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No surprise really... that same authoritarian sentiment is spreading through our leftists too.
Russian Supreme Court Upholds Prosecution for Truth About Hitler-Stalin Pact
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/truth-about-1939-now-prohibited-in-putins-russia.html
The Russian Supreme Court has upheld the prosecution of a journalist for writing the truth about what happened in September of 1939: a Soviet invasion of Poland as enabled by the Hitler-Stalin Pact that divided Poland and other Eastern European areas between the two totalitarian powers.
The prosecution was under a Russian statute that prohibits the publication of falsehoods about the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. The “falsehood” in question — not coincidentally written in Ukrainian, as it happens, and criticizing claims that Ukrainian nationalists were partially to blame for the war — was this: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War. That is, communism and Nazism closely collaborated … ”
That is literally and figuratively a historical fact, undisputed even in Russia (after the fall of the Soviet Union, that is) until fairly recently. The so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact (also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two foreign ministers who actually signed it) provided for a nonaggression agreement between the two former enemies supplemented by a secret protocol for the division of Poland, along with the cession of the then-independent Baltic States and portions of Rumania and Finland to the USSR. It was concluded just 9 days before the German invasion of Poland, followed 17 days later by the Soviet invasion of Poland, which began the moment a separate nonaggression pact with Germany’s ally Japan secured the USSR’s eastern borders.
The realities of this 1939 diplomatic coup were officially acknowledged by Russia along with the release of secret Soviet archives in 1939. But Soviet-era revisionism eventually returned via statements by Putin in 2014 and 2015 defending Soviet behavior and essentially blaming Poland for its own dismemberment. In the old-new view from Moscow, Stalin was simply defending his people and even the Poles from Nazi aggression, with the Polish regime sharing Hitler’s blame via its hostility to the USSR and the precedent it set by annexing a small Polish-majority area of Czechoslovakia upon that country’s collapse after Munich.
Russian Supreme Court Upholds Prosecution for Truth About Hitler-Stalin Pact
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/truth-about-1939-now-prohibited-in-putins-russia.html
The Russian Supreme Court has upheld the prosecution of a journalist for writing the truth about what happened in September of 1939: a Soviet invasion of Poland as enabled by the Hitler-Stalin Pact that divided Poland and other Eastern European areas between the two totalitarian powers.
The prosecution was under a Russian statute that prohibits the publication of falsehoods about the Soviet Union’s role in World War II. The “falsehood” in question — not coincidentally written in Ukrainian, as it happens, and criticizing claims that Ukrainian nationalists were partially to blame for the war — was this: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War. That is, communism and Nazism closely collaborated … ”
That is literally and figuratively a historical fact, undisputed even in Russia (after the fall of the Soviet Union, that is) until fairly recently. The so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact (also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the two foreign ministers who actually signed it) provided for a nonaggression agreement between the two former enemies supplemented by a secret protocol for the division of Poland, along with the cession of the then-independent Baltic States and portions of Rumania and Finland to the USSR. It was concluded just 9 days before the German invasion of Poland, followed 17 days later by the Soviet invasion of Poland, which began the moment a separate nonaggression pact with Germany’s ally Japan secured the USSR’s eastern borders.
The realities of this 1939 diplomatic coup were officially acknowledged by Russia along with the release of secret Soviet archives in 1939. But Soviet-era revisionism eventually returned via statements by Putin in 2014 and 2015 defending Soviet behavior and essentially blaming Poland for its own dismemberment. In the old-new view from Moscow, Stalin was simply defending his people and even the Poles from Nazi aggression, with the Polish regime sharing Hitler’s blame via its hostility to the USSR and the precedent it set by annexing a small Polish-majority area of Czechoslovakia upon that country’s collapse after Munich.