Bloodlands -- new book on Stalin and Hitler

To the victor go the archives (or history telling), but I don't think I'll read this one. The review is stunning enough. I was surprised to learn that Germany only had a small population of Jews--about 400,000. Most of the Jews the Nazis killed were in territories controlled by the Soviet Union, however, Joseph Stalin had started what Hitler tried to finish.

National Socialism and Russian Communism were flip sides of the same coin of Karl Marx, who is alive and well in American politics of 2010. Hitler wanted to control all of Europe; Stalin all the world. When the war was over and Russia was our ally so we could defeat the Germans, FDR handed the countries Stalin had helped to decimate back to him. When we were in Estonia in 2006, the saddest thing we saw was a small museum about the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Those poor people. They kept waiting for the Americans. They were so sure they would come.

The display of strength on October 2 at the Washington Mall of the U.S. Communists was stunning. Perhaps there aren't enough people alive today who remember Russia in the 1930s and 1940s and what Communism really is.

"Among his other goals in "Bloodlands," Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, "Bloodlands" gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn't purely a "death camp," lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.

Yet Mr. Snyder's book does make it clear that Hitler's "Final Solution," the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose "national" sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

Stalin then turned on other target groups in the Soviet Union, starting with the kulaks—supposedly richer farmers, whom Stalin said needed to be "liquidated as a class"—and various ethnic minorities. In the late 1930s, Mr. Snyder argues, "the most persecuted" national group in Europe wasn't—as many of us would assume—Jews in Nazi Germany, a relatively small community of 400,000 whose numbers declined after the imposition of race laws forced many into emigration at a time when this was still possible. According to Mr. Snyder, the hardest hit at that time were the 600,000 or so Poles living within the Soviet Union."

Book review: Bloodlands - WSJ.com

I find it distressing that loyal party Democrats don't see who is absconding with their party. The crowd wasn't huge on October 2, but it was blantantly anarchist and communist; Democrats, particularly Jewish Democrats, need to give each other a kick in the pants, then kick out the Communists, George Soros, MoveOn dot org from their leadership.