An army of the people is invincible!
Mao ZedongTags: people chinese revolution communism commie mao prolitariat red-army soviet
And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
Christopher HitchensTags: history revenge antisemitism communism jews nazis ideology israel poland germans red-army camus czechoslovakia eastern-europe stalin david-szmulevski east-germany hungary jewish-diaspora secret-police
I heard people talking about what this Red Army did to any Germans they captured, and this only added to my fears.
Alfred NestorTags: wwii hitler red-army ww2 alfred-nestor survival-story uncle-hitler war-story alf-nestor author-alfred-nestor hitler-s-germany nazi-party second-world-war-chidhood second-world-war-in-germany russian-red-army
[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]
In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.
For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
Tags: life happiness love true-love beauty death youth atheism hope suffering oppression atheist violence materialism wife communism marxism enjoyment red-army soviet magnanimity materialist tenderness revolutionist dialectical-materialism irreconcilable-atheism irreconcilable-atheist proletarian
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