Sunday - June 07, 2009

Russia wheels out the evil weapon of history, distorting facts.  So what’s new?

A week ago I read a book review for something called,
REMEMBER US, by Ruth Derksen Siemens, and published by Pandora Press.  It is not an inexpensive book and I confess I’m going to have to wait awhile for the paperback and a good price at AMZN.  But it’s on my must have list. 

What Heffer writes about here doesn’t cover my book per se but does remind me of the horror that must come with living under that regime.

It’s a sad story (and true) of a family broken up and one side never seeing the other side again.  How any of them managed to survive the gulag is as much a mystery to me as how anyone was able to survive the Nazi death camps.  I guess survival of the fittest maybe.

In 1929 two families fled for their lives. One catches the very last train to freedom in the west, but the other narrowly misses it, and ends up spending decades in prison camps.  Well, these many years later as so often happens, a large cache of correspondence was uncovered and is the basis for the book. And it is chilling.  I’ve never understood how or why the swastika, as a symbol of what it assuredly is, has been banned all over Europe and yet you can buy hammer and sickle jewelery and Soviet mementos and flags and display them. ?? 

Maybe the gulags weren’t death camps in the very same way that camps were under the Nazis.  But they were death camps non the less and nobody cared.
In fact, from what I’ve read about them, the dead might have been the lucky ones.
So this piece from Simon Heffer is timely. Very. 

Distorting the facts about the Second World War may well be a prelude to a battle over a land corridor through Poland, writes Simon Heffer.

By Simon Heffer
Published: 4:24PM BST 06 Jun 2009

There are few things more dangerous or terrifying than when a nation, or the state apparatus that controls it, falls into the grip of a collective delusion. Such was the case in Nazi Germany, when a straightforward decision was taken to scapegoat Jews, Communists and, in the end, anyone else who didn’t agree with the prevailing madness, and persecute them to the point of mass murder. Stalin, in his own pursuit of totalitarianism, behaved similarly.

Some of us hoped that, in Europe at any rate, such absurdities were over; but a dispatch from The Daily Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent last week showed that the madness is back, in Russia at least, and with it the determination to abuse and manipulate history.

A research official in the Russian defence ministry has published an essay saying that Poland effectively started the Second World War by refusing to accede to Germany’s “modest” demands. We may take it that this man’s view reflects that of the Russian state; it is certainly widely interpreted as such.

Russia has been struggling with its idea of itself since the international humiliation of losing its empire nearly 20 years ago. For a time its sudden wealth – thanks to a high oil price and the value of other of its minerals – restored its amour propre. Although its rulers locked up people who sought to push democracy to its natural conclusions, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, poisoned troublemakers and threw the odd journalist out of windows, the money enabled it to offer the pretence of being a dynamic and powerful economy. Rolexed men in expensive suits climbed in and out of BMWs all over Moscow, and an idea was perpetuated that Russia could feel good about itself.

Then the oil price collapsed, soon after the militarily successful but diplomatically disastrous war with Georgia last year. Once more Russia was poor – with many of its greatest businessmen broke – and an international pariah. So now history, that much-abused weapon, is brought out of the armoury.

To the rest of the world, the Stalin era is one of shame for Russia. The country is seeking to change this. The cynical pact with the Nazis, concluded between Molotov and Ribbentrop a little more than a week before the outbreak of war, is now defended as an essential prelude to the defence against the “inevitable” attack by Hitler. It enabled Russia to occupy half of Poland and the Baltic States.

As the genocide or occupation museums in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn all show (and I have visited them all), the miseries inflicted by the Communist occupier on Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians were vicious, bloody, murderous and had nothing to do with protection against Hitler.
They were about the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, a process interrupted by the Nazi invasion of 1941 but pursued with ruthless savagery after 1944-45. Oh, and by the way, Stalin was so reconciled to the “inevitable” Nazi invasion for which this occupation was a “preparation” that he ignored all warnings that it was coming.

