Sunday, October 30, 2016

Stalin's victims

I wrote an article about this in Arabic and I have mentioned this before here but it still bothers me: how US propaganda against the communism has really permeated world cultures.  When people talk about Mao's China or Stalin's Russia, they really are not talking about reality here but are reproducing the propaganda of the US government in the Cold War.  Counting Stalin's victims, for example, has gone beyond anything reasonable or rational.  The French propaganda book, The Black Book of Communism or Robert Conquest's books are works of propaganda and not of scholarship.   I told you before the propaganda tally of Mao's victims or Stalin's victims count people who died from famine or from natural disasters.  Take the collectivization "victims" in the Soviet Union.  It is a fact that conservative peasants who rejected collectivization slaughtered millions and millions of cattle in order to thwart the collectivization efforts which were intended to benefit the whole.  The starvation and deaths which followed are never blamed on those conservative peasants for example.  Some tallies of Stalin's victims even include people who died in WWII.  But there is no question that the propaganda against communism after WWII reflected a bias in Western countries in favor of Nazism in comparison to communism.  When the US Congress (Democrats and Republicans--not only Sen. Mccarthy) was searching for communists under every corner in the US, there were scores of Nazi working for the US military-intelligence apparatus.