Axis of evil: The Soviet-Nazi pact

Totalitarianism and anti-Semitism are on the march at home and abroad.

By Lloyd Billingsley, Frontpage Magazine

“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

That was Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother, in Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. British author Paul Johnson didn’t grow up in Nazi Germany, but his landmark Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, takes up the “virtually indistinguishable” theme in considerable detail.

By the dawn of the 1930s, “Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror.” The decision to collectivize by force, “was taken suddenly, without any kind of public debate” and Stalin set out to “smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” This was “the green light for a policy of extermination, more than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the ordering of the ‘Final Solution.’”

The Thirties was “the age of the heroic lie,” Johnson writes, and “the competition to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a moral rival in Hitler’s Germany.” Stalin’s agents “were always quick to learn anything the Gestapo and SS had to teach. But the instruction was mutual.”

The Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939 was the “culmination of a series of contacts between Soviet and German governments.” For two decades “this evil stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke to the surface.” During the Pact, Stalin handed Jewish communists directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. At the height of the SS extermination program in 1942-45, “there were many more Soviet camps, most of them larger than the Nazi ones.” Early in 1941, Johnson notes, “Stalin began quietly to accumulate military reserves of his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally.”

As in all totalitarian systems, Johnson explains, “a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete horrors of moral relativism.” The SS terms for murder included “special treatment,” “resettlement,” and above all “sending East.” Before Hitler died, “he had largely committed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of the European Jews.”

As Johnson shows, Stalin’s Soviet Union “was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been.” After WWII, “the tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage.”

Stalin branded Jews as rootless “cosmopolitans,” the same term he used for Westerners. Wall Street bankers in Soviet cartoons suddenly sported Jewish features. The Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was murdered in a fake car accident. By the second half of 1952, “Stalin was seeing Jewish-tinged conspiracies everywhere.” Jewish doctors attached to the Kremlin were arrested and accused of murdering Zhdanov.

Stalin had “lost touch with the normal world” which Johnson found “curiously reminiscent of Hitler’s last years.” The climate of moral corruption, Johnson concludes, “operates a satanic Gresham’s Law, in which evil drives out good.” Jump ahead to the 2020s in America under the Biden Junta.

The people find imprisonment without trial, political prisoners kept in solitary confinement, and show trials, all in the best Stalinist style. The government establishes a Disinformation Governance Board, and leverages media companies to take down posts that disagree with the government line.

Hitler had his SS and Gestapo, and Stalin his Stavka and NKVD. In similar style, the CIA, supposedly on guard for America’s security, is now a political force deployed against Donald Trump and other possible candidates. The FBI, charged with counterintelligence, now makes no secret of its deployment against Biden’s domestic opposition. Biden’s September 1, 2022 speech was like something staged by Leni Riefenstahl. Recall too the events of October 7, 2023, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

“From the River to the Sea,” is basically a call for a second Holocaust, and pro-Hamas activist shout it loud in the streets, on Ivy League campuses, and in the halls of Congress. The Biden Junta is harder on the Israeli response than the Hamas terrorists of 10/7, basically an Islamic Einstatzgruppen.

Elements of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR are now on display in the United States of America. At this point, as Hans Massaquoi discovered growing up in Nazi Germany, they are pretty much indistinguishable.

After World War II, Massaquoi came to America and found Harlem “peopled by active working-class folks not much different from those in my old Hamburg neighborhood. The only difference was that everyone – from the mailman to the barber to the police man to the garbage collector to the occasional big shot in a Cadillac convertible – was black.”

In the U.S. Army, “we black recruits got on well with our white comrades, and many interracial friendships formed.” In a military band, “we and our white buddies were like peas in a pod” and “our new integrated band not only looked like one harmonious ensemble, but it sounded better than either of the two groups had sounded alone.” Such positive portrayals of America explain why Destined to Witness is not featured during Black History Month.

Hans Massaquoi passed away in 2013 and Paul Johnson carried on until January 2023. Modern Times remains a work for current times when totalitarianism and anti-Semitism are on the march at home and abroad.

anti-SemitismRussiatotalitarianism