The Russian view now is that if only Poland had let Germany have a land corridor to Danzig – then a “free city” but effectively German, with a strong Nazi organisation and surrounded on three sides by Poland in its new, post-Versailles boundaries – there wouldn’t have been a Second World War. That is such idiotic nonsense that only a regime founded on lies, as Putin’s and Medvedev’s is, could seriously attempt to peddle it. Whatever Poland had done, Hitler would have annexed it. It had been his plan since Mein Kampf. It was where Germany’s Lebensraum was to be. The Czechoslovaks had made concessions to him (forced by us, not least), and they were not deemed enough: occupation followed.

There is no point trying to reason with the Russians about how they ought to know this. They don’t want to know it. Reason doesn’t come into it.

Further proof of the madness comes in the suggestion by the Russian government that it is planning to pass a law to make it an offence for Russians (and, more sinisterly, for foreigners – though how that would work remains to be seen) to describe what happened in Poland and the Baltic States between 1939 and 1941 as an “occupation”. If you still cannot grasp how evil this proposal is, imagine if the German government were to do the same – saying that it would criminalise the statement that Nazis had occupied Poland (or France, or the Low Countries, or anywhere else) during the last war. Germany would become a pariah state overnight.

So why are we not exercised by Russia’s wicked distortion of the past? And what else is to come? Are we to expect a further revision of the view about the Katyn massacre of 1940, when, on Stalin’s specific order, 6,000 Polish soldiers were murdered by Soviet executioners? It is only in the last few years that the Russians have owned up to doing this, having hitherto blamed the Germans. Perhaps now they will blame the Poles for this too, possibly even speculating that it was a collective suicide.

In history there is a distinction between revisionism and distortion. The former makes a sensible reinterpretation of known facts, often with the support of additional and uncontestable evidence, such as newly unearthed contemporary documents. Distortion requires no new evidence, but can require the disregarding of facts we already know. It is clear what the Russians are doing: and I fear it is not merely to make themselves look good, or to rehabilitate Stalin and his ideas, or to use history to seek to humiliate a troublesome and fiercely independent neighbour.

When the Baltic States threw out the Russian occupier in 1991, a part of the former East Prussia annexed by Stalin – Kaliningrad, the former city of Königsberg – remained Russian. However, like that other Baltic city, Danzig, it now finds itself landlocked away from its motherland. Poland is to its south and west, Lithuania to its east. Are the Russians trying to tell us something? Is Russia about to make a demand for a land corridor through Poland to Kaliningrad, for the same reasons that Hitler sought one to Danzig 70 years ago? If so, is Russia intending to argue that the denial by Poland of land access to Königsberg could provoke a big international fight, and possibly terrible destruction, and that it would be Poland’s fault for not giving into a “modest” demand?

I simply don’t know. But when people start twisting history and wielding it as a blunt instrument without any provocation, we are wise to start asking ourselves why.

SIMON SAYS

Posted by peiper     on 06/07/2009 at 09:34 AM   
Filed Under: • Commies • Jack Booted Thugs •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

DISCLAIMER

THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.

Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

THE INFORMATION AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS WEBSITE ARE DESIGNED TO COMPLY WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS WEBSITE SHALL BE GOVERNED BY AND CONSTRUED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND ALL PARTIES IRREVOCABLY SUBMIT TO THE JURISDICTION OF THE AMERICAN COURTS. IF ANYTHING ON THIS WEBSITE IS CONSTRUED AS BEING CONTRARY TO THE LAWS APPLICABLE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY, THEN THIS WEBSITE IS NOT INTENDED TO BE ACCESSED BY PERSONS FROM THAT COUNTRY AND ANY PERSONS WHO ARE SUBJECT TO SUCH LAWS SHALL NOT BE ENTITLED TO USE OUR SERVICES UNLESS THEY CAN SATISFY US THAT SUCH USE WOULD BE LAWFUL.

Copyright © 2004-2015 Domain Owner