Summer 2023—The Trump Indictments And Totalitarianism: The Weaponization Of Government And The Heartlessness Of The American Left

Justice Is Not Served When The Political Party In Power Acts Above The Law

Donald Trump continues to be indicted again and again. Of the four indictments thus far, one of them is for his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Hey...remember back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was running for president and was her party's leading candidate for that office? And she was caught with classified documents on her private email server? And then she completely destroyed that classified material with BleachBit? And then James Comey appeared before us all on television and told us that even though foreign adversaries likely got access to classified information because of what Clinton had done, he was inexplicably choosing to not prosecute her?

Anyone else remember that? Because I do.

I just have one question: why does federal law enforcement refrain from prosecuting Hillary Clinton, but insists on indicting Donald Trump?

The answer is simple: Democrats are above the law, and Republicans are legitimate targets for political persecution in our broken system of justice.

The republic is dead, the federal government is now just a weapon in the hands of the Biden regime, and any semblance we have here in the United States of free and fair electoral processes is hanging by just a few threads...and those threads seem about ready to snap and break.

Twin Totalitarianisms Of The Twentieth Century

The Soviet and Nazi dictatorships of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler were directly linked to the tragic and unprecedented waves of mass political murder that engulfed the European continent during the first half of the twentieth century. All three men would’ve never risen to power had it not been for the incredible social and political disruptions that hit Europe as part of that continent’s descent into World War I. This summer, I finished reading a brilliant book by Robert Gellately, a professor of history at Florida State University, that explored how the rise of—and especially the rivalry between—the Soviet and Nazi dictatorships directly resulted in more death and destruction sweeping over the globe during the years 1917-1953 than in any other phase of modern history, indeed of most of human history in general. The ideological drive by the communists and by the Nazis to politically and militarily dominate the globe was set in motion by this “age of social catastrophe” in which competing totalitarian visions of social utopia gave way to the worst dystopian nightmares imagined by the minds of men.

The book is entitled Lenin, Stalin, And Hitler: The Age Of Social Catastrophe, and its main arguments formulated around a contextual basis linked to the First World War. World War I was the most destructive conflict in human history up until 1918, and the conflict militarized, collectivized, bureaucratized, and brutalized Europe in ways that lasted far beyond the end of the war. The communist revolution in Russia allowed Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks to terrorize their country with a missionary zeal they would later seek to apply on the international front. Revolutions swept aside the monarchies of central Europe, often with the help of the communists in the Soviet Union. In western Europe, left-wing attempts to seize control of the government led to the rise of right-wing paramilitary groups and new radical nationalist movements. The later wars between communists and fascists in places like Germany and Italy would add to the perception that the “break” in the fighting between World War I and World War II was nothing more than a bitter illusion. When World War II finally did break out in earnest, the old rules of warfare were completely abandoned by communist and Nazi armies hellbent on ethnic genocide, total wars of annihilation, and political and racial hatreds that had been simmering for over a generation. Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews was just the most prominent manifestation of targeted racial violence during these years of bloodletting, and even after V-E Day in 1945, the ethnic cleansings and brutal civil wars that had come to characterize this phase of European history did not completely dissipate until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.

