotov reassured the Germans of his good intentions by commenting to journalists that "fascism is a matter of taste".  On September 1, barely a week after the pact had been signed, the partition of Poland commenced with the German invasion.  The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on September 17.

A famous cartoon by David Low from the London Evening Standard of 20 September 1939 has Hitler and Stalin bowing to each other over the corpse of Poland, with Hitler saying "The scum of the Earth, I believe?" and Stalin replying "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?". (link)

On September 28th 1939, the three Baltic States were given no choice but to sign a so-called Pact of defense and mutual assistance, which permitted the Soviet Union to station troops in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  The same day a supplementary German-Soviet protocol had transferred most of Lithuania from the envisaged German sphere to the Soviet sphere of interest.  Thus began the 50 years of Soviet occupation and suppression of the Baltic States.  By early 1941, the German and Soviet occupation zones shared a common border running through what is now Lithuania and Poland.  The two countries were were partners and old Joe Stalin and Hitler were budds.

In the Nazi-Soviet dispute over the partition of Romania, the Third Reich ended the pact of August 1939 by invading the Soviet Union together with Romania, opening an Eastern Front that would ultimately lead to the defeat of Germany.  After the launch of the German invasion, the territories gained by the Soviet Union due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were lost in a matter of weeks.  The German attack was followed by a Soviet pre-emptive attack on Finland on June 25, starting the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union.  The Baltic countries ended up as German protectorates until the end of the war when they were again annexed by the Soviet Union along with the rest of Eastern Europe, beginning the Cold War and the 50 years of brutal repression of Eastern Europe by the communists in the Soviet Union.

Cockburn, like the commie-loving Marxist he is, omits all of the above.  He is so enamored of communism and Marxism and hatred of everything American that he rewrites history (again and again) to serve his own warped view of the world and its history.  The fact is, communism and communists, in their search for "revolution," made World War II possible and the Soviet casualties are rightly laid at their feet.
1 posted on 05/08/2005 8:19:45 AM PDT by Beckwith
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To: Beckwith

And, oh by the way. . .

>>Historians have been revising upwards Soviet military deaths, to a level as high as 14 million and beyond, with estimates of civilian casualties ranging from 7 to 20 million."<<

Perhaps because Stalin executed the professional officer corp. . .perhaps this led to the massive defeats and losses. . .


2 posted on 05/08/2005 8:34:29 AM PDT by Gunrunner2
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