Monday, January 10, 2011

Communists are as bad as Nazis,

and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest wrote Insty a while back. Just recently I saw a book mentioned and found it at the library: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Only about sixty pages in, and one of the things it's convinced me of is that Stalin and the communist True Believers were(some still are) even more evil than I would have believed. And I do not use that word lightly. This is part of what really got me, referring to the famine Stalin ordered in the Ukraine:
As Stalin interpreted the disaster of collectivization in the last weeks of 1932, he achieved new heights of ideological daring. The famine in Ukraine, whose existence he had admitted earlier, when it was far less severe, was now a "fairy tale", a slanderous rumor spread by enemies. Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress.

Resistance to his policies in Soviet Ukraine, Stalin argued, was of a special sort, perhaps not visible to the imperceptive observer. Opposition was no longer open, for the enemies of socialism were now "quiet" and even "holy". The "kulaks of today," he said, were "gentle people, kind, almost saintly." People who appeared to be innocent were to be seen as guilty. A peasant slowly dying of hunger was, despite appearances, a saboteur working for the capitalis powers in their campaign to discredit the Soviet Union. Starvation was resistance, and resistance was a sign that the victory of socialism was just around the corner. These were not merely Stalin's musings in Moscow; this was the ideological line enforced by Molotov and Kaganovich as they traveled through regions of mass death in late 1932.

Stalin never personally witnessed the starvations that he so interpreted, but comrades in Soviet Ukraine did: they had somehow to reconcile his ideological line to the evidence of their senses. Forced to interpret distended bellies as political opposition, they produced the utterly tortured conclusion that the saboteurs hated socialism so much that they intentionally let their families die. Thus the wracked bodies of sons and daughter and fathers and mothers were nothing more than a façade behind which foes plotted the destruction of socialism. Even the starving themselves were sometimes presented as enemy propagandists with a conscious plan to undermine socialism. Young Ukrainian communists in the cities were taught that the starving were enemies of the people "who risked their lives to spoil our optimism."
Evil. There is no other word for this. Millions dead, God alone knows how many physically and/or mentally damaged for life. And we've still got fools who defend it. Make excuses for it.

This is going to be as hard to read as The Black Book of Communism.

1 comment:

Keith said...

They are not easy reads, I still haven't got back to this http://www.amazon.com/Mao-Story-Jung-Chang/dp/0679422714

and I only got about 100 pages into it.

I've just read the communist bit of this: http://mises.org/books/great_wars_great_leaders_raico.pdf

(Mises inst, has it as a free download)

It says not to think of Stalin as a cynical murderer, and argues that he was even worse than that, that he was an idealistic true believer!

It also points out that the terror, the mass murders on a scale never before seen (outside of Islam) and the fammines all started in the first year of Lenin's rule.

It also points out that with the single line command structures set up by Lenin, totally without any divisions of powers, checks or balances, It would have been a miracle if horrors like Stalin hadn't occurred!

The book probably won't markedly challenge your opinions of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or Hoover, but it's analysis of Churchill is devastating. It really picks him out as an opportunist progressive and statist, as well as a narcissist - the last I think we knew about already.

One way or another, with their morals consisting only of "the end justifies the means" and "by whatever means necessary", we can never trust anything the lefties say or do.