RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/axis-of-evil/

“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

That was Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, in  Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. British author Paul Johnson didn’t grow up in Nazi Germany, but his landmark Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, takes up the “virtually indistinguishable” theme in considerable detail.

By the dawn of the 1930s, “Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror.” The decision to collectivize by force, “was taken suddenly, without any kind of public debate” and Stalin set out to “smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” This was “the green light for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution.’”

The Thirties was “the age of the heroic lie,” Johnson writes, and “the competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a moral rival in Hitler’s Germany.” Stalin’s agents “were always quick to learn anything the Gestapo and SS had to teach. But the instruction was mutual.”

The Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 was the “culmination of a series of contacts between Soviet and German governments.” For two decades “this evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke to the surface.” During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the height of the SS extermination program in 1942-45, “there were many more Soviet camps, most of them larger than the Nazi ones.” Early in 1941, Johnson notes, “Stalin began quietly to accumulate military reserves of his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally.”

As in all totalitarian systems, Johnson explains, “a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism.” The SS terms for murder included “special treatment,” “resettlement,” and above all “sending East.” Before Hitler died, “he had largely committed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the European Jews.”

As Johnson shows, Stalin’s Soviet Union “was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been.” After WWII, “the tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage.”