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Joseph StalinPros:Collectivized agriculture and ended famines. Did so despite enormous resistance. Without this, industrialization would have been impossible.Industrialized the nation, enabling the creation of weapons to defeat Hitler. Hitler’s plan was to conquer and exterminate all Jews and communists, half of the Slavs, and enslave the remainder.Annexed the Eastern Bloc and moved fascist collaborators, bringing stability to these regions for decades to come.Took a semi feudal, peasant agrarian nation and turned it into the world’s second largest industrial economy, doubled the life expectancy, brought freedom from homelessness, healthcare, education, retirement, guaranteed employment, free daycare, and other benefits to all citizens. After Stalinism was abandoned by Khrushchev the death warrant for the USSR was signed. It would only be a matter of time.Cons:In hindsight the purges should not have happened.The Doctor’s Plot was caused by atherosclerosis, as deduced by his private physician on autopsy. This can cause a strengthening of some inclinations, such as suspiciousness becoming paranoia.The Katyn Massacre was cruel.USSR mortality numbers2.76 million. This list is here, with sources: death toll 2.pdfThis is the death toll of the actions of the USSR.The Holomodor was not intentional and should not be counted. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?All the other numbers you are used to hearing have been shown to be inflated and exaggerated, many fabricated.This document is based on reliable research from respected authors and official figures.The Black Book of Communism has been shown to be a fraud. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most biased book you’ve ever read?This includes the Great Purges, the NKVD Polish repressions, the transfer of various populations that resulted in death, the gulags, etc. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Why did Stalin kill the kulaks?Gulag numbers are here: number of gulag.pdf 1,053,829 died in the gulag. But it must also be remembered that this includes people who died from natural causes. The death toll went up during WWII because everyone in the nation was on food rations so there was no starvation, but sick people and older people sometimes succumbed out of the stress. There were also outbreaks of diseases that caused deaths. Solzehnitsyn Lied pdf.pdf,The Great Purges included 777, 975. But this includes a large number that were sentenced to execution but it was never carried out. The Great Purges were not as top down as one might guess. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Was Stalin central to the Great Purge of the 1930's?The PurgesIt has been shown that the purges were more complicated than one might imagine. Russia had always been under great pressure from attack on all sides. Within a few years Russia had seen the Tsar overthrown, a bloody civil war sponsored by 18 imperialist nations, conspiracies within his own party as discovered earlier in an undercover sting called “Operation Trust.” 37 volumes of conspiracies and treachery were discovered. The intelligence services would arrest people and then torture them until they admitted they knew something, believing that something had to be happening given the threats from outside the country, particularly the Nazis and Japan. People would say anything to make the torture stop. This led to more arrests and tortures. Members of the party, the factory workers, and everyone in the society believed there were conspiracies afoot. Stalin was terrified of the revolution being toppled. He also knew that Germany planned on invading for certain by 1939 and the country was not ready. Production shortfalls led to the belief by members of the party that there was intentional sabotage. This led to the estimation that based on intelligence (faulty) that it was “for certain” there were a certain number of traitors. This led to quotas. The individual members of the party at the lower levels began to increase their numbers to give the impression of loyalty so they wouldn’t be blamed. The entire thing became its own system of feedback loops. As documents have not been released it is not known how many conspiracies there were, or how they could know. This is not the first time this has happened in history.During the Red Scare in America a sense of great fear and paranoia overcame the American public. Each accusation led to more, and the paroxysm of fear overcame the bourgeoisie in America. It reached critical mass, ruining the lives of many before people took a step back and stopped it. This also happened with the ramp up to the Iraq war after 911. America was terrified after the attack. It felt powerless. It was reported that Dick Cheney almost had a nervous breakdown. The response was to pressure the intelligence services to find out who caused 911 and to root out the terrorists. This led to expectations. The intelligence services began to see conspiracies where they did not exist. Anything that could remotely be seen as negative was. There became a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. This led to a mass hysteria in the U.S. It was rumored that Saddam was developing biological weapons that would be released to terrorists. The U.S. invaded Iraq. It would be found there were no WMDs. The U.S. also started the “War on Terror,” which saw conspiracies where they did not exist. Torture began to be used to get information, but this information was unreliable. It led to false accusations which led to more arrests. Then drone attacks, indefinite detention, and black op cites. The large scale surveillance program began. Likewise, the Salem Witch Trials took on a similar tenor. Mass accusations, paranoia, murders, and more repression. Feedback loops of torture, accusations, more torture followed. But somehow they never seemed able to get to the root of the problem. Enemies were everywhere and nowhere. People were tortured with the expectation that they would say something incriminating. Protestations of innocence were regarded as lies. But then the torture led to them getting whatever they wanted to hear because torture is an unreliable way to get information as people will say anything to make the torture stop.Released documents show no disparities in Stalin’s agreement to the repressions and his own personal thoughts. They confirmed he believed they were real. There was no indication that they repressions were done for cynical, self serving purposes. Stalin knew that purging the military would make the country more weak, but he feared conspiracies more. The conventional wisdom was that people were working with Trotsky, who was collaborating with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet Union. After the civil war there were a number of Tsarists, fascists, and others who had indeed has some conspiracies. But the extent of this is unknown. And it wasn’t just Stalin that expressed these fears. The fears went all the way down to the factory worker level.Source: The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, by James HarrisThe issue of Stalin’s legacy and the Soviet Union is an interesting study in how we know what we know1. Historians are influenced by the cultural norms and bourgeois influences of society. History is also written by the victors.2. Propaganda has a cognitive framing effect. It creates associations between images and narratives that are false. But we see propaganda based narratives so much, and they are repeated by so many, they become the prevailing cognitive “frame” used when thinking about an issue.3. Goebbels talked about this in reference to propaganda. Edward Bernays was one of the leading advertising experts in the U.S. He used Freudian psychoanalysis to tap into the deepest and most basic subconscious desires and urges in people. Prior to this advertisers relied upon rationality to sell a product. When selling cars they would talk about the practicality of the car, the build quality, etc. After Bernays you would see a car commercial with someone driving fast, a beautiful woman in the car, and images related to status. You might see the person driving the BMW going to a cocktail party in a swanky part of the city while a valet drives the car away. Beautiful people await. All of these are appeals to subconscious desires, such as status, sex appeal, money and power. Bernays used these techniques to convince America to stop being isolationist and enter the WWI. Goebbels directed an enormous amount of energy creating propaganda against the Soviet Union and communism. After WWII the U.S. government hired former Nazis to work on “fighting communism” and creating propaganda against the Soviet Union. The U.S. even waived prosecution against them for war crimes in exchange for these services. The U.S. government also used its resources to demonize Stalin and communism. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation that brought in mainstream journalists to demonize the Soviet Union. This was only one of many anti-communist operations.4. The primary purpose of schooling is socialization. This means teaching students to value the things required to work in a modern industrial and office environment. The bells are like a work bell. Listening to the teacher and following directions is like following a line foreman. Being on time means arriving to work on time. Even lunch break is similar. Socialization also requires conformity. This means accepting the narrative espoused by the teacher in history.5. There were many primary source documents about actions done by Stalin and the USSR only just released within the last few decades. And many are still not released. The primary narrative about Stalin was written by Robert Conquest. Conquest was a rabid anti-communist. Due to a lack of historical records and the influence of Nazi propaganda from the Hearst publishing machine and others, there was significant “gap filling” used in writing his narrative. This was the “frame” for other historians to consider, including Applebaum. This narrative became so ingrained in the minds of people that others started repeating it, such as journalists and other writers. This narrative also happened to go along well with demonizing the Cold War enemy. The military industrial complex depended on the evils of communism to justify massive defense budgets. Presidents also wanted to use the Cold War and Soviet “aggression” to justify wars in Korea and Vietnam. Now that the Soviet