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
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. . .
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