Revisionist History

Factual Questions
21

Two reasons:

  1. Stalin’s murders were nowhere near as systematic and industrialized as were Hitler’s. Stalin killed people the same old boring way dictators always have. No gas chambers, no ovens, no records. Hitler ran his genocide like a factory.

  2. Hitler’s crimes were revealed over a very short period of time in early 1945. It took years of de-Stalinization in Russia before the facts started to slowly leak out.

It might someday be proven that Mao’s body count was even higher than his contemporaries in Europe.

When a death toll is counted in millions it really doesn’t serve any purpose to argue, “who was worst?” Just acknowledge that it happened and try to keep the crazy bastards of the world from repeating these horrors.

22

Sorry Ursa, but that seems so cynical. I mean if I kill someone for being a Jew is that worse then if I just killed them because I wanted their money? The outcome is the same. Someone was murdered. The crimes are equally reprehensible.

I just don’t understand why it is so neccessary for us to acknowledge the Jewish holocaust as being worse then the other things that happend in WWII. Their were some really bad people leading the world at that time (there still are) and I think we shouldn’t single out one of them as being worst just because his agenda was aimed at a certain group (which by the way it really wasn’t. Hitler hated anyone that wasn’t “white”. Perhaps he had a special hatred for the Jews, they have been the object of scorn before. of course if you look at the history of any country that has persecuted the Jews those governments all fell. Perhaps they are God’s chosen people. I believe that, but that’s neither here nor there.)

My only point is that many people besides Jews suffered as a reult of the leaders of that time. I t5hink it is immoral to single out the Jews as if they were the only ones.

23

Of course, nowadays all the Encyclopedia publishers would have had to do would be to press “delete” on relevant portions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia web page. The elimination of books and other printed media in favor of more-easily-manipulated “on-line” content could be a totalitarian’s wet dream . . .

Why must I feel like that
Why must I chase the cat?
Nothin’ but the dog in me.
–George Clinton

24

As I said before, read the speeches of the leaders of the rebellion. They wanted more than that. They wanted slavery extended to all the states. They said so, in so many words.

“Feds”? Do I detect a Freudian slip, there?

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

25

FEDS - short for the Federal government. Perhaps a confusing shorthand, it might seems like “Federalists” who were state’s rights advocates. Sorry for the haste.

26

BlockHead, I don’t know of anyone who says that all of WWII boils down to murdering Jewish people.

I would say that the murder of the Jews stands out as a particular horror because it was intended to destroy an entire people. Stalin’s crimes, and Mao’s, were horrific. (And Hitler certainly killed many people besides Jews.)

However, Stalin did not set out to murder 14 million people; he set out to quell (perceived) rebellions in various parts of his empire and he used starvation and machine guns to great effect. The difference in reactions is the difference we feel between hearing of a person murdered during an armed robbery and a child stalked and murdered for thrill. Both deaths are horrible, both are senseless, but we recognize that someone committing a robbery is under certain psychological pressures to prevent identification, etc. Objectively, each murder is the same evil, but we have more of a reaction to the deliberate taking of a life for the sake of taking a life than we do to the taking of a life in the commission of a larger event.

egkelly, this site may not provide what you would like, but it does indicate who came up with the 6,000,000 figure even if they don’t exacly explain how:
Eichmann Trial Session 13

Tom~

27

Tomndebb, I have to take issue with your assertion that Stalin didn’t set out to kill 14 million people. Like most of us, he just kind of drifted into his situation, but in his case it involved killing people. On his deathbed he uttered no last words - only raised his hand and made one last chopping gesture, as if passing the sentence of death was ingrained into his neurological reflexes. He hated the entire human race, and his innermost sentiments would’ve echoed Caligula’s: “If only they all shared the same neck and I had the only ax.” Hitler was like a little boy who killed himself when his schoolboy crush on Germania went sour after she failed to meet his expectations of world conquest. Stalin was so much different - none of the same Wagnerian vanity - his “cult of the personality” was just a game he played on his people, much as a high school quarterback will encourage girls to put picture of himself in their lockers even though he has every intention of dumping them. Stalin gave all the credit for Russia’s victory in W.W.II not to himself, but back to his people, and then went right back to business wiping them out. And I don’t buy the gradual “leaking-out” of Stalin’s crimes vs. the sudden revelation of the liberated concentration camps. Germans could choose to not ask what really happened to their Jewish neighbors. Russians had a realistic assessment of their state security organs going back to Ivan the Terrible, and could hardly delude themselves with images of benign resettlement camps as the average German could. Most important of all, Hitler died a loser, while Stalin went out at the top of his game. I can’t say which was worse that the other since, as Stalin himself observed “one death is a tragedy; one million a statistic,” But I think we’re better equipped to avoid the Hitlers of this world with their crack-pot theories and carpet-chewing rhetoric, than we are with the Stalins out there, methodically nursing their grudges and marshalling their powers. What I find most striking about the two is that while Stalin’s father dealt out brutal beating to his son, Hitler’s was no more violent than the average dad of the age, but used much more humiliating sarcasm. Fathers take note.

