Russia Forgives Uncle Joe (Stalin)

[peejay 327]

Peejay sez: Good article, but the last paragraph is a bit too weird and over the top. While a lot of the American Left is delusional about the true story of the history of world communism, most lack the 'nads and are mostly coffeehouse commies. A few of the old American Leftists like Pete Seager have "manned up" and actually denounced Stalin. It's real easy to talk bullshit when you don't have to actually live it in real life, eh? And Che T-shirts are so cool...aren't they?

Russia Forgives Uncle Joe

by Lisa Richards

Posted 12/31/2008 ET

“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”-- Joseph Stalin

On Sunday, December 28, 2008, RNA Novotsi reported 50 million out of 123 million Russians voted in Rossiyo TV’s “Name of Russia” contest for the greatest Russian leader. 13th century Prince Alexander Nevsky ranks number one, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is number three, losing by only 5,600 votes.

The man who extended Vladimir Lenin’s murderous Bolshevik rampage is forgiven for massacring 15 million “statistics” during his “purges” of people he referred to as “enemies of the state.” Beginning in the 1930’s and continuing into the 1950’s, Stalin imposed collectivization, sent millions to slave labor camps called Gulags to die from torture and starvation, and ruled the Soviet Union with absolute tyranny. 20,000 in Butovo were shot to death. For that Stalin is considered “great.”

Giving Stalin such honors demotes the lives he eliminated in the name of selective human control. Placing such a mark of distinction on brutality says only those one feels deserve life should be allowed to keep theirs.

Stalin’s death list included clergy and political opponents. 71-years later, Richard Galpin’s BBC News investigation reports: “Last month [November 2008] an Orthodox priest displayed an icon of Stalin in his church near St. Petersburg.” The elderly priest from the Stalin era told Galpin he considers “Stalin as his father.”

The leader of the St. Petersburg Communist Party Sergei Malinkovich explains why so many Russians revere the genocidal Georgian: “Stalin made Russia a superpower and was one of the founders of the coalition against Hitler in World War II. In opinion polls he comes out on top as the most popular figure. Nobody else comes close. So for his [stalin] service to his country we can forgive his mistakes.” It is convenient for Malinkovich and others to forget that before Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin was one of his three closest allies.

The communist party feels not naming Stalin number one is the fault of organizers rigging the contest to make Stalin lose. The SPCP is demanding Stalin be canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian radio and TV station VGTRK deputy Alexander Lyubimov said Stalin should be remembered in a better light: “He had no other choice. He was surrounded by enemies, and domestically it was also full of enemies of Bolshevism.” Lyubimov told The Independent he is proud of the contest: “five or 10 years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible. We’re creating historical distance, so it doesn’t touch us as much emotionally. This is the first brick in the wall toward trying to forget.”

Communist Party member Victor Ilyukhin claims: “there were also dark pages…and coming along with his [stalin’s] genius there were also destructive moments, but in general he is remembered mostly as a great leader. Ilyukhin says Russia has been forced to “live under capitalism for 20 years now and so what? We are now a rank-and-file country, no longer a superpower. Our voice is weak both in economics and politics, and key decisions are sometimes taken without us.”

Human Rights activist Lev Ponomaryov says “The younger generation is fed with myths about Stalin. It knows nothing about the millions who died in Gulag camps but well knows he was a strong leader who defeated Nazi Germany. Again, foreign enemies are to blame for all internal problems, so you need to rule with an iron fist -- it’s a purely Stalinist method.”

On September 20, 2007, USA Today reported Gorbachev, angry at Putin for what he called old-style politics in the Russian government today, condemned Putin and the Kremlin for its nostalgic views of Stalin: “We must remember those who suffered,” Gorbachev said, “because it is a lesson for all of us -- a lesson that many have not learned.” Putin’s reply was to say that patriotism and a pride for Russia needs to be restored and the west’s views of the old Soviet past are too negative.

Perhaps Hitler’s destructive moments were nothing more than negative communications on the part of Jews.

In October 2007, before Russian elections, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin memorialized Stalin’s victims at Butovo. The leader of the Association of Victims of Political Repression, Sergei Volkov, told the Associated Press that surviving victims of Stalin “had received little or no benefits from the state.” Volkov further stated, in regards to Putin’s pseudo-attempt at appearing democratic, while being elected from president to prime minister: “It’s the fault of the man who has stepped with one foot into democracy and still stands with another in KGB -- our president, Vladimir Putin.”

One year later Vladimir Putin appears to support the Saint Stalin effort. The former editor of a new history manual for Russian school children told Richard Galpin the book says Stalin’s massacres “were absolutely rational,” and the idea to name Stalin as greatest leader “came from the very top. I believe it was the idea of the former president, now prime minister, Vladimir Putin. It fits completely with the political course we have had for the past eight years, which is dedicated to the unity of society.”

