Blaming the USSR for the second world war is not only absurd – it boosts the heirs of the Nazis’ wartime collaborators
Seumas Milne, The Guardian/ UK, Sep 9, 2009
Through decades of British commemorations and coverage of the second world war – from Dunkirk to D-day – there has never been any doubt about who started it. However dishonestly the story of 1939 has been abused to justify new wars against quite different kinds of enemies, the responsibility for the greatest conflagration in human history has always been laid at the door of Hitler and his genocidal Nazi regime.
That is until now. Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was “Hitler’s accomplice”, the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.
Tags: equating nazism and communism, Nazi regime, Niall Ferguson, rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, Second World War, Seumas Milne, Soviet Union and Hiter's defeat, western historians
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