28

Thanks for the replies guys, but getting more back on topic, are there any more examples of revisionist history besides Hitler and Civil war. I think the Turks denied killing the Armenians.

How about stupid things like Country A saying Country B invaded them even though it was clearly the opposite? Anyone know of any like those?

29

I’m sure he really wanted to make a worker’s paradise and just strayed off course because of peer pressure.

I think the main reasons Stalin’s crimes aren’t as well known are:

  1. During WW2 Stalin was a valuable ally.

  2. After WW2 the Russians were the enemy and people in the west didn’t want them to be portrayed as victims. Of course, those still living under communism couldn’t talk about it.

  3. There was no political gain from publicizing what happened to Stalin’s victims. On the other hand, publicizing the holocaust a) helped support the creation of Israel and b) drastically lowered the level of overt anti-semetism. (for example Jewish quotas in universities) After all, no one wanted to be labelled a nazi.

One of the reason for this number is that Stalin was trying to cover up the number of Poles he murdered by inflating the number of deaths due to Hitler’s concentration camps. Since there were no exact numbers for the number of Jews in Poland he could claim that the decrease in Poland’s population was due to Germans killing off the Jews. It’s possible that between 1 and 1.5 million ethnic poles were killed during WW2 by the soviets. That would mean that about half of polish casualties were caused by what the west considered “the good guys”.

Many Poles feel very strongly about the 6 million figure because by continuing to use this estimate historians are essentially doing the same thing to the Poles as Neo-Nazis are doing to Jews. That is, denying their holocaust.

My mother is involved in revisionist history because much, if not most, of my family was killed during WW2 in various events that did not “officially” happen. These events were denied by authorities until the fall of communism. The problem now is that most of the people who know what happened are either dead, dying, don’t remember or don’t want to talk about it. The history books are being slowly rewritten but there is a lot of resistance. For example many people don’t want to worsen relationship the Poland has with the Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Many people in the Ukraine would like to forget their country’s collaboration with Germany.

If you want to see a good example of revisionism take a look at what people have to say about the Ukranian partisan organization OUN/UPA. In the past it was praised in the west for standing up to the soviets during WW2. If the revisionists are successful it will also be recognized as an organization that openly collaborated with the nazis and murdered hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians in an attempt at ethnic cleansing.

As with many parts of central european history, the revisionism is only happening now because in the past people in the west didn’t want to say bad things about an anti-communist group and people in the east weren’t even allowed to admit that such an organization existed.

30

I read about that too, Diceman. It was actually a double revision. Amenhotep changed his name and tried to strike out all mention of the god Amon and his images. He wanted Egypt to worship a new god, Aten. This didn’t go over well with the Egyptians and once Amenhotep was out of power they treated him the same as he had treated Amon. There’s very little evidence of Aten’s reign and the changes he made, but one interesting part is that King Tut’s tomb has both Tutankhamon and the other ‘traitorious’ name given to him by his father during his reign, Tutankhaten.

31

If you really believe that slavery was a federal-vs.-south issue from 1798 to 1860, you have really got to read a genuine history book.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

32

No they weren’t. The opposite, in fact, was true.

33

During 1918-1919, the United States took part in an Allied expedition to overthrow Communism in Russia, & install another form of government. A totally screwed-up operation, we bailed out & abandoned the White Russians after a campaign that was redolent of Vietnam decades later. A good book on the subject is “Ignorant Armies”.

For decades, the US army refused to admit that American soldiers had ever directally engaged Soviet troops in battle. And we lost.

“Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.”----Jung

34

Kennedy is absolutely right in his take on the American Civil War. As far as the number of Jews killed in Hitler’s death camps, who cares? Gee, we’re not sure whether it was 4 million or 6 million. However many it was, it was too many. As far as revisionist history goes, well, it’s great if you’ve found something new or developed a different take on the way things had traditionally been interpreted. It’s not so hot if you’re doing what you’re doing in order to promote an ideology that you had before doing your investigation.