This book by Robert Gellately contributed to the scholarship about Soviet communism and German national socialism in an important new way. Most books comparing Nazism and communism feature Adolf Hitler as the central character of the story, and then proceed to compare Nazism with Stalinism. These books often leave Lenin out completely. This is because the common narrative about Russian communism is that of the “good Lenin” who fought for universal liberation and social justice and whose legacy was ruined merely by the corrupting influence of the “bad Stalin.” Gellately, with this book, argued instead that Vladimir Lenin was a mass-murdering, coldly calculating, and democracy-hating radical who believed in a dictatorship of the avant-garde professional revolutionaries of the Bolshevik party. This is what came to be known as Leninism, and it was every bit as evil and destructive as Stalinism or Nazism ever were. It was Lenin who originally and enthusiastically dreamed up a secret police state just weeks after overthrowing the Russian government, who adopted a massive concentration camp system for the incarceration of political enemies. It was Lenin who made political intolerance and top-down dictatorship founding hallmarks of Soviet-style government, and it was Lenin who delighted in the mass use of terror, violence, and killing to get what he wanted out of the working class. Joseph Stalin expanded upon the bloody foundations first laid by Lenin, and Stalin was an all-powerful and bloodthirsty dictator long before Adolf Hitler ever became chancellor of Germany. This book seeks to tell the whole tale of communist and Nazi totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Just as the Russian communists envisioned a world “beyond history” in which class became the distinguishing ideological battleground, Adolf Hitler envisioned a world consumed by inevitable racial conflict. Hitler came to his own political maturation by blaming the World War I defeat of the thing he loved and romanticized the most (his idea of Greater Germany) on the Jews. To Hitler, the Jews represented the pinnacle of racial villainy: they were the ultimate internationalists, the supreme historical example of a people without a homeland, a people who survived and thrived upon the societies and cultures of others by acting out the part of a parasite. For Adolf Hitler, Germany could only ever be great by embracing biological purity and a racially-derived nationalist dictatorship that put the good of the racial state ahead of all other considerations. The Jews, in this formula, were the supreme enemy of Greater Germany’s rise to cultural and political dominance because, at heart, the Jews could never truly be part of any one nation. The Jews were irredeemable internationalists who gave their loyalty to capitalism, to democracy, to liberalism, and to communism. Indeed, Gellately argued that it was Adolf Hitler’s hatred and fear of the Jews that drove him into his regime’s titanic rivalry with Russian communism, because for Hitler, international Jewry was at its most threatening and dangerous in its alleged guise of international communism. For Hitler, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a racial struggle for world domination between the higher Aryan races of Greater Germany and the inferior races of the Jews, the Slavs, the internationalists, and all those elements of the planet’s population who could never and would never fit into Hitler’s racial New Order. It was the clash between Nazism and communism that was, according to Gellately, the defining characteristic of prominence for the European theater of World War II. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany became juggernauts of rival visions of social utopia. One was based on international class warfare, and one was based on national race warfare. The struggling liberal democracies of western Europe were no match for either of the totalitarian states, and it was only because of the United States entering the war on the side of the Soviets at the end of 1941 that Europe was ultimately saved, and then at the cost of a subsequent and terrifyingly long-lasting global Cold War throughout the rest of the century.

This book provided a social-historical comparison of communism and Nazism. The author felt that it was important to note the differences and similarities between the two regimes. In 1914, Russia was one of the most repressive, backwards, uncultured, violent, and unruly societies on Earth. Once they took over the government, Lenin and Stalin had no regard for the common people; indeed, they both rejected the legitimacy of popularity and instead believed themselves to be the elite leaders of the vanguard class of revolutionary zealots who were completely above the masses. Lenin and Stalin were also universal in their sought-after worldwide communist vision of global dominance. Germany, on the other hand, began the twentieth century as a far more liberal, forward-thinking, cultured, and well-ordered society. After he was elected to power in the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler maintained his dictatorship in the same way he came to power: through mass popularity and consensus, often backing off when the German people resisted his more aggressive changes to their society. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Hitler was exclusivist and particularistic, seeing world domination as a way of allowing the superior Germans to exploit, enslave, and rule over the lesser peoples of the Earth.

There were other differences between the Russian communists and the Nazis. For example, Lenin and Stalin were thoroughly cold-blooded when it came to purging their own ranks, to murdering their own people. But Hitler, for all his horrible treatment of those he considered to be outsiders, oftentimes chose to show deference to underlings, critics, and potential opponents who may have had power and popularity bases of their own. And yet, despite these pronounced differences, the communist and Nazi regimes had something very important in common: both managed to attract hundreds of thousands of young, well-educated, and truly committed idealists as followers. It is not sufficient to excuse these believers in totalitarianism as opportunists who simply tried to extract personal material benefits from believing in either communism or Nazism in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. The ultimate economic ruination suffered in Russia and eventually throughout Nazi-occupied Europe does not make sense with this merely materialistic narrative. Soviet political prisoners survived years of suffering in the gulags and eventually reentered society still firmly believing in the universal “brotherhood of man” that the dream of socialist utopia offered. The Nazis were obsessively exterminating working-age Jews well past 1943, when wartime labor shortages were at their most extreme. The sad truth stands out with clarity: communism and Nazism filled a dark spiritual need for many of Europe’s young and desperate idealists at the start of the twentieth century, and materialistic explanations for the communist and Nazi wars of aggression and extermination against their enemies simply do not tell the full story.

Russia entered World War I woefully unprepared for a long, devastating, and protracted conflict, and when the czarist government was toppled in February and March of 1917, the limited violence that took place in Petrograd at the time gave nobody in the outside world much of a clue as to how much worse things would get for the country and, subsequently, the world, during the ensuing age of social catastrophe.

