Maz wrote:Maybe the White House thinks the communists got it all wrong, and that much of Europe having experimented with communism was a horrible mistake.
Well that sounds like a perfectly valid reason to eulogize Hitler and Pol Pot!
Oxymoron wrote:The Russian and Russian speaking People defeated Fascism, Communism only caused extra lives to be lost as a result of the duplicitous command structure. Commissars cost thousands of lives to be lost with their military incompetence.
It is probably more likely that had it not been for the heroics of the Red Army, the
Jewish Holocaust would have had a nice head start in Russia before expanding into Germany.Jewish Virtual Library wrote:In the fall of 1919, there was a wave of pogroms committed by the counterrevolutionary White Army, under the command of General A.I. Denikin , in its advance from northern Caucasus into the heart of Russia. This army, which sought to restore the old regime, proclaimed the slogan: "Strike at the Jews and save Russia." Its officers and soldiers made savage attacks on the Jews in every place which they occupied. The most sinister of these pogroms was in Fastov at the beginning of September 1919, in which about 1,500 Jewish men, women, and children were massacred. The soldiers of the White Army also perpetrated similar pogroms in other regions of Russia: in Siberia, where they were led by Admiral Kolchak and where the Cossack battalions of Baron R. Ungern-Sternberg gained notoriety for the systematic destruction of many communities in eastern Siberia and Mongolia; and in Belorussia, where Bulak-Balachowicz was in command in 1920. During 1920–21, when the Red Army gained control of Ukraine, the armed anti-Soviet bands still retained their full strength and the pogroms and brutalities against the Jews assumed a character of revenge, such as the massacre in Tetiev, in which about 4,000 Jews were put to death and the whole townlet was set on fire. The anti-Jewish movement set the total annihilation of the Jews as its objective and destroyed whole townlets. Only the military weakness of the attackers prevented a holocaust of Ukrainian Jewry.
During this period of pogroms, Jewish self-defense organizations were formed in many places throughout the Ukraine. The "Jewish Militia for War against Pogroms" of Odessa was renowned; it prevented pogroms in the largest community of Ukraine. Such groups were created in many towns and townlets but they were not always capable of withstanding military units or large armed bands. It was only after the consolidation of the Soviet regime that they received its support and played an important role in the suppression of the armed counter-revolutionary movement.
It is difficult to assess the scope of the pogroms during the civil war years and the number of victims they claimed. Partial data are available for 530 communities in which 887 major pogroms and 349 minor pogroms occurred; there were 60,000 dead and several times that number of wounded (according to S. Dubnow). The pogroms of 1917–21 shocked East European Jewry, as well as world Jewry. On the one hand, they rallied many Jews to the Red Army and the Soviet regime; on the other, they strengthened the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people and a powerful and independent Jewish force. This aspiration found its expression in the Zionist movement, the He-Ḥalutz movement, and the Haganah in Ereẓ Israel.
So I guess we can add anti-semites in general to the poor victims of communism.
Patrickov wrote:Evidence please. What we know is that Mao thanked the Japanese invasion so that he and his party could usurp power.
This is a bit like asking for evidence that the American Civil War occurred, but here you go:
Historynet wrote:During what the Chinese call the War of Resistance (1937-45), Mao Zedong’s communists established an uneasy truce with Chiang Kaishek’s Kuomintang, which often broke down along the way, usually in regard to assigned areas of operation. The largest communist force, the Eighth Route Army, had only 30,000 men in 1937, but had grown to 400,000 in 1940. Attached to the Kuomingtang as the Eighteenth Army Group, the communist force operated independently in northern China, mostly as guerrillas who made it difficult for the Japanese to venture outside of the cities they controlled. In August and October 1941 the communists conducted large-scaled offensives, sometimes inflicting costly defeats on the Japanese, but the Japanese hit back hard and by the end of the year the army had lost 100,000 men to death or desertions. Meanwhile, in central China the communist New Fourth Army was conducting guerrilla operations while trying to gather civilian cupport—for which the Kuominting ordered it out of the region and attacked it when it did not move out punctually enough.
By the end of the war, the communists claimed to have fought 19,000 engagements of varying sizes, during which they inflicted a million casualties (dead, wounded and captured), of which almost all of their 150,000 prisoners were Chinese puppet soldiers collaborating with the Japanese, since the Japanese usually fought to the death rather than humiliatingly surrender to people they regarded as their racial interiors. Actual Japanese combat deaths in China totaled 396,040 compared to a total of 19,605,000 Chinese killed—of which only 3,800,000 were Kuomintang or communist soldiers. Besides using their mostly guerrilla strategy to increase their numbers (the Eighth Route Army had grown back to 400,000 by 1945), the communists also captured 320,000 rifles, 9,000 machine guns and 900 artillery pieces from the Japanese. These by-products of Japanese defeat would give them a new lease on life in 1946, when hostilities resumed in China’s Third Civil War between Chiang’s Kuomingtang and Mao’s redesingated People’s Liberation Army.
As for Mao's statements, they were made, but it was on a diplomatic mission to allow the Japanese ambassadors after WWII to save face when they apologized and was factually true as it was entirelly possible that Chiang Kai Shek would have been able to finish off Mao had he not had to turn back and go against the Japanese.
It is worth noting here that part of the reason that Mao didn't win a lot earlier was because of Stalin encouraged the communists in China not to have a revolution and to instead continue submitting to Kang Chi Shek's murder of them.
The idea was that
Trotsky postulated in 1906 that Russia, with remnants of feudalism, could have a socialist revolution. However, since Trotsky had to be proven to be wrong - a country with remnants of feudalism could now
not have a socialist revolution.
Instead, so the Stalinist reasoning went, the Mensheviks were now actually correct. First, it turns out that you have to have a bourgeois revolution before a proletarian one. No exceptions. The good news is that to have a socialist revolution, now you could use evolution instead of revolution. The proof was the good people under Kang Kai Shek that should be trusted to carry the evolution through:
Stalin wrote:It would be a different matter if there was no popular and revolutionary-democratic organisation in China such as the Left Kuomintang. But since there is such a specific revolutionary organisation, one which is adapted to the specific features of Chinese conditions, and which has proved its suitability for the further development of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China, it would be foolish and unwise to destroy this organisation, built up in the course of years, now when the bourgeois-democratic revolution has only just begun, is not yet victorious and will not so soon be victorious.
From this consideration, certain comrades draw the conclusion that the Kuomintang may be utilised in the future as well, during the transition to the proletarian revolution, as the form of state organisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat; and they see in this the possibility of a peaceful transition from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the proletarian revolution.
Generally speaking, the possibility of a peaceful development of the revolution is not, of course, out of the question. With us in Russia, too, in the early part of 1917 there was talk of the possibility of a peaceful development of the revolution through the Soviets.
So, really, if you're going to be upset about Mao's statement here you should more properly be praising Stalin.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!