As we raise monuments to Stalin, his countrymen are tearing them down. WTH Virginia?

As we raise monuments to Stalin, his countrymen are tearing them down

By: David
Freddoso
Online Opinion Editor

06/27/10 10:45 AM EDT

What’s wrong with this picture? In Virginia, U.S.A., we recently unveiled a bust of Joseph Stalin, the genocidal dictator
of Soviet Russia.

And in Georgia, the former Soviet Republic from which Stalin came, his countrymen are tearing down his statues:

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) – Authorities in Georgia on Sunday tore down another monument to Soviet dictator and native son Josef
Stalin. The monument in the town of Tkibuli in western Georgia was taken
down two days after authorities tore down a bigger and more famous
monument to Stalin in his hometown of Gori…The Georgian government says a
younger generation who have embraced Western ideals of freedom favor
the dismantling of Stalin’s monuments.

“A memorial to Stalin has no place in the Georgia of the 21st Century,” President Mikhail Saakashvili said Friday. Saakashvili’s government said a memorial to the fallen in the Russian-Georgian war of
2008 will replace Stalin’s statue in Gori.

Georgia’s Culture Minister Nikolos Rurua said the government will also soon rename Georgian streets still carrying Stalin’s name.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidentia....

A Stalin memorial? In Virginia? No joke.

By: Joel
S. Gehrke Jr.
Special to the Examiner

06/09/10 2:34 PM EDT

At the National D-Day Memorial ceremony this past Sunday in Bedford, Va., memorial officials unveiled a bust of USSR dictator
and mass murderer Joseph Stalin. No joke.

FDR, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill are already featured at the memorial, alongside Allied commanders and memorials to soldiers who
stormed the beaches on D-Day.

Stalin was not included in the original memorial — probably because Russia committed no troops to the D-Day invasion. Maybe Stalin’s, uh,
ideology had played a role in his exclusion.

John Fund reports:

Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, minced no words about what he regards as an inexplicable addition: “Since the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of
Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe. The world is closer
than ever before to a consensus on the evils of communism and Stalin’s
primary role in the worst crimes of the last century.”

Added Karl Altau, head of the Baltic American National Committee: “No matter what they do to explain [Stalin's presence], it’s still going to
put him on the same kind of level as the other leaders and their troops
who were there at D-Day.”

Stalin murdered 40 million Soviet Citizens. He imprisoned tens of millions more for such political offenses as “defeatist comments” during World War II, and for criticism of his own incompetent and cowardly
conduct of the war’s early stages. Soviet soldiers were frequently
surrounded by Germans early in the war, because Stalin had arrested and
murdered all of his army’s competent generals before World War II began.
And when the surrendered Soviet POWs were repatriated after the war,
they were sent directly to Stalin’s prison camps.

A ten-year sentence in the Gulag was the typical punishment for “anti-Soviet agitation,” also known as criticism of the Soviet government. Neighbors were forced to snitch on neighbors, under pain of
blackmail, extortion, and threat of arrest by their own government.
Political prisoners were forced into slave labor on such massive,
useless public works projects as the White Sea Canal (in whose
construction some 100,000 died, by conservative estimates).

Stalin’s secret police conducted interrogations with routine, brutal torture on his orders, using tactics

that make waterboarding seem like a day at the spa. They engaged in
secret executions and kidnappings (both international and domestic).
Stalin ordered massive campaigns of genocide (in the Ukraine) and ethnic
cleansing (in Chechnya) whose effects are still felt today.

Stalin was also an original ally of Nazi Germany (until Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941). You might say he voted for Hitler before voting against him. Nor did Stalin “waste the crisis” of World War II,
taking advantage of the chaos afterward to establish repressive puppet
Communist governments in Eastern Europe and establish the “Iron
Curtain.”

If memorial officials really wanted another bust for their collection, maybe they should have contacted President Obama before the White House returned

the bust of Churchill to the British government.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidentia...

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