Stalin himself once said that "one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is just another statistic."

Who is not to say that this is exactly the way the human mentality measures most events, great and small? Certainly, during World War II, Stalin and his great red empire were both heroes of the highest order to the United States government, the government of the United Kingdom, our 16 million members of the armed forces on duty -- and in many case in armed combat -- all across this planet. As Churchill said, the Soviet Army tore out the guts of the German Army in the most titanic battles of human history. But for that, Eisenhower would never have been able to land and sustain the Allied Expeditionary Force on the coast of France in June 1994.

Possibly we would have undertaken the nuclear destruction of the main German cities as we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following year. On the other hand, if the Soviet Union had collapsed under the Nazi German onslaught in Operation Barbarossa in late 1941, who can say for sure Hitler would not have rendered his position impregnable throughout Eurasia. And who can say his scientists would not have figured out the secrets of nuclear and thermonuclear energy in time to develop their own super-weapons to use against us?

None of the above excuses the crazy excesses and mass punishments of their own populations by the various communist governments established since 1917. But most Americans in 1941-1945 simply said:

"Who gives a shit about all that? If they're on our side, they're good and the situation is good. If not, they're bad and so is the situation."

I was a kid in those years, but I heard how people talked and knew what people were thinking. Just remember what I said here. Nobody gave a damn about Stalin's millions of victims when we needed him and his army. Just like nobody gave a damn about the Osama bin Laden and his terrorists when we assisted the mujahadin in Afghanistan in the 1980s to help expel the Soviets from that country.

Hindsight isn't worth a hill of beans, because nobody ever learns enough from it to generalize future unintended consequences of today's conventional wisdoms.Think about all this before you start getting indignant all over again about Big Red and his badass bunch.

In any case, maybe there are no permanent victims. Or at least there doesn't have to be such a thing. They were able to grow a new Armenian people after the Turkish massacres of 1915. And a new Ukrainian people after the mass starvations of 1933. And a new Jewish people -- in their own independent state and armed with their own nuclear weapons -- after the Nazi mass killings. A new Cambodia people now, as well, after the Kmer Rouge went into history's dustbin. Just as we will do the same thing here in America if the need ever arises. Life goes on, with or without justice.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Feh. When you're in a war, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a perfectly justifiable attitude, but that doesn't mean you trust such vile "friends." And we shouldn't have--we know now that Stalin had deeply penetrated the Roosevelt White House with spies, and was actively engaged in activities to undermine our government and our way of life. He and his Comintern were a bunch of vile monsters, and you know it as well as I do, Arnold.

I know you and I disagree about McCarthy, Arnold. I think his over-the-top rhetoric and his carelesness and his arrogance hurt the anti-Communist cause deeply. But I'm surprised that an unrepentant Joe fan like yourself would now be making excuses for these bastards.

But you and I fundamentally disagree: people who don't remember holocausts, don't acknowledge them, don't see the unredeemable horror of them, are more likely to repeat them.

But then again, I am the bleeding-heart liberal here.

Why do I hate them?

Because when I was a child, our family had to celebrate Christmas behind thick curtains, and couldn't talk about it outside our home.

Because my maternal grandfather gave directions to Finnish tourists on the street, resulting in their home phone being bugged for the next fifteen years.

Because ten percent of my country's population was sent to Siberia. Imagine 28 million Americans torn from their homes, men, women, children, infants - loaded on cattle trains, and moved to a bitterly cold, barren wasteland thousands of miles away.

Because everywhere I look in my country, I see the scars the bastards left behind.

Because my paternal grandfather was loaded on one of those cattle trains and deported to Siberia. He, unlike the thousands around him, managed to stay alive, and eventually found his way back. He lost all toes on both feet to frostbite.

Because my maternal great-grandfather was blacklisted his entire life under Soviet occupation, an educated man kept from working as anything but a janitor. They did this because at age 17, he fought against the Red Army in the Estonian Independence War (and won).

Because he died in 1987, a year before the blue, black, and white flag of Estonia was unfurled on the streets again, after 47 years.

Because he died before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

Because he died before we regained our independence in 1991.

Because during their famines, people ate their children, because hunger drives you mad.

Because their hands have the blood, screams, and torment of one hundred million people on them.

If you take a pen and start writing down the names of every single person who starved, froze, was beaten to death, was raped, shot, hung, stabbed, sobbed in despair and realized there was no hope, and then slowly but surely died, you'd go through countless pens, boxes and boxes of paper, and your goddamn arm would fall off.

That is why I fucking hate them. I've hated them as far back as I can remember, and as years go by, I've come to hate them even more.

And if I ever run across someone who actually defends these vile, repugnant monsters, I will hospitalize them.

