LP: "I was not talking about how the Red Army was deployed across Europe to defeat the Nazis. I was talking about how it was used to strangle the Hungarian Revolution, the Czech revolution in 1968, etc."
First, words mean what they say, not what LP re-interprets his words to mean later. "The bottom line is that the encroachment of NATO at the doorstep of Russia is a direct outcome of the encroachment of the Red Army on nations throughout Eastern Europe." Second, NATO had been formed years before the Hungarian revolt; its pressure on the Soviet Union was constant. Third, Stalin died in 1953, and immediate changes began in the CPSU. Khrushchev's lying speech about Stalin in 1956 came a few months before Hungary. Linking the Stalin-era regime to Hungary and Czechoslovakia is precarious. Incidentally, each of these two events has its own rather different character. But for LP, the Soviet Union becomes an immutable object of hatred from the mid-1920s, when the CPSU decided to industrialize and sent Trotsky packing. LP even uses Robert Conquest-style lies, such as the totally bogus claim that "upwards of 7.5 million Ukrainians died in the famine of 1930-1932." Al Szymanski exposed the phony statistics and the ten-fold exaggeration of that number in his book, Human Rights in the Soviet Union. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