Many young Russians today view Stalin as the hero and savior of World War II. Galpin’s report showed “Russians have a positive view of Stalin that is gaining ground.” When Galpin tried to enter “Memorial,” the Historical Research Organization devoted to preserving documents of Stalin’s atrocities, his camera crew was pushed back and blocked by Russian police confiscating records and destroying evidence. “It’s a huge blow to our organization,” said Memorial curator Irina Flige.

On March 15, 1987, New York Times columnist Philip Taubman noted Gorbachev’s anti-communist/anti-Stalin campaign would not work: “His [stalin’s] brutality is largely ignored, but it is not uncommon to hear Russians complain that Mr. Gorbachev is moving too fast to liberalize society and that what’s really needed is a stern disciplinarian like Stalin to crack the whip.” Twenty years later many Russians still reject western democracy and capitalism while embracing Joseph Stalin’s whip-cracking policies.

Don’t expect to see the human rights aktivistas of the lovable left decrying Stalin’s tribute. The Mercedes Marxists love authoritarianism in any way, shape or form. They supported the Viet Cong and that led to Cambodian mass-murders during the 1970’s. Proliferating communism’s absolutism keeps the earth’s population under control. The left adored Stalin when he was alive and revere him today. Thus it is no wonder Democrat Bolsheviks are not condemning Russia, which has turned into the New Left of 1968 America that continues worshiping Castro and Che Guevara as liberators of corporate capitalism.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30104

[Ban Hammer 14,295]

Peejay sez: Good article, but the last paragraph is a bit too weird and over the top. While a lot of the American Left is delusional about the true story of the history of world communism, most lack the 'nads and are mostly coffeehouse commies. A few of the old American Leftists like Pete Seager have "manned up" and actually denounced Stalin. It's real easy to talk bullshit when you don't have to actually live it in real life, eh?

many are naive about it. just show them the lines for a loaf of bread.

And Che T-shirts are so cool...aren't they?

Edited December 31, 2008 by charles!

[peejay 327]

I'm laughing so hard it hurts. And the truth hurts real bad. Can you say, "Bill Ayers"?

[peejay 327]

On a side note for some of the Leftist intelligensia, coffehouse commies, Mercedes Marxists, wanna-be revolutionaries, and campus commies among us that still have romantic illusions and delusions about Soviet socialism I can suggest some select reading materials to enlighten and, hopefully, give some food for thought for the naive.

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy In Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a sad note in history about US citizens that immigrated to Soviet Russia during the Great Depression to escape US poverty only to perish in Stalin's Terror campaign and in the Soviet gulag system. Also highlighted is the FDR administration's abandonment of US citizens to their death so as to appease the Soviets. Is this the same FDR that is often hailed as the savior of America during the Great Depression with his New Deal by modern day Dems? Say it isn't so. How could he throw US citizens under the bus to jump in bed with the Soviet commies? How indeed.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes is also a huge eye opener and can be quite disturbing after reading it as is his other book A People's Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

All three are good reads for the uninitiated.

[Danno 1,228]

I found it absolutely true that Russians have no distaste ... if not out right fondness for Stalin... young or old.

Generally the line they will use to defend him goes something like this.

" You must judge Stalin in the context of that time".

The place he holds in the hearts and minds of the Russian people is a real tribute to Propaganda (one sided information).

Several generations came of age, where Stalin was like a God (No others were permitted).

Can you imagine telling people of any faith to "stop believing"?

I knew a woman who told me, her Grand father was a POW in germany.

after the war, he did like 10 years in the Gulag for being a traitor (surrendering alive to the Germans).

Not only did they shoot, enslave or work to death men women and even children.

They also devoured each other.

Many of the same monsters that killed an endless stream of innocent people, found themselves on their knees being shot in the back of the head or sent off to the Gulag.

It's funny PeeJay mentions the book "Whisperers" as I am in the middle of it.

Let me relay one small story in it.

This one Russian writer just knew, like so many, that "One Day" they would come for him.

To hear a car stop on the street in front of his Apartment at night would cause him to sit up and begin to get ready.

As many did... he kept a bag packed and ready to take with him so he would have toiletries and a pair of underwear.

Finally one night they did come, the young daughter relays the story how her father sat like a stone on a stool in the apartment all night as the NKVD searched through everything, gathering evidence... such as Books written by other Authors who had already been arrested or the evidence of Binoculars (see he is a spy).

Finally at about dawn they are done as the floor is covered in pages torn from books and Documents and family photo albums, emptied out. The daughter doesn't want to look at her father, doesn't want him to see the fear in her eyes but as he gets to the door she runs and clings to him.

He turns and says something like;

"My dearest Little one, there are mistakes in History, but remember, We started something great!

