Few people reading or hearing about the plane crash that killed 93 leaders of Poland probably know much about the historical event that they flew into Russia to commemorate. I found a number of sites that explained the event. This one is from the CIA, Yup, the Central intelligence Agency. This one is probably not contaminated but the most of the first twenty google hits that showed up all warned of dire Internet infections that could result should I be foolish enough to enter them. Most of the websites advertised pictures of the exhumation of 4,500 Poles.
The Poles in question were the top echelon of Polish society – military and political. They were murdered on Joseph Stalin’s orders after Stalin’s agreement with Adolph Hitler, the Non Aggression Pact, to divide Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union. I wonder who would be taking it upon themselves to warn people off looking at these pictures? Possibly its Russian nationalists who don’t want Russia’s dirty secrets made too available.
When Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded he had Stalin’s victims exhumed and the story publicized to embarass Stalin and make it harder for the world to sympathize with the Russians as his Panzers rushed to conquer Stalin’s socialist utopia.
When I was little I found and kept a scrapbook my Father made about the early years of WW II before he himself enlisted in the Navy. He was fascinated with the war in the way a historian was fascinated by current events. On a trip to Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall he was listening to a Polish, (communist) tour guide talk about the destruction of Warsaw by the Germans when the Russians reinvaded Poland. The Guide made it clear the Germans did the dirty work. When my Father pointed out that the Russians were close enough to save Warsaw and put an end to the destruction but held back to let the Germans finish the destruction the Polish guide grimly agreed.
He was a communist but he was also a Pole.
American communists who were bought and paid for by Staliln’s Russia defended the much reviled Non Aggression Pact.” They never lived their toadying of Stalin’s party line down. Nothing should have more humiliated a good communist than a pact with a fascist devil. But buy into the Pact they did. They didn’t dare second guess the Communist Party’s great leader Joseph Stalin.
The silence of communists at the beginning of World War II is not that surprising. People are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. Just look how Republicans suffered the bloating of the national budget under President Bush with gritted teeth. Look how they mocked Republican Congressman Ron Paul for warning against getting involved in foreign wars that were none of our business. Hypocrisy runs rampant in the GOP today. Oh, I know Vic, give it a little time and the same thing will true of the Democrats.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union no Russian would have dared admit what happened in Katyn Forest. How ironic that seventy years later it should once again be the site of the decapitation of Poland’s military and political leadership.