After the communist revolution and the fall of Russia’s czarist regime, Vladimir Lenin and his Red communists plunged the country into a new dark age of civil war, starvation, deprivation, and destruction that ultimately ended in the Orwellian single-party dictatorship that eventually came to be known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In this book, Robert Gellately went to great lengths to explain that the ideological foundations and visions of the Soviet Union were always based entirely in Lenin’s evil totalitarian beliefs, that Soviet history should not be viewed through the lens of “the good but perhaps flawed Lenin” having his legacy wrecked by the “bad Stalin.” The reality of the matter is that Lenin and Stalin were close partners in terms of their personal ideologies and shared totalitarian vision for their country’s future. The secret police, the continual terror, the elimination of democracy and private property, the vast and cruel prison and concentration camp networks: all of these things were features of the Soviet system from the very start, not flaws later introduced by Stalin. In sizing up the immense evil represented by the Soviet Union as a historical phenomenon, Vladimir Lenin deserves no pass from the moral judgement of history.

It is important to note, however, that no matter how close Lenin and Stalin were to each other, both of these evil men had severe disagreements from time to time, and Lenin was famously critical of all his underlings, including Stalin. In his last months of life, Lenin wrote in private about how he had serious doubts about Stalin and the split in the Communist Party that Stalin’s differences of opinion with fellow Party leader, Leon Trotsky, seemed to portend. Lenin also harshly criticized Stalin for being too rude, too self-aggrandizing, and too unwilling to act in conciliatory ways towards other members of the Party. Lenin even wrote about the desirability of finding someone else to be the Party general secretary after his impending death. In the end, Lenin’s last testament would serve as a confusing endnote to his complicated relationship with Stalin. Trotsky and other political opponents of Stalin would later try to make hay with Lenin’s final words about the Soviet Union’s second dictator, but to no avail. Vyacheslav Molotov, the most famous Soviet diplomat of World War II, would famously say that between Lenin and Stalin, he always considered Lenin to have been the more brutal and unfeeling dictator, and that Lenin had often criticized Stalin for being too soft! Ultimately, Robert Gellately felt that no matter their differences or criticisms of one another, Lenin and Stalin were kindred spirits and of one heart and mind in terms of their monstrous intentions for the world they sought to rule over.

Monsters come in more than one form, and that became plain with Gellately’s descriptions of Nazi terror when compared with the Soviet varieties. According to the author, “coercion and violence [in Nazi Germany] were limited and predictable and thus different from the arbitrary and sweeping terror of the Soviet Union. Hitler set out to combine popularity and power and aimed terror at specific groups of ‘outsiders.’” For the most part, this kind of limited and targeted state-sponsored violence seems to have been relatively popular or at least acceptable to the general population in Nazi Germany. During the first two years of the Nazi regime, tens of thousands of communists and criminals were detained in impromptu torture cellars or sent to concentration camps. Fatalities only seemed to range in the hundreds. Many initial prisoners of the concentration camps were later released (albeit after suffering from horrible forms of mistreatment and torture), and by the end of 1934, almost all of the initial concentration camps had been shut down as Hitler felt more established in his dictatorship. The author even claimed that Hitler once seriously considered ending the use of concentration camps for good, even of entirely disbanding the Gestapo. In these early years, Nazi terror was mixed with popular accommodation. The Nazis were always careful to gauge the people’s enthusiasm for national socialism, and as long as only the most far-left radicals were the ones being targeted, even some German socialists, it seems, were enthusiastic about Hitler’s violent and aggressive anti-Marxism.

Sources seem to suggest that if the Nazis had held more elections after March of 1933, they would’ve attained a true majority in an otherwise democratic government, such was the seeming popularity of their cause. In reality, millions would eventually join the Party, and they would do it in such droves that occasionally, the Party would have to put a temporary halt to new membership requests. In the early years of Hitler’s rule, Germans generally seemed to be eager to give the Nazis a chance even if they were not fully necessarily fully invested in Nazi beliefs. After the horrors of losing World War I, seeing their country fall into near anarchy and civil war, and suffering from the Great Depression, millions of ordinary Germans were desirous to be a part of a truly united national movement that promised a bright future for Germany. Women in particular seemed eager to join the many new Nazi auxiliary organizations that started popping up for different segments of the society. Today, more and more historians are beginning to genuinely accept that the Nazis achieved a true “consensus state” very early on in the 1930s, that Nazi totalitarianism wasn’t as unwelcome an initial imposition on the general populace as was once assumed.