Union is gone Russia was quickly replaced as the “bad guy” to justify the bloated military budget of the U.S. The real reason for the bloated military budget was economic—many representatives in Congress have military bases, production of armaments, or have constituents that join the military for jobs—thus the military industrial complex has become an essential part of the U.S. economy.6. The “Evil Empire” narrative of the Soviet Union and Stalin have become so ingrained that academics that look at new information and attempt to correct the historical record are labeled “Stalin apologists,” which they equate to being a Holocaust denier. Thus there is great peer pressure and risk of becoming a pariah due to scorn from others that don’t want to be associated with someone like that. Many scholars would rather just not bother with it.7. In the Soviet Union the oligarchs and elites benefit from the demonization of Stalin and the USSR because it is against their interest to have the Soviet Union resurrected. Marx taught that the social classes of different nations have more similarites in interests than do different nations. Proof of this is how the artistocracy in Europe would sometimes not even know the language of the nation they were governing, such as Catherine the Great, who had to learn Russian.8. In many respects Hitler and the Nazis did more to harm communism than anyone. By effectively using propaganda against communism it created the false “mainstream narrative” in the West that communism “Doesn’t work,” “killed 100 million people,” “starved and imprisoned millions,” and “always leads to mass death.” Attempts by historians to attack these lies using newly released primary sources is met with eye rolls, claims of being “The same as the Holocaust deniers.” It even becomes a form of moral judgment against the person stating the truth, “What kind of person denies such atrocities? Do you support mass murder?” Thus members of the left distance themselves from Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Union. And by cutting themselves off from the rich writings of Lenin and Stalin one loses an important source of real historical examples of the achievements of Marxism Leninism. A similar example would be if the Apostles were labeled as sex offenders and mass murderers. The de-Stalinization by Khrushchev in his “Secret Speech” had a devastating effect on the faith in the Soviet Union. In fact it was so devastating it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In fact during the Gorbachev period dissidents played a litany of anti-Stalin and anti-USSR propaganda on TV. It was this and the showing of the lives of rich American movie stars that led the people to lose their faith in the Soviet Union and socialism. Sadly, they would find out all too brutally what capitalism really meant—austerity, starvation, homelessness, massive inflation, and poverty. To this day Russia has not recovered. A recent poll showed that 60% of those living in the former Soviet Union said they miss it. Stalin has a 55% approval rating. Many now say that had they known what would happen they would have fought hard for the Soviet Union.The GulagIS THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO BY ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN AN ACCURATE DEPICTION OF WHAT THE SOVIET UNION WAS LIKE?No.His wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIAKenneth Neil Cameron in his short biography on Stalin:"[Stalin's role in the war] was recognized by the Soviet people, and by the end of the war he was regarded as the savior of the nation.The record shows that the tribute was well deserved. Had Stalin not won the fight for industrialization and defeated the Trotskyists and Bukharinites, the USSR would have become a Nazi province. Had he not had the foresight to build a metallurgical industry in the Urals, the Red Armies could not have been supplied with arms. Had he not industrialized the economy and introduced mechanized farming, he would have had neither a base for producing arms nor a mass of soldiers trained in the operation of machinery. Had he not signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany, the USSR might have been attacked 22 months sooner. Had he not moved the Soviet armies into Poland, the German attack would have begun even closer to Moscow. Had he not subdued General Mannerheim's Finland, Leningrad would have fallen. Had he not ordered the transfer of 1,400 factories from the west to the east, the most massive movement of its kind in history, Russian industry would have received a possibly fatal blow. Had he not built up the army and equipped it with modern arms, it would have been destroyed on the frontiers.He did not, of course, do these things alone. They were Party decisions and Party actions, and behind the Party throughout was the power, courage, and intelligence of the working class. But Stalin stood at all times as the central, individual directing force, his magnificent courage and calm foresight inspiring the whole nation."From Stalin: Man of Contradiction, pg. 107 (1987)Alexander Finnegan's answer to What if the devil met Stalin?Was Joseph Stalin a bad person?Growing up I was terrified of my father. He had a terrible temper. Whenever I heard the sound of footsteps I knew that pain wouldn’t be far behind. My heart would race. I just had to be strong and take it. If I cried he made it worse.“I’ll give you something to cry about” he would say, the smell of alcohol on his breath.I developed smallpox. It scarred my cheeks badly.“Hey Pock Pock” the kids at school would say, mocking me. I hated them, but if I cried it made it worse. I had to be strong like I was dealing with my father. I learned that crying won’t get you anywhere. You have to be strong, like steel.I was very devout. My mother entered me into the seminary where I studied theology. I went to every mass and devotion. It was quiet there, peaceful.One day I came across the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in a bookstore near the cafe. I had never seen anything like that. He managed to perfectly capture the injustice I saw in this world. He offered scientific answers as to why capitalism was exploiting people. On Friday afternoons I used to go for a walk through the city. The aristocrats would ride by in their carriages, the women dressed up so fancily. Not long after the workers would pass by, their clothes tattered, dirt on their faces, weary. They used to spend most of their money at the bar after work. Kind of like my father did. He was unhappy too. He hated his job.“Why do some do so well while others suffer?” Marx offered explanations that made sense. I spent my free time reading more and more. I started talking with the other seminarians about Marxism. Some were interested, but many were against it. One of them turned me in. He was extremely conservative.I was summoned.“Our kingdom is not of this earth” the formation director said to me. I told him about the ideas of Marx, and that there is hope for something now, in this world. After a meeting with the other supervising priests I was dismissed for passing out Marxist literature.Fast forward a few years…The desire to make change didn’t go away. It had become a spiritual matter for me to stop the exploitation, alienation and oppression of capitalism. If others couldn’t do it, I was going to damn well try. I joined an upstart group of other Marxists called the Bolsheviks. I met Trotsky and Lenin. Trotsky was a genius, and also very eccentric. He believed in free love, communal living, communal raising of children, and he was an atheist. He wrote extensively and was extremely energetic. Lenin had a near religious devotion to Marx. He had so much charisma. People were inspired just listening to him. He believed that with the right people, with those willing to do what it takes, he could overthrow the Tsar and institute a Marxist society.1924The multiple gunshots Lenin suffered from assassins took everything out of him. There were times when he looked half dead from exhaustion. But he kept pushing himself, afraid everything would fall apart without him. I could tell, as could others, that his health was declining. It also became clear that someone would have to assume his position. Trotsky naturally wanted it. I think he expected it. Some expected him too, while others thought it should be me. I wasn’t the public speaker that Trotsky was. But I am far more practical, especially in administrative matters.We all knew that socialism could never be safe so long as there were even one capitalist nation on earth. The Paris Commune taught us that. The imperialists would stop at nothing. But Trotsky sometimes didn’t know when to slow down. He wanted worldwide revolution, all the time. That wasn’t the right way to do it. You have to strengthen the home front before you engage in never ending war. When Lenin’s time came I feared it was going to get ugly. Trotsky wasn’t going to happily go away if he didn’t run the whole show.circa 1930Germany hasn’t turned out well. The Nazis are growing in power. They have hypnotized the nation. Judging by the speeches Hitler is giving it won’t be long before there is another war. In Mein Kampf Hitler laid out very clearly his hatred for Jews and communists. He calls them “JudeoBolsheviks.” We are 50–100 years behind the West in industrialization. Russian troops were slaughtered in WWI. We have no tanks, no planes, nothing. We have 5–10 years to prepare by industrializing or they will smash us.I ordered a 5 Year Plan to industrialize. It became clear that the only way we were going to be able to feed those in the cities after moving them from the farms was to collectivize and update the farming techniques. I convinced many members of the party but some are unconvinced. After the announcement of the collectivization the kulaks went crazy. They slaughtered half the livestock needed to farm. Some killed the families of government officials. They encouraged the farmers to grow less food.