FDR had a much better excuse than young liberals have today. In the 1930s, Stalin's worst activities weren't commonly known. Furthermore, he was right about Hitler when the rest of the West was pacifying him. Stalin gets a bad rap for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that carved up Poland, but it's not entirely fair. The Soviet Union did that mostly to delay an inevitable that they had largely resisted. Before any of that, Britain and France were carving up Czechoslovakia for Hitler and shutting Stalin and obviously the Czechs out of the process because they were too anti-Hitler. Furthermore, the brutality and inherent failings of communism were very much open questions. So I don't fault FDR for being less hostile to Stalin than was ideal.
In 2018, we have no excuse. The people who fetishize communism (like the New York Times has) are no better than those who fetishize Nazism. They're defending something they know to be evil and deadly.
We focus a lot on the Polish Jews and for good reason. They bore the brunt of the Nazis' most horrific and most infamous crimes against humanity. However, the plan was the ethic cleansing and full incorporation of Poland into the German Reich. That meant the expulsion and enslavement of ethnic Poles and resettlement of the area by ethnic Germans. Obviously they didn't completely finish the job, but they made a lot of "progress," and massive numbers of Poles died as a result, while massive numbers of Germans resettled the area. The bottom line is that had Germany won the war, the overwhelming majority of Poles would have eventually met a similar fate as the Jews. They would have been used as slave laborers, and once the Soviet Union was defeated, they would have been killed by force or starved death.
Were the Communists terrible to the Poles? Absolutely, but they didn't plot their complete destruction like the Nazis did. The Nazis were really bad hombres or really "böse Männer."
Last edited: Mar 31, 2018