cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/460511
A few of many ways, to be precise. Quoting Christopher Simpson’s Blowback, page 15:
But inside the [Axis]‐occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, the Nazis and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.
[Axis] warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the Germans and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so‐called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.
(Most emphasis added.)
I realize that this history is elementary, so what I’m sharing here is likely no news to you.
Nevertheless, between those who feel the need to repetitively equate Fascism with socialism in one country every chance that they get (which, taken to its logical conclusion, would imply that Operation Barbarossa was redundant), and those who have to blame Moscow or ‘the left’ as much as possible for antisocialist atrocities like these (quietly exonerating the actual perpetrators), I think that it’s all too easy for people to forget about this important history.
Throughout all of the time that I’ve been online and offline, I have seen far more Hitler/Stalin comparisons and equivalences than I have seen actual, direct references to these events from the Eastern Front…ponder that for a moment.
Throughout all of the time that I’ve been online and offline, I have seen far more Hitler/Stalin comparisons and equivalences than I have seen actual, direct references to these events from the Eastern Front…ponder that for a moment.
Such comparisons are a handy propaganda tool. Presenting Stalin as a bloodthirsty dictator just like Hitler and socialism/communism as “red fascism” has been normalised by decades of McCarthyism and the political Centre trying to justify its existence. Many people uncritically take those as a given, since the media have also normalised such views, incl. by giving less air time to actually leftist views.
It is interesting to note how various history “documentaries” made in Western Europe also present Stalin as a dictator akin to Hitler, using what is considered an “objective” medium to misrepresent the deeds and intentions of historical figures, making them into mere caricatures.
it’s always such an insane claim when people compare the two.
Germany was a race-based extermination engine.
There is nothing more that should need to be said.
and so on, and on, and on.
There really is a fucked up surrealness to the horrors of the Holocaust. There’s a photo of a man committing suicide by jumping off a building, during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, rather than be captured. And most of the leaders of the uprising killed themselves when their bunker was found. Everyone who fought the Nazis those 29 days knew they were going to die.
It should be obvious why the name Come and See was chosen for that movie. It’s from the Book of Revelations.
This reads A LOT like
Both Nazis and Zionists emulated British Empire and American genocide of the Natives.
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My mom saw some BBC documentary about the horrors of Stalin (it sounded pretty muck like the passage cited above but also insinuated that Stalin murdered his wife) and while she was excitedly telling me about it I told her it sounded like bullshit and asked why Stalin would even want to do these things. She said it was probably because he wanted slaves. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that I’m starting to notice how much western media about eastern adversaries is pure projection.
This shit is so difficult to untangle in westoid brains. They have all these anecdotes that are usually just straight up lies or at best, extreme exaggerations.
I read Losurdo’s Stalin book in part to better understand a lot of what people believe as the “totalitarian” history of Stalin and the problem is, how do you “debunk” a lot of random nonsense? Losurdo is great at it but he’s getting involved in details most people don’t have a clue about. People don’t actually have some detailed but wrong understanding of history. They just know the “vibe” that Stalin and Hitler were the same. And unfortunately, facts and material analysis usually lose out to “vibes” unless someone is actually curious (which they never are).
Worth noting that despite all this horror, the Red Army showed incredible restraint and didn’t pay back an eye for an eye when they rolled back the Nazis. They could have done what the US/UK did and started bombing civilians in Germany but chose not to.