Hitler’s record as a politician who kept his promises in the years 1933-1938 is relatively undeniable. In reincorporating and reoccupying the Saar, in breaking the Versailles Treaty stipulations against German rearmament, in setting out to build up a German army of thirty-six divisions, in supporting the Falangists in the Spanish Civil War, in the Anschluss with Austria, in the annexation of the Sudetenland, and in the conquest of Czechoslovakia, Hitler proved over and over again that he would keep his promises to make Germany great again. He succeeded time and time again in making Germany’s enemies look like fools, and with his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, there came an open rhetoric of mockery of a Soviet system that couldn’t even feed its own population despite the vast natural resources at its command. Through all of these maneuvers and bloodless conquests, Hitler’s domestic popularity grew and grew. Germans started paying him the highest possible compliment: that he was fulfilling Bismarck’s great work. German nationalism, which had taken hit after hit between 1918 and 1933, experienced a renaissance.

In the early years, most Nazi violence against Jews was not ordered by Berlin, but was of local initiative. Later, with the national implementation of the Nuremberg laws, the country itself seemed set on a path forward of national exclusion of the Jewish race. But it is important to note that Hitler waited to establish the Nuremberg laws after having first allowed for a few years of popular “individual actions” against Jews by the German people. The Nazis only took a brief pause in their violent persecutions of the Jews for the Olympics in 1936. By 1937, Hitler had returned fully to his old rhetorical strategy of viciously trading in public against the linked enemy forces of Bolshevism and Semitism. He made more and more speeches denouncing the Soviet Union, and how worldwide communism was simply a front for an international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. He also openly disparaged the United States of America as a country wrought with social problems and disorders because of its mixed and impure racial identity. Hitler also started to openly brag that the Jews had been completely removed from German culture, and only existed within Germany’s borders as a hated minority that most Nazis wanted to see emigrate to other lands. Once Germany had incorporated Austria into the Reich, the new national efforts against the Jews revolved around deporting them to other countries. This of course became difficult for Jews who also faced intensified state-sponsored violence and plunder of their personal wealth. This tragedy repeated itself every time the Germans annexed any new set of territories that included large numbers of Jews.

The Night of the Broken Glass (also known as Kristallnacht) in November of 1938 was the first large-scale pogrom against Jews throughout all of Germany in centuries. Tens of thousands of Jews were arrested, hundreds were killed, hundreds more committed suicide, thousands spent time in a freshly-built network of concentration camps, and a mighty destruction of Jewish property and wealth all over the Reich took place. The Night of Broken Glass was orchestrated and carried out by the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party. Interestingly, the Nazis studied intently the public’s reaction to the pogrom. Notably, the Night of Broken Glass was the first ever instance in Nazi Germany of there being signs of mass disapproval of what the government had condoned and encouraged. There was a strong undercurrent throughout Germany that the pogrom had gone too far. Germans seemed to have no problem with theoretical and even institutional anti-Semitism, but that was a far cry from the immorality and chaos of homes and businesses being burned to the ground. Hundreds of synagogues and thousands of businesses had been torched because of Kristallnacht, and it seems the German people were not quite ready to approve of such harsh measures. Accordingly, the Nazis took note and proceeded more carefully, and the author pointed out that this was one of the most remarkable differences between Nazism and communism.

After Kristallnacht, Hitler gave a speech in 1939 in which he infamously prophesied that if international Jewry and international Marxism conspired together to bring the world once more into open planet-wide conflict, the fate of the Jewish race in Europe would be sealed: the Jewish race in Europe would be destroyed. In actuality, no one wanted war more than Hitler did. Indeed, he felt deprived of it in 1938 with the Munich conference, and he was bound and determined to have his final showdown between his precious Third Reich and the twin enemies of Jews and Marxist communists that he believed posed the greatest threats to the “productive” nations of the world. From the start, Hitler and the other Nazi leaders did everything they could to help the German armies understand that Operation Barbarossa (the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union) would be unlike any other military operation conducted thus far…except, perhaps, for what had happened to Poland in 1939. Hitler stressed that it was not a traditional military conflict between powers, but a struggle between two races, between two ideologies that were sworn enemies. The Soviet Union was not to just be invaded and conquered, but its very essence should be permanently eliminated. The Russian people were to be starved to death, and plans were made for nearly thirty million Soviet city-dwellers to be deprived of foodstuffs so as to make room for German settlement of the region. Northern Russia would be ceded to Finland, and the Caucasus would be given to Turkey after it had been totally exploited and stripped bare of all its many resources. Ukraine would become Germany’s new breadbasket, and socialist rump states would be constructed all over the region to permanently replace what had once been the USSR. The intelligentsia of both the old communist regime and the old imperial regime would all be exterminated, and massive numbers of Slavs all over the conquered lands would be used as slave labor or else permanently deported to Siberia. Operation Barbarossa would be a war of extermination, and not just mere conquest. Moral scruples would have to be abandoned, and Hitler made it clear that as the German army moved eastward in its conquests, the SS and other “security” forces would be given free rein to do whatever they liked in the rear areas behind the front. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and other Nazi architects of what would be known as the Holocaust drew up extensive plans of their own for the mass killing and starving that would be inflicted upon the conquered peoples, and some Nazi experts even went so far as to calculate just how many trainloads would be required for all the forced resettlements and deportations that would take place as the Nazis built their so-called “Garden of Eden” in the east.

