Posted on 11/26/2008 11:06:02 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Archives from Stalin’s secret police have become a flash point because of the rise of a movement that has sought to idolize Stalin as a leader who defeated Nazi Germany, spurred industrialization and made the Soviet Union a superpower.
Last year, the Kremlin promoted a study guide for high school teachers that deems Stalin “one of the most successful leaders of the U.S.S.R.,” while describing his “cruel exploitation” of the population. Mr. Putin himself has acknowledged the losses under Stalin, but has said Russians should not be made to feel ashamed of them.
“We do have bleak chapters in our history; just look at events starting from 1937,” Mr. Putin said at a meeting where the study guide was presented. “And we should not forget these moments in our past.”
“But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments,” he said. “In any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam.”
In interviews, F.S.B. and other security officials said they had in fact declassified many documents. Asked about complaints from historians, Oleg K. Matveyev, a senior official at the F.S.B. archives in Moscow, said some people wanted to depict Soviet rule only negatively.
“To draw the line at 1991 and say, everything before was black, and now has come white, as is done in many countries and regions in the former republics of the Soviet Union, we have nothing like that here,” he said. “We are more careful about our past.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It’s a strange world indeed. Meanwhile so called paleoconservatives are openly shilling for Putin because they love this parody of Russian nationalism, that amounts to a revanchist hatred of American power.
“But other countries have also known their bleak and terrible moments,” he said. “In any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam.”
The temptation is to respond to these three charges on a factual level, to point out that it took not one but two atomic bombs to bring Japan to the decks of the battleship Missouri to surrender-the need for the second demonstrating the need for the first; to point out that chemicals were used to defoliate a jungle hiding guerrillas who murdered south Vietnamese who would not succumb to communism, a tactic gruesomely pioneered in the Soviet Union the evidence of which the article describes at Kashtak, and a tactic which the United States sought to put an end to in South Vietnam both by the use of defoliants and by heavy bombing. But to respond to these charges on extensive factual level is a mistake because it concedes to the left the high ground.
The left invariably argues by resort to relativism. Once conservative, democratic, capitalist America agrees to engage in the argument at all, we lose because we have given away the idea of American exceptionalism. We've given away the idea that a democratic, capitalist, conservative America is by definition a virtuous land which should be emulated by all other countries on earth.
The resort to argument by relativism, of course, is not limited to matters of international virtue but go to the very heart of political epistemology. If all values and realities are relative and nothing is absolute then the relativist gets to shade and shape the values. If virtue is absolute, he cannot redefine it. But if it is relative, leftist gets to play God. Since that is his ultimate goal, (whether he is possessed of self-awareness enough to know that or not is irrelevant because his impulse is what matters) he has won the game, the game of politics, in which he gets to rule.
To suggest that Russia has bleak periods, but to intimate that they have been less destructive or harmful than the actions of the U.S. in WWII or Vietnam is beyond ridiculous. We could start with Ivan the Terrible, or Peter the Great, and endlessly recount the slaughter, criminality, and dehumanization of people at the hands of the Russians - from serfdom to the Gulags and purges, the endless wars of conquests from the Iron Curtain to Afghanistan, on and on, and on...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.