Posted on 01/18/2014 11:54:07 AM PST by WXRGina
The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with.
I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author Krystyna Piorkowska, the Associated Press reported this week, has unearthed a “lost” U.S. document, dating back to 1945, known as the Van Vliet report on the Katyn Forest Massacre. Few Americans are familiar with the World War II-era massacre, let alone with U.S. Army Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet, so what is history telling us?
Its message is one that we as a people are deeply conditioned to reject. It concerns decades of U.S. appeasement, support and collusion regarding the USSR, and even in some of the evil empire’s worst atrocities. In American Betrayal I re-examine this terrible pattern, long obscured by false narratives of the “good war” that I learned along with everybody else, for evidence of Soviet agents’ influence on U.S. strategy. Equally important is the corrosive impact this subversion has had on our nation’s character. Nowhere is this moral impact more evident than at Katyn.
This chapter of the story begins when Van Vliet and other prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany were brought by German officials to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, to watch the exhumation of thousands of executed Poles, mainly officers, from mass graves discovered there in 1943. The evidence Van Vliet saw convinced him he was looking at a Soviet atrocity of colossal proportions. As part of Stalin’s diabolical plans to Sovietize Poland, the Soviets liquidated 20,000 Polish POWs in 1940, a time when this region was under USSR occupation following the Soviet invasion of Poland in tandem with Nazi Germany in 1939.
By 1943, however, the U.S. and Great Britain had struck a military alliance with the communist dictatorship against the Nazi dictatorship. At the time of the massacre’s discovery, Stalin instantly blamed Hitler. Much more importantly, so did FDR and Churchill. Did they know the truth about their murderous ally (Stalin) against their murderous enemy (Hitler)? Did they want to know the truth?
We know that a British diplomat named Owen O’Malley was dispatched to study the war crime in the spring of 1943. O’Malley wrote a remarkable report for the British government concluding the Soviets were guilty. We know Churchill gave this report to Roosevelt that same summer. Former Pennsylvania Gov. George H. Earle, Roosevelt’s personal emissary, would testify that he presented evidence of Soviet guilt at Katyn to Roosevelt personally in 1944. FDR wasn’t buying it. Meanwhile, “we mustn’t offend the Russians,” went the internal government mantra, confounding truth, morality and, I argue, U.S. strategy. As a result, both the U.S. and Great Britain would peddle Soviet lies about Katyn throughout the war. The Office of War Information, a wartime U.S. government agency we now know was riddled with Soviet agents, was a strong arm for this propaganda.
U.S. support for the Big Lie about Katyn, however, continued long after the war – which is where the Van Vliet report comes in.
At war’s end, newly liberated Van Vliet sped home with his eyewitness account of Soviet guilt. On May 22, 1945, Van Vliet presented what he knew directly to the head of military intelligence, Gen. Clayton Bissell. The general tagged the report Top Secret, and, as Van Vliet later told Congress during its investigation of Katyn in the early 1950s, “then dictated the letter directing me to silence.”
Silence. When we see the past as a struggle between silence – which includes cover-up – and revelation, a new pattern of understanding takes shape. Why was the truth of Soviet guilt at Katyn suppressed until Congress ferreted it out in 1952? What impact did this have on the advance of communism in the world? What or whose cause did silence serve? Not the causes of truth or freedom, to be sure. Meanwhile, it is this silenced American eyewitness account of Soviet guilt at Katyn that became known as the Van Vliet report. From the moment congressional investigators began looking for it in the early 1950s until now, the report has been missing.
In fact, that same report Van Vliet dictated on May 22, 1945, is still missing. What Krystyna Piorkowska discovered is a sworn deposition by Van Vliet dated May 10, 1945. As the testament of America’s most famous witness to Katyn’s toll, this document found by Piorkowska, author of English-Speaking Witnesses to Katyn, is highly significant.
Van Vliet was not the only important American witness at Katyn. Army Capt. Donald B. Stewart was there, too, and, according to declassified documents Piorkowska uncovered last year, Stewart sent a coded message in 1943 to military intelligence indicating that he and Van Vliet believed the Soviets were guilty of the massacre. In other words, U.S. brass received eyewitness information in real time.
It gets worse. In 2012, writing about Piorkowska’s earlier Katyn findings, the AP reported: “The newly discovered documents also show Stewart was ordered in 1950 – soon before the congressional committee began its work – never to speak about a secret message on Katyn.”
History is telling us that more than Polish bodies are buried there.
FDR is a known communist sympathizer. Churchill not so much towards the end of the war. Uncle Joe had an express line to info that FDR was privy to. McCarthy may be reviled for his methods. But he was on the right track.
Begs the question . . . given the circumstances uncovered in Diana West’s work mirror current Islamic infiltration to this US administration, why is this not considered treason and stopped in it’ tracks now?
Here’s the 2007 Polish film Katyn (with English subtitles): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pocHgwUX5Ck
As With All Coverups The Truth Will Eventually Be Revealed.
It seems the Islamists and their commie sympathizers in our government are immune from prosecution.
Senator McCarthy was right, and that’s why he was reviled by the enemies within our nation.
The Roosevelt Administration included quite a few communists at very high levels, up to and including Vice President. Much of our history has been colored by the efforts to excuse communist behavior. Even the characterization of the Nazis as “right wingers” comes from this effort. The Nazis, of course, were radical socalists and were in fierce competition with the communists for political power. When we decided to fight the Nazis, we could hardly call them left wingers when we had decided to ally ourselves with the Soviets.