Generally speaking, the author found very little evidence in his research that the German army officers felt any real disagreement with Hitler’s plans for Barbarossa. Most German generals seemed to approve of what Hitler had in store for the lands and peoples of the Soviet Union, and most seemed enthusiastic about using the invasion as a stepping stone to making Germany a great power again. Orders were given and literature published encouraging German soldiers to think of the enemy peoples as inherently irredeemable and hopelessly anti-German, even inhuman. Rules of warfare and international conventions concerning the conduct of troops in war were to be expressly ignored. Punishments for abuses, deprivations, and massacres against enemy populations were to be generally suspended unless the discipline of the troops was ever endangered. Mention was made that the war against the Soviet Union should and would have more in common with the ancient practices of warfare’s cruelty, and that such cruelty should be proactively embraced and encouraged.

Shortly after Operation Barbarossa commenced with extraordinary slaughter and destruction wreaked upon the Soviet military, Stalin, in a panic, immediately contacted the head of the Communist International and ordered a reversal of that organization’s isolationist and pacifist policy towards Nazi Germany: now that the Nazis had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, communists all over the world were directed to mobilize and advocate for a military and diplomatic defense of the Soviet Union. Stalin also found the time and energy to arrest and execute a few of his own generals for allegedly failing to adequately defend the Soviet Union…which is ironic in a sick sense because nobody was more responsible for the Soviet Union’s unpreparedness for Barbarossa than Stalin himself. Then, for almost a full week after Operation Barbarossa began, Stalin snuck away to his country dacha and remained quietly in isolation. We know now that he suffered a nervous breakdown during this time. He became utterly paralyzed with depression, convincing himself that his own ineptitude in dealing with Hitler had resulted in the complete wrecking of his and Lenin’s dream. During this time, Stalin’s underlings grew nervous, both because the Nazis were smashing through their territory, encircling entire army groups and taking them prisoner, and seizing important Soviet cities like Minsk and Smolensk. Finally, Lavrentiy Beria, the Bolshevik secret police chief, decided to drive out to Stalin’s dacha along with a few other important officials. When they arrived at the dacha, Stalin was found ruminating alone in one of his chambers. It is likely that during his weeklong absence, Stalin had been mentally and emotionally preparing for the worst. Those who did spend time near him during this week later recalled that he often could be heard blaming himself for failing to protect Lenin’s dream, that “all was lost” and that the Soviet Union’s destruction would be blamed on him. There is a good chance that Stalin was expecting Beria and the others to arrive demanding his arrest or resignation, but remarkably, they were too cowed for that. Instead, Beria and the others proceeded to coax Stalin out of his inactive depression, convincing him that a new military leadership committee needed to be formed, and that they needed him to serve as chairman. In a sense, they were calling the dictator out of his depressive episode and begging him to lead the country’s resistance against what was most certainly the worst crisis in the entire history of Soviet communism up to that point.

The situation was more desperate than many might’ve initially realized. During the first eighteen months of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans managed to capture about sixty-five percent of Soviet military personnel as prisoners of war. Russia’s mechanized corps were rendered ninety percent inoperable. The air force was wiped out within a matter of weeks, if not days. However, Stalin was eventually able to rally his people by narrating the conflict as a great ideological battle between communism and fascism. It also helped that the Soviets had some special weapons systems up their sleeves: for instance, the T-34 and KV-1 tanks were, in many ways, superior to anything fielded by the Germans. In a speech to the country broadcast over the radio waves, Stalin spoke to his people using familiar language that caught many off guard, hinting at just how desperate the crisis was for the Soviet Union. He called upon the people as “comrades” and as “brothers and sisters” and even “friends.” He reassured them that entering into the 1939 nonaggression pact with Germany had been the right thing to do (he offered no apologies whatsoever for his own foolishness), but that now was the time to put forth every effort, withstand every depredation, and make any sacrifice necessary to achieve ultimate victory over the fascist scoundrels who had betrayed Mother Russia.

