Lest We Forget

Sorry, It's Already Been Forgotten

We recently had the opportunity to watch the DVD, The Soviet Story. Derived from previously secret archival material and from eye witness accounts, it presents a history of the Soviet Union that is chilling and almost beyond belief. For a good deal of the script, Russian academics, particularly historians, present the story.

The West to this day consistently and wilfully blindfolds itself to the horrors of Soviet Communism. If you asked the "person in the street" which they considered more evil, Hitler and the Nazis or Stalin and the Soviet Communists you would almost certainly be told that the Nazis were the greater evil by far. In fact, notwithstanding the evil of Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin and the Communists wreaked unspeakable evil upon the human race.

The Soviet Story documents, for example, the genocidal forced starvation of millions in Ukraine during the years 1932-3. Stalin ordered the Ukrainian border sealed, confiscated all food which could be found in the Ukraine, then waited for the people to starve to death. The entire Ukraine became one vast concentration camp. Over 11 million people perished. The footage is far more grotesque than any that has survived the Nazi concentration camps--if such comparisons can be meaningful in any way. Hitler admired Stalin's accomplishments in this arena.

What the documentary establishes from the Soviet archives is that in the years prior and during the Soviet-German Non Aggression pact, the Soviet Union regarded Hitler and the Nazi's as fellow socialists, and constantly aided, supported, and abetted Hitler. This changed only when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and attacked the Soviet Union. Only then, in the official Soviet mind, did Hitler and Nazi-ism become distinguishable from Communism and cease to be part of the de-facto Comintern. It is likely that Stalin's stubborn refusal to consider that Hitler might attack and his angry dismissal of irrefutable intelligence on Hitler's plans were due to his inability to conceive that one socialist/communist nation (Germany) would attack another (the Soviet Union).

Claire Berlinski, writing in City Journal, marvels at the indifference in the West to Soviet atrocities.

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

The Soviet Story needs to be shown to every high-school pupil, lest we forget. Actually, it's too late. We are all socialists now, non? Any disagreement the West may have with Stalin and the Soviets is only the relatively minor matter of arguments over tactics--as was the case between Hitler and Stalin.