“They wanna take 30% for the cities, we’ll grow 30% less,” they chanted.Clearly they weren’t math majors. Many were hiding grain to speculate on the prices, hoping requisition fees would go up. People in the cities are going to starve and these people don’t give a damn. I ordered the soldiers to assist the turning over of the grain. I had to have them removed or everybody would have starved. The Western media is calling this genocide. Genocide would have been if I just had all of them shot, but I didn’t.To make things worse there was a famine in the Ukraine from drought, sabotage, an increase in the birth rate, and more people in the cities not farming. Goebbels told Hearst, the newspaper publisher in America that I caused the famine intentionally. They even used recycled photos from earlier famines to really play it up. I ordered everyone in the nation to be on rations until the famine subsided. They brought me a copy of the newspaper. Goebbels has only the best working with him. And Hearst might as well have a swastika tattooed on his arm. They have a contract together to publish pro Nazi fake news.Some criticized me for collectivizing. But after the famine I was proven right. But tales of me and the “Holodomor” never went away.Circa 1937I received word that Trotsky had been collaborating with the Japanese and the Germans to overthrow me. Trotskyites, Tsarists, and social democrats have been conspiring. Even some members of the military are in on it. I had their phones bugged, and my spies have confirmed it. A few years prior we ran an undercover operation called Operation Trust. We discovered a vast array of conspiracies, spies, double agents, and plots seeking to overthrow the government. It filled 37 volumes! Later we would discover even more disturbing news. What hurt the worst was that Tukhachevsky and Bukharin were in on it! Who can you trust? I have already had attempts on my life. Why should it be different for me than Lenin? He took three bullets. The Americans are wanting us destroyed too. We have had sanctions for years. They won’t accept gold, only grain for payment. They want us to starve. Even during the famine they would take no less than grain. I lock my room at night. Nobody is permitted to enter. The American media said I was “paranoid.” How can you be paranoid when you have had attempts on your life? You can’t win with anybody. You have to remain strong, because you are fundamentally alone. I have terrible dreams.It became clear that there was a cancer in the party. And if not cut out it would destroy the whole body of state. I ordered a purge to root out the conspirators. Trotsky fled. I put the top officials on trial. The evidence was clear. Most confessed publicly. We had journalists from America there too. They admitted to conspiring to overthrow the government, do away with the collectivization of agriculture, reinstate the NEP and the let the kulaks and private property be, and roll back the gains we made for the people. The problem is that there was no going back. The Germans were going to attack. We weren’t growing enough food to feed those industrializing the nation in the cities. But without that we wouldn’t have the tanks, planes, guns and other arms we need to fight the Germans. The Lend Lease from the Americans can only go so far. Losing was not an option. Losing meant extermination at the hands of the Germans. Bukharin said he felt sorry for the kulaks having been moved. But how sorry would he feel when the Germans brought worse atrocities? You have to be strong. You can’t let emotion get in the way. Nazis don’t care about compassion. It is just like when I knew my father was coming up the stairs. Crying only made it worse. You just have to face it, no matter how hard it was going to be. Meanwhile the purges started to take on a life of their own at the lower levels. Some made false accusations as to be spiteful. I issued an order to reign it in. The process was ugly, but there was no other choice. It was a horrible time. People don’t know what it is like to live during these times of crisis. You have to make very tough choices. FDR has had to do the same thing. All leaders do.Most of the purges involved firings. The more serious offenders were sent to the gulag. The West doesn’t have anything like them. They are work camps. Men and women are together. They aren’t cells. People move around, go to movies, can write letters, go to cultural events, and do other things. But they are expected to work hard. During the war we were low on food so everyone had rations. The older and sicker people didn’t hold up well. There have been outbreaks of typhoid. Most people admitted go home. They are paid for their work, and the workday is 8–10 hours per day. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these Tsarists didn’t write a bunch of lies about his experience to garner support from the West. They would probably even give him a Nobel Prize in literature!Sometimes the weight of carrying all this feels like it is too much. I have even resigned several times. But the people won’t let me. I don’t know what is going to happen after I am gone. I need to implement some way to weed out corruption, greed, and stagnation. It has to be a meritocracy and remain ideologically sound. If not the Soviet Union will fall. I see so much incompetence, weakness, and dishonesty around me. The future depends on our future leaders. All it takes is even one leader not up to the task, someone foolish and easily wooed by approval from the West. Someone who trusts too much. Capitalists can never be trusted.People think I have no feelings. They think it is easy, or that I have god like control over everything. I am not a dictator. I have to work with the Politburo too. I feel like the only adult in the room. Somebody has to be a steady hand at the ship of state. The only one who really understood was FDR. Churchill is a sop. Given the number of fascists in the Eastern Bloc I worked out a deal to bring them in to the Soviet Union at Yalta. I can’t leave fascist governments in control at the border. We would never be safe like that. We can’t let Germany reunite, either. Germans are too aggressive. They are better off split up. In fact I had to work very hard to keep the spies and operatives out. Truman told me about the A bomb at Potsdam and used it just to prove the point.I try to enjoy the little things—a glass of Georgian fruit wine, a good cigar, or spending time with family. For my birthday they wanted to read one of my old poems that I wrote in my youth, but I was too embarrassed. It feels like those days were so long ago.Somebody asked me what would happen if the Soviet Union was destroyed.“There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries. The working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost,” I said.I pray that day never comes.I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.— Ioseb Besarionis dze JughashviliSourcesContents Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martenshttps://mltheory.files.wordpress... Kruschev Lied by Grover FurrS-300 in Syria – a preliminary assessment...Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on HolodomorOrigins of the Great PurgesNew Study Supports Idea Stalin Was PoisonedLet’s Be Honest – Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJWhy doesn’t the Soviet Union exist any more? Part 5: Perestroika and glasnost - Invent the Futurenumber of gulag.pdfSolzehnitsyn Lied pdf.pdfLeft Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cuthttps://msuweb.montclair.edu/~fu...Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939?The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceAlexander Finnegan's answer to How much of Stalin's paranoia was based on actual assassination plots?Alexander Finnegan's answer to How true is the claim that most Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is regurgitated directly from Nazi propaganda?Alexander Finnegan's answer to Did Stalin really kill 60 million people?Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most insane fact about the present that would be nearly impossible to describe to someone in from the past?https://www.quora.com/share/Why-has-history-forgotten-that-Stalin-had-signed-a-peace-pact-agreement-with-Hitler-to-invade-Poland-after-Germany-did-meaning-Stalin-was-a-willing-Axis-member-until-Hitler-attacked-the-Soviet-Union-1?ch=10&share=63d3b959Alexander Finnegan's answer to What are the least known facts about Communist Russia?

Few people know what communism even means.Communism—Marx said that capitalism will give rise to automation to eliminate labor costs. Competition will lead to automation. But this will displace so many jobs that unemployment will rise, causing misery and suffering that would make the Great Depression look like nothing. People will rise up and seize the means of production for themselves. Workers will own the means of production and manage themselves. A new age will begin, the age of communism. Society will become moneyless, stateless, and classless. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”“Communism”—colloquialism. In America the term “communist” is used to describe Marxist Leninist socialist nations like the USSR, China, and Cuba. As indicated by the definition above, these nations did not meet the definition of true communism as they still used money and still had a state. Colloquialisms are words that are everyday meanings used by people but which are not accurate.Socialism—Workers own the means of production. There is still money and a state.2. There were millionaires in the Soviet Union. And no, this was not illegal.3. Under socialism, everyone is required to work unless they are sick, elderly, or a caregiver. Jobs were guaranteed. Many believe that under socialism some just lounge around while others work hard and are poor. That is not the case at all.4. When you work you can save your money. Some people made more than others. More education meant higher pay. You didn’t work and turn over your entire salary and then receive an allowance.5. The means of production were publicly owned. Personal property was yours.6. You could leave your home to your kids in the USSR in the form of a life estate.7. Lenin was not a dictator. He was often overruled by members of the party. So was Stalin.8. The workers wanted the purges and voted for them in 1937.9. Stalin tried to resign several times but he was talked out of it.10. It has been shown that the purges were more complicated than one might imagine. Russia had always been under great pressure from attack on all sides. Within a few years Russia had seen the Tsar overthrown, a bloody civil war sponsored by 18 imperialist nations, conspiracies within his own party as discovered earlier in an undercover sting called “Operation Trust.” 