Incredibly, Stalin ordered twenty million Soviet citizens to relocate east of the Ural mountains. He also ordered the dismantling and relocation of over one thousand factories to the east of the Urals as well. In the second half of 1941, the Soviets were thereby able to increase their production of weapons, tanks, and airplanes. As the Soviets continued to retreat before the invading Nazis, they were instructed by Stalin to employ thorough scorched-earth strategies, just as the Russians had once used against Napoleon. Slowly at first, but then steadily, the Soviets were able to conscript millions more men (and women) into the armed forces or into the industry of military production.

The initial Nazi victories in Russia were primarily due to initiative and surprise, better tactics and training, but not necessarily to better technology. In fact, most would agree that initial Soviet unpreparedness and disorganization had been mostly to blame. However, throughout 1941, 1942, and 1943, Stalin and his generals would slowly and painfully learn the hard lessons about what it took to produce and maintain an effective fighting military. Whereas the Soviet military on the eve of Barbarossa had been an immense and cumbersome shell of a fighting force, that same military would only increase in quality and immensity just as long as the Soviets could keep it alive and fighting throughout Russia’s geographic vastness, and alive and fighting is precisely what Stalin would remain after his initial weeklong post-invasion stupor.

By 1943, the tables had turned against Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. It took until 1945 for Germany’s ultimate defeat to come about. In the last months of the war, Nazi terror was finally turned directly against the German people like it never had been before. The Gestapo, SS, and police forces started rounding up and shooting or hanging any and all who dared speak out about defeat or surrender; anyone who was even suspected of undermining Germany’s will or ability to resist until the bitter end was dragged in front of special tribunals and sentenced to death. Hitler became obsessed at the very end with destroying everything that would be of value to the enemy after the war’s end. In a sick sense, Hitler believed that if Germany was not strong enough and therefore worthy enough for victory, it was Germany’s destiny to be completely destroyed in an absolutely apocalyptic defeat. For example, as his troops evacuated from France, he ordered all of the country’s factories to be blown up. When his troops pulled out of the Netherlands, he ordered the country’s dikes to be similarly destroyed. At one point, when Hitler ordered all of Germany’s own infrastructure to be destroyed, the Nazi chief of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, had to resist him and insist that the German people would need that infrastructure to sustain themselves after the war ended. Hitler didn’t care, insisting until the end that the inferior must perish while the strong prevailed. Hitler was determined that if Germany went down in flames, it should and would take down its own population and as many of its enemies as possible along with it.

In his final political testaments, dictated to his secretaries in the bunker under Berlin’s streets, Hitler once again repeated his prophecy from 1939 that the Jewish race would be exterminated for its crimes against Germany, and he urged future generations of Germans to do whatever it took to maintain the purity of their blood and to maintain an everlasting hatred of the international Jewish conspiracy that threatened to engulf Europe with the whore of Bolshevism and the “pimps” of the Western democracies. Although begged by some to leave Berlin, Hitler committed suicide instead, choosing in the end to die in Berlin, the capital of the Reich he himself had brought to ruin.

After the war was over, Stalin did everything he could to revert the political and cultural situation in the Soviet Union back to the days of the Great Purge in the 1930s. He banned all veterans organizations and rallies, canceled Victory Day commemorations, and demoted and/or banished to obscure postings many of the Soviet war heroes, including Georgy Zhukov himself, incredibly. Women who had served in the military were not allowed to participate in parades or to receive honors, prisoners who had spent time in Germany were kept under suspicion and derision for the rest of their lives (many were even shot or imprisoned in the gulags when they were returned to the Soviet Union), and soldiers who had been part of the invasion of Germany and other central European countries were subjected to special attention from the intelligence services for having “seen too much” of the West’s wealth. After the war, the gulag system expanded and the population of prisoners would essentially continue to increase right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. In places like Greece and Ukraine, bitter civil wars erupted between communists and non-communists; in the end, only Greece would remain free from communism, and within the communist bloc, only Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia would manage to remain outside the Soviet orbit. Communist puppet regimes were set up throughout central and eastern Europe, Soviet “cleansing” operations continued unabated throughout the conquered areas, ethnic genocides and forced relocations were enacted against Germans throughout the Soviet-occupied territories, and Stalin reinstituted the personality cult he had enjoyed before the war…only this time, he was portrayed as a deity. He was the supreme conqueror in the greatest war mankind had ever fought. He was the dictatorial ruler over a full one-sixth of Earth’s surface area. Unlike Benito Mussolini, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, or Japan’s Hideki Tojo, World War II had not resulted in his death. Unlike Churchill, World War II had not ended with him falling from power. Sadly, Stalin could sincerely boast that he had personally fared the best out of all the world leaders, and he could sincerely boast that destiny itself seemed to be smiling on the Soviet system. Despite the fact that his country lay in ruins and that his population was still in the throes of mass starvation, the end of World War II had created a new geopolitical situation in which Stalin was able to convince himself that the government and society crafted by the Bolsheviks was indeed superior to all others. Stalin did not view this from a moral standpoint, unless you count morality as synonymous with martial strength and the conqueror’s triumph. In the most Darwinist of senses, Stalin at the end of World War II believed he had come out on top…and more than that, he believed that World War II was simply a stepping stone towards future triumphs and conquests. There is strong evidence that suggests that Stalin was satisfied with conquering half of Europe at the end of the 1940s only because the time was soon approaching when the Soviets would be at war again, this time with the West. Stalin had every intention of taking all of Europe, and eventually the world, whenever he felt the time was ripe. For the rest of the world, victory in the Second World War represented a chance at lasting peace. For Joseph Stalin, it was just another stepping stone in the bloody path to world domination.

