DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIALISTS & COMMUNISTS?

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STALIN

THE MAN WHO DESTROYED RUSSIAN COMMUNISM SPLIT SOCIALISM OFF FOREVER

After The Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact Became Public Knowledge, The Left Was Cleft

It's the 70th anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that divided up Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. This week, the Poles are not celebrating. The Russians are still trying to pin the blame on anybody and everybody else. And the Germans will never finish apologizing and atoning for what the faux-socialist Nazi's did. (No wonder people are still confused as to the difference between socialism and Fascism. Their very name was a deliberate subterfuge by the "National Socialist Workers Party," or Nazi's. And by today's corporatists.)

Conservatards like to make up their own history. Who can blame them? The facts place them in the outer edges of the Hitler camp. Some of them are not so outer; more inner. If you can stomach reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf," you'll find it remarkably similar in parts to the more extreme stuff that is written and spoken and done by some on the Right in America today. And by some I mean most of them, even those in or formerly in government.

Not all of the current eruption of hate in the Red States is strictly Hitlerian. Some of it is more like Goebbels or Goering or Himmler or Röhm and his Brownshirts. And then there's the original corporatist himself, Benito Mussolini. Some of them started out as Leftists, but quickly swung to the far Right in preference for violence and authoritarianism driven by racism, sectarianism, nativism, sexism and homophobia. They were all conservatives, by their own description; ultra-conservatives with more in common with Newt Gingrich and David Duke than with any liberals, progressives or socialists. They hated socialism more than anything in the world, except maybe Jews. Or Gypsies. Or Homosexuals. Or any minority, any foreigner, anyone who was different, or "degenerate." Jazz was degenerate, according to them. Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway, the pop music of your mother, grandmother or great-grandmother: All degenerates.

The Nazi's were great ones for ridiculous and obviously false characterizations. They even named themselves "Socialists," knowing that their sworn enemies were more popular than the Fascists could ever hope to be, honestly anyway. The real socialists were on the center Left, not on the far Right. They were the only ones with real solutions, and the average working people all over Europe knew that. So the Nazi's lied. In fact, they invented the Big Lie. And their ideological descendants are still telling it, every night on Fox News.

They can't fool everyone, though. The Poles, for example. They know who sold them out, who partitioned Poland, and who slaughtered them. It was an unholy alliance between the extreme right-wing Nazi's and the extreme left-wing Stalinists. It allowed Germany a free hand in Western, Central and Southern Europe. The Russians got the East, and peace; until Hitler betrayed them and opened up a suicidal Second Front in the war. That was pretty much the end of him. Hitler should have learned from Napoleon: You can't beat the Russian Winter. And so went Fascism. Until today, in the new Republican Party here in America.

In Europe, the local communists and socialists were the main groups who stood up to the Fascists. After the war, there was a split. The communists were forever tainted by their connections to Stalin, who had gotten into bed with Hitler, and wiped out tens of millions of his own people, decimating the old Bolsheviks and Trotskyites as well as much of the Russian peasantry, the Kulaks. The communists in the West resisted participation in government, preferring not to stand for elections at first, only entering coalitions with the socialists in the days before WWII broke out. The socialists swallowed their scruples early on and entered the mainstream political fray in almost every country in Western Europe before the war. After the war, now in the mainstream, men like Mitterand and Brandt had to deal with real-life everyday issues like taxes and road maintenance, unemployment and job-creation, national defense and criminal justice. To the surprise of some and the disillusionment of others, they managed fairly well, making few radical breaks with the bourgeois past, even making the trains run on time, and opposing communism all over the world.

In many areas, socialist policy even cribbed from the right: Social security and national healthcare were originally right-wing sops to the rising leftist movement in Germany under the Kaiser. The fact is, those programs just made good common sense. Ultimately, everyone would have to adopt them. Even the United States. Some day. But crypto-Fascists in America will fight common sense to the last drop of somebody else's blood. Like the Nazi's, they will let us all die in the name of some fuzzy-minded notion of racial or ideological purity, sitting in the waiting room of a bankrupt hospital's emergency room here in America.

Remember that, the next time some Republican rube starts screaming about SOCIALISM!!! SOCIALISM!!! SOCIALISM!!! It's really National Socialism, Nazism, he's afraid of, with good reason. But for him, it's too late: They've already gained control of his mind. Any "Polock" would know better.


THE LONDON TELEGRAPH
"Russia and Poland trade insults on 70th anniversary of World War Two"
Tovarich! Can't we all just get alongski?