My standard is this: If you were a Communist during the 1930's, but broke with Communism upon hearing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, I forgive you and, if you spoke out against it, I honor you. If you were a Communist while we were fighting alongside Stalin against Hitler, but broke with Communism with Communism after the war, I forgive you, and if you spoke out against it, your honor is less but I still honor you. I honor those like Whittaker Chambers who had been Communists but broke with it and spoke out against it. But if you spent the Cold War whining about "McCarthyism" and hardly uttered a peep against Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc., if your position was "yeah, they shoot dissidents, but, so what? they have free healthcare", then to Hell with you. If you still think that way, then all I can say is:
"Commies: dead but too dumb to lie down" -P. J. O'Rourke
Communists, like Nazis, have the right to free speech. But we ostracize Nazis everywhere, we treat them with the opprobrium they deserve. We do not lionize them, praise their "idealism", give them jobs in schools and universities and in the media, give them jobs in government or in defense plants in sensitive positions. Communists should be treated just like Nazis.

My wife was born in the Soviet Union in 1980, but when I talk to her about how evil Stalin and communism are, she states that nobody even thinks or talks about Stalin anymore. The region she's from (Khabarovsk) has destroyed every shred of Stalin's existence. However, Lenin's statue can be found everywhere...strange. They don't link Lenin with communism and all the evils it brought; they view him as a historic (positive) figure in their nation's history.

She comes from a middle-class family - father is a carpenter, mother an architect. Having visited their home a few times and spent a few months with them, they convey, that their family's standard of living was much better prior to 1991 then it is now. They have much less real purchasing power now (in rubles) then before - by sending about $300 a month to her mother, this puts them in an upper-middle class category. I asked my wife about issues of freedom and liberty, and she says that she has no recollection of not being free to travel, play in the center square. In her city they had (and still have) great celebrations where people drink, dance, and whatnot. I attributed this to the fall of communism, but they all say that the celebrations were more lavish and fun back in the 70s and 80s because they had more money and goods weren't so expensive. I expected them to talk of life in the "gulag" sense, where KGB were checking every corner for political dissedents, but this was not the case.

Maybe things were bad and they just accepted it without rocking the boat. Of course, my wife was only a child when Gorbachev took power. Most Russians I've talked to hate him and Yeltsin, but they like Putin.

I don't know what to make of it all. Of course communism is evil, but that was not my wife's experience.

Tim:

Your wife's experience might have a little to do with the fact that Khabarovsk is in the Far East of Russia. My mom and dad and the rest of my clan lived in Bialystok, Poland. That is significantly closer to Moscow. Let me just say that my mom will never utter a word of russian (even though she is fluent) because she has such resentment. My mom was born in 1940. Stalin was not kind to the Polish people. My grandfather was in a gulag and my dad at age 13 or 14 had to quit school and work to support his mother and his young siblings. Dad was the oldest, born in 1936. They remembered. That's why my dad risked everything to come here in 1965. Better to die trying to make a better life - than die from despair knowing it will never be better.

Be thankful that your wife didn't have it bad. Really thankful.

Tim - after Stalin's death, things changed a lot. Mass murder (of Russians) became a thing of the past. As long as you weren't offensive to anyone high-up, you were left alone.

A great deal of Russians want Communism back. There are people in my country who want Communism back. Why?

Because for some people, the 100+ million deaths don't count. For some people, freedom isn't worth a thing, it's a stupid idea, an empty word. Who needs freedom when the all=powerful state guarantees jobs for everyone, equality for all, free healthcare, free education, and keeps anyone from having it better than you.

Never mind that technologically, your society is 30-40 years behind the developed world. Never mind that you cannot buy a car without a special licence to do so. Never mind that there are special Party stores, which common Soviet Citizens have no business entering. Never mind that this economic system cannot sustain itself.

Why are the old days so popular in Russia? I think the fact that Russians have never tasted actual freedom before - Russia has never had a democratic government (and still doesn't) - might have something to do with it. And many think of the Soviet era as Russia's finest hour - they were, after all, a world superpower. But most of them just want free lunches back.

In every nation, there are large numbers of people who'd pick state-guaranteed everything and lack of responsibility over freedom. And Lenin, Stalin, Beria, and the rest killed off most of the ones who would disagree.

My mother was born in South Korea.

The Imperial Japanese might be why I don't have many grand-uncles or grand-aunts on that side of the family, but the ChiComs are why I don't have many uncles or aunts.

When they overran her village, every educated person in her village, or anyone who used to work for the government in any capacity whatsoever -- including postmen and street sweepers -- was rounded up and shot. Among them was my maternal grandfather, who I never met. He was a local village constable, or WTF they called it.

Right with you guys on the "fucking hate them" plan.

Dean,

The mass murders of large numbers of inhabitants of this planet are an integral and unchangeable part of the human story. Whether or not you choose to agonize over these events, they will continue. The reason is related to the territorial imperative that has been at the heart of the human psyche since our remote ancestors climbed down from the trees. Agression and xenophobia live within the human breast, side by side with desire, envy and sexual lust. Combine that with a continually expanding population competing for a finite amount of land and for shrinking global resources, and you have holocausts. Not pretty, but real.

Sam, the Estonians, along with the other Balts (Finland, Latvia, Lithuania) ought to think about a comment attributed to Porfirio Diaz, late 19th century leader of Mexico, before he was deposed in 1911:

"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States."

