Day of Remembrance for Victims of Katyn Massacre

[v2]

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish intelligentsia committed in April 1940 by NKVD soldiers who were fulfilling the orders of Stalin and the highest command of the Soviet Union.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2ZYdiEE20Y

 

[pbehn]

Lest we forget ............

 

[michaelmaltby]

... and the West was willing to believe Stalin's lies. He did what he did everywhere ... murder the intelligentsia, the leaders, the gifted ... Stalin and his posse were the epitome of evil.

 

[Wurger]

 

[vikingBerserker]

 

[swampyankee]

Not to apologize for Stalin here, but destroying Poland had been Russian policy for at least three hundred years, from before the First Partition. Hitler also made it easy for Stalin's lies about Katyn to be believed, because Hitler had been bragging about murdering Poles for years.

 

[michaelmaltby]

swampyankee ... you are conflating Poland - the nation state, with Poland - the Polish people. No one had been discussing wiping out the Polish people for 300 years. Poles were very integrated into the Czarist Empire and indeed subsequently, the Communist Party.
This is Stalin's handiman on the spot in 1939 .... personally executed 7,000 Polish officers in 28 days.
Vasily Blokhin - Wikipedia

 

[swampyankee]

swampyankee ... you are conflating Poland - the nation state, with Poland - the Polish people. No one had been discussing wiping out the Polish people for 300 years. Poles were very integrated into the Czarist Empire and indeed subsequently, the Communist Party.
This is Stalin's handiman on the spot in 1939 .... personally executed 7,000 Polish officers in 28 days.
Vasily Blokhin - Wikipedia

The Poles were very much the victims here; Stalin's motivation in destroying Poland -- and the people who could lead Poland -- was probably not that much different from that of the European rulers who destroyed the nation-state of Poland in the Partitions.

What does surprise me is how the Katyn Massacre remained hidden during the Cold War. Certainly, that Hitler was simultaneously committing genocide helped to hide Stalin's crimes.

 

[Torch]

I remember my father translating my aunts and uncles in Poland how shocked they were to find out that it was the Soviets who did the slaughtering and not the Nazi's. That cover up lasted a long time and I know the Polish people, at least the ones I know/knew had a deep seated resentment and hatred to those that did this.

 

[michaelmaltby]

".... that Hitler was simultaneously committing genocide helped to hide Stalin's crimes."
More like ... that the Allies and their media had already bought into Stalin's agenda helped to hide's Stalin's atrocities. IMO.

 

[Gnomey]

Lest we forget

 

[michaelmaltby]

... lest we remember the wrong message.

 

[Greg Boeser]

Our church has a memorial plaque commemorating the victims of this massacre.

 

[v2]

Our church has a memorial plaque commemorating the victims of this massacre.

Hi Greg, make a photo, please...

 

[swampyankee]

Stalin's willingness to murder allies and imagined enemies is an interesting contrast to his disbelief in the invasion from his buddy, Adolf.

 

[Greg Boeser]

Hi Greg, make a photo, please...

Will do.

 

[J.A.W.]

Oddly enough, the Pope, & Stalin, each other sworn enemies, both did deals with Hitler,
after he'd impressed them with his doings..
(The Pope by anti-Jewish/Communist measures, & Stalin's purges being inspired by Nazi 'night of the long knives')

Hitler died 'in *good grace' with the RC Church, if not with **Stalin,
- who reckoned that J.Edgar Hoover had done a deal with Hitler, too..

That Stalin sardonically reclaimed the bloody soil of 'Holy Mother Russia' from the Papist Poles,
while ethnic-cleansing the Lutheran Prussians out of their lands to hand to the Poles,
( so long as they were kept in order by his 'Jew-Bolshevist ***Commissars') , is yet another irony.

*Dying 'in good grace' - means that you have a sure place in 'Heaven' - according to RC dogma.

**Stalin did not accept Hitler died in the bunker, & suspected that via the FBI/OSS - he'd escaped with his life,
- just as the US did an even more blatant deal with Hirohito, while still claiming his 'unconditional surrender'..
- to date, no certain proof has contradicted ol' Joe, such as DNA tests of putative Hitler bone samples.