' The dignity of ceremonies to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in Poland is being marred by furious spats between Russia and Eastern European states over their respective wartime roles. Many Poles claim to detect the hand of the Kremlin in the recent Russian media broadside, and see it as an attempt to absolve Russia of guilt over the contentious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed between Stalin and Hitler in August 1939. A pact of mutual non-aggression that lasted until 1941, it allowed Russia to invade and annexe Eastern Poland. While Poland and other Eastern European states have now made their peace with a repentant Germany, there is long-standing frustration in the region that Russia has never really recognised, or apologised for, crimes committed by the Soviet state between 1939 and 1945, or the subsequent brutalities of communist rule. '

REUTERS
"Russia's Putin rejects WW2 criticism in Poland"
The "Appeasers," by the way, were Conservative British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who coined the term "appeasement;" and right-leaning "centrist" French Premier Édouard Daladier. They were encouraged to give way to Hitler at Munich in part by the US Republicans' "Neutrality Acts" in the 1930's, a boon to Fascism everywhere, which grew unchecked by any concerns over American aid or intervention, forbidden by those Acts.

' Russia and former satellites such as Poland are at loggerheads over the actions of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1939, when he clinched a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that opened the way for the invasion of Poland and world war. Russians are deeply proud of their country's victory over Hitler in 1945, but Poles, Balts and others say Stalin also bears direct responsibility for the outbreak of war, for carving up Poland with Hitler and also annexing the Baltic states. Putin cited efforts by Britain and France to appease Hitler in 1938, resulting in their acceptance of the destruction of Czechoslovakia, as well as Poland's own seizure of a strip of Czech territory shortly before it too faced German invasion. [Putin's] comments will not satisfy the Poles and Balts, who regard Stalin's actions as a stab in the back and also recall the mass deportations and executions of their countrymen that followed the Soviets' arrival. Poland wants Russia to apologise for Stalin's decision to have 20,000 Polish officers shot at Katyn. For decades, Moscow blamed the deaths on the Nazis, but after the fall of the Soviet Union it acknowledged they had been shot on Stalin's orders. Poland lost about a fifth of its population, including the vast majority of its three million Jewish citizens, as well as a fifth of its territory during World War Two. After the war, it remained under Soviet domination until 1989. Some 27 million Soviet citizens perished in the war after Hitler reneged on his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. "I commemorate the 60 million people who lost their lives because of this war unleashed by Germany," Merkel said. '

INFOPEDIA
"Encyclopedia—Socialist parties—General History"
Some ACTUAL history of socialism vs. communism.

' All European Socialist parties were marked by schisms; the main issue dividing them was whether party members should cooperate with bourgeois-dominated governments to work for gradual reforms or should organize extralegally to hasten what Marxists viewed as inevitable, proletarian revolution. Eduard Bernstein, in Germany, was one of the first to deny (1898) some of Marx's doctrines and to argue for “revisionism.” During World War II, socialists were prominent in the resistance movement in the countries occupied by Germany. In the postwar period the cold war widened the gulf between the Socialist and Communist parties, and most Socialist parties moved even further away from Marxism. Substantial periods of power have, however, enabled some to promote their goals of a planned economy and a welfare state in many European countries; their position has been especially strong in the Scandinavian countries. In the 1990s a number of Socialist parties moderated their commit to a planned economy and the welfare state, most especially the British Labour party, which went so far as to abandon formally its traditional Socialist positions. '

NEW WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA
"Social Democracy vs. Communism"
The final schism on the Left was all about the Russians. They made communism illegitimate, and socialism, legitimate.

' In the U.S., the Socialist Labor Party was founded in 1877. This party, small as it was, became fragmented in the 1890s. In 1901, a moderate faction of the party joined with Eugene V. Debs to form the Socialist Party of America. The influence of the party gradually declined, and socialism never became a major political force in the United States. Communism also failed to gain a large following in the U.S. and Canada. The party fell into significant disfavor in the aftermath of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which resulted in the Communist Party USA opposing any U.S. involvement in the war effort against Nazi Germany until the surprise act on the Soviet Union by Hitler in 1940. The distinction between socialists and communists became more pronounced during and after World War I. When the First World War began in 1914, many European socialist leaders supported their respective governments and Lenin was very outspoken in his opposition to this. Lenin denounced the war as an imperialist conflict and urged workers worldwide to use the war as an occasion for socialist revolution. During the war, socialist parties in France and Germany supported the state wartime military and economic planning, despite their ideological commitments to internationalism and solidarity. This ideological conflict resulted in the collapse of the Second International. Throughout much of the interwar period, socialist and communist parties were in continuous conflict. Socialists condemned communists as agents of the Soviet Union, while communists condemned socialists as betrayers of the working class. However, with the rise of fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, socialists and communists made attempts in some countries to form a united front of all working-class organizations opposed to fascism. The "popular front" movement had limited success, even in France and Spain, where it did well in the 1936 elections. The failure of the German communists and socialists to form a "popular front" helped the Nazis gain power in 1933. The "popular front" period ended in 1939 with the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Socialists condemned this act as an act of betrayal by the Stalinist Soviet Union. '

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