Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 8:58 pm Post subject: Nazism & Stalinism examined by Jonathan Meades
One of the best documentaries I've ever watched ... and includes some sizzling comment by stylishly oblique Jonathan Meades on the flippant rehabilitation of the Nazis in modern German tourism.
Jerry Building: Unholy Relics of Nazi Germany (BBC 1994)
Using Berlin as his starting point, writer and presenter Jonathan Meades goes in search of the architectural relics of the genocidal Third Reich, which was steeped in mysticism and pagan death cults.
These include a model village for SS Doctors, Himmler's Castle at a crossing of ley lines and a seaside utopia for 20,000 of the master race. He shows that far from Nazi Germany having existed in a void, it left a regrettable architectural legacy for the rest of post war Europe.
Joe (Stalin) Building part 1
Meads' anti-religious sentiments I go along with to a certain extent but he makes no distinction between religion and spirituality.
Fredrick Taylor's numbers are a farce. The number he used for "total killed" is the number the Germans reported as "positively identified".
_________________ "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ~ Pennsylvania Historical Review (1759)
I'm not sure why dresden is of any relevance to the OP - or why some people go on about it as if it was the worst atrocity of the war or anything like.
for example, what the Germans did to Warsaw and its population during the warsaw uprising of 1944....
For a Brit to yammer on about Nazi disregard for all things holy is, to say the least, ironic.
Not really
All major combatants (US, UK, Germany, Japan, Russia) committed horrific war crimes.
Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. Fascists and NWO puppets the lot of them. A plague on all their houses.
The only heroes of the war were the brave foot soldiers and civilians who laid down their lives in what they thought was a struggle from freedom and justice.
This is why I regard holocaust revisionism as irrelevant at best. Regardless of some of the finer details of WWII, Hitler and his nazi stormtroopers were fascist war criminals.
Joined: 10 Dec 2005 Posts: 2017 Location: Croydon, Surrey
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:23 am Post subject:
ian neal wrote:
This is why I regard holocaust revisionism as irrelevant at best.
In one sense, yes.
In themselves the numerical details are not particularly significant (except to those involved....the victims and their families for obvious reasons. For the perpetrators and their countrymen there is also, surely, a huge significance)
However, the holocaust is anything but a dead issue. It remains a great engine of destructive propaganda to this day. See the following.
If the holocaust was 'irrelevant at best' why did Sarkozy suugest that every 10-year-old schoolchild should be "entrusted with the memory of a French child victim of the Holocaust"
If the motive was the prevention of genocides we should surely be all for it. Unfortunately no one seems to give a *hit about the genocide that we ourselves are perpetrating against the Muslim peoples.
This 'holocaust awareness' is not about 'holocausts' or genocides.......it is about something else entirely.
It is a rotten thing.
It is, as Norman Finkelstein rightly says, a racket. Moreover it is utterly dishonest and the real agenda it promotes is entirely malign.
If 'holocaust revisionism' counteracts this then it is doing nothing but good.
......anyway we are all 'revisionists', aren't we?...even Yad Vashem.
The Auschwitz numbers have been revised from 4 million to 1.1 million in 1983. If that isn't revisionism then what is?
I just want a convincing explanation as to how, in light of this, the total has remained at 6 million.
.......not that the number itself is of great significance.
.......but fraud and the motive behind a fraud and the consequences of a fraud most certainly are a serious matter.
In the end, if we are not very careful....this fraud might turn out to have consequences every bit as serious as the heinous crime itself. And very few of us doubt that a great crime was committed.
....it is just that none of us should be prepared to tolerate the possibility that one crime be used to enable another one....of potentially greater proportions.
History is full of such horrors.
If we allow this manipulation to continue...
...well, are not the dangers obvious?
.
