PART 1: INTRODUCTION
I was in public high school in New York City from 1959 to 1962. In English class, during one of those years, we studied Early Nineteenth Century Romantic Poets, especially the English poets, Lord Byron, Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
[Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley (1797-1851), is especially famous for writing Frankenstein – the first narrative of scientific experimentation creating a catastrophic disaster for mankind. (There was no Wuhan Laboratory around at that time.) She also composed the eternally most beautiful translation of the ancient Greek Aeschylus play about the mythological figure of Prometheus who brought Reason and, therefore, Freedom and Free Will to mankind. (It is by far my favorite Greek tragedy,) She was the equally brilliant daughter of the world’s first feminist – Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to this brilliant second child. (Now there is a true personal human ‘tragedy.’)]
One of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems – “Ozymandias” – originally made no sense to me, until the English teacher explained it. (I was fortunate to receive my complete public school education BEFORE there were teachers’ unions and before progressive politicians denatured, and then destroyed, Public Education and so many other institutions.) All of my teachers, from kindergarten on, were true Professional Educators – with real standards and a genuine personal conscience to perform their duties without any deficiencies – intellectual or moral. If you did not truly learn the material, you did not advance to the next grade. Both Colin Powell and Thomas Sowell, two very famous BLACK men received the same quality education in the NYC Public School system five or so years before me. (There was no Jim Crow law in New York City in my lifetime or before.) So much for 60+ years of LYING about SYSTEMIC RACISM before Progressive Politics moved in to destroy the world in the name of Idealistically ‘making a better world’ with the perpetually undefined ideal of THE SOCIAL JUSTICE – being on the moral high ground, whatever they do is okay, even mandatory, because those ENDS justify the MEANS by ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart (sic). Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition
The major point of the poem is to highlight the fact that, in the evolution of human civilization, it is not just events and facts and history that occur and is BELIEVED to be true. Those in Authority, being as imperfectly human as you and I, are inclined to glorify their existence (and defame their ‘opposition’) with the distortions of reality we call PROPAGANDA.
Misunderstanding Propaganda as if it is TRUTH and HISTORY is an eternal problem with eternally flawed human nature.
PART 2: SOVIET HISTORY
On September 1, 1939, after Stalin’s Soviet Empire and Hitler’s Nazi Germany had secretly arrived at a treaty to attack Poland from two sides within a two week period (and thereby begin WWII in Europe), they then quickly divided Eastern Europe between the two massive, mass-murdering (bizarrely, yet each in their own perverse way, Idealistically-motivated) Tyrannies.
They both then consolidated their two massively enhanced Evil Empires until June 22, 1941 – about five and one-half months before Pearl Harbor was attacked by Imperial Japan on December 7, 1941. (The original date that should live in Infamy.)
Stalin had been terrified of Hitler because he knew, with certainty, the military force of Nazi Germany, though smaller than his own, by then, was a much more powerful military force for a quick war that did not drag on for years.
Of the four men who had together invented the USSR (from 1917 to 1922), Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 1870 – 1924), a lawyer, was by far the biggest NARCISSIST and therefore was the unchallenged Boss. Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879 – 1940), the public face of the Regime, was at least partially innocent because of his sincere Faith that the inevitable Truth of Marxism would create a world-wide Marxist Revolution in each and every country of the world. (He truly believed the workers of the world would now seize power everywhere because it had finally happened the first time in the Russian Empire.) Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, 1877 – 1926, a descendant of a Polish aristocratic family, had a powerful Sadistic drive to physically torment inconvenient individual human souls to promote this Revolutionary change to history. He created the original Soviet Secret Police, originally called the CHEKA (and many times reorganized during the history of the regime evolving into six or seven acronyms, the final one being the often talked about KGB). The fourth man, Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Jughashvili, 1878 – 1953), a former Georgian seminary student inspired by Marxism, was both the most intellectual in the use of language and most ‘guarded’ in terms of personal vulnerability.
Hitler, who had stumbled (shortly after WWI) into that Munich beer hall meeting of the NZDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) of nine founders, quickly discovered he was so tragically brilliant at making inspiring speeches to motivate followers. In a slower more complex mechanism of communication to potential followers, Stalin was the most skilled in utilizing language (and even picture-image appearances) to motivate followers of communism. Or so they all believed until June 22, 1941.
Because of his ‘language skills,’ Stalin had been fully in charge of Propaganda for the Communist Party going back even before WWI and the November 1917 Bolshevik Coup d’Etat (or Putsch, in German) that turned a several month old Democratic post-Czarist government into the Tyranny that was supposed to finally end when the Cold War ended, in stages, in the period from 1989 to 1993.
(Too bad Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the only two truly historically knowledgeable and fully competent leaders were gone long before the process came to an end. Reagan left office January 20, 1989 and Thatcher on November 28, 1990. The Massacre at Tienanmen Square on June 4, 1989, in front of the world, failed to wake up the Experts and Authorities with Foreign Policy Experience in the free world to the NEW EVIL EMPIRE, Communist China, until Donald Trump became president, 2017-2021.)