In the years leading up to Stalin’s death, Stalin adopted a far more nationalistic attitude as part of his crafted narrative of having personally (and seemingly single-handedly) led the Russian people and nation to victory in the war. As part of this, Stalin became a genuine anti-Semite at the end of his life. Jews had always been welcomed in the Bolshevik party, but during the war, Nazi propaganda had consistently linked Jews with communism. In rejection of this propaganda, the Soviets turned more and more openly anti-Semitic. In addition, Jews continued to be persecuted and even killed in different locales throughout eastern Europe even after the war’s end. Many non-Germans had materially benefited from the Holocaust during the war, and with the war’s end, they were not necessarily ready to return confiscated property to its former Jewish owners. Ultimately, the Jews would be treated as unwelcome foreigners in most of the Soviet lands, especially after the events of the fake “Jewish doctors’ plot” got going in the early 1950s. There is strong evidence that in the weeks before his death, Stalin was planning a major action against Soviet Jews. He had broken off all diplomatic relations with Israel, had warned about mass deportations, and had ordered the construction of at least four new concentration camps in the east. It is very possible that another mass genocide or pogrom against the Jews had been in the making. Stalin’s death may have been the only event that prevented such a thing from being realized.

At the book’s conclusion, the author explained that “the age of social catastrophe contained forces of such destructive power that even Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, could not bring the era to a close. The shock waves and eruptions, almost like gigantic earthquakes, could be felt as far away as South and Central America and eventually all over Asia, particularly in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Centuries of Asian civilization were threatened or rooted out, and new communist regimes were formed at the cost of immeasurable suffering. As in many parts of eastern Europe, the scars left on the land and on the people can be seen to this day.” By the end of World War II, the death toll inflicted upon both the Soviet Union and Germany meant that the conflict had ultimately wiped out nearly ten percent of both countries’ total populations. The age of social catastrophe unleashed in 1917 did not come to a close until Stalin’s death in 1953, but it definitely reached its crescendo during the World War II years. Robert Gellately wrote this book in an effort to catalogue the horrors inflicted by the Soviet and Nazi regimes, and he did it in a way that was meant to tell an important truth: that Hitler and Stalin should be joined by Vladimir Lenin as the three most abominable and bloodthirsty tyrants of the twentieth century’s first half. Even though there are people all over the world today who defend the more “positive” aspects of Lenin’s life and career, Gellately insists that Lenin was the creator and crafter of the Soviet regime’s horrific totalitarian system of government, a system of government that Stalin inherited and intensified but did not create out of whole cloth. Together, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler unleashed an age of social catastrophe upon Europe (and ultimately the world) that would consign many millions of innocent people to the most brutal of deaths imaginable, and inflict unfathomable amounts of misery, destruction, and destitution upon the lives of millions more. With Lenin and Stalin, we see a Soviet system imposed by the revolutionary vanguard of “experts” from above, a Marxist Bolshevik “paradise” brought to Russia and the rest of the world by force, violence, and terror targeted at those who opposed the Party as well as those who simply deserved to be sacrificed out of the necessity of terror for terror’s sake…and all of it done in the name of and on behalf of “the people” or the proletariat. With Hitler, we see a Nazi system of consensus dictatorship, an openly authoritarian system in which only Germans (and eventually, maybe a few Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch) were allowed and encouraged to buy into. With the Nazis, violence and terror were never meant to be the ends in and of themselves, but were instead the tools with which the Nazis would wrest control of Germany’s destiny away from its racial enemies and carve out an Aryan empire safe and secure for the higher race to dominate the globe from…and all of it would be done with the German people’s consent and approval. In the Soviet story, we find a regime that habitually lied to its own population, routinely mass murdered its own citizenry, betrayed its people by opening itself up to attack and invasion, and covered up its own sins by wiping out broad swath after broad swath of not just innocent people, but of truth itself. In the Nazi story, we find a regime that forged a devil’s bargain with the German people, a government wedded to a racial ideology and a utopian vision of the future that literally ended up costing Germany’s national integrity and even its very soul. Together, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany left scars upon our world that have not fully healed, even to this day. The dreams, visions, works, and wars of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler tell us a horror story that must never be repeated in humanity’s future. Men with such crazed and immoral ideologies must never again be given so much of unrestrained martial power and political influence that entire populations of humanity can be starved or disappeared or imprisoned or exterminated out of existence solely upon the whims of the supreme leader.