37 volumes of conspiracies and treachery were discovered. The intelligence services would arrest people and then torture them until they admitted they knew something, believing that something had to be happening given the threats from outside the country, particularly the Nazis and Japan. People would say anything to make the torture stop. This led to more arrests and tortures. Members of the party, the factory workers, and everyone in the society believed there were conspiracies afoot. Stalin was terrified of the revolution being toppled. He also knew that Germany planned on invading for certain by 1939 and the country was not ready. Production shortfalls led to the belief by members of the party that there was intentional sabotage. This led to the estimation that based on intelligence (faulty) that it was “for certain” there were a certain number of traitors. This led to quotas. The individual members of the party at the lower levels began to increase their numbers to give the impression of loyalty so they wouldn’t be blamed. The entire thing became its own system of feedback loops. As documents have not been released it is not known how many conspiracies there were, or how they could know. This is not the first time this has happened in history.During the Red Scare in America a sense of great fear and paranoia overcame the American public. Each accusation led to more, and the paroxysm of fear overcame the bourgeoisie in America. It reached critical mass, ruining the lives of many before people took a step back and stopped it. This also happened with the ramp up to the Iraq war after 911. America was terrified after the attack. It felt powerless. It was reported that Dick Cheney almost had a nervous breakdown. The response was to pressure the intelligence services to find out who caused 911 and to root out the terrorists. This led to expectations. The intelligence services began to see conspiracies where they did not exist. Anything that could remotely be seen as negative was. There became a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. This led to a mass hysteria in the U.S. It was rumored that Saddam was developing biological weapons that would be released to terrorists. The U.S. invaded Iraq. It would be found there were no WMDs. The U.S. also started the “War on Terror,” which saw conspiracies where they did not exist. Torture began to be used to get information, but this information was unreliable. It led to false accusations which led to more arrests. Then drone attacks, indefinite detention, and black op cites. The large scale surveillance program began. Likewise, the Salem Witch Trials took on a similar tenor. Mass accusations, paranoia, murders, and more repression. Feedback loops of torture, accusations, more torture followed. But somehow they never seemed able to get to the root of the problem. Enemies were everywhere and nowhere. People were tortured with the expectation that they would say something incriminating. Protestations of innocence were regarded as lies. But then the torture led to them getting whatever they wanted to hear because torture is an unreliable way to get information as people will say anything to make the torture stop.Released documents show no disparities in Stalin’s agreement to the repressions and his own personal thoughts. They confirmed he believed they were real. There was no indication that they repressions were done for cynical, self serving purposes. Stalin knew that purging the military would make the country more weak, but he feared conspiracies more. The conventional wisdom was that people were working with Trotsky, who was collaborating with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet Union. After the civil war there were a number of Tsarists, fascists, and others who had indeed has some conspiracies. But the extent of this is unknown. And it wasn’t just Stalin that expressed these fears. The fears went all the way down to the factory worker level.Source: The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, by James Harris11. 60% of former members of the USSR miss it. Russian nostalgia for Soviet Union reaches 13-year high12. The USSR did not collapse due to Stalinism. It collapsed because it abandoned Stalinism. Mismanagement Killed the Soviet Union13.14. Communism is not like being a little bit pregnant. Levels of capitalism vs socialism fall on a spectrum. China is socialist with a Leninist NEP style of socialism with some private property and markets. The land in China is owned by the government, and leases are given. 66% of industry is owned by the state. 86% of businesses have Communist Party cells in them. Children learn Marxism in school. The financial sector is owned by the state. The fundamental direction of the economy is planned. Either you are pregnant or not. When it comes to political systems, it isn’t so black and white. That is why there is a political spectrum, with left, center left, center, right center, right wings.There has been much discussion about whether Venezuela is socialist, whether China is socialist, etc.At its core a socialist country is at least a system where the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned.In reality there are many mixed economies around the world. For example, the U.S. has many socialist elements, such as Social Security, some state owned industries that belong to the public, progressive income taxes, etc.My concern is when systems are named socialist or capitalist for propaganda purposes, untethered to any policies.In the USSR Lenin permitted some private ownership and small businesses during a period of crisis after the war with the Whites. Stalin later did away with this and nationalized most private property that constituted the means of production. We will call this Stalinism, which is a form of Marxism Leninism. On the political spectrum Lenin’s NEP style is still socialism, given the restrictions on enterprise, the heavy regulation of the system, but permitting from some market style elements.Stalinism would fall further to the left of this system. Modern China is Marxist Leninist because it is a one party Communist state, 66% of industries are still state owned, the economy is planned, but there are market systems that permit some business and 86% of industries still have communist party cells in them. A large factor too is that the land is still owned by the state. This is crucial. The government issues leases for use. Because the system is working well, propagandists want to claim this is capitalism. But strangely, if you were to propose this same model in the U.S. people would freak out about it being socialism. The U.S. is objectively different in its form of economic system than China. China’s banking system is owned by the state. In America the big banks are privately owned. The economy is primarily market based in the U.S. Land is privately owned. There are two corporate based political parties, with elections of representatives and the President. In China the leader is chosen by the party. The U.S. style of capitalism is based on deregulation, privatization, free trade, and liberal democracy. China is the opposite. Based on any reasonable criteria, China is socialist, but different from the type of socialism we saw under Stalin and even under Lenin. However, the economic system of China has much more in common that Lenin’s NEP than it does in the U.S. version of neoliberal capitalism. None of these systems, however, are “pure.” They are mixed economies, falling on a political spectrum.Consider Venezuela. People say it is “socialist.” Yet 80% of the wealth is held by 200 ultra rich oligarch families. The oil reserves are nationalized. It is a market economy with many social programs, like health, education, and some housing. This is more like a social democracy like Norway, not the U.S., but also not China or Cuba.In the U.S., systems which do well are labeled capitalist, because according to them, capitalism is so wonderful. But systems that fail are socialist, because “socialism always fails.”How the Chinese government works15. 90% of Americans work for a boss. Altruism and ingenuity have absolutely nothing to do with the completion of their jobs. They are asked under both systems to perform a task or get fired. Same thing. In both systems your boss doesn’t care about whether you really meant to pickup that trash or build that house—you do it according to spec and get paid.16. The Gulag Archipelago was meant to be fiction. Solzhenitsyn’s wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA17. Famines were common in Russia and China for centuries. Stalin never deliberately starved anyone, nor did Mao. After Stalin collectivized agriculture there were no more famines. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?18. The claims that Stalin and Mao killed 100 million people are lies. Even the authors of the book, The Black Book of Communism, now admit the numbers are not true. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most biased book you’ve ever read?19. A single mother in the USSR could live without worrying about homelessness, lack of electricity and heat, healthcare for her children, food, education, and being unemployed. Daycare was free if she worked. She would receive paid maternity leave, paid vacation, equal pay as a man, and the infant mortality rate was lower than in America. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Is it true that a single mother with one job was able to live well in the Soviet union?20. It was a meritocracy. The child of an unskilled worker could study all the way through college and graduate school to become a leading scientist. Educational cost was no barrier.21. Housing was provided to everyone. There was no risk of homelessness.22. Russia was a developing nation before socialism. Then it was a superpower. After the collapse of the USSR it became a developing nation again. There is no middle class, mass emigration, a negative birth rate, and massive inequality. The Eastern Bloc nations, except for Poland, have fared even worse. Ukraine is almost a failed state.