Because that is your relationship to Russia at one end of the Baltic, and to Germany at the other end. Rosemary, that goes for your beloved Poland as well. That country is little more than Germany's Mexico, and that is all it ever shall be; an exporter of cheap labor and raw materials, an importer of manufactured German products.

Sam: Estonia has independence right now, but that is solely because Moscow is suffering one of its periodic fits of weakness. Your people have gone through these cycles before. How many times? They will go through it again, when the next real Tsar takes his rightful seat in the Kremlin and the next Bismarck takes control in Germany. Just like Peter the Great. Just like Josef Stalin. Don't waste you time listening to the UN-type blather on the part of the big democracies of the west. Instead, keep you eye on the new combination of the Germans, the Russians and the French. One day they will be the overlords of all Eurasia from the English channel and the Atlantic ocean to Bering straits and the Pacific ocean. I view the future as an extrapolation and continuation of all that has gone on before. The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.

Steven Malcolm Anderson,

Like most other Americans of my age and upbringing, I regarded Marshal Stalin and his great thundering army as part of the great epic of World War II. Because they were on our side, and Adolf Hitler was the enemy who had to be stamped into the ground. That does not mean we had any particular respect for or regard to communism, which most of thought was a silly foolish notion as pest and a degradation of human life at worst. But we overlooked that purposely because of the war.

When the war ended, and it was clear that Stalin had planted real enemy agents all across this country, most of us supported the idea of exposing them, rooting them out, and ruining them and their schemes wherever feasible. I was a soldier in the US Army late in the Korean War period by then, and people like me cheered whenever McCarthy damaged the reputations of people like these. Nor do I have any regret today about the blacklisting of the Hollywood reds. I wish we could do the same thing today to people like Barbara Streisand, Alex Baldwin or similar creeps.

But if our country had to refight World War II under the same circumstances, I would cheer good old Joe Stalin just as much now as then. My principles are based on what's good for my country, my family, my friends, and me.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold Harris:
I agree with you about World War II. As Churchill said: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would have good words to say about the Devil."
But he never forgot that Stalin was Satan, even if Hitler even worse. Nor did he forget that, only a little while before, Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler, refuting the false dichotomy of "Left" vs. "Right" totalitarians. The real opposition is totalitarians vs. anti-totalitarians.
I agree with you about those actors. As I said in the thread on Mao's China, I would put Shirley MacLaine at the top of the blacklist for having visited Communist China and then coming back and proclaiming that their system is better than ours because "the group is more important than the individual", the basic premise of every totalitarianism. Despicable.
I'm glad that you openly, unapologetically, state that your principles are based on what's good for your country, your family, your friends, and yourself. My principles, also, are based on what's good for myself, my loved ones, my country, my culture (the West), and, above all, my love of beauty. I'm selfish and proud of it.

Steven Malcolm Anderson,

There's little enough true beauty, so I'll drink to that, wherever and whenever I discover it.

You are correct in observing that I never apologize. If I deem my thoughts worth expressing, I do so openly, the way my father and the strict teachers of my early age taught me, so long ago.

And yes, I would burn the world for the United States of America and for the protection of the constitution of this great commonwealth. When I look for a true hero, I think of the story of the great Aemilius Paulus, a general of Rome and conqueror of Macedonia in a rising year of the republic, who, when informed of the death of his sons as he was enjoying his triumph in the strets of Rome, said:

"I face a solitary hearth in my old age. But the prosperity of the State consoles me." (A man of granite and steel.)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Dean - an observation:

In this exchange I noticed the following:

Arnold has a detached view of history. What effects him personally is where he places is energy and attention. Whereas, you tend to be view history in a more subjective and passionate fashion. You are an emotionally expressive individual and it's that element that gives your writing its special and open quality.

I am always eager to read what you both have to say on any subject. Dean's World is a real treasure.

Excellent onservation, Jane. I love the styles of Arnold Harris _and_ of Dean Esmay. And Hail to the Queen of All Evil!

Well, Jane, variety is the spice of life. Maybe the spice of blogsites, too. If all the writers and commenters on Dean's World sounded the same note, nobody would have special reason to tune in.

The thing is, each of us views life from a different set of lenses and digests facts with a different memory and perceptive viewpoint. And, in the main, we all do this politely, and unless someone really gets under Dean's skin and makes him itch, he lets everybody ramble on and on. In this format, you never know when someone will come up with something bright or maybe even brilliant, and you won't get that from a bunch of sycophants.

In any case, if everyone agreed with me one hundred percent and did it one hundred percent of the time, it would bore the hell out of me. I expect that might be true of most other folks.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold

Please don't think I meant to slight you. I like your objective explanations of life as you see it and always feel that it is time well spent reading your comments. I just noticed such a contrast between your analysis and Dean's and thought it was an interesting juxtiposition

No doubt, you have developed an understanding of life that may have changed every decade or so. I know I have and I recognize in some of the younger commenters here a highly passionate reaction to many important issues. My passion has cooled quite a bit as I enter my "golden" years but I can still remember the intensity of my point of view and find it coming upon me once in awhile now.

Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I'm always learning from the your posts.