Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Stalin Bust at National D-Day Memorial

The national D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, now includes a bust of Joseph Stalin. See news coverage here and here.

I wonder how many people will be as outraged as many Polish and other Eastern European Americans will be at this news. I wonder if they will understand our outrage. Not just Poles. Lithuanians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians…

We often ask this question: Why would a t-shirt with Hitler's image on it be abhorrent, but t-shirts with Mao or Che on them are socially acceptable?

Please ponder the double standard. Please consider the memories of people I know whose parents or grandparents were at home, living their day to day lives, when thugs came in the night, roughed them up, put them on cattle cars – and, for no crime other than their ethnicity, their Christian faith, their stamp collecting, that they wore glasses (yes Communists have prepared lists like this – "Arrest the stamp collectors. Arrest those who wear glasses") and sent them off into no-man's-land, where many died along the way. Only they weren't going to Auschwitz. They were going to places like Kolyma.

Please see Andrzej Wajda's Katyn. Please think of a person like Vasili Blokhin, a personal friend of Stalin, and the most prolific executioner in history, who, by his own hand, killed tens of thousands of human beings in the name of communism, including prisoners at Katyn.

7 comments:

  1. This is a letter I wrote to William McIntosh of the memorial last November 11th. There was no reply.

    Veteran’s Day, 2009

    National D-Day Memorial
    Dr. William McIntosh
    P.O. Box 77
    Bedford, VA 24523

    Dear Dr. McIntosh,

    On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is an irony to hear of the National D-Day Memorial’s plans to honor the man responsible for its existence. Joseph Stalin, the perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity, did not “challenged Hitler on the Eastern Front”, as your press release states. Joseph Stalin enabled Hitler to begin what became the Second World War by acquiescing to, and participating in, the invasion of Poland – it was Hitler’s invasion of the USSR that forced the reluctant Stalin to respond. This was not a challenge to Nazism – it was a survival tactic. To now honor him for cooperating with the allies on D-Day would be akin to rewarding a murderer for restraint in not killing more. In fact, that is exactly what this is.

    This kind of irredentism is to be expected of Vladimir Putin, who two years ago had all Russian history books re-written to remove references to Stalin’s brutality. The enslavement of hundreds of millions of people throughout Central and Eastern Europe is becoming but a footnote. By now honoring this mass murderer at the National D-Day Memorial would be confirmation of myths long perpetuated by first the Soviet Union, and now the anti-American regime in Moscow.

    The display of historical ignorance in the Memorial’s decision goes further. The Red Army was in fact not the least involved in D-Day operations, and Moscow was kept in the dark as to the planning of the Allied invasion. No Western leader trusted Stalin for a very good reason: his army was ordered to occupy all lands it “liberated”. The people of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia experienced this policy in its harshest application, as their countries were integrated into the USSR. Others in Eastern and Central Europe saw their democratically elected governments replaced with Moscow-controlled dictatorships. Germany was torn apart as Stalin redrew its borders, causing the greatest forced migration in human history, and the division of that country for forty four years.

    Americans were not immune from the brutality of Stalin’s regime. Thousands of American, British, and Commonwealth servicemen were taken to the Gulag after the war – disappeared without a trace – at the direct order of Joseph Stalin. To now honor this man would be to betray the honor and sacrifice of these servicemen, as well as the millions who perished under that brutal dictator’s hand.
    As a non-profit foundation, the National D-Day Memorial receives preferential treatment under the tax code, and therefore has a special responsibility to taxpayers. The Memorial’s aim to become a national landmark further emphasizes the importance of staying focused on your mission: to honor those who sacrificed their lives fighting for our freedom. To then honor the likes of Stalin is particularly disturbing.

    Sincerely,


    Warren Wilczewski

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  2. Mr. Wilczewski, thank you for that excellent letter. It is disgraceful that you did not receive a reply.

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  3. I also wrote to the national memorial. There was no response. I spoke to the commander of the local American Legion post in Bedford, and he said that the memorial had also ignored their requests to talk about this.

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  4. Pressure for removal of Stalin's bust needs to continue, in an effective way. But first we need some facts, to figure out how to proceed.
    The Bust: Is it on public land? If not, who owns the site? Who paid for the bust --taxe funds, individual contributions, or combination? Who is the present owner/caretaker?

    Dr. McIntosh: What is his area of expertise? Is he a university professor? What is his political background, e.g., does he promote leftist 'progressive' causes? Who are his superiors and sponsors, and what is their political leaning and attitude toward Stalin's bust? (probably the same as McIntosh)

    Once this and maybe some other relevant facts are assembled, it would be possible to start an effective campaign to remove the bust ( and maybe discredit McIntosh).

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  5. Good letter but from an individual so do not expect any answer. But what has fall of berlin wall got to do with anything. Is this an attempt to dientify the fall of the Soviet Union with the fall of berlin wall??- the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union was in september of 1980 when the strike in Gdansk shipyard led to the first independent trade union.

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  6. A couple months ago I heard Alan Watt
    http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/
    discussing a statue of Mao that went up in a park in the Vancouver area, funded by some kind of Canadian public works program.

    So now we’ve got a bust of Stalin in Virginia … commemorating an American assault in World War II that Stalin had no connection with. Why should anyone be surprised?

    This is just a measure of how brazen our owners and directors have become, understanding well that we’re so thoroughly communized by now no insult to our intelligence, and simple decency, could be great enough to raise much of a stir.

    Call it “communitarianism,” if you will.
    http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communitarian/niki.htm

    The labels aren’t all that consistent anyway. In fact, the vitiation of our language has served to advance their cause – whatever you want to call it – just as Orwell predicted that it would, fostering such a fog of confusion, moral and intellectual, that anything at all might come to seem OK.

    Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’m convinced that somewhere there’s a small – still marvelously unnamed, and hence, obscure – core of people who do understand … exactly how society’s been reduced to its present, sorry state. For we may infer: it’s just these same exponents of Mao and Stalin and the like who’ve engineered this outcome – ever so gradually and persistently mind you, over generations, lest folks catch on, get aroused, and take the proper measures, somehow, before it’s too late.

    I’m glad to see there’s still a few good people out there with enough good instinct left to generate a bit of anger. Yet what we’re facing now is hardly going to be set right by removing surrealistically offensive monuments from parks, if that were even possible, or likely. Those monuments are nothing but a symptom of something far more deeply wrong, and very far advanced.

    I don’t wish to sound defeatist, or to abet passivity, but I don’t see any neat, formulaic course of action either. The clearest judgment I can offer at this point is that anyone who isn’t brain dead and ethically retarded ought to be deeply concerned about what’s coming down the pike.

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  7. Bob, thank you so much for posting.

    I wonder if you listen to Michael Savage and I wonder if you've ever heard phone calls from a guy named Jimmy in Brooklyn.

    You can listen to one conversation here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSddp1B4ph8

    Me, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But I'm not judging. I am open to hearing various points of view.

    Thank you very much for posting.

    ReplyDelete

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