Last edited by kbo234 on Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:24 am; edited 1 time in total
Joined: 18 Dec 2007 Posts: 290 Location: New Albion
Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2008 2:36 am Post subject:
Zeppelin Field was a great place to see Iron Maiden. That's all I have to say on the matter. _________________ "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ~ Pennsylvania Historical Review (1759)
Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. Fascists and NWO puppets the lot of them. A plague on all their houses.
too true - and that's why it was good to watch the 2 documentaries back to back - given that we seem to have a surfeit of forum members who are in denial about the extent of German atrocities, while the "I hate hitler but admire stalin" mentality is still alive and well among any number of middle-class guardian readers, clinging laughably to their schoolboy fantasies about "wevolution"....
You might have thought that Stalin wouldn't be very popular in
today's Russia. But for supporters of the Communists, the closest
thing Russia has to an opposition, the dictator is a hero -- and the
message is going down well with disgruntled voters.
Josef Stalin is back. Wearing his light-grey party uniform and
holding his pipe in his left hand, the Soviet dictator stands on
the "Boulevard of the Defenders of Stalingrad" in the southern
Siberian city of Barnaul, surrounded by astonished pensioners. "I put
an end to bread price increases 80 years ago and sent speculators out
to work in the forests," says the dictator. The elderly onlookers,
who are currently suffering the effects of inflation, applaud
enthusiastically.
This macabre performance by an actor from the local theater is not
some comedy act, but part of a political campaign by the Communists.
Their national Web site promotes the show with the slogan: "He
promised to return."
This is also the approach taken by Gennady Zyuganov, the Russian
Communists' chairman and presidential candidate, when he appears at
an event in Barnaul. He delivers an unscripted speech in a musty and
unheated "House of Culture" dating from the Soviet era. The
temperature outside is minus 26 degrees Celsius (minus 15 degrees
Fahrenheit).
His audience of more than 500 people are dressed in shabby coats and
jackets. Few of them are younger than 60. They listen attentively as
Zyuganov speaks. "Stalin certainly made his share of mistakes,"
Zyuganov says, "but he built 9,000 factories before the war." The
crowd applauds. No one objects to what this man is saying, not even
when he praises the authoritarian regime of Belarusian President
Alexander Lukashenko. "There are no oligarchs or even stray dogs
there," he says.
Unlike their former comrades in Poland, Hungary and eastern Germany,
who grappled with the Stalinist past in agonizing debates, Russia's
communists have refused to conduct any kind of re-examination of that
era. In its agenda, the Communist Party describes the demise of the
USSR as a "counterrevolutionary overthrow." Without reforms and
modernization within the party, a return to government is likely to
continue to elude them. But for the Putin system, the existence of
this last major opposition party holds propaganda value.
There are allegedly about 160,000 people who still support the
stubborn Zyuganov and his current platform. This is less than 1
percent of the Communist Party's membership in early 1991. For a long
time, the party derived its strength from invoking the glory of
Soviet battles. In the 1996 presidential election, Zyuganov forced
incumbent Boris Yeltsin into a runoff election. Although Zyuganov
lost to Yeltsin, he did manage to capture an impressive 40.3 percent
of the vote.
The former official Soviet party has been headed downhill ever since.
It now holds 57 of the 450 seats in the Russian parliament, the Duma,
and is having trouble attracting new members. In regional elections
last March, the Communists did manage to double their results over
the previous election in St. Petersburg and Moscow, to 16 and 17
percent, respectively. In Orel, Zyuganov's hometown in central
Russia, they even captured 31.3 percent of the vote.
Russia, with its deep social divide between millions of poor and a
small class of the super-rich, holds strong potential for leftist
candidates. According to a study by the well-known Moscow Levada
Center, 55 percent of Russians support the notion of a planned
economy. And according to a survey by the Academy of Sciences, 35
percent of Russians believe that the government should control
factories and businesses.
While the US business magazineForbes counts 53 dollar billionaires in
Russia, most of whom acquired their fortunes through dubious deals
with government officials, about 40 percent of Russians must make
ends meet with less than 6,000 rubles a month, or roughly €166 ($242).