This:or this:Robert Conquest was an on the payroll British intelligence services propagandist who created anti-communist work made to look scholarly and distributed it to journalists, academics, and other information providers. He is the one that gave us the supposed “20+ million killed by Stalin.” He was so effective that later work by academics looking at actual sources have been labeled “Stalin apologists” for even questioning it. Now that is effective propaganda. And J. Arch Getty, the historian is a mainline academic, not some fringe nut job.Alexander Finnegan's answer to Robert Conquest vs. Arch Getty, totalitarian vs. revisionist theories in Sovietology, which do you consider the most reliable source of knowledge? Inspired by the many answers marked with ignorance and bias in the light of Russian disclosed archives.The best kind of propaganda connects with you emotionally. It also relies on cementing groupthink so challenging it exposes you to shame. Most people don’t want to bother. Plus they don’t like cognitive dissonance and challenging what they learned when they were younger.Soviet propaganda on TV sort of worked. But as the Soviet Union started to fall apart people knew that the news reports were full of it. What was really effective was the anti-Soviet propaganda that Gorbachev permitted. This really helped bring down the entire system.In the U.S. most journalists believe in capitalism or they wouldn’t be hired. The corporations that own the media channels aren’t going to put a dedicated Stalinist on TV. If you believe something it comes across as much more authentic. And people can tell.Contrast this with Soviet propaganda, where many people didn’t even believe their own message.Chomsky and Herman analyzed the modern media and found that there are unofficial “filters” that help direct the modern Free Press into a form of propaganda. This was discussed in Manufacturing Consent.Glasnost proved to be an equal disaster.“What happened in our country is primarily the result of the debilitation and eventual elimination of the Communist Party’s leading role in society, the ejection of the party from major policymaking, its ideological and organisational unravellling, the formation in it of factions, careerists’ and national separatists’ penetration of the leadership of the party and state as well as the party and power structures of the republics, and the political conversion of the group headed by Gorbachev and their shift to the position of elimination of the Communist Party and the Soviet state.” Id.“It’s worth pointing out that Gorbachev never put much meat on the bones of ‘democratisation’. With hindsight, it’s obvious that his use of the term reflected an ideological concession to western capitalism; that he had come to believe that the Soviet Union should aspire to the political norms defined in Western Europe and the US. Such thinking neglects a number of factors that should be well understood by any Marxist:‘Free speech’ in the advanced capitalist countries is essentially a piece of attractive icing beneath which lies a bitter cake of plutocratic repression. Via its monopolisation of the mass media, the ruling class dominates the field of ideas almost comprehensively. There is a level of debate and criticism, but only of a few individual policies and not of systemic features of capitalism. As Chomsky famously put it: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”.27The political freedoms available in the west are much constrained owing to the correlation between wealth and power. Ordinary citizens have the right to vote, but their choice is nearly always restricted to two or three pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist parties, between which there is little substantive difference (so rare is the appearance of a meaningfully different option within mainstream politics, that when it happens it sends the ruling class into a frenzy of confusion, as is being witnessed at the moment with the rise of the Labour left under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn). Actual power is monopolised by the wealthy, and challenging it can be extremely dangerous, as is evidenced by the treatment of Irish Republicans that have served time in Britain’s colony in the north of Ireland, or the many longstanding black, Puerto Rican and indigenous political prisoners in the US who have spent decades behind bars on account of their struggle for equality and human rights.In a context of ongoing class struggle waged by the working class of a socialist country against its internal enemies (those that want to restore feudalism or capitalism) and its external enemies (the leading capitalist countries that will inevitably work to destabilise a socialist country), a level of political repression is an unhappy necessity; this is elaborated in the article on ideological deterioration28 in relation to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. The needs of the few – to get fantastically rich – can’t be allowed to compromise the needs of the many to enjoy a dignified, peaceful and fulfilling life.” Id.“Szymanski describes “a few basic assumptions of Soviet society” that were not debated in the press: socialism as a system, communism as a goal, and the leading role of the Communist Party. “These issues are considered to have been settled once and for all and public discussion of them is considered by the regime to be potentially disruptive of popular rule.” This is consistent with Fidel Castro’s famous formula: “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.” These basic assumptions of socialism can be compared with the basic assumptions of capitalism: the supremacy of private property; profit as the major engine of economic activity; exploitation of labour as the source of profit. Id.“Dissidents and anticommunists were appointed as editors of newspapers and magazines, and were given carte blanche to use their publications to openly attack the basic ideas of socialism and the whole nature of the Soviet system. “Liberal intellectuals were named to run Ogonyok, Sovetskaya Kultura, Moscow News, Znamya, and Novy Mir… The top political leadership had actually given editors, journalists, writers, and economists freedom to write as they wished, using the mass media as their vehicle.” Id.“Added to all this was the fact that Gorbachev and his allies decided to end restrictions on foreign propaganda, for example putting an end to the jamming of Radio Liberty– a generously-funded propaganda arm of the CIA, focused on spreading anticommunist lies around the socialist countries of Europe. So Gorbachev’s idea of “improving socialism” was in fact based on bulldozing its structures and legacy.The attack on the party went so far that Fidel Castro, in December 1989, at an event commemorating the 2,000-plus Cubans who died in the course of their heroic internationalist duties in Angola, was moved to remark:It’s impossible to carry out a revolution or conduct a rectification without a strong, disciplined and respected party. It’s not possible to carry out such a process by slandering socialism, destroying its values, discrediting the party, demoralising its vanguard, abandoning its leadership role, eliminating social discipline, and sowing chaos and anarchy everywhere. This may foster a counter-revolution – but not revolutionary change… It is disgusting to see how many people, even in the Soviet Union itself, are engaged in denying and destroying the history-making feats and extraordinary merits of that heroic people. That is not the way to rectify and overcome the undeniable errors made by a revolution that emerged from tsarist authoritarianism in an enormous, backward, poor country. We shouldn’t blame Lenin now for having chosen tsarist Russia as the place for the greatest revolution in history.” Id.Gorbachev then began a full scale assault on reducing the power of the CPSU, the communist party, in an attempt to consolidate his own power. But by weakening the party he left there no gatekeepers of communism in the society. The party had always been the heart of the worker’s revolution and the keepers of the spirit of Marxism. Once it was destroyed the system was doomed.In China they did the opposite. There was no criticism of the party.But we do like the Soviets sometimes, too.Chomsky makes the excellent point that to debunk a lie it takes 10x longer than it does to repeat it. Why? Because lies are lazy. They rely on groupthink. So you must address and knock down improper assumptions if you are to uncover the lie. The problem is that the news media doesn’t have time for that. Second, most people are too lazy to read longer things. The prevailing logic is “Don’t make me think.”Perhaps the most ridiculous things I have heard was from someone who claimed that I am full of it because my answers are “too long,” “based on sophistry,” “cherry picked for the facts,” and “If you cannot explain something simply, you don’t understand it.” Einstein said this. However, he was required to show his work, and not present his theories in cartoon form. Unpacking lies takes time, especially when dealing with a heavily indoctrinated audience.Concision explainedThe other issue is novelty. If you make statements that are outside the groupthink, you need to support them. They will sound crazy to the closed minded. But the open minded will hear you.Verdict:The U.S. propaganda was far more successful.The Soviet propaganda was okay, but you could see through it far more easily than U.S. propaganda.The real problem in the Soviet Union was Glasnost, which really tore the house down. You could have had no propaganda but forbidden anti-Soviet propaganda and been fine. But permitting dissent was the real problem. Also, remember the Soviet people had not learned about so called “atrocities” of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, so they had no framework to discern truth from fact. So they were easily duped by Solzhenitsyn and other dissenters. Solznitsyn is the most effect propagandist in history.His wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIAWhy Americans are so effectively indoctrinated.The U.S. has a long and very sophisticated history of propaganda, dating back to WWI, in which Edward Bernays created the modern marketing industry.Marketing and advertising are propaganda. The names are different.Marketing—Propaganda for selling goods and servicesAdvertising—Print or media propaganda for selling goods and servicesPropaganda—”Is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies, religious organizations and the media can also produce propaganda. “Propaganda - Wikipedia“In the twentieth century, the term propaganda has often been associated with a manipulative approach, but propaganda historically was a neutral descriptive term. A wide range of materials and media are used for conveying propaganda messages, which changed as new technologies were invented, including paintings, cartoons, posters, pamphlets, films, radio shows, TV shows, and websites. More recently, the digital age has given rise to new ways of disseminating propaganda, for example, through the use of bots and algorithms to create computational propaganda and spread fake or biased news using social media. In a 1929 literary debate with Edward Bernays, Everett Dean Martinargues that, "Propaganda is making puppets of us. We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates." Id.Bernays was a genius at influencing the public. Prior to this period advertising used logic to sell goods. For example, a Ford might create advertising that describes the quality of the product, its usefulness, and other logical reasons to buy the product.Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming very popular at the time. Freud talked about how human beings are not solely rational actors. In fact there are subconscious desires acting upon us without our knowledge. Freud intended to use these factors to help people overcome their mental disturbances. Bernays had a different purpose—to make money.Bernays happened to be Freud’s nephew. Bernays was approached by a cigarette manufacturer.“I have an untapped market,” the executive said.“There is a stigma against women smoking, so we are missing out on potential sales of cigarettes.”“Let me think about and get back to you,” Bernays said.There was turmoil in Europe, so Bernays did not write to him.“So then I called up the head Freudian psycholanalyst in America and presented the problem.”“I can help you, said the psychoanalyst, but it is going to take some money.”A week later Bernays received a call back.“Women don’t smoke because there is a stigma against women smoking. Men don’t like it. But there is a big push for women’s suffrage. So you need to associate smoking with women’s liberation. Call the cigarettes ‘Torches of Freedom’ and have important women smoking. It will associate smoking with women’s liberation.”Bernays told the cigarette maker to give cigarettes to women marching in a parade for women’s suffrage. They did. The newspapers reported the smoking as “Torches of Freedom.”Smoking among women skyrocketed and the cigarette companies made a fortune.Appealing to women who wanted freedom and to be cosmopolitan was very effective.America was isolationist and didn’t want to enter WWI. President Wilson did. He hired Bernays to turn around public opinion regarding the war. Bernays was incredibly successful.This documentary covers Bernays very well.To this day political elections are marketing campaigns. Take for example Barack Obama. Obama was young, well spoken, good looking, in line with American neoliberalism and not a radical, and could reliably deliver on the side of Wall Street. He received enormous support from them.America was given a “sample” of Obama during the 2004 election. The Democratic Party is ran by the elites of Wall Street. The Democratic Party up until recently had in its selection process superdelegates. These were party elites that could deliver a huge number of votes. The superdelegates could easily outnumber the number of votes by members of the party. That is why Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election had virtually no chance of winning unless he received a vast majority of votes by the ordinary members of the party. The elites also happen to be leading members of society, including Wall Street, Fortune 500 corporations, etc. In America both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are corporate parties. Turns out the primary was far more rigged in other ways too, as shown by Wikileaks.The public liked Obama. America had been run through the ringer by the Big Banks selling risky but profitable subprime loans. They were selling debt packages too, which they knew were not secure. America was in a terrible recession and mired in Iraq and Afghanistan in bloody wars going nowhere. America was terrified still of terrorists.Obama could be sold as something different. Young, articulate, and African American—perhaps he could be sold as someone who might give us hope and bring change. Thus, the “Hope and Change” campaign began. During this process Obama let himself become everything to all people. He made no efforts to disabuse liberals of his neoliberal ideology.Obama won. Bernays would have been so proud. Obama’s campaign even won a “Marketer of the Year Award.”"I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president," said Linda Clarizio, president of AOL's Platform A, the sponsor of the opening-night dinner attended by 750 where the votes were cast."I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, pointed to Mr. Obama's facility with engaging voters in social-media channels. "It's the fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said.In introducing the winner to the crowd, Ad Age Editor Jonah Bloom joked, "I'm surprised. I thought you [all] made more than $250,000."Obama Wins! ... Ad Age's Marketer of the YearObama turned out to be the Trojan Horse that saved Wall Street. As President he bailed out the Big Banks and auto companies. He let Main St. learn “tough love and personal responsibility.”He also was the best friend to the defense contractors and the military industrial complex. He doubled down on drone strikes and extrajudicial killings. He supported the overthrow of governments in Libya, Honduras, and Ukraine, and largely in Syria by supporting jihadi extremists fighting against Assad, a moderate Muslim. He presided over a massive government surveillance program spying on all Americans.Obama’s Final Drone Strike DataBoth Republicans and Democrats agree when it comes to U.S. imperial aggression.At a speech for the elites Obama proudly reminds them how much he did for them:“You’re welcome.”The American Media As Self CensoringNoam Chomsky and Ed Hermann in their book “Manufacturing Consent” discuss how the media self censors while presenting information. The best form of propaganda is that in which the speaker truly believes it. That way it is sincere.The U.S. mainstream media is owned and operated by six major corporations. Advertisers control funding, thus they control the content by voting with their wallets. If Tucker Carlson says something that offends the public and might hurt their sales, they pull the funding. Without money the show is cancelled. If Tucker Carlson says something pro socialist, this is detrimental to business interests, so the funding gets cut.Journalists that believe in the values of American imperialism, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism are hired. Dissent is permitted, but within sharply constrained boundaries.Discussion is focused on differences between the two corporate parties, Republican vs. Democrat. The Green Party and others aren’t given much attention. Sharp differences between the two give the illusion of free speech and active debate.Television media is constrained by concision. Pundits must say things in between commercials. Pundits that say things contrary to the standard conventional wisdom are not aired because explaining the facts and nuances of their positions would take too long. So pundits tend to just confirm what is already understood.“Balance” is another factor. Take climate change, for instance. 97% of climate change scientists are in consensus that climate change is real and caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. This is established. But the media will bring on one scientist to represent the majority and for “balance” a dissenter will be brought on. Then the two debate. This gives the impression that the matter is in fact not settled, and there is genuine debate going on in the climate change scientist community. It is not.Just in case the mainstream media doesn’t fight communism enough, the government works to ensure that the public is properly propagandized against the “evils of socialism.”School in America is the primary form of propagandaThe Black Book of CommunismThe Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Nicholas Werth et al. is anti-communist propaganda filled with lies and misrepresentations. The book is often quoted for the bogus claims that “Communism killed 100 million people,” “Stalin killed 60 million,” etc.In it, the authors wrongly equivocate communism and Nazism. Nevermind that Hitler was the mortal enemy of communism, whom he claimed were “JudeoBolsheviks” because 80% of the Bolsheviks were Jews. It was communists that liberated Jews from the camps. Upon liberating them some Soviet soldiers broke down. Many vomited. Some found Nazi guards hiding and killed them.Were the Nazis Socialists? SnopesMost of the Black Book of Communism the regurgitation of Nazi propaganda. Sometimes it references Robert Conquest. It fails to mention that Conquest based much of his narrative on Nazi propaganda (at that time the Kremlin had not released seminal documents), so historians had confused propaganda from what really happened. Once Conquest, Pipes, and Applebaum published their works, these composed the Cold War propaganda canon. Any attempts to correct these by actual historical proof that was released by the Kremlin after the fall of the USSR was waived off as “Stalin apologism” and equating it with “Holocaust denial.”Alexander Finnegan's answer to How true is the claim that most Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is regurgitated directly from Nazi propaganda?CriticismEven mainline scholars consider it not something to be taken seriously.Whereas chapters of the book, where it describes the events in separate Communist states, were highly praised, some generalizations made by Courtois in the introduction to the book became a subject of criticism both on scholarly and political grounds. Moreover, two of the book's main contributors—Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin—as well as Karel Bartosek publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Werth and Margolin felt Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship"and faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries. They also argued that based on the results of their studies, one can tentatively estimate the total number of the victims at between 65 and 93 million. In particular, Margolin, who authored the Black Book's chapter on Vietnam, clarified "that he has never mentioned a million deaths in Vietnam.” Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty have criticized Courtois for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder". Economic historian Michael Ellman has argued that the book's estimate of "at least 500,000" deaths during the Soviet famine of 1946–1947 "is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger", with 1,000,000–1,500,000 excess deaths. Regarding these questions, historian Alexander Dallin has argued that moral, legal, or political judgments hardly depend on the number of victims. Many observers have rejected Courtois's numerical and moral comparison of Communism to Nazism in the introduction. According to Werth, there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism, saying: "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union". He further told Le Monde: "The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious". In a critical review, historian Amir Weiner wrote: "When Stalin's successors opened the gates of the Gulag, they allowed 3 million inmates to return home. When the Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution". Historian Ronald Suny remarked that Courtois' comparison of 100 million victims of Communism to 25 million victims of Nazism "[leaves out] out most of the 40-60,000,000 lives lost in the Second World War, for which arguably Hitler and not Stalin was principally responsible". A report by the Wiesel Commission criticized the comparison of Gulag victims with Jewish Holocaustvictims as an attempt to trivialize the Holocaust. Historian Peter Kenez criticized the chapter written by Nicolas Werth: "Werth can also be an extremely careless historian. He gives the number of Bolsheviks in October 1917 as 2,000, which is a ridiculous underestimate. He quotes from a letter of Lenin to Alexander Shliapnikovand gives the date as 17 October 1917; the letter could hardly have originated at that time, since in it Lenin talks about the need to defeat the Tsarist government, and turn the war into a civil conflict. He gives credit to the Austro-Hungarian rather than the German army for the conquest of Poland in 1915. He describes the Provisional Government as 'elected'. He incorrectly writes that the peasant rebels during the civil war did more harm to the Reds than to the Whites, and so on". Historian Mark Tauger challenged the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was largely artificial and genocidal. According to journalist Gilles Perrault, the books ignores the effect of international factors, including military interventions, on the communist experience. Social critic Noam Chomsky has criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger. While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Chomsky argued that "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone". Le Siècle des Communismes, a collective work of twenty academics, was a response to both François Furet's Le passé d'une Illusion and Courtois's The Black Book of Communism. It broke Communism down into series of discrete movements, with mixed positive and negative results. The Black Book of Communism prompted the publication of several other "black books" which argued that similar chronicles of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of colonialism and capitalism.The Black Book of Communism - WikipediaThe Black Book of Communism alleges that communism killed 94 million people during the 20th century. This number is accumulated from more than 10 different nations and various movements around the world. It includes two of some of the most populated nations on Earth — China and the Soviet Union. Despite being cited often, the Black Book of Communism has repeatedly been criticized for it’s reckless, careless, and highly questionable methodology.Some of the major criticisms against the Black Book of Communism includes the fact that it counts the following as “victims of communism”: some nazis and their collaborators who were killed by the Soviet Union during World War II, people who died in the 1921 Russian famine (which was caused by drought, the whites stealing food, war, etc), other hunger-related deaths caused by the nazi war against the Soviet Union, and many other incidents that were dishonestly attributed. The book contains deaths dishonestly attributed to communism by completely ignoring external factors such as sanctions, foreign military intervention, etc. It also includes inaccuracies of historical events such as when Werth credits the Austro-Hungarian army, not the German army, for the occupation of Poland in 1915, making the ridiculous claim that the bolsheviks only had 2,000 members in October 1917 when they actually had around 200,000 members, or claiming that the infamous U.S.-backed dictator Batista “fiercely opposed” the U.S., and in some instances, pulls numbers straight out of thin air.Debunking: “Communism killed more people than naziism!”A passage from the “Black Book of Communism” where it portrays the OUN/UPA nazi collaborators as heroic victims of communism who fought against the ‘commies and jews’ . They are responsible for pogroms in Ukraine where they murdered tens of thousands of Jewish, Polish, & other ethnic minorities alongside of the German nazis such as in Babi Yar (1941) where they later set up the Syrets nazi concentration camp in 1942. Id.The critics of the book’s claim of 94 million people killed by communism includes some the book’s own authors. One of them that is particularly noteworthy is Nicholas Werth, who is responsible for writing much of the book. Werth is on record as saying that the allegations of a death toll of communism during the 20th century of beyond 85 million as being ‘non-clarified’ and ‘unjustified’. Continuing, he says from the book that the highest possible estimate is 93 million while the lowest being 65 million. In another instance he also admitted that he alleged 15 million deaths by the Soviet Union and Courtois, the editor, seemingly pulled 5 million deaths out of thin air, which just so coincidentally happens to be about as many nazi/axis soliders that were killed in WWII by the USSR, and added it to reach 20 million. Margolin, another main writer of the book, also admitted in the previous Le Monde article that Courtois’s claim of one million killed in Vietnam is also bogus, stating that he ‘never reported a million’. In explaining why Courtois lied, they admitted that the editor was “obsessed” with trying to reach 100 million. Various authors of the book have also protested Courtois’s comparison of communism and naziism with comments such as ‘extermination camps did not exist in the USSR’ and ‘the more you compare communism and nazism, the more the differences are obvious.’The claim that communism killed 94 million people during the 20th century, for all intents and purposes, is an outright lie that hinges on counting millions of deaths that were not caused by communism and by having sympathies for nazis and their genocidal collaborators during WWII, as if they were victims of anything but justice. But that is a whole discussion for another time — even with the Black Book of Communism’s fake death toll, many people have taken it upon themselves to stretch that lie even more, attempting to place the death toll at 100 million. The false and inflated number of 100 million people being killed by communism over 100 years will be the number I will use just because it is the most common myth perpetuated.If the allegation against communism is that it killed 100 million people, how many people did naziism kill? The Holocaust death toll is estimated to be between 15 million to 20 million people. That is at least 1.25 million people killed each year. Compared to communism’s alleged one million deaths among ten different nations and from various movements. If naziism kept that pace of 1.25 million people killed each year, it would reach 125 million deaths in a century— compared to communism’s alleged 100 million. Comparing the alleged deaths of 100 years of communism to the death toll from 12 years of naziism is intellectually dishonest, you are comparing apples to oranges. When you realize that you are comparing 15 million deaths in 12 years versus 100 million deaths in 100 years, the claim that “communism killed more people than naziism” starts to become more visible as the nazi propaganda that it is.However naziism is responsible for more deaths than just from the Holocaust. Naziism is why World War II even happened — had naziism not been created then Nazi Germany wouldn’t have caused the world war, and World War II (as we know it) would not have existed. It is possible in a hypothetical universe that a war would have still occurred given the material conditions that the nazis exploited to rise to power. But at the same time it is also possible that other people would have risen to power and not caused a war. But we live in this universe and in this universe WWII was officially caused by Nazi Germany after rising to power by exploiting the dismal material conditions in the failed capitalist Weimar Republic. The number of civilians killed during WWII is estimated to be about 50 million people to 55 million people (almost all being allied civilians, largely Soviet civilians), about half being from famine and war-related diseases. Military deaths range from 21 million people to 25 million people — in total that is about 71 million people to 80 million people killed because of naziism’s war on humanity through WWII. Using both of the most conservative estimates, 71 million from WWII and 15 million from the Holocaust, that’s about 86 million people killed by naziism. In 12 years.Naziism was only getting started with it’s killing though. The nazis had a plan called “Generalplan Ost”, a plan for genocide of Slavs and colonization of Eastern Europe. The population of the Soviet Union was over 160,000,000 people before the war and had a net growth of almost over a million people each non-wartime year. In 1946, the population of the Soviet Union was 170,548,000, after losing over 20,000,000 people during World War II. The nazi plan, had the Soviets and their allies lost, would have resulted in the deaths of about 200,000,000 people in the Soviet Union.What about the deaths caused by neo-nazis since World War II? Since 2014, thousands of civilians have been killed by the neo-nazi militias of the fascist Ukrainian government such as Azov in Donbass with grad rockets, by cutting off water supplies, shelling the homes of civilians, and more. An alt-right nazi terrorist in Norway (2011) killed 77 people and injured over 300. The number of deaths by nazi terrorist attacks, neo-nazi movements, and regimes inspired by Nazi Germany adds more and more deaths to the nazi death toll.Nazi Germany was born in 1933 and died in 1945. In 12 years of it’s ugly existence, it led to the deaths of over 86 million people between the Holocaust and causing World War II. Meanwhile