Outrage of the Year: A Statue to Stalin in Virginia?

January 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

Dr. Paul Kengor, FloydReports.com

Of course, it’s customary at year’s end to share our favorite news items from the year past. As someone who teaches and writes about history, I tend to focus on historical things I fear are lost to American education.

So, my enduring “news item” of 2010 falls under the category of historical outrage, though it is redeemed somewhat by another item considerably more positive. I’d like to link them here as a teachable moment.

My outrage of 2010: the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, erected a statue of Joseph Stalin, architect of the Great Purge, Ukrainian famine, gulag, war on religion, and countless millions of deaths.

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Christmas at Katyn

December 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

Dr. Paul Kengor, FloydReports.com

The people of Poland got an early Christmas present this year. It’s bittersweet but long awaited, and indeed a gift of sorts—and from an unlikely source: Russia. In Moscow, the State Duma, Russia’s legislature, passed a statement conceding Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Woods massacre, one of the 20th century’s worst war crimes.

The roots of this atrocity date to September 1939, when the Nazis and Bolsheviks jointly invaded, annihilated, and partitioned Poland. The Soviets seized thousands of Polish military officers as prisoners. Their fate was sealed on March 5, 1940 when Stalin signed their death warrant, condemning 21,857 of them to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” This we now know conclusively through the surviving NVKD document.

The officers were taken to three execution sites, the most infamous of which bears the namesake of the crime: the Katyn Forest, 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. There, these Polish men were slaughtered. The Bolsheviks covered their crime with a layer of dirt.

The apology from the Duma was something Poles waited decades to hear. It was something many of us who have studied and written about this incident have waited to hear. And it is too bad that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not around to hear it.

FDR? Yes, FDR. Let me explain.

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The Left, Duped by North Korea

November 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Dr. Paul Kengor, FloydReports.com

North Korea is not an easy issue. I’ve dealt with it since the early 1990s, beginning at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I had few answers then, and I still have few today.

It also is not a partisan issue. For over 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents alike have suffered the daunting challenges posed by this belligerent dictatorship. Some responded weakly, some hawkishly, with neither party characterized by a single response. The first president to deal with North Korea, Harry Truman, a Democrat, was anything but timid, sending massive U.S. troops into a major war on the Korean peninsula, one that killed tens of thousands of American boys. It was just the start of a 60-year nightmare.

What is interesting, however, has been the long battle within the American left over North Korea. The Left has suffered two threats in particular—call them “internal:” First, there was the deception and manipulation by the communist Left, which, by its nature, refused to acknowledge it was serving the Communist Party line. Second, there was dangerous self-delusion and gullibility among some leading Democrats. As to the first, consider the instructive example of Frank Marshall Davis; on the second, consider Jimmy Carter.

As I’ve written before, Frank Marshall Davis was a mentor to Barack Obama, and an actual member of Communist Party USA. (Click here to view documents.) He did pro-Soviet propaganda work, particularly….

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