PART 3: NATIONALISTIC PROPAGANDA
The most powerful and complete Governmental Propaganda Inflection Point in all of human history appears completely lost in today’s academically indoctrinated history. I am not even certain that the most rational, most knowledgeable and most brilliant True Expert and Authority with ‘Foreign Policy Experience,’ Henry Kissinger (who died days ago at the age of 100), had as clear a memory of it as I do. [Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, I read an eye-opening fascinating book I bought (probably from the History Book Club) written by an old and originally sympathetic with Communism scholar who had been shocked by how Soviet Propaganda had made a massive 180 degree U-turn several months after the June 22, 1941 Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union.]
Up until that point in history, all Soviet Propaganda focused on the idea that all Soviet ‘citizens’ (and international faithful believers) should be filled with Pride, for they were on the cutting edge of what a religious philosopher like Pope John Paul II would think of as the Material World analogue of Religious Faith.
All sincere religions, in what a good logician would call a ‘Transcendental’ form of logic, DO NOT BELIEVE the Material World we are living in is the ‘be all and end all’ of human existence. Every real religion, each in its own unique way, accepts the idea of the Eternal Individual Human Soul that ‘transcends’ material world existence.
[In ancient Jewish speculative scholarship, there is an expectation of a Messiah that will lead his followers into a heavenly perpetual existence. However, there are two schools of theological thought. One is that the Messiah leads the individual souls into such an existence after the individual’s body dies. And the other presupposes that this Material World becomes Heaven on Earth and is perpetually perfected for all future humanity.
[To begin with, when Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) brought Plato’s perpetually unchanging Political Ideals of perfect societal Harmony into the modern world as the Chairman of the Philosophy Department in the new Prussian University of Berlin, he had a slightly less grandiose ‘philosophy.’ He sincerely believed, as so much of human history reflects the assumption that all Socialized groups of people – probably united by ethnic identity – were in perpetual competition with every other such group. He therefore promoted the idea that the German people should dominate the world (because he was a German and his employer, the Prussian Monarchy, which had created the University of Berlin was the best structure of government of the best ethnic group of people in all of humanity. (The whole ‘uberman’ idea starts here.)
[Ironically, Prussia is accurately described at the Congress of Vienna in 1848 (17 years after the Professor-Lunatic was dead) as a German monarchy and a German Aristocracy ruling over a predominately Slavic population. Slavic Serfdom had yet to fully dissolve in the modernization process that Napoleon started all over Europe. Prussia was anything but purely German to begin with.]
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883), a German citizen by birth, was arguably the most brilliant student educated under this ‘system’ at the University of Berlin. He invented a slight change to Hegelianism with the assistance of his rich-boy junior partner Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895). It was a slightly different but more adamantly eternal form of this Messianic Material World perfection.
Both crazy systems (Hegelian and Marxist) begin with an enormous amount of beguiling Sophistry, with the idea these self-delusional geniuses are blessed with an assumed form of Clairvoyant Scientific Knowledge of Humanity’s future. They both believe that human evolution must follow an inevitable three-step pattern in which the first step is called the THESIS. This first step leads to an inevitable and definable second step that they call the ANTITHESIS (sort of like Newton’s Action-Reaction Natural Law of Motion). After which the Geniuses can see the inevitable third step which they call the SYNTHESIS.
All of these Educated and Credentialed ‘Experts’ and ‘Authorities’ understand all this with their Clairvoyant Scientific Knowledge – because they are so Special and Brilliant unlike you or I. (If you think that this is simply Egotistically Delusional, you agree with me. I believe in Human Free Will – these Idealists do not. They believe in HISTORICITY – a fancy term for Inevitable Patterns of Change only perceivable by Political Scientists – the first of what are many Fake Sciences today.)
Marx and Engels, coming along in the early 1800s when the huge wealth-creating natural-science-based Industrial Revolution had been around for only one to two generations, switched the HISTORICITY Motivating Force of Inevitable Historical Change from dominating Ethnic Grouping to controlling ‘the Means of Production’ – the new magical wealth-creating industrial stuff. All of these delusional geniuses, being totally ignorant of natural law science, are off in their own political fantasy world.
[All of the Idealistic Political Organizers of human society are absolutely crazy. Virtually no ‘educated’ person ever says that. I am pretty well ‘educated’ but I say that at every opportunity. So did Karl Raymond Popper (1902 – 1994) and Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), the two real philosophers whose works – 3 of which are listed at the bottom of the “About the Book” page on this website – began my REAL EDUCATION in politics and philosophy.]