the allegation against communism over 100 years in 10 different nations (two of which were some of the most populated nations on Earth), and from various communist movements around the world is 100 million people killed.And as for capitalism, 100 million Indigenous people in the Americas were killed during the European colonization for the propagation of American capitalism, as well as millions of African people that were enslaved as property to be profited off of by capitalists in the West. How many people have been killed by capitalist sanctions? How many people have been killed in capitalist wars? How many people have been killed by capitalist dictators like Pincohet? How many people have died and will we let die for profiteering?Every time you preach this lie, you’re aiding the rise of neo-naziism & fascism. Put the intellectually dishonest claim that “communism killed more people than naziism” to sleep — you’re lying to yourself & everybody around you. Id.There are indeed no limits to which anti-communists will stoop to preach their hateful message. Sadly, some of it comes from right wing nationalists. There is a disturbing increase in fascism and neo Nazism around the world.More realistic numbers can be found.Some may argue that capitalism is not related to imperialism. Or some argue that capitalism is not bad but crony capitalism, or corporatism is the problem. Both are untrue. Capitalism involves competition. When corporate entities influence politicians to make laws which favor them and disrupt the market, this is unstoppable because liberal democracy is bourgeois democracy. It is rule by the bourgeois elites who will stop at nothing to maintain their power. Your average person doesn’t want there to be corporate donations and lobbying, but this is not something they can change because even the Supreme Court has endorsed dark money and has called corporate donations Constitutionally protected Free Speech.“According to Karl Marx, the expansion of imperialism was directly linked to a growth in capitalism due to one fundamental reason: the fact that capitalism was a worldwide system and unable to be constrained within the boundaries of a single country or nation-state (Chandra, 39). This viewpoint of Marx is reiterated by historian Bipan Chandra who states: “by its very nature capitalism could not exist in only one country…it expanded to encompass the entire world, including the backward, noncapitalist countries…it was a world system” (Chandra, 39). In accordance with this view, Marx argued that capitalism required an “international division of labour,” in which the capitalists sought to convert “one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part which remains a chiefly industrial field” (Chandra, 43). Thus, according to Marx, imperialism served as a means to extract a large amount of “raw materials” and resources in a relatively cheap manner – all at the expense (and exploitation) of the indigenous peoples of the world that came into contact with the imperial powers. Ironically, Marx viewed the expansion of capitalist societies into the world as a necessary evil that would, ultimately, shift societies toward the path of communism. For Marx – who believed that society followed a series of progressing epochs – imperialism was simply the next (and unavoidable) step for capitalism’s relentless expansion.”Capitalism and the Expansion of ImperialismHitler loved capitalism. He believed in private property. The Nazis at Mauthausen concentration camp would rent prisoner slaves to businesses, including Volkswagen and Bayer. Slaves were rented to do quarry work and to work on railroad lines. Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex - WikipediaThe lies about the Holomodor have been solidly debunked:Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?Much of the present anti-communist propaganda is from Nazis.“According to journalist George Seldes:"Hitler had the support of the most widely circulated magazine in history, Readers Digest, as well as nineteen big-city newspapers and one of the three great American news agencies, the $220-million Hearst press empire.Hearst…was the lord of all the press lords in the United States. The millions who read the Hearst newspapers and magazines and saw Hearst newsreels in the nation's moviehouses had their minds poisoned by Hitler propaganda."Seldes recounts that the American Ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, told him that"[When] Hearst came to take the waters at Bad Nauheim [Germany] in September 1934…Hitler sent two of his most trusted Nazi propagandists…to ask Hearst how Nazism could present a better image in the U.S. When Hearst went to Berlin later in the month, he was taken to see Hitler."Seldes reports that a $400,000 a year deal was struck between Hearst and Hitler, and signed by Doctor Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. "Hearst," continues Seldes, "completely changed the editorial policy of his nineteen daily newspapers the same month he got the money."In court documents filed on behalf of Dan Gillmor, publisher of a magazine Friday, in response to a lawsuit by Hearst, he states:"Promptly after this visit with Adolf Hitler and the making of said arrangements... plaintiff, William Randolph Hearst, instructed all Hearst press correspondents in Germany, including those of INS (Hearst's International News Service) to report happenings in Germany only in a friendly manner. All of correspondents reporting happenings in Germany accurately and without friendliness, sympathy and bias for the actions of the German government, were transferred elsewhere, discharged, or forced to resign."In the late 1930s, Seldes recounts, when "several sedition indictments [were brought by] the Department of Justice...against a score or two of Americans, the defendants included an unusually large minority of newspaper men and women, most of them Hearst employees."Source: Randy Davis, "Nazis in the Attic"http://www.emperors-clothes.com/...---William Randolph Hearst is known as one of the largest media moguls of all time. During the 1930s, he worked with the Nazi party to help promote a positive image of the Nazi party in American media. He also received loans from Italian fascist bankers during this time. The actions of Hearst were an important element in shaping American sentiment about not getting involved in the political situation in Europe as many Americans were lead to believe that there was nothing terribly wrong going on in Europe, and even after the war started some Americans continued to support the Nazi regime based on the propaganda that they had been exposed to through Hearst media sources.Source: "This War Is About So Much More."http://ww.rationalrevolution.net/american_supporters_of_the_europ.htm”William Randolph HearstIt is a matter of some significance that Cardinal Innitzer’s allegations of famine-genocide were widely promoted throughout the 1930s, not only by Hitler’s chief propagandist Goebbels, but also by American Fascists as well.It will be recalled that Hearst kicked off his famine campaign with a radio broadcast based mainly on material from Cardinal Innitzer’s “aid committee.” In Organized Anti-Semitism in America, the 1941 book exposing Nazi groups and activities in the pre-war United States, Donald Strong notes that American fascist leader Father Coughlin used Nazi propaganda material extensively. This included Nazi charges of “atrocities by Jew Communists” and verbatim portions of a Goebbels speech referring to Innitzer’s “appeal of July 1934, that millions of people were dying of hunger throughout the Soviet Union.”Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 49-51Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomorhttp://www.rationalrevolution.ne...The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceThe West is also susceptible to anything anti-communist. Even Solzehnitysn’s wife admitted her husband’s book was fiction.A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.” She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyIn fact the U.S. government hired former Nazis to help them create propaganda and to spy on leftists.“The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.Mr. Dulles believed “moderate” Nazis might “be useful” to America, records show. Mr. Hoover, for his part, personally approved some ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed accusations of their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda.In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.”In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazishttps://www.archives.gov/files/i...““Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …”That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables” during the Second World War.Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war–the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.“The real winners of the cold war were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other,” says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and America’s chief Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a Clinton-appointed Interagency Working Group (IWG) committee of U.S. scholars, public officials, and former intelligence officers who helped prepare the CIA records for declassification.”The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret: Newly Declassified Files Confirm United States Collaboration with Nazis - Institute for Policy StudiesThe art of the big lie: the history of fake newsOne of the biggest forms of propaganda is the myth that communism killed 100 million people. Every time you hear it the lie gets bigger. If someone fell off their bicycle and hit their head and died it must have been the fault of communists, according to their strange logic. The truth is that communism never caused a famine. Famines were common in Russia. The Nazis blamed the famine on Stalin to incite Ukrainian nationalism. Stalin never killed by the Great Purge millions of people. In fact reliable sources estimate that no more than 250k at the absolute most died in the purges, and many of those killed were swept up in the purges ran by lower level officials. Stalin ordered some people killed. Those condemned in the trials have been shown to be guilty by overwhelming evidence. They were not show trials.Debunking: “Communism killed more people than naziism!”Even to the present day America supports neo-Nazis in Ukraine. America has a long history of pro-Nazi sentiment.America’s Collusion With Neo-Nazis