Young and educated voters are also incensed over poverty, corruption
and the dismantling of democracy. In December's Duma election, the
Communist Party garnered 26.45 percent of the vote in Moscow's
university district, placing it ahead of the Kremlin's party, United
Russia. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda ridiculed United
Russia's list of candidates, headed by President Vladimir Putin, for
having achieved its best results in psychiatric institutions and
military barracks.
But young voters, such as those at the Horizon youth club in Kolomna,
an industrial city 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Moscow, who
want to know how the red presidential candidate envisions the future
are served up an answer from the days of Stalin. Speaking in the deep
voice of an aging storyteller, Zyuganov tells them what his father
once said to him: "There is nothing more honest, better and smarter
than the Soviet power, my boy!"
The Communist Party leader recently revealed his deep roots in
Stalinism during a discussion of cultural issues at a plenary session
of his central committee, when he railed against "cosmopolitanism"
and condemned "modernism, postmodernism and pop art." He described
these movements as the weapons of a "devious and long-known enemy."
His words echoed those of Stalinist ideologues in the late 1940s,
when they inveighed against modern art and Jewish intellectuals,
against the "cosmopolites."
Like a sailor on board a sinking ship, Zyuganov trudges from meeting
to meeting, his ideological baggage weighing heavily on his
shoulders. His demeanor, slogans and pathos are reminiscent of the
Communist hero protagonist of the classic East German propaganda
film "Ernst Thälmann -- Leader of his Class," shot a few years before
Zyuganov performed his military service with the Soviet forces
stationed in East Germany.
When he speaks to his voters, Zyuganov still gushes about his
military days: "The Germans were always happy to see me, because I
was a soldier of the victorious army." But even members of his
party's central committee doubt whether his party is marching toward
new successes. According to a party bookkeeper, the cadres who claim
to be out to rescue the people are guilty of "sloppy and confusing
accounting of member fees" at party headquarters.
Officially, the Communist Party collects less than €0.50 in monthly
dues from each of its members -- hardly enough to run an effective
election campaign in the world's largest country by land mass. This
is yet another reason why Russia's oldest party is increasingly
becoming easy prey for the country's current rulers.
Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the Kremlin administration and
Putin's right-hand man on matters of domestic policy, uses a carrot-
and-stick approach to domesticate the Communists. If they play along -
- by taking part in unfair and manipulated elections like December's
Duma vote -- they receive TV airtime and possibly even money from
slush funds. Zyuganov gets the chance to speak on government-run
television when, for example, he condemns the idea of a Ukrainian-
style Orange Revolution and when he apes Putin's warnings of
a "revenge of the oligarchs."
The Communist Party has not withdrawn a resolution it adopted at its
2005 convention, which describes Putin's "Bonapartist, bureaucratic
regime" as being "hostile to the people." Nevertheless, in private
the president, who has reintroduced the Soviet national anthem, is on
first-name terms with the head of the Communist Party.
The "conservative image of the Communists" suits the Kremlin
perfectly, because it weakens them, says Oleg Smolin, a Communist
Party member of the Duma who is seen as a social democratic defector
within his own party. Smolin derides the nostalgic wing of the party,
saying that mentally it is still stuck "in the time before the
1970s." A former Soviet Communist Party official, Smolin favors
the "classic strategy of European leftists." Voters, says this
reformist Communist, "don't want a return to the USSR, but a European-
style social welfare state."
But that isn't something the Communist Party is capable of achieving,
says Alexander Prokhanov, the editor-in-chief of the patriotic,
leftist weekly newspaper Savtra and a popular novelist. Prokhanov,
who spent a decade advising Zyuganov, believes that the party
is "crude, intellectually undemanding and, as a result, incapable of
developing new leftist concepts."
Most of all, says Prokhanov, the party is outdated because
it "derives its fundamental energy from mourning the loss of the
Soviet Union."
