Posted on 08/30/2009 12:25:55 PM PDT by lizol
Medvedev: blaming Soviets for WWII a 'cynical lie'
By STEVE GUTTERMAN (AP) – 6 hours ago
MOSCOW — Russia's president defended Moscow's role in World War II before the 70th anniversary of its outbreak, saying in an interview broadcast Sunday that anyone who lays equal blame on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is telling a "cynical lie."
Dmitry Medvedev's remarks were the latest salvo in Russia's bitter dispute with its neighbors over the war and its aftermath. The Kremlin has launched a campaign for universal acceptance of its portrayal of the Soviet Union as Europe's liberator.
In Eastern Europe, however, gratitude for the Nazi defeat is diluted by bitterness over the decades of postwar Soviet dominance.
Medvedev suggested in the interview with state-run Rossiya television that nobody can question "who started the war, who killed people and who saved millions of lives — who, in the final analysis, saved Europe."
"You cannot label someone who defended himself an aggressor," Medvedev said.
Tuesday marks 70 years since the Nazis invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, shortly after Josef Stalin's Soviet Union reached a nonaggression pact with Germany that included a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
Weeks after the German invasion, the Soviet army entered Poland from the east. After claiming its part of Poland, the Soviet Union then annexed the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania.
Germany is widely considered the chief culprit in the war, but many Western historians believe Hitler was encouraged to invade by the treaty with Moscow, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Kremlin recently has mounted a defense against suggestions that the Soviet Union shares responsibility for the outbreak of the war.
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Soviets didn’t liberate anything. All Eastern Europe did was trade one set of chains for another.
I’m not an expert, but I think blaming Hitler and the Soviets *equally* is quite a stretch. As an aside, it’s very tiresome when people use “lie” to describe an honest error, or in this case a difference of opinion on interpretation.
Why is it such a stretch? Hitler and Stalin both wanted war, Stalin was to wage an offensive war by 1943, he was just trying to buy time to rebuild the Red Army by then.
Stalin wanted Germany, England and France to get into a long war that would drain all sides. That would have left the Soviets to clean up the mess. He wanted Poland, Finland and the Baltic countries to get him into position to launch such an attack. By signing the Non-Agression pact with Hitler, he had hoped those things would be in place.
What Stalin didn't count on was France falling so quickly.
Actually it may have been fortuitous that France did fall quickly. Had things gone Stalin's way, the Iron Curtain wouldn't have been from "Stettin to Trieste", it would have been the Atlantic Ocean.
As far as WW II goes, The REAL culprits were Lloyd George and Clemceaeu(sp?) and the POS “Treaty of Vesaille”.
I watch “The Reader” the other day and a quote from the movie was, “There were thousands of camps. Everyone knew! Our parents, our teachers; that isn't the question. The question is, How could you let this happen? And better, Why didn't you kill yourself when you found out?”
I watch “The Reader” the other day and a quote from the movie was, “There were thousands of camps. Everyone knew! Our parents, our teachers; that isn't the question. The question is, How could you let this happen? And better, Why didn't you kill yourself when you found out?”
Now THAT is a cynical LIE.
The Soviet union "liberated' nothing. Instead it annexed most of Eastern Europe and part of Germany and placed it behind the Iron Curtain, and forced the Ukraine, Poland, and East Germans to live in insufferable misery cut off from the rest of the world
When you're talking about two of the three most murderous psychopaths of modern history (the third being Mao) I have no problem *whatsoever* assigning equal blame to both.
Medvedev should also ask the Ukrainians, who after having half the population starved to death by Stalins collective farming program, (Not to mention those deliberately SHOT in prisons and farmyards by Stalins Bolshevik red army accused of being ‘resistors’ for stealing their own grain to make a loaf of bread) who then were barely able to put some flesh back on their bones before the Germans rolling in and sent them back to work in labor camps, If they felt so “liberated” being occupied once again by the soviets.
Germany got “The Marshall Plan.” Poland got “The Marshall Stalin Plan.”
Hmmm, Nazis or Bolsheviks. Hitler or Stalin. Not much to choose from there.
The Red Army did “liberate” Stalingrad eventually, after a long, bloody battle, but that’s really about it for liberation.
In 1941 the Axis/Nazis invaded Russia- it wasnt the other way around. So I’d put more blame on Hitler for engaging Russia in heavy combat, but Stalin was so thoroughly horrific in his rule that I dont see why Russia would want to bring it up now- except to attempt to compose revisionist history.
I wonder when Obama toured Buchenwald, he was informed that after the war, it was used by the Soviets as part of their Gulag system?
Hitler’s biggest mistake, was treating the conquered areas of Russia so harshly.
He should have cynically treated the Russians more like the way the French or Dutch were treated, at least until the Soviets were defeated. Heck, most Russians would have welcomed the Nazis as liberators from Stalin. Then Hitler could have then done whatever he wanted, knowing the Red Army was vanquished.
But Russians clearly saw that Stalin was preferable to Hitler, and they continued fighting.
The Ukrainian Christianity probably went through the most hell on earth over the longest period of time than anyone in Eastern Europe, Although Christianity throughout the Eastern block and Asia minor saw horrific slaughter, over a hundred million souls lost by most estimates from the fall of the ottoman empire till the collapse of the soviets.
“As far as WW II goes, The REAL culprits were Lloyd George and Clemceaeu(sp?) and the POS “Treaty of Vesaille”.”
I tend to disagree, in part, with that, but only politely so.
From my understanding, limited as it is, the true roots of WW2 grow out of letting the German army quit the field in WW1 without them having to admit full, complete and abject defeat. That gave birth to the myth that if they’d only held out a little longer, only tried a little harder, etc and so on, they’d have won.
I also tend to believe that it was the foot dragging appeasniks from ‘36 through ‘39 that guaranteed a much deeper blood pool from the war when they finally got around to dropping their denial that a war was upon them, like it or not.
The Treaty of Versailles, in my opinion, is simply an excuse their propagandists drummed up to give something for their useful idiots to glom onto, much like the jihadiscum like to try to use the old Crusades as their excuse for their current predations.
Appeasement of any sort with any enemy at any time serves no purpose but to allow that enemy to gain in sufficient strength to become an even greater threat and extend the horror of war beyond necessary limits.
But, on topic to the main post, yeah... the USSR was a dedicated belligerent on the world stage from day one of “the revolution”. Imperial expansion was written into the Soviet ideological model as a requirement. Same with our current jihadiscum enemy and their ideology of islamic expansion.
Soviet communism, nazism and islam share much in the methods, mechanics and motivation in regard to expansion. All methods, covert, overt, military, migration, etc and so on, are on the table, used aggressively and have plenty of historical documentation as to their brutality and murderous intent.
And, all three ideological abominations also produce(d) propaganda efforts that cherry pick among those excuses loved most by the leftardic intellectual inbred morons to feed back to them as rationalizations and reasons for the ideological spawned wars of aggression and acts of mass slaughter, in order to paralyse the “left” into non action, or even into siding with the enemy that also wishes the “left” destroyed, man, woman and child.
The Soviet Union was not with the good guys until June 22, 1941. All of its actions prior to that date were as an ally of Hitler.
Technically yes.
That said, the situation was not unlike that recurring scene in action movies, where both antagonists are squared off in a fight scene with a gun on the ground in between them.
Someone was going to make the first move.
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