Stalin Quotes
Truman had been briefed on the number of Japanese who committed suicide rather than surrender—including civilians—in Saipan, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and other locations where United States troops had invaded. He and his experts agreed that the Japanese would not surrender unless there was a new dramatic factor that was outside the usual thinking—the atomic bomb. He was proved right about the warning. Not only did the Japanese ignore it, but they did not even surrender after the nuclear devastation at Hiroshima. It took a second bomb dropped on Nagasaki to motivate the surrender. So even a demonstration with all those Japanese casualties did not cause the surrender until it was repeated.
During the Cold War, Yugoslavia was a part of the Eastern Communist Bloc, but was very independent. They had a very experienced military and were the one country of the Eastern Bloc who the Russians could not easily militarily dominate. Tito was a great and feared military leader having killed More Germans per soldier with his army than any of the Allies in WWII. He was also very independent of Moscow and would not follow Russia directives. The Russians decided on assassinating Tito but the attempts failed.
Stalin’s purges and suppression of potential rivals killed off mostly other communists exceeding the number of communists killed by brutal, murderous, anti-communist forces over the world.
Even when Russia was coming to grips with Stalin’s crimes against humanity, Hoxna was still an apologist for the Soviet Dictator, whose “mistakes” cost millions of lives.
Seeger’s admission was typical of tens of thousands of Americans who had become disillusioned with the fairness, equity, and effectiveness of capitalism during the depression. They were easy prey for Communist propaganda which pointed out all the problems in American society from legal racial discrimination to lack of a social safety net while at the same time lying about the Russian achievements and hiding the horrible abuses of human rights—especially the political murders of millions of people. Then the truth about Russia emerged, Seeger and so many others abandoned the Communist Party as at the same time America was improving its society and beginning to try and deal with the great problem that had plagued America from its inception—racism and slavery.
So many Afghans thought very differently and resisted Amin’s Government and the Russians, that the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan.
Seeger had joined the Young Communist League as a young boy, and was a supporter of Joseph Stalin until all the information about Stalin was made public by Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Seeger, along with other Stalin apologists throughout the world realized that the criticisms of Russian Communism under Stalin were not just right wing propaganda.