I know more than your average Joe about the Soviet and Nazi regimes, so I think it’s saying a lot for me to admit that I gave a 5 out of 5 stars on my personal rating system to this book specifically because it managed to teach me some new and thought-provoking insights about two subjects I already knew well before reading it. I had never really thought about or considered Nazi Germany as a “consensus dictatorship” before, or thought of Adolf Hitler as a leader who was actually deeply concerned about his own popularity and careful to not take his people anywhere ideologically they themselves were not prepared to go on their own volition. I had also never really known just how despicably guilty Joseph Stalin was in being personally responsible for the Soviet Union’s unpreparedness for the German invasion in 1941; Stalin indeed bears most of the responsibility for the millions of deaths and untold levels of destruction wrought upon the Soviet peoples due to his incompetence and outright negligence in failing to prepare for the defense of his people. This book also introduced me to the massive scope and scale of the many ethnic “cleansings” that were committed by the Soviets during and after World War II.

If you’ve been looking for an excellent history of Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, or Soviet communism as it was defined and enforced by Lenin and Stalin, then Robert Gellately’s Lenin, Stalin, And Hitler: The Age Of Social Catastrophe comes highly recommended from yours truly.

Joe Biden: A Corrupt And Heartless Political Huckster

A few days ago, I was shown the footage of Joe Biden speaking to the people of Hawaii about the Maui fires.

Word on the street is that there could easily be more than one thousand people dead or missing because of this tragedy.

And what does Joe Biden say to the people of Hawaii?

He tells them that even though he "doesn't want to compare difficulties," he knows how they feel. After all, he once experienced a small house fire that ALMOST deprived him of his wife, his '67 corvette, and his cat. And he ends the story with his trademark transition phrase: "...but all kidding aside..."

Hey Joe! What were you kidding about? Were you kidding about the housefire that almost took your precious '67 corvette? Or were you kidding about something else? Was there someone in your immediate vicinity who was kidding around about something else just before you began your remarks? Something that we in the TV audience didn't know about? Or was this just a slip of the tongue, a nervous habit that you engage in during speech after speech in which you make a complete fool of yourself and embarrass the rest of us that you are the pathetic excuse for a leader we've apparently chosen for ourselves?

Or am I being too harsh? Am I looking too eagerly to be critical of the leader of the political party that I have worked to oppose in every possible way for most of my life? Were you actually trying to be genuinely empathetic, Joe? Were you actually serious when you told the people of Hawaii that you know how they feel?

Because either way, Joe, your words were beyond inappropriate in this instance! When you comfort others who have suffered great loss, you don't make jokes and you don't compare what they are going through to something you experienced that doesn't even represent the tiniest fraction of the suffering they are going through! When you are speaking to a group of people who have lost a number of loved ones on a magnitude that is a full one-third of the number of Americans we lost in the 9-11 terror attacks, the last thing you should ever think about doing, Joe, is comparing the tragedy to a time when you ALMOST lost something.

"But all kidding aside..." I'm just posting about this because I feel it's my duty as an American to help my fellow citizens and voters to know this man who seeks reelection in 2024. When I asked my friends and family who voted for Biden in 2020 to explain to me why they preferred him over Trump, the number one answer I got had something to do with Joe Biden bringing "class and decency" back into the White House, that he had a "more presidential style" than Trump did, that he was a "better example for our children," and that Joe Biden was just a "nicer" person.

No offense, but that reasoning doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In Joe Biden's case, it never did, but if you didn't pay attention to Joe Biden's career before he became president, I beg you to pay attention now.

I certainly hope the people of Hawaii are paying attention.

--Christopher Peterson, August 31st, 2023