So, to return to that ‘Propaganda Inflection Point’ in Soviet history which took place after Hitler invaded the USSR, you have to follow the history on the ground. The German Military, along with its four ‘Einsatzgruppen’ mobile death squads and the ever-growing WaffenSS paramilitary associates (many recruited from local populations) rapidly turned the western USSR into conquered people and conquered territory. The soldiers of gigantic Soviet armies (INADEQUATELY PATRIOTICALLY MOTIVATED) surrendered by the millions. Anyone who could be identified as a Communist Party member, civilian or military, was treated like all the hundreds of thousands of Jews in this place in what you would today call Ukraine. They were rounded up and murdered with bullets to the head, falling into the mass grave pits that they themselves were forced to dig before the mass executions. [The largest such mass grave during the ‘Holocaust’ was at Babyn Yar, with 500,000 or 600,000 victims, which was located in today’s Kiev, since so many Jews lived in the area for many generations – going back to Catherine the Great (1762 – 1796)]
There were many thousands of Nazi volunteers among local populations – none more numerous than Ukrainians. Ukrainians had an old semi-legitimate grievance against Communism (not Jews) that goes back especially to the period of 1930 to 1933 during Stalin’s one-man rule that requires some explanation.
Stalin became the complete master of the USSR by 1929. Lenin had died of a stroke in 1924 at the age of 54; Soviet Police State Leader Dzerzhinsky died at the younger age of 49 in 1926 and was replaced by one of Stalin’s fellow Georgians, Lavrenti P. Beria, who kept that job until at least one day after Stalin died in 1953. The most sincere Marxist ‘true believer’ Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) had been permanently deported by Stalin, first to Turkey in 1929, and then lost his Soviet citizenship in February 1932. He was eventually murdered by a Soviet assassin on August 20, 1940, in Mexico, before he could testify to a US Congress committee about the real USSR and the real Stalin, not the propagandized version. (The assassin planted an Ice Axe in his head, so, had he managed to survive, it was unlikely that he would be left with a functional brain. He died obviously.)
As to the Ukrainian grievance against Communism, the story begins with the end of serfdom in the old Russian Empire a little after the time of the ending of the US Civil War (1861 – 1865). Russia had been the most eastern and backward of all European countries. Feudalism was economically based on agriculture, and such areas encompassed today’s Caucasus, western Russia, southwest Belarus, much of today’s Poland, but most especially Ukraine.
[In the old Russian Empire, Jews were not allowed to own land, therefore, they could not be independent farmers, called ‘kulaks.’]
Even in antiquity, the area of Ukraine was the richest farmland in all of Europe. If you read Herodotus, which no one but I ever does, you will discover in the year 480 BCE, when Xerxes led his humongous Persian Imperial Army and Navy to invade Greece, the Persians were astounded to discover a never-ending line of grain ships coming down from Ukraine and the Black Sea through the Hellespont to feed the perpetually over-populated area of the eastern Mediterranean, north of Egypt.
When serfdom was abolished, individual farms were established with individual farmers on land separate from monarchical and aristocratic owned property. As any non-Marxist can easily understand, a farmer farming his own land is likely to be significantly more productive than a serf or a farm laborer working for a higher social status owner or boss. If an individual farmer owned all of 8 acres or more (640 acres in a square mile) in Stalin’s Soviet Union, he was classified as a Kulak. In moving Marxism to its more purely Idealistic MEANS of PRODUCTION agricultural structure, the private ownership of land was totally abolished and replaced with the COLLECTIVE FARM in 1930 with dire consequences from 1930 to 1933. As many as six million kulaks were directly or indirectly murdered, the preponderance of which was from the rich land of Ukraine.
[Somehow the mass murder story got out to the rest of the world. In the UK, the Trotskyite (or more democratic socialist) publication “The Guardian” started ‘reporting’ on it. Worldwide Social Oligarchies detest atrocity stories which they don’t employ (whether embellished or completely fabricated) for a ‘change of regime’ if it could unsettle their comfortable existence. So as to maintain the status-quo, a simple mechanism was employed to Socio-Politically ‘DEBUNK’ this truthful massacre story.
Walter Duranty (1884 – 1957) was the New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief from 1922 to 1936. He was a chronically drunken stooge of Stalin, living a comfortable and privileged existence under Communism. In 1931, he wrote a famous series of articles to completely DEBUNK the mass murder story in the Ukraine – probably without even going on a fake private tour a la Potemkin Village. In 1932, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Reporting. The New York Times still proudly takes credit for his Pulitzer Prize – as they and the Washington Post still take pride in their Pulitzer Prizes won during their collaborative participation in the Russia-Putin-Trump Hoax stories that permanently (and fraudulently) soiled the reputation of the Presidency of Donald J. Trump – our only fully-competent and honest President since Ronald Reagan left office on January 20, 1989. (Or so I so sincerely believe with my First Amendment right to express my opinion here.)
I have an awful lot more to add to this essay which I started back in late September after a Friday, September 22 episode at the Canadian Parliament that shocked me no end.
I will especially dwell on two Jewish survivors of Holocaust I, that are vastly different moral historical figures often confused one for the other by whoever can remember either one.
What happened on October 7th and subsequently in Israel caused this essay to remain incomplete for two months now. However, today being December 7, 2023, the 82nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day – the Original Date that Will Live in Infamy – requires that this as yet incomplete essay be published today.
MUCH MORE TO FOLLOW.
