You mean Assange works for Putin?

So has Assange always been a KGB mole, or just since he started working for RT this past April?

...his buying the Wall Street Journal, but you're the first to say so. Perhaps you are mistaken.

I knew they owned WSJ, but I did recall some talk of them acquiring NYT as well- obviously the sale didn't go through, but I do remember some consternation about whether it could remain 'The Paper of Record' if it was owned by an unapologetic propaganda machine like NewsCorp.

RT is Russian TV. But Assange went there after other venues were closed to him.

RT is just another news source that transmits somewhat biased information. At least its name leaves no doubt what its bias is.

Fox News, on the other hand, is also a biased media organization -- and it pretend to have no bias whatsoever.

I listen to RT and take their reports with a grain of salt, regardless who reads them.

I don't listen to Fox News if I can possibly help it. A grain of salt isn't enough seasoning to make Fox News palatable.

That the people who have shows or appear for RT have any particular affection for Russia is not an assumption you can make.

Max Keiser also had a show on RT. I don't know what he is politically, but he certainly is no Putin supporter. Same for Thom Hartmann.

Hey! RT employs newscasters of different points of view. At least it challenges you to think critically, unlike Fox News.

Some of the programming on RT is obviously Russian propaganda.

Thom Hartmann is also on RT and he certainly is not "working for Putin."

Ah, here it is.

There's a reason for that.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2028283,00.html

Russia's threats were taken very seriously by Wikileaks.

This must not be a very fun place for you to post.

Leftists here and abroad would claim it was "propaganda."

The entire Eastern Bloc fell because of thousands of people far braver than Assange ever thought about being.

You seem to have an issue with "leftists" and seem to need to question Assange's "bravery."

Is your reply a textbook case of projection?

My post said nothing of leftists or of their beliefs and did not characterize Assange as brave. You seem to be reading a lot into it.

Why don't you explain projection to me so that we can discuss this further...?

However, you do have an interesting point regarding the number of people leaking information back then. Could you provide a link to back up your assertion?

Russia gets a big ass pass for its atrocities by leftists in my experience. I dislike it because I have read the history books.

You can read about the eastern bloc here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc

They fought long and hard, clandestinely, to rid themselves of the USSR. The stories are numerous. My favorite example are the "Singing Revolutions" where people would sing their old anthems, publicly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution

That took more bravery than Assange has ever shown. Sorry, but it's true. Arrests were numerous. It was civil disobedience at its finest (their anthems were banned).

Meanwhile, as I substantiated in another post, Assange refused to release the Moscow files. Why? Because I suspect he wouldn't have got the job with RT if he had released them especially given the threats Russia issued. The Moscow documents are damning to the Russian mafia state, and Assange has not released them. He is not someone who is for full transparency and nor is Wikileaks.

That is interesting history to know about. On YouTube, there is a nice video of a segment of a Latvian Song Festival:

People were pretty sure even back then that the Soviets were the ones who did it, but the Allies made a point of looking the other way to avoid screwing up the alliance.

FDR didn't want to anger Stalin. Stalin helped found the Koch fortune, which not only finances, but also bundles for Romney who is Poland's current BFF.

the Russians certainly were not going to prosecute them or turn them over for prosecution. If we had made the massacre public, there was possibility of public opinion or Congress forcing the U.S. to take actions that could have destroyed the alliance we had with the Soviet Union, which would have changed what happened in Europe and probably would have led to more Americans dying if the Nazi's had been able to divert more resources to the fronts France or Italy.

When does the unvarnished truth get to ride up front?

at the time we couldn't bring the people who ordered and committed the crime to trial and we if did something that caused the alliance against the Germans to dissolve, it would have likely resulted in many more American deaths.


What would you have had us do?

Certainly one of the reasons why the Americans avoided disclosure and confirmation is because Joseph Goebbels was making a big deal out of it in Signal magazine--I think in a December, 1943 issue.

Signal could be picked up at any newsstand just about anywhere in Europe, including in neutral countries where the US still had diplomats. So the disclosure would have been widely known even in some American circles by the end of 1943, without the Americans having to compromise a potentially valuable route of communication between the lines.

American eyewitnesses OTOH would've been much more credible.

No way you're going to take Goebbels' word for it!

I find these mass slaughters of humans to be worse than sick, perverted.