But if you’re seeking oblivion with a few modest creature-comforts then this lonely outpost, where news travels slower than the meandering cows, is as good a place as any.
Lana Peters, or Svetlana Stalin as she was known before marriage removed the stain of her surname, hides here for just that reason (though it helps that Richland Center is more generous than most U.S. towns when it comes to handing out welfare benefits, she tells me).
As the only surviving child of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — the most murderous tyrant of the 21st century — Lana has spent more than half of her 84 years trying to escape the dark shadows of her past.
Since famously defecting to the West via India in 1967, after being granted a two-week visa to scatter a friend’s ashes, she has lived the life of a perpetual fugitive.
Frequently changing addresses at short notice and adept at dodging her neighbours’ prying questions, she moved first to Switzerland then scuttled between America and Britain, where I last tracked her down 14 years ago to a small town in Cornwall.
Not a soul there knew her true identity. Though I kept my promise not to reveal her whereabouts, however, writing only that she was living somewhere in the West Country, shortly afterwards she packed her battered old suitcase.
This time she decamped to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to be near her beloved daughter, Olga, now aged 39, whose late father, William Peters (Lana’s third husband) lived there as an apprentice to the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
However, amid an extraordinary row about a new documentary film about her life, which was screened for the first time in America this week, she felt compelled to move on again.
Loving tyrant: Stalin with his young daughter. He was controlling to the point of sending her lover to a labour camp in Siberia.In the end she defected in 1967
Lana was found by an intrepid young Russian-American film-maker, Lana Parshina, who won her over with a touching story about how she had read her book, Twenty Letters To A Friend, when she was ten years old.
Telling Lana she had been profoundly affected by the book, and remarking on the coincidences that seemed to have drawn them together (they share the same first name, and Peters was granted U.S. citizenship in 1978, the year Parshina was born) she persuaded Stalin’s daughter to talk on camera for the first time in decades.
Last weekend, however, when the resulting 44-minute documentary, Svetlana About Svetlana, was screened at the Madison Film Festival, in Wisconsin, its star was notably absent.
For though the film broadly portrays her in a favourable light — well-read, astute and amusing, if somewhat self-absorbed — she claims she was duped into participating.
‘This girl (Parshina) told me she was a college film student and she had to present something different,’ snorts Lana, who speaks BBC World Service English with a Russian accent.
‘She was young, and I always like to help young people, so I let her in. But she only came to see me twice and she didn’t say she was making a film about my father.
‘She just said it was going to be about the way I live now. I wish I didn’t do it. I won’t even make any money out of it. She will make all the money.’
Lana is even under the impression that the film-maker was helped by Russian intelligence. ‘She came with a laptop computer with all my family portraits on it. They’ve only got those in Russia, in the state files, so I was suspicious that she had them. They wouldn’t just give them to anybody, you know.’
Parshina, for her part, seems incredulous at the suggestion that her film was part of a plot. She is saddened, too, that her first film-making venture has ended in acrimony.
She will gladly pay Lana half of any profits from the low-budget documentary, she says, claiming her subject willingly signed a form sanctioning the film’s release.
Whatever the truth, the film set the furtive Lana running again. But this week I found her living in Richland Center, a 30-minute drive from her former home, in an old people’s subsidised housing complex with the Stars and Stripes fluttering outside.
I buzz an intercom marked simply ‘L Peters’, and after a few moments a familiarly stern voice answers. She claims she cannot remember our last meeting, but as I have come so far she agrees to talk to me in the lobby.
Seeing her for the first time in 14 years is quite a shock. In Cornwall she strode for miles every day along the cliffs, but now she is bent over a stick and can barely hobble.
‘I was fine until I was 80, then I began to fall apart,’ she smiles, saying she has scoliosis — a condition which twists the
spine. ‘But look, I still have my red hair. I don’t even dye it. In England everyone thought I was Irish.’
Her clothes have changed markedly, too. When last we met she wore a beret and a heavy overcoat; now, in her sloppy grey tracksuit and pink blouse, she looks every inch the American retiree.
