Blood Lands

[cmort666]

I just started a new book, "Blood Lands", about the areas in which the greatest number of non-combat civilian deaths took place between 1930 and 1945.

It's the story of those areas in between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in which deliberate policies slaughtered millions of people. It covers both the Soviet terror famine in the Ukraine (and the Great Purge), and the German planned starvation and the Holocaust.

He introduces some new information of which I was unaware, or didn't recall, such as guard towers being erected on Soviet collective farms to catch people "stealing" the food they were raising... but weren't allowed to eat.

This is definitely not a book for the overly sensitive, or those with a pollyannish view of history or human nature. Neither is it a book for those who want to excuse either Hitler or Stalin.

I've just started the book, but it seems well worth the money. As an aside, I believe I first read about the book in the "New York Review" of books, which has led me to a LOT of good books.

 

[wbraswell]

I've seen a book review of Blood Lands on CSPAN a while back, with the author. Sounds like good information about the Socialist Eastern Hemisphere between the wars.

 

[da gimp]

Stalin & crew are thought to have murdered & starved/worked to death twice the number Hitler & his bunch did... Mao was thought to have had killed/starved/worked to death more than Stalin & Hitler killed/starved/worked to death...combined.

 

[sasu]

And they needed lots of people in the so called agent state to do all the deadly work for them.

 

[cmort666]

And they needed lots of people in the so called agent state to do all the deadly work for them.

And the ironic thing is that unlike Hitler, Stalin regularly culled the ranks of the executioners.

There were several purges of the NKVD, two out of the last three heads being executed by Stalin. The third, Beria, was executed by Khruschev.

 

[pharmer]

And they needed lots of people in the so called agent state to do all the deadly work for them.

Google up Vasily Blokhin (sp?). Find out just what can be accomplished with Walther .25 acp. Joe

 

[vytoland]

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible..........

 

[cmort666]

The real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible..........

On the other hand, it doesn't take too much to figure out what the casualties of an invasion... or even a continued blockade would have been.

When it was all said and done, there might have been more Japanese in California and Brazil than in Japan...

 

[vytoland]

On the other hand, it doesn't take too much to figure out what the casualties of an invasion... or even a continued blockade would have been.

When it was all said and done, there might have been more Japanese in California and Brazil than in Japan...

I thought the topic was.......about the areas in which the greatest number of non-combat civilian deaths took place between 1930 and 1945

 

[cmort666]

I thought the topic was.......about the areas in which the greatest number of non-combat civilian deaths took place between 1930 and 1945

That would rule Hiroshima and Nagasaki out from the start.

They were military targets engaged by military assets.

And that leaves aside the trivial numbers killed compared to the terror famine, the purges, the German starvation policy and the Holocaust.

What was the military objective of the Holodomor?

What was the military objective of Babi Yar?

Of course too, why mention Hiroshima and not Nanking?

 

[cmort666]

Speaking of Japan, there was a largely imaginary threat mooted by the Soviets involving a conspiracy between the Poles and the Japanese to take advantage of the self-inflicted chaos of collectivization.

Supposedly, since the Ukrainians (both in Ukraine and those deported to the Soviet far east) were unexpectedly testy at having been driven to cannibalism, the Poles and Japanese were planning a joint invasion of Ukraine and Siberia to exploit the disaffected Ukrainians at opposite ends of the country.

It was of course nonsense, but between 1917 and 1991, the only "sense" in the Soviet Union was nonsense.

 

[cmort666]

A couple of interesting ironies from the book:

• Stalin murdered more Polish COMMUNISTS than Hitler.
• Until the German invasion of Poland, Stalin committed VASTLY more ethnically motivated murders (mostly Poles and Ukrainians, with a HEAVY emphasis on the Poles) than Hitler. He also killed far more Jews until 1939, albeit because the majority were in Ukraine, the center of the slaughter. He did apparently cull the Jews from the upper levels of the NKVD, and by design, since they were almost invariably replaced by Russians. That kind of blows the bow off of that old Nazi (and neo-Nazi) saw about "the Jews(tm)" running the Soviet Union.

 

[cmort666]

I'm almost finished with the book.

It's been simply PACKED with astonishing information, which even if I knew it in bits and pieces, I've never seen collected and correlated in such a comprehensive way.

The sheer extravagant cruelty of the participants (including some of the former victims) is simply amazing.

In a book full of ironies, you have a real doozy:

Having spent years fighting Germany's campaign to create ethnically "pure" territories, Stalin... created ethnically "pure" territories, forcibly moving Poles from Western Ukraine and elsewhere to Poland, ethnic German (colonists AND natives) from Poland and the Soviet Union to Germany, etc., etc.

If you know anybody who thinks there ANYTHING that one human being won't do to another, buy them this THIS book.