Statues of Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe. I have witnessed how happy Lithuanian youth were peeing on his fallen monument in the Park of Fallen Foibles in their capital Vilnius in 1991. Stalin killed more people than Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Castro and led the world in the worst socialist crimes.
To commemorate his “part of our history”, a statue of Stalin is included in the National D-Day Memorial dedicated in Bedford, Virginia, this Sunday, June 6. It is unbelievable how the idea of putting up a monument to a monster would come to anyone’s mind and – especially in Virginia – the cradle of our freedom! Sure enough erectors of the Stalin’s bust are soliciting funds from Obama and Virginia Governor Kaine to defray the cost of the monument to the mass murderer who exterminated millions of innocents in Europe and Asia and hated this country with such a passion that under his watch thousands of Americans were also killed in the dreadful Gulag. How can we void this?
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It’s also ironic given that our single biggest reason for launching Operation Overlord as early as as June 1944 was possibly because the Red Army had clearly taken initiative on the Eastern Front (and had had initiative since at the very latest after defeating the German strategic offensive against Kursk during early July 1943). Knowing that if we did not liberate France as soon as possible, the Red Army was bound to overrun the entirety of Germany (when we first invaded France, even high command saw it possible to take Berlin by “the end of the year”, give or take a few months), and we had no interest in allowing the Soviet Union to gobble Europe west of Poland and the Balkans.
So, our greatest enemy at the time was not only Hitler’s Germany, but Stalin’s Soviet Union. The seeds for the Cold War were planted many years before the end of the war (and probably many years before the war even started, given that Germany was largely allowed to rearm at first to act as a buffer against the Soviet Union).
No question, the Normandy invasion, (and the ground war in Italy and Aftica) was less significant to the overall war effort than generally portrayed. I just read Chris Bellamy’s “Absolute War,” which, despite occasional stylistic lapses, is an excellent history of the Eastern front.
The News and Advance says, “McIntosh has said the intent of installing the bust is not to honor Stalin as a hero but acknowledge his role in distracting German forces, which played a part in the timing and unfolding of D-Day.” In fact, the reverse is true. The initial strategic significance of the Normandy invasion (on June 6th) was to prevent German troops and supplies from being used on the Eastern front. The much larger Soviet offensive, Operation Bagration (involving more than 2 million Soviet troops) began on June 22.
It is difficult to say at what point a Soviet victory became inevitable, but, by the time of the Normandy invasion, the tide had turned, and the Soviets definitely had the upper hand.
As for the bust, the real question in my mind is, “Why make a new bust of Stalin, when so many used and unwanted statues are available?”
Soviet victory was inevitable after Stalingrad in the beginning of 1943. For an excellent book about the bloodiest battle in world history read Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor. The most telling statistic of Stalin’s brutality lies in the fact that the Soviets executed around 13,500 of their own soldiers during that battle compared to only around 3-400 executions for desertion by the Germans. They might as well be putting up a statue of Hitler, after all, he is the basis for our current economic policy and Keynesians never tire of pointing out that his military expenditures meant that Germany didn’t suffer as much during the Great Depression.
I think that while a Soviet victory was not inevitably after Stalingrad, as Manstein had done a great job of restabilizing the southern portion of the Eastern Front, it was impossible for their to occur a German victory. The only thing, I think, could have happened, other than a complete German defeat (which was made possible after the Germans expended what little strength they had on Kursk in the summer of 1943) there could have only been a conditional armistice. That said, I’m not convinced the Red Army was in a position to completely defeat the Germans, had the Germans not expended the brunt of their strength on the Kursk offensive.
I think one of the best histories of this is provided by Jonathan M. House and David M. Glantz in their book, The Battle of Kursk. Ben, with that said, I would suggest Glantz’s and Houses’s Stalingrad trilogy over Beevor’s popularized account (two of the three books are already out, I’ve only read the first). While there is no doubt that Stalin was a murderous and oppressive tyrant, Beevor is an ardent anti-Communist and it sometimes clouds his writing. Glantz is a much better source, although not as good as a read (much heavier with statistics and whatnot).
None of those men deserve the honor – Churchill tricked thousands into certain death at Russian hands, Roosevelt seriously backed a plan to deindustrialize Germany and let millions starve because of where they lived(not to mention the approval of civilian massacres via carpet bombing) and Truman ordered the use of the most horrific weapons ever conceived because the Japanese government wouldn’t surrender unconditionally. They all deserve a special circle of hell.
*slow clap*
This reminds of the observation that “people who advocate a war on drugs don’t know what the hell that means” – suspension of habeas corpus, corrupted police and politicians are to be executed for treason, the military bombing drug labs with the potential for collateral damage, attacking countries who support the drugs trade (e.g. Colombia), etc. There’s a form of amusement in the South Park when the mothers of South Park didn’t realise the censorship issue would go so far as to erupt into war whereas Sheila Broflovski did. She knew that if you’re serious about fighting the enemy then you have to fight to the end. The other mothers were like most people – do enough to feel as though you’re making a difference but you’re not really but it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside anyway.
By the way, you could argue Gandhi should be stripped of his reverence because he supported the Nazis simply because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
No one should revere Gandhi given his extreme statism, especially his opposition to technology (= wanting billions of people who rely on modern farming to die). However, he did not support the Nazis. In fact, he drew much domestic criticism for urging Indians to fight in the British army during the war – which is just as bad…
I am sure that the Big Four are all in the pits of hell.
