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(This is the history that the slimy bastard Ben Norton swept under the rug when he wrote an article repeating RT.com talking points on the Baltic states.)
This week is the 78th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, signed Aug. 23, 1939. This was the lit fuse guaranteeing that the Second World War broke out precisely when it did, where it did, and why it took on the geopolitical shape that it did. In less than a week, Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland, igniting the bloodiest war in history.
Germany’s convulsive military expansion is, at least, a well-known chapter in world history, even for most Americans. Less recognized is the fact that only 16 days after the German attack on Poland, the Soviet Red Army invaded Poland from the east. German and Russian forces halted at the line of demarcation secretly agreed to in their treaty, Wehrmacht and Red Army officers then fraternized like old comrades, and the two armies held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.
Within three months, the Red Army invaded Finland, which had been consigned by the Pact to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. The following year, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, likewise condemned to be “liberated” by the Red Army, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR. Then eastern Romania suffered the same fate.
In all the annexed territories, hundreds of thousands of inhabitants assumed to be “counterrevolutionary elements” were shot out of hand, tortured, or imprisoned either locally or in gulags in Siberia. In order to suppress potential resistance in Soviet-occupied Poland, 20,000 captured Polish military officers were transported to a forest in Belorussia, shot, and dumped into a mass grave.
full: http://billmoyers.com/story/putin-alt-right-long-shadow-history/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