The Cold War caused the communists to go to ground, change their name, and cry foul over the exposure of those in their ranks by McCarthy and others. With the Cold War over, they have reemerged. Now, these communists call themselves Progressives and they once again occupy important positions in the White House. This time around, they’ve even managed to get one of their ranks into the Oval Office.
Seventy years ago, as the first Red Army units rolled into Poland while expelling the Nazis, the rest of the world learned that the Soviets had no intentions of honoring the promises that they made to the Poles. That was never their intention, as the Katyn burials prove, but our government helped keep the lie alive.
More than 600,000 died either during the deportation or shortly thereafter.
Almost all of them were reserve Army officers (anyone who had a college degree was a 'reserve officer' under Polish law), academics, lawyers, etc. and their families.
The Soviet Union and Germany shared the same goal of exterminating Poland's culture and sense of national identity by annihilating her educated classes.
I first heard about Katyn back around 1970 when some news article mentioned a soldier confessing about it.
The MSM then lambasted it as “hearsay” from one dubious source and that there was nothing to it, so forget it!
Then one day, I was in a book store which had a book of reprints of SIGNAL, the Nazi era magazine, with a large article about Katyn, complete with photos.
0 bummer's birf certificate?
Evil never sleeps.
Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans Poles?
What difference at this point does it make?”
It doesn't help when a supposedly "free" press acts as a bodyguard of lies.
http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/timeline/description.asp?cid=121&width=650&height=240
Katyn massacre: Soviets execute tens of thousands of Polish officers 3/4/1940
According to data in the possession of the Polish government-in-exile, in early 1940 the Soviet Union held as many as 15,000 Polish prisoners of war, of whom 8,300 were officers. Taken prisoner by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939, they were interned in three camps: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostaszkow. Late that year, there were reports that the three camps had been disbanded. In 1941 and 1942, the Polish government-in-exile repeatedly asked the Soviet Union for information on the prisoners’ fate, but to no avail.
On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that mass graves had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, in their area of occupation, containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been shot in the back of the head. The Germans charged the Soviet authorities with the murder and appointed a multinational medical commission to probe the matter. In May 1943, the commission reported that the graves contained the bodies of 4,143 officers, of whom 2,914 were identified by documents in their uniforms. It was the commission’s opinion that the men had been shot to death in the spring of 1940. The Soviet authorities flatly rejected the accusations of the German-appointed commission, arguing that the Germans themselves had committed the deed when they had occupied the area in July 1941.
In mid-April 1943, when the Polish government-in-exile demanded that an investigation of the Katyn killings be made by the International Red Cross, the Soviet Union reacted on April 25 by severing relations with the government-in-exile. This step would have far-reaching effects on relations between the Soviet Union and Poland. In November of that year, several months after the Red Army had liberated the area, the Soviet Union appointed a commission of inquiry of its own, which blamed the Germans for the Katyn murders. A United States congressional inquiry in the early 1950s found the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) responsible, and most Western historians now believe that the massacre was committed at the behest of the Soviet authorities. On March 8, 1989, the Polish government officially accused the NKVD of perpetrating the slaughter.
In 1990, in keeping with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost policy, the Soviet Union released documents indicating its responsibility for the massacre at Katyn, and uncovered further mass graves in the area.
Excellent movie.
Apparently the Germans and Russians were equally culpable of disposing of the Poles.
There is a section in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” that tells a grisly tale.
Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe chief, recounts the massacre of tens of thousands.
It is a tough read.
This distinction, not unreasonably, fell out of fashion for approximately 65 years. At that time, when assorted forms of formalised socialism had been unleashed on the world, the "pure" or "purer" socialists in assorted nations, seeking a distinction between themselves and other "corrupt" socialists, resurrected it.
By the 20th century, this left-right nonsense had devolved into the harder-core socialists, Bolsheviki and their ilk, styling their socialist opponents as "rightists" and "right-wing" and (I love this) "forces of reaction", i.e. reactionaries. In reality, the only practical differences between Bolshevism and Italian/German state socialism were that the latter two "philosophies" also contained a strong component of nationalism AND that the latter two had relatively little interest in outright ownership of the means of production. Hitler's speech to the Nazi conclave at Nuremberg on 1 May 1927 contains several (and one VERY specific) reference to this latter point, ownership of means of production, to wit: "Our socialism goes much, much deeper."
There is an account from 1936 or so, titled "The Vampire Economy" written by an on-the-ground industrialist in Germany. It's heavy reading -- the author was distinctly not a writer -- but worth the effort, speaking historically. The similarity described within between Nazi bureaucrats and modern-day Eurocrats and American bureaucrats is, frankly, stunning.
Socialism can never and will never tolerate any ideological competition. It is NO accident that, after assuming power, Hitler first of all purged the Communist faction in Germany.
Yours for accurate history, and FReegards, m'friend.
History has proven over and over again that socialism is just another word for mass murder.
I truly believe that one of the reasons that liberals are so hateful is because they have aligned themselves with a system that has committed so much butchery, that demons flock towards anyone who accepts it, and overwhelms them.
You want to see what a liberal really is in thirty seconds flat, just tell them about how many hundreds of millions socialism has murdered, and ask them if they think that all those lives have proven that that form of government doesn’t work.
They won’t even blink as they reject your premise - all that horror doesn’t touch their souls at all. Zip.
At that moment, you will see them with different eyes.
Amen and spot-on, Talisker!
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