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That does not surprise me. The American people have never understood the truly sinister nature of Stalin's order. They haven't because the real history of the Stalin regime even in outline form never made it into popular culture or the common shallow level of knowledge that is passed off in textbooks. This is deliberate for, I think, two reasons. One, the Soviet Union was ‘socialist’ in the mental universe of American liberals so it couldn't really be an’evil empire’. That is at the basis for all the cold war revisionism. Two, the US was an ally of the Soviet Union in World War Two and the liberals and a lot of shallowly triumphalist Americans have a vested interest in creating a cartoonish image of WW2 as an immaculate conflict unlike any other and our only ‘good war’. The left uses this version of WW2 to undermine any US military operation comparing the ‘evils and corruption’ of Viet Nam or Iraq or Afghanistan or the War on Terror to the virtuous decent war against the Nazi monsters.

A couple of WW2 vets got very angry when I have pointed out that there was no difference between the eliminationist agendas of the Third Reich and Stalin's regime and that our ally at the moment Dachau was liberated was operating far larger (Magadan, Vorkuta) and equally deadly labor and elimination camp complexes. The comment that we destroyed one eliminationist tyranny to assist another gain control of half of Europe is very disturbing to many Americans that have grown up on the ‘good war and the only good war’ theology.

“The comment that we destroyed one eliminationist tyranny to assist another gain control of half of Europe is very disturbing to many Americans that have grown up on the ‘good war and the only good war’ theology.”

Your absolutely right; Americans would rather live with the myth rather than the truth. Coming from an area with many Eastern Europeans (mostly Poles), the myth died a long time ago. The people that France & Britain went to war for (though only declaring war on Germany while the USSR invaded eastern Poland) ended up enslaved by Bolshevism instead of National Socialism; different groups simgled out for murder, but the same result just the same (on a much larger scale). When you tell Americans that the wars in Korea & Vietnam followed directly as a result of saving Joseph Stalin and the Bolsheviks, you get some strange looks; it is the truth.