As I say often, What the fuck is wrong with people?

country had name USSR
country with name Russia has never been

Stalin and his assistant Beria, which killed Russian and Polish, were Georgians.
why no one blames Georgia?
Why always blame Russian?

and FDR was Dutch. So?

Hitler was born in Austria. That's why we say he was Austrian.

FDR never had Dutch citizenship.

stating that Stalin ordered it.

There's probably of lot of which Russia is aware the US has done in the past which remains under wraps.

death of 83.500 russian prisoners of war in 1919-1921 in Poland

The General Prosecutor's Office or RF appealed to the relevant state bodies of the Republic of Poland with a request for a criminal investigation into the death of 83.500 russian prisoners of war in 1919-1921

Prisoners in Poland 1919-1922. prisoners of war were killed by the following main methods:

1) mass killings and executions.

2) creating unbearable conditions. Basically, in the concentration camps themselves with: a) the abuse and beatings, b) hunger and exhaustion, c) cold and disease.

Poland has established a huge "archipelago" of dozens of concentration camps, stations, prisons and dungeons of serfs. It is located on the territory of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, and included not only dozens of concentration camps, including the opening of what was then called in the European press, "death camps"

>> the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

This is the subject of the thread, not some other random slaughter to be pulled from history
(and there are certainly plenty to choose from).

Unless, of course, you are deliberately trying throughout this thread to disrupt the subject.

its linked directly

thay say it was revenge of Stalin for that

Most people that are familiar with the Katyn Forest Massacre put the blame on the Soviets. The Soviets just used the excuse to dispose of a bunch of anti-communist Poles. It sounds callous to us to talk about genocide in that way, but remember this was the Soviet Union we're talking about here. They killed non-Russians by any number of ways, including starvation, collectivization, and deporting to gulags.

And do notice the colorful and/or iffy language....

"some scholars believe..."

"mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power..."

"The long-held suspicion is that..."

"lend weight to the belief that..."

"Historians" describe the new archive material as "important"...nay, as...

"potentially explosive"!

---------------------------

Bush Jr. and his pals slaughter a hundred thousand innocent people in the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad, to steal their oil, torture prisoners for reasons unknown, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the U.S. Constitution, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and all manner of laws and civilized norms, out CIA agents and an entire WMD counter-proliferation project--putting U.S. agents and contacts around the world in peril of their lives--"lose" billions of dollars in Iraq, and entirely bust the U.S. economy--not to mention ignoring dire warnings and going on vacation in August 2001--and the Associated Pukes couldn't care less and subsume all this and more into the corporate news "river of forgetfulness"...

...but let FDR lose, overlook or deliberately ignore one coded message in obscure circumstances (Russians marching out, Nazis marching in) on the eve of world war and that is...um..."important" and those ace reporters at AP really got on it, "days before" it was released, speed-dialing their academic contacts to find out if there was any dirt on Roosevelt.

They even quote one of their experts as saying that it is "potentially explosive." I mean, come on. Something that happened in 1940 is "potentially explosive"? "Explosive" in what way? I'll tell you what's explosive. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld NOT being at the Puke convention is explosive. U.S. taxpayer money developing drones now being sold on the open market is explosive. Drone bombings of "suspected" this and "suspected" that ("suspected insurgents," "suspected terrorists," "suspected drug traffickers," et al) all over the world is explosive. The State Department's "fine" of Blackwater, about two years ago, for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan" is explosive.

FDR "laundering" a critically needed ally, back in 1940, in order to defeat Hitler, is NOT "explosive." It is not even new news.

The more I contemplate this article, the more suspicious do I become--of its timing, of the reporters and academics involved and of the motives of Associated Pukes owners and editors. The article is a very long one--unusual for AP--goes way back into the whole long history of this issue (congressional hearings, Gorbachev admission, the lot) and its point seems to be to associate FDR with Stalin's brutality and tyranny--as if these were FDR's fault--when what FDR was looking at was the consequences of LOSING WW II without Russian help. That is very arguably what would have happened, if the Russians hadn't joined the Allies against Hitler. At the least, tens of thousands more Americans and other allies would have died--rather than millions of Russians--trying to defeat Hitler. Bloody as it was, it could have been a lot bloodier and a lot longer than it was, and we could well have lost the war. To this day, we do not give enough credit to the Russians who fought and died, and suffered so incredibly, to defeat Hitler.