Be a good young Communist"!

He stood up and said "Believe in Justice....."

and before he could finish his sentence they shoved him out the door and he was gone forever.

I am quite sure this guy, like all the other "citizens" snuffed out of their homes in the middle of night, transported in a Bread truck (to conceal it from the public) to a Prison, thought to himself

"If only Stalin knew what was going on here."

[NickD 203]

Under Stalin, the USSR never was a communistic socialist government, was a dictatorship with a huge econimical difference between elite party members and the average working class. My history books state that over 25 million Russians were killed by Stalin. WW II was a disaster, Stalin learned, could even be more fun to kill foreigners than his own people, and liked the idea of having a very strong military that he didn't have before.

Historians can reason why Stalin gained such power, average Russian is isolated and uneducated, but war baffled how Hitler gained power in a very well educated and organized Germany. False promises and greed seem to work for him, and taking away property and lives from people that were smart and hard working for it, without thinking their own property would be taken away as well, kind of stupid of them, wasn't it?

Chavez is working the same scheme as the majority of Venezuelans are poor, saw those red shirt guys with trucks and music giving away free beer and promises, but kind of backfiring on him now as inflation is so bad, even the poor getting a couple of free Bolivars can't afford to buy anything with it. Price of oil going down is hurting him. The middle class people, those that are well educated and hard working to get a little are really hurting now.

One common denominator with all these guys, and even here in the USA, is that a mere 10% of the people can control the other 90%, only ten percent of the people were party members for both Stalin and Hitler, but while they had guns, in the USA, it's money, where only ten percent of the population controls over 90% of the cash. This is caused but those with the cash financing our political system to give them an uneven playing field, it's all legal.

So what does this say about the other 90% of us that represents the vast majority? Only thing I can think of, is that we are stupid and stupid enough to vote in the likes of GWB with his false promises. We are sure paying the price now.

[Danno 1,228]

Only thing I can think of, is that we are stupid and stupid enough to vote in the likes of GWB with his false promises. We are sure paying the price now.

Didn't we just get done trading one set of promises for another?

[peejay 327]

It's funny PeeJay mentions the book "Whisperers" as I am in the middle of it.

Some other recently published books that I found on the shelf of my local libraries that I really enjoyed reading were:

The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, & the desperate struggle for Moscow that changed the course of WWII by Andrew Nagorski

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I first got interested in the subject of the USSR and Russia when I was in college in the 1970's. In one of my American history classes I had to write a paper about one of my ancestors and their role of living American history. I chose my grandfather because my grandparents immigrated to the USA during the Great Wave at the beginning of 20th Century. As a kid I was always told they were from a small village in Eastern Europe and my mom left it at that. Both of my grandparents died in the 1960's when I was in elementary school and I went on with my life here in America. Anyway, while researching my college paper as a young adult in the 1970's I located the village my grandparents were born in on a map and discovered for the first time that it was in the USSR. I was horrified to learn this fact about my grandparents because this was never discussed in our family. I grew up during the heyday of the Cold War and the prevailing attitude in America then was that the Russians were horrible people and were the #1 enemy of America. "Better dead than Red" and "kill a commie for mommy" were popular refrains at that time.

I guess I never connected that my grandparents were Belorussian because my grandfather had anglicized his Belorussian surname during the Red Scare of the 1920's and he formally anglicized his adopted name when he became a US citizen in 1943. They tried as best as they could to blend in and shield my mom and aunts from anti-Soviet sentiment in America then.

My grandparents never returned to Belorussia after immigrating to the USA and my mom and aunts never met their relatives there. After my grandparents died in the late 1960's no one from our family maintained contact with our relatives in the USSR. During the Glastnost period when Gorbachev loosened up the Soviet Union my mom's Belorussian relatives felt safe enough to try to contact their American relatives.

This contact via letters in the mail eventually culminated in my mom and I visiting our relatives in what is now Belarus. Since that first visit I was able to travel to Russia and Belarus many times to see relatives there. And this is how I eventually met my Russian wife in Belarus.

[EstebanTrabajos 7]

[Danno 1,228]

Good thing you are in the "off topic" area.

But since you brought it up...usually when you make the claim someone "is awesome"... it has a little more impact if you can list a few reasons "why" .....so others can get excited too.

[peejay 327]

Kind of reminds me of a favorite song by David Allen Coe. It's a great song and most appropriate for the occassion. And it goes like this:

The @sshole Song by David Allen Coe

Well I was drivin' down I-95 the other night.

Somebody nearly cut me right off the road.

I decided it wasn't gonna do any good to get mad.

So I wrote a song about him instead.

It goes like this...

Were you born an @sshole?

Or did you work at it your whole life?

Either way it worked out fine

'cause you're an @sshole tonight.

