Wednesday, November 7, 2007

"Uncle Joe" the Mass Murderer

How the West sold Eastern Europe to murder and mayhem. Eric Margolis says:
From 1934–1941 alone, some 7 million victims were sent to the system of concentration camps known as the "gulag," including one million Poles, hundreds of thousands Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, and half the entire Muslim Chechen and Ingush people. Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Bashkirs, Kalmyks followed. Stalin’s gulag did not need gas chambers: cold, disease and overwork killed 30% of inmates yearly.

To this day, Russian and foreign historians are unsure of the full number of Lenin and Stalin’s victims. Estimates range from 20–40 million total deaths from 1922 to 1953 – and this awesome figure does not include deaths in World War II.

Stalin committed his worst crimes well before Hitler’s major atrocities got under way. His concentration camps were opened and filled with inmates by the early 1930’s.

We have forgotten that Germany alone did not spark World War II, as most people believe. Germany and the USSR jointly invaded Poland in 1939; Stalin then attacked neutral Finland. Two years later, Britain and the USSR invaded neutral Iran, an aggression as lawless and brazen as the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland. History indeed remains the propaganda of the victors.



Paula said...

Thank you for this post, Elena. East-Europe was a buffer between the West and URSS...some people do not like to remember this.

There is a certain disdain here in West toward the Eastern-Europeans even now when most of East-Europe got integrated in UE.

elena maria vidal said...

You are welcome, Paula. We are always hearing about the Nazis but everyone forgets about the horrors perpetrated by the Communists in Eastern Europe and in China for a much longer time, and on a much larger scale.

alaughland said...

I believe these sort of invasions have happened throughout history, but what was unique about the 20th Century was the calculated mass murder of particular segments of the population, not only in Europe, but in Africa and South America as well.