| |
Why this disingenuous attack on Stalin?
• I HAVE been a regular New Journal reader since the very early 1990s.
Your historical features have brought to life progressive individuals and events from a past that few of us ever learned about in school.
Why, then, have you decided to break with this honourable tradition by publishing a piece attacking Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, the one-time leader of the international proletariat, the architect of socialist construction in the former Soviet Union and the principal organiser of the defeat of fascism in the Second World War?
I refer, of course, to the review by Gerald Isaaman (Top of the tyrants: who’s the greatest dictator of them all? January 8) of Clive Foss’s new book, The Tyrants: 2500 Years of Absolute Power and Corruption.
Among the libellous allegations aimed at Stalin in this disingenuous article are that his foreign minister, Molotov, signed the 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in order “to do down the West”.
Odd, then, that in reality the Soviet Union was acting in response to a failure by the Western powers to agree a collective security accord, and that the “West” had all along wanted to divert Hitler’s tanks eastwards, in a war against the Soviet Union which both Britain and France would have relished as part of the joint struggle against Bolshevism that all capitalists knew was in their interests.
We are also told in Mr Isaaman’s review that Stalin presided over the deaths of “five million peasants who perished in the man-made famine of 1932-1933”.
Resistance to collectivisation may have had something to do with this, don’t you think? And perhaps your reviewer should check his figures, on famine deaths as well as the number of people jailed in the USSR during Stalin’s leadership.
The old archives are now available and they reveal that, per capita, fewer people were ever imprisoned in the USSR than are now languishing in the “correctional facilities” of that great bastion of democracy, the United States of America.
Let’s get it right, please. Don’t let your readers down.
Steve Cook
Stalin Society
• WHAT an appalling review of an obviously appalling book – The Tyrants by Clive Foss – (January 8).
You get together a bunch of world leaders going back thousands of years and then apply modern British parliamentary values.
You also leave out the crimes of the British colonial system in which untold millions died.
Man-aided famines swept through Ireland and India killing millions. The French Spanish and Portuguese were no better. When the Belgian Congo was the private fiefdom of King Leopold 10 million Africans died.
WJ Haire
Lulot Gardens, N19
• I WRITE to protest about the reference to Xerxes in Gerald Isaaman’s review of Clive Foss’s book The Tyrants. Xerxes is described as a “terrible tyrant”, thereby repeating ancient Greek propaganda of the 5th century BC. Xerxes was a king of Persia who in response to Greek interference in Asia Minor invaded mainland Greece. The account of this invasion comes to us from the Greek historian Herodotus, of course, writing from a Greek perspective.
There is no evidence to suggest that Xerxes was any more or less tyrannical than any of his contemporaries and the 19th century view of the Graeco-Persian wars as democracy versus despotism is now very old-fashioned. Xerxes is nowadays highly regarded by patriotic Iranians, and to label him as a tyrant at this moment is highly irresponsible.
John Curtis
Hillfield Road, NW6
|
 |
|
|
| |
| |