Yes you're an A S S H O L E...

And don't you try to blame it on me.

You deserve all the credit.

You're an @sshole tonight.

You were an @sshole yesterday.

You're an @sshole tonight.

And I've got a feelin'

you'll be an @sshole the rest of your life.

And I was talkin' to your mother

just the other night.

I told her I thought you were an @sshole.

She said, "Yes. I think you're right."

And all your friends are @ssholes

'cause you've known them your whole life.

And somebody told me

you've got an @sshole for a wife.

Were you born an @sshole?

Or did you work at it your whole life?

Either way it worked out fine

'cause you're an aaaassss...hole tonight.

Enjoy!

[Danno 1,228]

I never heard that one before but it

Kinda has that;

"You don't have to call me Darlin (Darlin)"

feel to it in the beginning.

And we all know thats a great song!

[lostinblue 1,989]

Remembering Ukraine's famine

Luke Simcoe, Saskatchewan News Network; Canwest News Service

Published: Monday, November 24, 2008

SASKATOON -- When Rose Kinal was just nine, Soviet agents came to the small Ukrainian town where she lived and took away the life she had known.

"They took everything," she said. "Land, animals, food ... everything."

Kinal, now 85, is a survivor of the Holodomor, a devastating famine perpetrated on the Ukrainian people between 1932 and 1933.

Under the direction of Josef Stalin, the Soviet regime imposed excessive grain quotas on the Ukraine, a region regarded as the agricultural heartland of the former Soviet Union.

Staunchly nationalist, many Ukrainians resisted collective farming. Those that did were blacklisted -- their towns and villages were cordoned off by soldiers and their food supplies confiscated.

Kinal remembers soldiers tapping on walls and floors to make sure they weren't missing any hidden stockpiles of food.

Death toll estimates vary widely for the famine, but according to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, seven to 10 million Ukrainians, one-third of them children, died during the Holodomor.

At its peak, starvation was claiming the lives of 25,000 Ukrainians every day.

Those that survived did so under a veil of silence and terror. Informers were everywhere and many who opposed Stalin's policies were arrested or went missing.

Vasil Szalasznyi, Kinal's friend and the son of a Holodomor survivor, recalls the story of an old widow who disappeared from his parents' town after refusing to hand over her cow to the Soviets.

"That story kind of stuck with me as a little kid," Szalasznyi said. "How could you do that to an old lady?"

Kinal's father -- a vocal Ukrainian nationalist -- was among those arrested by the Communists. Like so many others, he never returned.

"I don't know where my father is buried," Kinal said.

After her father's disappearance, Kinal and her siblings were put in the care of her grandfather but he soon succumbed to the famine. Left to fend for themselves, the children subsisted on whatever they could catch from a nearby river.

Beaten by Soviet soldiers if they were caught fishing, Kinal says her brothers set up nets in the river in the middle of the night, and supplemented their meager catches by foraging for crayfish.

Referring to herself as "walking history," Kinal has no shortage of stories and memories from the famine. She recalls the thrill of stealing seeds from a Soviet-controlled farm and fights back tears when discussing how the Communists tore the cross off of her church and converted the building into a grain silo.

On Saturday, members of the Saskatoon community, some Ukrainian, others not, gathered to mark the 75th anniversary of the famine.

http://www.canada.com/reginaleaderpost/new...14-709cddce4a38

[peejay 327]

I never heard that one before but it

Kinda has that;

"You don't have to call me Darlin (Darlin)"

feel to it in the beginning.

And we all know thats a great song!

The guitar riffs in "The @sshole Song" is superb. The other song you refer to is "You Never Even Call Me By My Name". Both are classic David Allen Coe tunes.

[NickD 203]

My other grandfather is a deserted from the Czar army, did a name change and came to Milwaukee, my grandmother was born from a Polish maid taken advantage of from a French nobleman, a lord, was kicked in the eye as a child by a goat, so that nobleman sent her to Milwaukee where a famous eye surgeon resided that restored her sight in that eye. She stayed here, met my grandfather and got married. With a history like that, almost impossible to trace their roots. Practically all the churches where any records were kept were blown far away by the Germans. So that is all I know, but do have an interest in that part of the world.

Roots trace back to Italian, French, German, Polish, and Russian, guess that makes me a mutt. Some of my purebred German Shepherd dogs got 2,000 bucks for a stud fee, I couldn't get a dime. Vikings also got into the act in Italy, so that really messes things up. Ha, my Italian relatives are fat short little people, at least a full head taller than all of them, more like a foot, and have deep blue eyes that my wife loves, but then I like her green eyes. Ha, makes me wonder if my mom was fooling around, did meet my dad later on, what a short little guy he was, not the monster I remembered as a kid.

Guess we all are children of the world, but still wonder why we let all the nuts get in charge.