Well, she says, when I remark on her appearance, she has been here so long that she feels American.
She likes American food, particularly hamburgers, watches American films (though never TV), and prefers to speak her adopted language. She even thinks and dreams in it.
Murder: Katyn Forest where, in 1940, Stalin's had 4000 Polish officers killed
Contrast this with her contempt for Russia, and all things Russian.
‘I ran away from Russia because somehow they have two governments,’ she says with heavy irony.
‘There is the official government and then there is the secret police, which was started by Lenin and continued by everybody else. Even now we have a head of government who is a former spy: Mr Putin. I have no time for him.
‘I have had American citizenship for 30 years — and my daughter was born here — but they (the Russian authorities) still won’t recognise that. They still want to think of me as Russian.
‘And I hate them! I hate the Russian language! We aren’t Russian, you see. We are Georgian.’
Quite what her father would have made of this outburst, one shudders to imagine. As a girl, though, Lana was the muchindulged apple of Joseph Stalin’s eye.
She was born in 1926, when Stalin was just cementing his grip on the Soviet Union.
Eager to present himself as the much loved head of the perfect Bolshevik family, he would cuddle his daughter on his knee for propaganda photographs.
In truth, however, her upbringing was anything but idyllic. For her father created a climate of fear and suspicion inside the Kremlin that mirrored the Soviet empire at large, turning brother against sister, father against daughter, husband against wife.
When Lana was six years old, her mother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, shot herself after a row over his philandering. Thereafter, Lana was raised by a beloved nanny.
But at least she survived. Lana’s older brother, Yakov, died in mysterious circumstances as a Nazi prisoner of war after his father declined Hitler’s offer to exchange him for a captured German general.
Her second brother, Vasily, an inept air force pilot, drank himself to death at 42 years old after being rejected as a failure by Stalin.
Many of the monster’s nine grandchildren also met tragic and premature ends. ‘Yes, there was a lot of tragedy in my family,’ she says, gazing at me bleakly, when I remark on the seeming curse on Stalin’s family. ‘It’s amazing. Terrible. My two uncles were arrested in 1938, during the Great Purge (Stalin’s brutal extermination of thousands of generals, politicians and intellectuals perceived as a threat to his position).
‘My beloved aunt was also arrested and never came back. We only learned about her relatives in the Sixties.’
And it was her father who did this, I say. This observation sparks off her legendary temper.
‘No! Not my father. It was Beria,’ she snaps, referring to Stalin’s sinister, round-spectacled secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who was ordered to orchestrate the purge.
‘Beria was a terrible man. There is an English word for him. What do you call the man who chopped off the head of Mary, Queen of Scotland? An executioner! Yes, that’s it.
‘My mother would never allow Beria in our house. She knew what he was. But after she died, of course, things changed and he was promoted from the Caucasus to Moscow. He seemed to have some sort of hold on my father.’
Worked to death: Millions perished in Siberian Labour camps like this under Stalin
So what about the systematic starvation of Ukrainian peasant farmers (the millions who were sent to the Gulag labour camps and never returned), the sudden, bloody purges. None of this was her father’s doing?
‘Oh yes, my father too,’ she says with a dismissive wave, as if the man who ruled the Soviet Union by terror for 30 years had played a mere bitpart in the slaughter of more than 20 million people.
‘My father had to give his permission to arrest his two brothers-in-law. But they were arrested because they didn’t like Beria. All this happened after my mother died, in 1932; after that my father was not the same.’
She declines to elaborate, but when I ask if she has forgiven Stalin she snaps: ‘I don’t forgive anything or anybody! If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never!’
In his determination to mould her into a daughter of the revolution, her father also wrecked her happiness. At 17, she fell in love for the first time, with a film-maker and writer 22 years her senior named Aleksei Kapler.
