The Unspeakâ„¢ Forumâ„¢

Seumas Milne has written in the Guardian this,

"Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war."

( This Rewriting of History is Spreading Europe's Poison , Wednesday 9 september 2009 )

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … oviet-pact

Milne, a lifelong admirer of the former Soviet Union, uses the popularity of revisionist historians in some Eastern European states who 'equate' Hitler and Stalin to conflate them with Western historians who stress the similarities of the USSR and Nazi Germany as regards their totalitarian nature.

To stress the similarities that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is actually very different from 'equating' them or blaming Stalin for the Holocaust.

Milne presumes that the historian Orlando Figes has actually done this when he quotes Figes claiming the Pact was a "Licence for the Holocaust", as if he was somehow giving firepower to far-right nationalists in Eastonia or Moldova to go right ahead and join Hitler when he broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

What Figes had actually written on the BBC World service did no such thing,

"For the Jews of all these lands [those of the Baltic and Eastern Europe invaded by the German and Soviet armies in 1939-41], the pact was the licence for the Holocaust."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8214391.stm

What Figes means here is that, without the Pact, Hitler could not have invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and proceeded to begin the extermination of the Jews in East Central Europe. Milne has misrepresented Figes by quoting him completely out of context.

More than that, which Figes has already pointed out, Milne is trying to have it that anyone who does not accept his historically correct line that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany cannot be compared is somehow, in the old Comintern jargon, 'objectively' pro-Fascist.

As Milne later writes in his defence on the Comment is Free blog,

"I quoted him in the context of current attempts to equate communism and Nazism and claims that the Soviet Union shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact".

Milne has clearly attempted to smear Figes in suggesting he has equated  Nazism with Communism because he is not happy with any historical evidence which clearly points to both Hitler and Stalin's dual aggression in the lands they invaded.

It's true that Hitler targeted Jews alone for extermination as a race whereas Stalin only tried to liquidate entire sections of Polish society in Eastern Poland on the basis of their dual threat as an ethnic and class enemy.

This is quite different from the position of far-right nationalists who still do exist in the Baltic states and Moldova i.e those who try to equate Hitler and Stalin in order rationalise support for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils.

However, Milne makes no distinction between far right nationalist 'revisionists' and Western historians who he himself terms 'revisionists' and 'neoconservatives' for drawing attention to the scale of Soviet Union's crimes e.g Robert Service.

The nationalist kind of 'revisionism' is refers to those who wanted the Treaty of Versailles destroyed or their regional territorial ambitions fulfilled in an alliance against the Western democracies and the USSR.

That tradition still exists today with those in Moldova who think Antonescu was a national hero and martyr or those in the Baltics who describe their own Waffen SS units as 'freedom fighters'

But it has nothing at all to do with historians hostile to both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and their territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe in 1939 ( as opposed to the collaboration in the Baltic states with Hitler after 1941 )

Milne continues attempt to smear Figes by stating,

..it is simply bizarre to justify his Holocaust statement by saying the Germans "began their mass killings of the Jews in the eastern territories they occupied with Stalin's aid".

Figes, of course, does not mean the territories occupied by Hitler after the invasion of 1941 and which had already been gobbled up by Stalin as the direct consequence of the secret protocols attached to the 'non-aggression pact'.
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As Figes quite rightly insists, he means the Jews exterminated between September 1939 and June 1941 in the Western part of Poland which were eastern territories to the Nazi regime

After all, the 'eastern terriroties' of the Reich is where the extermination 'began' and they became the laboratory for the further export of extermination Eastwards when Hitler subsequently invaded the Soviet Union.

Milne still does not get that point, claiming that Figes has said what he simply has not said.

"In the case of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Poland east of the Curzon line (the "lands" referred to in his BBC article), the opposite is of course the case: they were occupied by the Soviet Union as a result of the pact and the Nazis were only able to begin their mass killings of Jews there after the pact was broken by the invasion of the USSR in June 1941".

Milne is falsifying history. The killing of Jews from the western part of Poland easily qualify as 'mass killings' before the invasion of Soviet territory In any case, Milne ignores or simply does not think the 'mass killings' of Poles in German occupied Poland

How many people have to be killed before Milne accepts it as 'mass killing' as opposed to just killing a few hundred thousand shows some indication of his view of the value of human life.

As does his view later in his piece that the pretext for killing off millions people can be euphemised by calling it 'repression' because deporting some 1.4 million Poles to the Gulag ( 400,000 who were Jewish ), many of whom never came back, is not as somehow direct as having camps that intend to exterminate.

."..the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial".

Yes, that's right. Any attempt to draw comparisons between the scale of the killing practiced by both the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union by drawing attention to the concentration camp system in the latter is a latent Holocaust denier.