35

History is written by the winners. Good historians come back later and try to figure out what really happened. Bad ones dissect the available information, take the parts they need, and discard or discount the others.

Its fun to say things like, “Michelin lost the Vietnam War” or “herring defeated Catholicism,” but that’s like shaking the tree of knowledge, getting hit in the head with an acorn (or an apple), and saying you know the truth.

One great way to spot revisionists is to check the sources cited. Regarding the Holocaust, you have political mongoloids pointing out the errors of nineteen year-old clerks trying to categorize one of the most massive tragedies in human history. On the other hand, there are twenty thousand letters written home from Patton’s Third Army saying the opposite.

Groucho Marx said it best, “who are you going to believe, me, or your own eyes?”

36

Getting back to the original question, I can think of one excellent book as an example of “revisionist history” - The Trial of Socrates by IF Stone. Everyone thinks of Socrates as a martyr of truth. Read Stones book and you will see why he really deserved to drink that hemlock. People identify ancient Greece with democracry and Socrates - but Socrates was no friend of democracy. However, if you read Plato you will see that Socrates was an obnoxious, patronizing smart ass. His opponents were made to look like idiots (and many of them were heroes who had helped restore democracy in Athens). I think that the reason Plato’s writings (and therefore Socrates) were so popular is that Plato wrote very clearly and simply. Some other writers, especially when you get to the early dark ages, wrote such dense, complicated, over educated stuff that it would make you sick. This sort of guaranteed that Plato would be popular among scholars and students who read this stuff. IF Stone himself had a reputation as a “revisionist,” and may even have been supported by money from the Soviet Union. So his point of view might be suspect. But his book on Socrates does have the ring of accuracy to it.

37

So… Socrates was smarter than other people and opposed the Athenian democracy, and therefore he deserved to die.

Yup. This IF Stone sounds like a real winner.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

38

Markxxx said:

Sure. Take a look at the biographies of famous people written over the last couple of decades:

John F. Kennedy: In the first few decades following his assassination, we were treated to more hagiographies (sp?) than real biographies. JFK was, of course, a martyred saint who would have lead the country out of Vietnam, through the racial troubles, and all of the hatred and angst of the '60’s and '70’s never would have happened.

Now, we generally have biographies of Kennedy that portray him as the Left’s Dan Quayle with better speechwriters. A vapid, vacuous, and amoral spoiled brat and womanizer who never accomplished much and never would have succeeded where LBJ succeeded, much less where LBJ failed.

Christopher Columbus: Portrayed for generations as a shining example of the adventurous spirit, the man who knew he was right and overcame all obstacles to prove himself, and in doing so opened up the new land for discovery and settlement.

Now, of course, we realize that his discovery led to a near genocide of the Native Americans, a near genocide of Africans due to increased demands for slavery, and all sorts of horrible disease and destruction of a noble, unprotected land. Columbus himself was a rabid Christian with delusions of grandeur, who cheated, stole, and scammed his way into his adventure (which, had their been no New World, would have failed abyssmally). He treated the natives he met with nothing more than opportunism (being morally against slavery until it became an economic advantage to enslave all those natives he encountered), and was generally the scum of the earth.

Harry Truman: During his presidency and for the two decades following, Truman was reviled. He was a party hack, a machine politician who only got into office through massive fraud, and whose friends and associates (whom he put into high places in his administration) were corrupt. He was uncouth and unintelligent, leading America into a failed war (Korea) and miserable economic times.

Now, we consider Truman as one of the better Presidents this country has ever had, a man who was charming in his frank ways, a man who never lied and always upheld the honor of his office and the country. He faced more and bigger challenges than many others, and while not always besting them, he at least always did what he thought was right and did it without compromise.

JMCJ

This could be YOUR sig line! For just five cents a post, JMCJ Enterprises will place YOUR sig line at the bottom of each message!

39

Lawrence sez:

Didn’t I just explain who cares?

Am I talking to myself here? Hello?

40

One significant bit of revisionist history came out of Wisconsin in the 1960s and 1970s, concerning the beginning of the Cold War. Rather than blaming Stalin and Communism for their “inevitable” expansion into Eastern Europe and subsequent imposition of hegemony, this group of historians pointed out how the SU made logical responses in the face of Western aggression: eg, the consolidation of the occupied zones in western Germany into a joint administration, the freeze on reparation payments to the SU from the Allied sectors, freezing the SU out of the control commission set up for Japan.

In true dialectical fashion, the orthodox and revisionist theories on this subject has gone on to create another set of theories on the origins of the Cold War which is currently favored by most scholars.

And Beria was shot after Stalin’s death.