It is also absurd to believe that, had the truth about Katyn been publicly known at the time (that the Russians committed this massacre) that it would have made any difference at all to the fate other Poles or other peoples during WW II and afterward. It would very likely have made no difference at all. Indeed, disclosing Soviet guilt could have turned the course of the war toward a Nazi victory, and it furthermore could EASILY have led to the U.S. nuclear war madmen of the 1950s/early 1960s nuking Russia--wiping Russia and its people off the map--in a preemptive strike, which they so dearly wanted to do (and almost succeeded in forcing JFK to do). The world was a tinderbox at the end of WW II and the last thing in the world that was needed was lighting a match to it! Literally, the last thing in the world.

So, what is the point of this LENGTHY article dissing FDR--from a news organization whose news articles are usually "sound bite" length and most often contain no context and no historical background? All of a sudden they're deep into history and the exigencies of PAST war?

Nope. There is an agenda here, and I think it's ECONOMIC and very election oriented. It is an anti-New Deal article. It says, subliminally, that "liberals" love "communists," especially insane communist tyrants--the same old shit we heard from the McCarthyites of the 1950s, and are hearing ominous echoes of today, and, believe me, it is all about money--looting the social programs of the New Deal, privatizing everything, the rich getting ever richer, and kicking the elderly, the sick, the poor and even workers "off the island."

This article almost REGRETS that it was liberals--New Dealers--WHO WON WW II! But I'll tell you what I think Bush Jr. and his ilk would have done. They would have allied with Hitler to conquer Russia--with the rightwing press--the Associated Pukes of that day--applauding them all the way. (And it would have been the Holocaust that was suppressed!) That I truly believe, if you want to speculate about the past and gainsay decisions of the people who won WW II. It was LIBERALS who won WW II, by NOT being Bushwhacks and stupid, asshole redbaiters and "Tea Partyers."

The U.S. could not have taken on both Hitler and Soviet Russia! It was NOT possible. So Roosevelt had to choose, and it is very clear that he was not happy about that choice, but he had no other. Period. End of story. And, once both sides had nuclear weapons, world war became unthinkable to reasonable human beings and provoking such a war the most unpardonable of crimes--the war crime to end all war crimes, literally.

I am not saying that the truth about Katyn should have been suppressed--then, now, or in between. In an ideal world, there would be no such secrets. But the Associated Pukes is, here, very cynically positing an ideal world in which they are the champions of openness. I've been AP-watching for some time, and nothing could be further from the truth. They are the champions of transglobal corporations, banksters and war profiteers. They are NOT in the business of creating an informed public. Their business is propaganda. They are NOT INTERESTED in Bush Junta secrets or crimes. So, WHY do they give such cache--an unusual in-depth report--to this tiny blip of info on Roosevelt's horrible dilemmas and choices in WW II, which have long been known?

Only one reason: the New Deal. They couldn't care less about U.S. massacres and other war crimes, current era. They couldn't care less about all sorts of grand scale crimes--by the banksters, by the war profiteers, by the rich and the corporate. But, boy, give them a bit of redundant news about FDR and they "stop the presses" to give you an "AP Exclusive"!

It makes you want to puke.

------------------------------

(Link to the full OP source: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-exclusive-memos-show-us-hushed-soviet-crime )
(Link back to this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014224613 )

I may have heard of it in Germany or Austria.

The Russians oppressed all kinds of people in Central Europe, especially Jews and people from Poland, for generations. And if you speak to Germans and Austrians, they will tell you many, many stories.

We haven't done something that horrible and morally reprehensible since-----An hour or two ago??

The Russians were very nearly as bad as the Nazis, but as the enemy of our enemy you would never have known it from the newsreels.

Your greatest enemy is your military industrial complex that to keep their profits pulls you into military adventures constantly

When the victor commits an atrocity, it usually just gets ignored. That's been a consistent truth from just about every human civilization that's existed.

Whether you're talking about the Katyn Forest Massacre or the Germanic ethnic cleansing across Europe after WWII (possibly the largest such event in human history), the reality is that even "just wars" usually have a dirty underside that we choose to overlook.

Please.

Kind of like that bomb they blew up at a construction site in Germany a couple of weeks ago.

World War II just keeps on giving headlines.