It’s probably related to the new foreign policy initiative between Russia and the West. Recently, Russia invited NATO soldiers – Americans included – to march in Red Square in commemoration of Russia’s Victory Day. Even the EU’s anthem was played. Still, a Stalin statue isn’t the most appropriate way to return the favor.
stalin would have appreciated the irony, one imagines.
I was actually at this monstrosity last week, pre-Stalin Bust. Why we went, who knows. I guess morbid curiosity. It was a very chilling “monument” that reminded me of the kind you would see in Soviet Gorky Park. It is laden with busts of the the fascists FDR and Churchill, and the sycophants Marshall, Eisenhower, and Bradley. It glorifies the slaughter that was “necessary” for our “freedom” in the “Great Crusade” to “advance democracy” and so on and so forth.
The good news was that the memorial is already suffering from bad attendance and has considerable funding issues. The former president of the memorial’s foundation was even investigated for fraud as the attendance started to slip. I imagine that a Stalin Memorial will hurt the memorial even more. Ironically it was completely funded by private donations. That is a relief, considering how much of our money was stolen to fund the FDR Temple Gardens in DC, or the USS Winston S. Churchill. The bad news is that if the memorial remains in dire financial straits, take it to the bank that the Politburo will nationalize it and bail it out. According to its Wikipedia page, this is already in the works as part of the latest Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama. Soon we will have the honor of paying for this failed attempt to worship the slaughtered youth of June 6, 1944: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_D-Day_Memorial
You can email the memorial here to let them know about how you feel about memorializing the murderer who outdid Hitler: http://bit.ly/aUjhbo
Why the concern over Stalin? Do any of the leaders recognized at the memorial have clean hands? What is the difference if a leader ordered the death or 1 or 1 million, the act was evil.
Level the memorial and put up a memorial to the innocent victims of war and the few who really have tried to stop wars. I would like to see a memorial to those who have tried to save us from ourselves.
The action is evil all the same, yes, but it’s one thing to put up the statue of a murderer, and another of a man who took millions and millions of lives, by people who would in the same breath decry such a statue going up for Hitler.
Because Stalin is one of the two socialist leaders of the XX century who made the WWII possible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact
and the rest of the economic and political agreements that made it possible for Third Reich to survive naval blockade by the Allies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi–Soviet_relations
If they are willing to commemorate one of the two men behind the WWII they should commemorate the other one: Adolf Hitler.
Victor, you are absolutely right! There would be no D-Day without Hitler. Shouldn’t he get a monument as well?
It looks that federal funding is on the way. Building monuments to Stalin is a great way to stimulate economy according to Keynes and our macroeconomic gurus.
“Building monuments to Stalin is a great way to stimulate economy according to Keynes and our macroeconomic gurus.”
I don’t think Keynes would have said that. He was a big supply & demand guy. And there’s not much demand for Stalin statues.
Here’s something he might have said: There are nearly a billion very hungry people out there. Put some money in their hands and they would constitute an incredible demand for food… stimulating producers to grow more. And there are probably three billion people sunk in poverty, who would stimulate the production of consumer goods no end if they had money in their pockets.
If you postulate new money in this way it would flow down the following streams: producers and investors would be rewarded with profits; the jobless would be rewarded by being hired on to meet demand with greater production; the USA would be rewarded by having the world’s poor and disenfranchised love us again; and the money itself would be fully soaked up in the newly expanded economy.
Rather than just dispute the accuracy of such a view we should perform the experiment. Then we could see what the effect was, and post the results for all to see.
Thrown tomatoes might add an appropriate tinge of blood-like red to such busts.
To paraphrase Billy Beck (the most consistent moral philosopher I know of), “Stop (expletive deleted) paying for it.”
And everything else.
Well, now I know where to stop for a piss break when I’m drivin’ through Virginia!
Or help out the pigeons with their paint job.
We went to war over Poland. But at the end of the war, Poland was still under the thumb of a brutal dictator.When Germany invaded Poland they only occupied the country up to the Vistula river, the Red Army occupied the remaining part, yet the commonwealth countries declared war on Germany only. Why did they not declare war on Russia as well?
This is not even taught in schools. An admiration for ‘UncleJoe’ was part of the popular culture
in the forties and has not entirely faded away. Do a search for “Stalin wasn’t Stallin” to hear a popular song from 1943…..
Had we declared war on both Hitler and Stalin, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would have stayed in effect to oppose us. And together they would have defeated Great Britain and the USA.
We would be speaking German now. Probably not Russian, certainly not English except as a local patois.
This is great grist for the mill! If you’re going to honor the leaders who defeated Hitler in the Big One, Stalin has to be among their number. Any other solution is too much like the way they used to do business back in the old USSR. Whenever a member of the Politburo fell out of favor, he was airbrushed out of all the group pictures.
They could have put up an empty pedestal, with no bust and no inscription. Or, probably better, just decided not to do such a series of busts at all.
I do find this interesting, though, in the original news report:
“McIntosh has said the intent of installing the bust is not to honor Stalin as a hero but acknowledge his role in distracting German forces, which played a part in the timing and unfolding of D-Day.”
I like that. He “distracted” the German forces. As though the main theater of war was not in the East, and Western Europe was not just a provincial sidelight to the serious action. There should have been a statue of the brave men and women of Russia who, with American arms and their own strong will (see article on the possibility of free will), defeated Hitler despite Stalin’s atrocious leadership.
However Ben Ranson, above, says it best: “Why make a new bust of Stalin, when so many used and unwanted statues are available?”
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