Harry´s Blog

Religion Without God

Ah yes, the Lefties! It took quite a while for them to face up to Stalin’s deeds. In the Thirties, there were purges, the show trials and the execution of the fellow revolutionaries, the general staff and anyone who happened to fall victim to the benevolent dictator’s whims and moods. The Lefties gulped it up with nary a burp or a gasp.

In the Spanish Civil War, as the Franco Fascists were pushing the Loyalists back, the Stalinist Faction rushed to cancel out other Leftist Factions before the final collapse. When Hitler invaded Poland, they said Stalin wisely stood by and bided his time. And when the Hun eased into France, the French comrades sat on their hands and said “What a shame!” They didn’t make a move until June of ‘41 when Stalin’s former friend and ally Adolf caught him unawares. That’s when word from Moscow came and resistance started. It’s all in Sartre’s The Roads of Liberty.

Excuse after excuse was posited. Some things just had to be, and good reasons were continuously concocted. The traitors were Orwell and Koestler. They were the Luthers who presented heretical views.

Finally, after decades, the truth could no longer be hedged, except for a few diehards. If you look hard enough, you can still find a couple of those here and there.

What does this all go to show?

Religion without God
can be just as abominable
as religion with God.

Mission in Propaganda

Mission to Moscow was Michael Curtiz’ follow-up to Casablanca in 1943, with another script by Howard Koch. This non-masterpiece was made at the request of F. D. R. Curtiz was renowned as a cynic, and maybe that’s his excuse. What the hell, if the president says do it, who was Curtiz to quibble?

Our ally of the time Josef Stalin is not only made palatable, he is presented as a man to admire. The show trials of Stalin’s fellow revolutionaries in the film are legitimate legal procedures, in which all confess to being Trotskyite traitors in the pay of Nazi Germany. And these blackguards get their just deserts, which conveniently occur off celluloid.

The Allies needed the manpower of the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany.
Was Mission made to butter the dictator up? Did Stalin need such cajoling in order to fight on? And what was the purpose of presenting such fabrications to film theater audiences of the time?

The Russians bore the brunt of the fighting, and their losses were over twenty million, which didn’t faze Stalin in the least. After the war, he added to the casualties by transferring Russian prisoners of war and slave laborers to the gulags or killing them outright after repatriation. Only a traitor would let himself be captured or work as a slave for the enemy. But that lay in the future when the film was made.

Here we have a rose-colored evaluation of the invasion of Poland by the otherwise great Winston Churchill on October 1, 1939: “We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on the present line as the friends of Poland instead of invaders. But that Russian should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace. At any rate, the line is there, and an eastern front has been created that Germany does not dare assail. When Herr von Ribbentrop was summoned to Moscow last week, it was to learn the fact and to accept the fact that the Nazi designs upon Baltic States and upon the Ukraine must come to a dead stop.”

Oh, yes indeed they came to a dead stop in June of 1941. Could Stalin’s decimation of the general staff have had to do anything with that?

Here’s Churchill again on May 24, 1944: “Profound changes have taken place in Soviet Russia. The Trotskyite form of Communism has been completely wiped out.”

“Hallelujah!” is my comment.

This certainly is one of Churchill’s least admirable quotes. Trotsky was ruthless, as he proved by brutally quelling the sailors’ uprising in Kronstadt, but he was a military man and a man not only interested in power for its own sake. If he had prevailed over Stalin, the Soviet army would have (at least) stood its ground against the Wehrmacht.

Yes, Trotskyism was wiped out, as was Trotsky. Stalin had him in mind in August of 1940 when his hit man polished him off in Mexico. What he did not have in mind was preparing for an invasion by Nazi Germany.

The fact of the assassination is conveniently omitted from the Mission film, as well as from Churchill’s evaluation.

I know, I’m writing in hindsight: Stalin’s participation in the war certainly was essential, but was it necessary to kiss a mass murderer’s ass?

- Herbert Kuhner