Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Stalin and Hitler were both rulers of socialist nations, just a slight difference of opinion on who should be killed. I've never forgotten the simple little museum we visited in Estonia. They really, truly thought the Americans would come any day and free them from the Soviets after WWII. In Finland the wounds are still not healed.

What the author Timothy Snyder "calls the bloodlands were the territories of eastern Poland and western Soviet Union, including the Baltic states, which had the misfortune to be controlled at different times by two of the most murderous leaders in history: Stalin and Hitler. As a result 14 million people were deliberately murdered in that zone between 1932 and 1945, until 1939 almost exclusively by Stalin and afterwards by Stalin and Hitler together." . . .

"Stalin could not admit that collectivization of the farms had failed in the early 1930s and so millions had to die for his refusal to face this reality. His commissars on the ground even saw peasants dying of starvation as saboteurs undermining the Soviet economy. And Stalin’s paranoia about foreign plots drove the Great Terror and his attitude to returning Soviet prisoners of war, most of whom were sent to the Gulag.

Hitler, in turn rather, than accept the folly of his war policy, blamed the Jews for the circle of enemies around him: Britain, the USA and Russian and therefore made their annihilation the only remaining war aim once he was on the defensive."

From the blog Creativeconflictwisdom

I won't read this book; I just began reading last week the Prologue and first two chapters of Bonhoeffer by Metaxas and that's about as much evil and demon possession I can handle for now. Those of you who fancy yourselves do-good humanists or socialists/progressives will continue to blame two crazy, psychotic sociopaths, and never examine the political system that allowed them to create their killing machines.