The Forgotten
I recently came across an item in the Catholic press describing a Mass of Reparation offered in Britain for the 12,000 Slovenian Catholics handed over by the British to be murdered by Yugoslav Communists in May 1945. This piece caught my eye for personal reasons: The fathers of two very close friends were among the Slovenian refugees who fled Tito's butchers at the end of World War II, and they would have ended up in the same mass graves as the 12,000 did if the grandfather of one of my friends, a medical doctor who spoke English, had not persuaded British officers to let his particular group of refugees stay in Austria, from whence my friends' fathers ultimately found their way here.
Of course, the Slovenians butchered by Tito were but a small drop in the immense ocean of blood shed by the Communists. But despite numbering in the tens of millions, these victims are largely forgotten because they are too often seen as an embarrassment by those who fancy the egalitarian rhetoric mouthed by their murderers and by those who insist that the struggle against the great evil represented by Hitler renders all the suffering caused by our allies in that struggle as somehow irrelevant. These points were brought home when I picked up the August 30 issue of the New Yorker, which contained both a piece by Ian Frazier, describing how Stalin's millions of victims are being forogotten in Russia, and a piece by Adam Gopnik, praising the same Churchill who sent those Slovenians (and many other anti-Communists) to their deaths at the end of World War II for "moral instincts" that Gopnik sees as having been "uncanny." Gopnik praises Churchill's "moral instincts" in part because Churchill distinguished between Stalin and Hitler and indeed was even urging negotiations with his wartime ally Stalin in the 1950s, negotiations that, if successful, could only have legitimated Communist control over Eastern Europe.
It bears noting that the moral evil of Nazism died with Hitler, but the moral evil of Communism lives on nearly two decades after the collapse of the USSR. The great moral dislocation of Russia, seen in the prevalence of abortion, family breakdown, alcoholism, corruption, and early death, is attributable to a system that sought to destroy Christianity and taught generations of Russians to live by lying. Thanks to our general agreement with Churchill's "uncanny" moral instincts regarding the relative evils of Nazism and Communism, the West has became nervous about even mild expressions of nationalism, while those who mouth egalitarian rhetoric generally get the same sort of pass Stalin did while murdering millions. The victims of Communism deserve to be rememberd, as do those who resisted it. But, unfortunately, it is no more fashionable to honor the victims of Communism or anti-Communists today than it was in the days when Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about the Ukrainian famine for the New York Times.
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Thank you, Mr. Piatak for this informative piece. I've long believed Eastern Europeans are the last group to whom it is acceptable to slander,mock,ignore and generally diminish. The evils you describe above happened in the Balkans because Churchill and Roosevelt decided to abandon Mihailovic and side with Tito; the latter's rather extensive Yugoslavian crimes thus got swept under the carpet.
Do we ever hear of the number of Russian POWs who were shipped against their will from British control back to Stalin and certain death after the war ?
How about the fate of Poland, whose out of proportion assistance in both the Battle of Britain and in code-breaking was rewarded with the treachery of Yalta?
Of course, the average Westerner is not at all well-informed about the plight of the Ukrainians who were starved and murdered by Stalin in indescribably large numbers only to suffer again as the Nazis swept into Eastern Europe.
The point about Communism's poisonous effect lingering on in Russia and the other Warsaw Pact/Communist states is so very perceptive. Sadly, Communism's attractiveness to Western liberals operating out of flimsy multicultural assumptions - a la NYT and the New Yorker - has also left a disgusting odor.
Excellent article. Your observation that “...the moral evil of Nazism died with Hitler, but the moral evil of Communism lives on nearly two decades after the collapse of the USSR” is right on the mark.
I’d like to believe that someday society will rid itself once and for all of the rotten by-products of Communism, but it is not clear how or when this will happen. In the meanwhile, it is important that we do not lose sight of the truth.
I'd like to thank my friend Tom Piatak for bringing some more attention to the crimes of the communists which are too often ignored and justified away by the leftists in charge of most every institution today.
Given the ongoing confusion and abuse of facts as regards the formerly communist east and particularly what has passed as rational discussion on the Balkans, I think it appropriate that I remind Mr. Piatak and Mr. Colin to use the appropriate ethnic identifiers in the description of the key players in all this.
It was the Serbian anti-communist General Dragoljub Mihailovich, military leader for the legitimate and recognized royalist Yugoslav government, who was betrayed by Churchill and the Allies when they helped the Croatian communist Josip Broz Tito prevail in the internal struggle for control of Yugoslavia.
This is important because it has been claimed in the past twenty years that it was "Serbian communism" which plagued the Yugoslav peoples. And pointing out readily identifiable facts has been grounds for designating objective observers as Serbian hegemonists and apologists.
That the dictator Tito was not a Serb and that he purged the two Serbian members of the politburo who ever had any sway by the 1960s is particularly important to point out when discussing these and other crimes against the Catholics of northern Yugoslavia whose descendents should rightly be concerned that the facts come to the light of day. This is not to claim that no Serbs were ever involved in any communist crimes but to dispell the notion that this was a Serbian communist endeavor.
The Serb Mihailovich was butchered by Tito just as were those Slovenes. Decades later it was revealed that through the efforts of American military men who respected the general he was clandestinely awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Truman.
"Clandestinely" because no one wanted to upset the sensibilities of our communist allies in Yugoslavia.
Eagle,
Yes, I am well aware of the Allied betrayal of Mihailovich. According to Fitzroy Maclean, when he pointed out to Churchill that the inevitable result of aid to Tito would be a Communist Yugoslavia, Churchill asked Maclean if he was planning on living in Yugoslvia after World War II. Another example of Churchill's "uncanny moral instinct" at work.
Tom, I didn't mean to infer that you were unfamiliar with this bit of the history and I genuinely thank you for reminding readers of one of a multitude of crimes committed by the communists across Europe. I only meant to remind the readership here of these facts.
Because of the slander of the Serbs in these past two decades I now always remind all writers on the topic of communist Yugoslavia to do three things: (a) be sure to identify who was the dictator in charge (Josip Broz Tito), (b) identify his ideological framework (communism), and (c) identify his ethnicity (Croat).
Marshall Tito is greatly admired here in India, and is praised as one of the greatest Cold War era anti-imperialist allies of India in various Indian textbooks.
What astonishes me is that long after those days are over and we can comfortably re-evaluate Indian allies of the past, Gammal Abdul Nasser and Marshall Tito are celebrated as champions of peace by the intelligentsia here, simply because they were socialist. Now, some genuine socialist who may be posting here may object that those two were anything but that. But consistency is not a trait of Indian ideologues, and they will gladly overlook the dirty laundary of a dictator if he matches their views only in rhetoric.
These two dictators will still be called promoters of democracy around these parts, because their etatist control of industry means they were more democratic than a democracy which does not have such control.
When Mr. Piatak says, "The West has became nervous about even mild expressions of nationalism, while those who mouth egalitarian rhetoric generally get the same sort of pass Stalin did while murdering millions", he is quite correct, only it applies to the world now.