Word: katyn
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...religion, their slavish conformity to the stale attitudes of "nonconformity," their long willingness to excuse Soviet crimes in the name of a higher aim (scathingly, Aron asks why so many had to wait for the Hungarian massacres to become indignant when the purge trials, the slave labor camps, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations should have been enough). Says Aron: "Both American liberals and the Left in France and Britain share the same illusion: the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction . . . Marxism is only one version, a simultaneously cataclysmic and determinist version, of an optimism...
...20th century's long parade of horrors, through the villages of the Russian kulaks, into the torture chambers of the Gestapo and the prisons of the Falangists, through the streets of Nanking and Lidice, past the ovens of Buchenwald and the lime pits of Katyn Forest, might have left governments too hardened and peoples too toughened to the news of wholesale brutality and murder. But the hot shiver of fury that circled much of the world last week showed that it has not truly calloused the human heart...
Most of these mob scenes, organized or spontaneous, began as what one Pole called "demonstrations of happiness." But as they continued, their temper turned bitter. In Wroclaw (formerly the German Breslau) demonstrating students who started off shouting "Long live Poland" gradually progressed to "Tell the truth about the Katyn murders"* and a steady chant of "Rokossovsky, go home." ("What do they want from me?" lamented the dejected Soviet proconsul. "After all, I was born in Poland and my parents are buried here...
Unforgotten Crimes. The mistakes Moscow has made in Poland date back to 1938, when Dictator Stalin liquidated almost the entire leadership of the old Polish Communist Party. The Stalin-Hitler pact, by which Germany and Russia partitioned Poland for spoils, the massacre of 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940, the failure of Russia to aid the underground Polish armies, and the deliberate stand-off by the Red army during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis in 1944, are Russian crimes which Poles do not easily forget. Nor, apparently, do Polish Communists. The recent downgrading...
Unfortunately for his career (and for U.S. diplomacy), Henderson was prematurely antiCommunist. As a specialist in Washington in World War II, he continued to call the Red turns accurately. He was one of the first to spot the Katyn Massacre as a Russian, not a German, crime. When Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov complained of his "unfriendliness," the State Department in 1943 shunted him off as Ambassador to Iraq...