But Stalin didn’t approve of Kapler, whom he dismissed as a ‘Bohemian artist’ and — to compound matters — a Jew, and banished him to Siberia for ten years.
Incensed that her unsuitable boyfriend had influenced her to apply for a university fine arts course, he also insisted she study history and become ‘an educated Marxist’.
‘He broke my life. I want to explain to you, he broke my life twice,’ Lana says.
Starved: A Polish child sent to a camp after the USSR's invasion of Poland following Stalin's pact with Hitler
‘He put to jail and then to labour camp the man I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could do that.’
By the same token, she remains convinced Stalin loved her in his own way, and this seems to please her.
‘I looked like his mother (and) I have freckles all over, like her,’ she says.
‘He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated (he loved me and he wanted me to be with him.’
Maybe so, but the irony is, of course, that he drove her away, and 14 years after his death in 1953 she left Russia altogether.
Apart from a two-year spell in the Eighties when, disillusioned with the West, she accepted an invitation to return home — only to feel even more disillusioned with communism — she has never been back.
Her self-imposed exile has come at enormous price.
Her first son, Joseph, was born in 1945 after Lana married a fellow Moscow University student, Grigory Morozow.
Her father grudgingly allowed the union, but it ended in divorce in 1947. For virtually all his adult life she was estranged from Joseph, and he died two years ago.
Lana quickly entered another doomed marriage, this time to Russian academic Yuri Zhdanov, and bore him a daughter, Katya, but Lana hasn’t seen her since she was 15.
Now aged nearly 60, Katya is a forlorn figure.
Her husband shot himself with a hunting rifle, supposedly by accident, and she lives alone in the farthest reaches of Eastern Russia.
Five years ago, I journeyed there to talk to her. I found her in a hovel reeking of cats and stale cabbage soup.
She has made it her life’s work is to study the huge volcano beside which she lives, but no one seems remotely interested in her charts and photographs-taken on an antiquated Soviet-era camera. She told me her letters to her mother in America went unanswered and could not understand why she had been ‘abandoned’. When I mention this to Lana, she becomes animated. ‘You saw Katya?’ she mouths. ‘Did she mention a grandchild? Because I hear I’m a great-grandma now.’
However, she insists she has tried to contact her daughter several times over the years, and blames Katya for breaking off the correspondence.
So many conflicting stories, so much revised history.
Struggling to make sense of it all, I later call the person who knows Lana best, her second daughter Olga, who manages a clothes shop thousands of miles away from Wisconsin, in Portland, Oregon, and phones her mother daily and speaks of her with admirable loyalty.
She paints a picture of a great stoic who has striven admirably to come terms with a terrible heritage that is no fault of her own, but for which she is constantly called to account.
‘She has always wanted to move on but she has never been allowed to,’ Stalin’s 39-year-old grand-daughter told me (having spent ten years in Cambridge and London, she speaks with a surprising Estuary twang).
Vain: During his reign Stalin also enforced his own cult of personality
Her whole life has been about living this down and trying to lead a new life.
Of course she abhors what Stalin did. But there was a period when so many people held her responsible for his actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true.
‘She still receives hate mail and people write poisonous blogs, and this horrible film has started it all again.
‘It’s so unjust. How can she be held responsible for the sins of her father?
‘All she wants is to be left to live out her years — and hopefully she has many left — in peace and, at 84, I think she’s earned that right.’
Lana is said to have earned £1million from her books, but claims it all went towards supporting her third husband’s architectural projects.
In Cornwall she lived on welfare benefits, and she is still doing so, receiving about £400 a month plus her medical care and subsidised accommodation in Wisconsin.
When last I saw her there was talk of her becoming a nun.
But her old spiritual adviser in the Vatican has died and she says she rarely attends church these days.
At least she seems to have settled well among the dairy folk of Wisconsin.
She paints a little, and reads; wanders as far as her spine will allow along the nearby creek; swaps smalltalk with the baseball-hatted caretaker, who knows of her past but is far too polite to mention it.
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