Posted on 02/04/2010 3:37:09 AM PST by Clive
Those who are concerned that once history is distorted, it often never gets corrected, can breathe easier after a startlingly accurate documentary was premiered this past Sunday at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Toronto.
Even so, The Soviet Story, made two years ago and shown mostly in the Baltic states and Europe, has resulted in angry protests in communist quarters. The documentary’s young writer and director, Edvin Snores, a Latvian, has been hanged in effigy and denounced as a liar by some in the European Parliament.
One Russian historian publicly regretted having taken part in the film — a film in which he did not take part. Such is the outrage.
The Economist urged “those who want to ban it should try refuting it first.”
I’ve seen the film (it premiered in the U.S. six months ago) and, put bluntly, it cannot be refuted. Rejected, maybe; offensive to some sensitivities, perhaps; horrifying, undoubtedly; painful, without doubt. But refuted? Impossible.
The core theme is the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was mentor to Hitler and the Nazis. Until Hitler turned on his ally, Stalin and the USSR were Hitler’s partners in war, with a treaty to divide Europe once the pesky problem of defeating Britain had been solved.
Most people do not realize — or have forgotten, or never knew — how closely Nazi propaganda emulated Soviet propaganda — similar images of muscular men in posters, smiling young women, all working for the improvement of mankind by eliminating human trash like Jews, Serbs, Gypsies, even Scotsmen!
The genesis for genocide to rid the world of the weak or unwanted, originated with Karl Marx who, around 1849, wrote: “Killing is justified, especially if it cleanses society.”
Lenin agreed, Stalin expanded the creed and Hitler copied it.
In the early days of the Second World War, Jews who fled Germany to the USSR were rounded up by the NKVD and turned over to the Nazis.
Where Hitler and Stalin differed in building a pure society and better human beings, was Hitler digressed from Stalin’s formula of “class warfare” and introduced “racial cleansing.” Hitler watched with envy how the NKVD eliminated seven million Ukrainians by imposing the world’s first man-made famine on Ukraine in 1932-33, confiscating all food and making record sales of Ukrainian grain to Europe.
The world paid no attention — the few journalists who did (Malcolm Muggeridge) were ignored. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for dodging the famine.
The film footage is ghastly but persuasive. Mountains of skeletal, starved bodies are bulldozed into mass graves. Vivid photos of victims shot in the head and tumbling into mass graves. There is Katyn Forest, where 20,000 Polish reservists were shot, some buried alive in mass graves, and our side pretended the Germans did it.
The world remembers the horrors of the Nazi death camps, but we hunger to forget, if we can, the 20-plus million who died in the Soviet Gulag at the whim of our wartime ally, “Uncle Joe.”
Among Edvin Snores’ interviews are aging women who recall the famine, the massacre of their families, the Gulag. Painful, but essential to record.
With younger generations reluctant to believe history, it’s important there be a source for unvarnished truth.
— The movie can be bought at sovietstory.com
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BTTT
I think I saw parts of this on U tube. The USSR & Uncle Joe killed 11 million Ukrainian’s in the Holodomore. Not only does it rival the Holocaust, it far out does it in both numbers and terrible efficiency. Mass starvation that lasted only a year yet worked to ruthless perfection.
BTTT
Britain imposed a famine on Ireland quite a bit before 1932.
That is an offensive and completely untrue distortion of historical fact.
The worst that can be said of Britain’s role in the famine is that they badly mishandled the relief effort. The famine itself was triggered by natural causes (the Phytophthora infestans fungus) and excacerbated by Ireland’s unique economic circumstances.
Ireland was an extremely densely populated country, similar to England, but far less industrialised. Unfortunately, people didn’t know what to do to rectify this. Except for a Linen industry based predominantly in the North, Ireland hadn’t really industrialised like the rest of the UK due to a lack of resources (particularly coal) which meant that the Irish economy was predominantly rural and poor, which meant that Irish labourers came to be overly dependent on the cheap and easy to grow potato, which was a disaster waiting to happen should something ever happen to affect the potato crop. This fact was a cause for concern even before the famine. What happened afterwards was not a deliberate act of genocide, but a combination of unavoidable disaster and an incompetent attempt by the British Government to mitigate the crisis, in many ways similar to the US Government’s attempts to deal with the after effect of Hurricane Katrina in 2005...
Were there, or were there not other food products grown on the island.
Did the british through any means cause those foodstuffs to be exported rather than fed to starving Irish?
A happy coincidence, if you will.
Yuck.
Thank goodness for cultural diffusion.
MrEdd, I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it is a classic example of a technique often used by the left. The subject is Soviet genocide and the discussion is about potatoes.
The other crops tended to be grown for sale to pay rent or for export. The landowners (who were predominantly Irish) wanted their rent same as always, and they wanted it sold for profit, and it was much more profitable to export it than hand it over to feed the starving poor in Ireland.
The prevailing political ideology of Britain in that period was one of lassaiz faire free market economics, and they did not want to interfere with the free market by forcing the Irish Landowners to use their property to feed the distressed people of Ireland. Ironically, this non-interventionist approach would probably gain much ideological sympathy from many members of this board, but as a result, the famine was excerbated because the Government felt it did not have the right to intervene and force people to use their property as welfare for other people...
Noting an incorrect statement in the source article is honest debate, not lefty nonsense.
Hmmm sounds like lib propaganda to me. If that is the case then explain the role of Parliament in passing the notorious Corn Laws??
Suggest buying it to get the full effect. http://www.sovietstory.com/
Related YouTubes:
“The Soviet Story”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqEf2FSbrdY
“The Soviet Story - Why killing is essential to communism”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3uFUxMwA1w&feature=related
“The Soviet Story - trailer (napisy PL)”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU4Dc5Z8TUw&feature=related
The Soviet Story PL (2008) 8(9)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Wn59A-1RcE&feature=related
Hitler and Stalin admired each other. In fact, had Germany defeated the Soviet Union, Hitler would have installed Stalin as the leader of the Nazi-Puppet Russian state.
While Hitler frequently mocked FDR and Churchill, he never did any such thing with Stalin.
You mean the Corn Laws which were repealed at the beginning of the Famine in 1846, in keeping with the emerging lassaiz faire free market liberal philosophy of the age?
In fact it has been said that Peel repealed the corn laws to save his tail from all the bad propaganda of starving Irish (The famine started in spring-summer of 1845 and was making headlines by 1846). The repeal of the corn laws came too late to save the Irish as they were too cash poor to pay for either the relief supplies or the food that their landlords shipped to Britain.
A cynic could argue that American grain interest (those evil capitalists again!!) wanted the famine so they could make money on those exports to the UK
Gotta love liberals....
Good point. Appreciating your putting things in prejudiced perspective, Byron
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