November 16 2008

Ludwik:

You wrote:

1) My short OpEd article about Wars and Genocides has been posted last night.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/comments_email.php?m=5959&r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opednews.com%2Farticles%2FOn-Wars-and-Genocides-Are-by-Ludwik-Kowalski-081115-399.html

Your "article" on OpEd News contains more lies, I am sorry to say. You do not care about the truth at all, and that is a shame.

Here is what you wrote:

Hitler's genocide killed most of the members of my family, Stalin's genocide killed my father.
Less than ten days before invading Poland, Hitler said (3): "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. . . ." On January 1933, Stalin said (4): "As the result of fulfilling the Five-Year plan, we have managed to eliminate totally the last remains of the enemy classes from their productive base [agriculture]. We smashed kulaks and prepared the way for their annihilation.''

Kowalski Lie No. 1: Neither Stalin nor the Soviet Union committed "genocide" of any kind, by any definition. The Nazis did, of course.

Kowalski Lie No. 2: Hitler's order -- as quoted by you, which means unreliably at best -- explicitly mentions killing.

You imply that Stalin's does as well. But of course it does not do so at all.

These words of Stalin's are from his speech to the joint Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in January 1933. The full text is in volume 13 of Stalin's Collected Works, widely available on the Internet.

You know Russian, so you can of course read the whole speech. It's here:

http://stalin.newmail.ru/stalin_sobr/13-22.htm

For everybody else, here it is on the Internet in English:

http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/RFFYP33.html

Stalin was talking about eliminating the kulak class as a class. Not about "killing" anybody, but about eliminating exploitation and poverty in the villages of the USSR.

Here are some quotations from the English translation (URL above):

Secondly, the fact that almost all the poor peasants have been drawn into collective-farm developrnent; that, on this basis, the differentiation of the peasantry into kulaks and poor peasants has been stopped; and that, as a result, impoverishment and pauperism in the countryside have been done away with.
These are tremendous achievements, comrades, achievements of which not a single bourgeois state, even the most "democratic," can dream.

... the differentiation of the peasants into kulaks and poor peasants, about the exploitation of the poor peasants by the kulaks, about the ruin which every year caused hundreds of thousands and millions of poor peasants to be come destitute. Three or four years ago the poor peasants constituted not less than 30 per cent of the total peasant population in our country. They numbered about 20 million. And still earlier, in the period before the October Revolution, the poor peasants constituted not less than 60 per cent of the peasant population. Who were the poor peasants? They were people who usually lacked either seed, or horses, or implements, or all of these, for carrying on their husbandry. The poor peasants were people who lived in a state of semi-starvation and, as a rule, were in bondage to the kulaks -- and in the old days, both to the kulaks and to the landlords. Not at all long ago more than 2 million poor peasants used to go south -- to the North Caucasus and the Ukraine -- every year to hire themselves out to the kulaks -- and still earlier, to the kulaks and landlords. Still larger numbers used to come every year to the factory gates and swell the ranks of the unemployed. And it was not only the poor peasants who found themselves in this unenviable position. A good half of the middle peasants lived in the same state of poverty and privation as the poor peasants.

What has the five-year plan in four years given the poor peasants and the lower strata of the middle peasants? It has undermined and smashed the kulaks as a class, liberating the poor peasants and a good half of the middle peasants from kulak bondage.

It has thus eliminated the possibility of the differentiation of the peasantry into exploiters -- kulaks -- and exploited -- poor peasants, and abolished destitution in the countryside.

THEN comes the passage you quote, translated into English thus:

As a result of fulfilling the five-year plan we have succeeded in finally ejecting the last remnants of the hostile classes from their positions in production; we have routed the kulaks and have prepared the ground for their elimination.

IF a person does not read Stalin's whole speech, and did not know he was talking about "eliminating the kulaks as a class", not as persons, he might think Stalin was talking about "killing" people.

If you read the Speech you can see that he is not doing that at all. But if you read it in Russian, there is no chance of misunderstanding. For the original does NOT state "routed the kulaks". It states "routed the kulak class", "kulachestvo", and prepared for ITS elimination.

"Its", not "their". Here it is. I have underlined the words kulachestvo, meaning "class of kulaks", and the word for "its", ego.

В результате осуществления пятилетки мы добились того, что вышибли вконец последние остатки враждебных классов из их производственных позиций, разгромили кулачество и подготовили почву для его уничтожения.

Ludwik, here is the LIE on your part. You read Russian fluently! Better than I do, I'll bet!

You could have taken five minutes -- that's what it took me, five minutes -- and verified this quotation.

But then you'd have found out that Stalin is talking about eliminating classes, not people. About eliminating exploitation and poverty!

So you have NO excuse at all for this abominable lie. Your supposed "parallel" with Hitler would have disappeared.

In fact Hitler and Stalin could not possibly have been more UNlike, more different. The Soviets were eliminating exploitation. Hitler was taking it to one logical conclusion -- killing the Poles so the German "volk" could move in.

Hitler was far more like the American Presidents, or British Prime Ministers, than like Stalin. Hitler was acting like, say, the American Presidents of the 19th and early 20th centuries who killed off 90% of the Native Americans so others -- "white" farmers who could then be exploited by the railroads and banks -- could take their land.

This is why your book is not simply worthless, Ludwik, but harmful. It is full of falsehoods. In this way your book is like Hitler's own book, Mein Kampf, which is also full of anticommunist lies.

You ought to be ashamed of spending your declining years of retirement spreading fascist-type lies. Especially when Hitler killed your family! For shame!

Sincerely,

Grover Furr
English Dept.