***Who continued to cruelly persecute those returnee Poles who'd fought with the West, as 'enemies of the State'.

 

[michaelmaltby]

".... Stalin's willingness to murder allies and imagined enemies is an interesting contrast to his disbelief in the invasion from his buddy, Adolf."
You need to think like a hard core communist who has robbed banks and fought in nasty-dirty Civil War fights and who was intended to be an Orthodox priest, to see just how consistent ... mostly ... Stalin really was. He saw the world entirely through communism .. the atheistic, Marxist narrative that we see taking form in the west these days ... BUT ... Stalin saw his role as implementing "communism in a single country" ... something Marx had never described. Stalin inherited/usurped a revolution that had stalled out. What do you do when the Revolution doesn't go global?? Pragmatist Stalin knew the answer, just as Peter the Great knew the answer, you create a new state ... a powerful state ... a state that can be controlled by one man ... and when you get that venture off the ground you advance your cause by intimidation and propaganda.
And of course it goes without saying that such a lifestyle as Stalin led was/is guaranteed to create raving paranoia ...
COMINTERN agents all across Europe were confirming that Germany wasn't buying up furs and sheep-skins ... Stalin thought that was telling. (In Hitler's mind the campaign was going to be over before winter)
British, French and American diplomats warned Stalin about Barbarossa ... but their interests were suspect ... capitalistic/imperialistic, Stalin thought. (Britain, France and America hadn't done a deal with Hitler ... Stalin had. He'd gambled and lost.)

Stalin is the absolute embodiment of all the weaknesses of the marxist-intellectual mind-set, IMHO. The capacity to rationalize and then espouse absolute contradictions of fact and then to make decisions involving massive quantities of blood and treasure. Stalin bears responsibility for the massive Soviet body count inflicted by the Germans ... he threw his resources away ... squandered them ... because doctrine told Stalin Attack, always Attack.
Machine guns don't kill soldiers ... politicians do.

 

[swampyankee]

".... Stalin's willingness to murder allies and imagined enemies is an interesting contrast to his disbelief in the invasion from his buddy, Adolf."
You need to think like a hard core communist who has robbed banks and fought in nasty-dirty Civil War fights and who was intended to be an Orthodox priest, to see just how consistent ... mostly ... Stalin really was. He saw the world entirely through communism .. the atheistic, Marxist narrative that we see taking form in the west these days ... BUT ... Stalin saw his role as implementing "communism in a single country" ... something Marx had never described. Stalin inherited/usurped a revolution that had stalled out. What do you do when the Revolution doesn't go global?? Pragmatist Stalin knew the answer, just as Peter the Great knew the answer, you create a new state ... a powerful state ... a state that can be controlled by one man ... and when you get that venture off the ground you advance your cause by intimidation and propaganda.
And of course it goes without saying that such a lifestyle as Stalin led was/is guaranteed to create raving paranoia ...
COMINTERN agents all across Europe were confirming that Germany wasn't buying up furs and sheep-skins ... Stalin thought that was telling. (In Hitler's mind the campaign was going to be over before winter)
British, French and American diplomats warned Stalin about Barbarossa ... but their interests were suspect ... capitalistic/imperialistic, Stalin thought. (Britain, France and America hadn't done a deal with Hitler ... Stalin had. He'd gambled and lost.

Stalin is the absolute embodiment of all the weaknesses of the marxist-intellectual mind-set, IMHO. The capacity to rationalize and then justify absolute contradictions of fact and then to make decisions involving massive quantities of blood and treasure. Stalin bears responsibility for the massive Soviet body count inflicted by the Germans ... he threw his resources away ... squandered them ... because doctrine told Stalin Attack, always Attack.
Machine guns don't kill soldiers ... politicians do.

...and whose brother was executed by the czar. Personally, I think that Stalin's behavior was Stalin, and not from his ideology. He would have been just as horrible in any position where he had that sort of unbridled power, whether the title was Chancellor, Chairman of the Central Committee, or czar.

And let's broaden that "marxist-intellectual" mindset to "authoritarian-dictatorial."

Robbing banks was (and is) a common tactic of all sorts of anti-government organizations: they are, after all, where the money is. Stalin robbed banks, as did the Irgun, the Lebanese Phalange, the IRA, the PLO, Mao, and the Shining Path. Hitler didn't need to; he had friends with money, as did, say, Franco and Pinochet.

 

[michaelmaltby]

"... let's broaden that "marxist-intellectual" mindset to "authoritarian-dictatorial."
Can't really ... one hides behind the facade of pseudo philosophy, the other can come in any philosophical shape or form and makes no pretense of higher aspirations than concentration of power. But of course "marxist-intellectual" always is "authoritarian-dictatorial" in the end ...