The Katyn Massacre: Soviets Murder Polish Leaders

Until June 1941, the USSR was an enthusiastic ally of Hitler’s Germany. Stalin eagerly invaded Poland from the east, while Hitler’s troops attacked from the west.

After the Nazis and the Soviets divided the occupied Polish territory, Stalin’s socialists were eager to neutralize any potential leaders. Thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, and priests were rounded up.

The prisoners were taken eastward into Russia, into the Katyn Forest. In an infamous war crime, the Soviets murdered them. An estimated 22,000 victims were brutally killed.

The communists worked to keep the atrocity secret, but in 1943, when the German army entered the area, soldiers discovered the mass graves. The Germans informed the world.

By this time, the Soviets had changed their allegiance, and were now fighting against the Germans. The Germans had no motive to protect the USSR’s reputation by hiding the massacre. The USSR was eager to deny the event.

The Polish government-in-exile asked the Red Cross to conduct an official investigation. They documented the war crimes extensively.

The Western Allies - Britain, France, and the United States - were allied with the both Poland and the USSR. The Western Allies needed the USSR in the war effort against Hitler.

To avoid angering Stalin, and thereby to keep the USSR engaged against Hitler, the Western Allies downplayed the Katyn atrocities. The media in the Western Allies did almost no reporting on the topic. Diplomats from the Western Allies did not confront their Soviet counterparts with the murders.

During the remainder of WW2, and for several decades afterward, the USSR continued to deny that the incident ever happened. In some cases, they were joined by governments, media, and academics from the Western Allies. Historians Stan Evan and Herbert Romerstein write:

At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to take an example earlier noted, the Soviets captured a million-plus Poles and shipped them off to Russia, some to become slave labor in the Gulag, a few recruited as agents, others who disappeared entirely. One vexing question was the fate of fifteen thousand Polish officers who couldn’t be found when efforts were made to form an army-in-exile to fight the Nazis. Nobody could get the facts about these captives, who had in fact been murdered by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest. The truth about the murders would be denied and covered up for years, not only by the Soviets but by Western leaders who knew the facts but kept discreetly silent.

When communism inside the USSR began to crumble in 1989, evidence surfaced, giving shocking details of how the Soviets carried out the massacre. With the communist government gone, the Russians were free to tell the truth about Katyn.

Scholars and researchers from both Poland and Russia have now extensively documented the executions. The priests, policemen, and military officers murdered in the Katyn Forest are officially recognized as victims of communism.

Greece Expands: Causes of the Colonization

“We sit around our sea like frogs around a pond,” said Socrates, and thereby described the settlement activity of the Greeks, which lasted for more than three hundred years. It began in the archaic era, in the eighth century B.C., and ended as the sixth century B.C. drew to a close.

Greek cities spread out around almost the entire Mediterranean area, and all around the Black Sea, colonies of Corinth, Phokaia, Rhodos, or Miletus. These daughter-cities, in turn, again founded colonies, so-called grandchild-cities. Their names partly live on today, in modified forms: e.g., Nizza (Nikaia), Marseille (Massilia).

Which causes led to this emigration movement, which the Greeks called “the relocation of home”? In the case of the Samier - people from the Island of Samos - it was political disputes, and a lack of any prospects for success and wealth.

Other reasons were the search for new places to do business, the desire for adventure, and the desire for knowledge. In most cases, however, failed harvests, starvation, poverty, and dense population allowed no other choice than to move on.

Because, according to Greek inheritance laws, property was divided among all sons, the farmer’s fields could, with time, become so small that they could not sustain their owners. Because, in addition, the population grew, the homeland did not offer enough land and chances.

When reports about other lands became known through traders, individual cities began to think about getting some help: they organized the founding of colonies, and these were often so successful, that they, like e.g. Miletus, could themselves send out colonists several times within a generation of their founding.

Communist Brainwashing

The word ‘brainwashing’ became widely used in the 1950s. It was used first to describe how Chinese citizens were subject to ‘thought reform’ inside their government’s ‘re-education camps’ and prisons.

Individuals who had previously been skeptical of communism emerged from these sessions, proclaiming their firm belief in communism and confessing their previous ‘errors’ and even ‘crimes’ in opposing communism.

Robert Lifton described the psychological techniques of such mind control in his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.

The Chinese used these techniques to help North Korea during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). Captured American soldiers were made to confess to crimes which they had not committed. Edgar Schein documented these instances of ‘thought control’ in his book, Coercive Persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the “brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists.

Louis West also analyzed China’s use of undue influence in an article, “Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread).”

The term ‘brainwashing’ became a permanent part of the popular vocabulary, although specialists prefer phrases like ‘thought control,’ ‘mind control,’ ‘thought reform,’ ‘unethical influence,’ and ‘undue influence.’

Spy novels and movies about secret agents began to regularly feature the ideas of brainwashing.

In The New York Times, Tim Weiner writes that, during the 1950s, China was “a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home.” Bit by bit, the public learned “that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.”

There are at least two variants of brainwashing: the first changes a person’s beliefs and values; the second induces him to make false confessions of crimes he never committed.

The type of brainwashing which changes beliefs and values has wide-ranging implications. The person will view his own past differently: what was good is now bad, and what was bad is now good. The person will act differently: actions are based on values. The person will speak differently: he’ll give up military secrets, or make propaganda statements for the media.

Tim Weiner recalls that Edward Hunter popularized the word:

The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.” He determined that “the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels,” experts in the use of “drugs and hypnotism.”

Although forms of mind control had been featured in fiction, like Brave New World and 1984, Weiner notes that

It took Mao’s China — and the forced “confessions” of some American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict — to make brainwashing a centerpiece of 1950s culture.

In the context of the Cold War, China seemed better than the Soviet Union at thought control techniques, and used them more often. Weiner cites “A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo,” who wrote

in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.”

After the Cold War, the practice of mind control is more commonly found in ‘destructive cults’ like the Scientology organization or the Unification Church (known as the ‘Moonies’). Mind control, as unethical influence, can also be found in personal relationships in a family, a group of friends, or a workplace.

The Global Network of Communist Spies

In the mid-1930s, the world was filled with the major tensions which would later become known as World War II.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, a semi-independent region controlled by China. In 1937, Japan invaded China itself.

Up to that time, a civil war divided China between the communists and the nationalists. Both sides declared a truce and agreed to work together to stop the invading Japanese.

The Soviet Union wanted Manchuria for itself, and was afraid that the Japanese would invade the USSR. The Soviets, who’d already been supporting the communist party in China, helped the Chinese against the Japanese.

The truce in China was an uneasy one. The communists and the nationalists knew that, as soon as the Japanese were gone, they’d fight each other again. Each side was seeking to undermine the other, even before the Japanese were defeated.

In addition to military conflict, all the involved parties employed substantial espionage networks, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

To deal with this complex of issues and protect their flank in Asia, the Soviets had on the ground in China a formidable group of undercover agents. Foremost among these was the German Communist Richard Sorge, perhaps the most effective secret agent in Soviet history (enshrined in the Moscow pantheon of intelligence heroes).

The GRU is a Soviet intelligence agency. It is older than the KGB. The GRU was founded in 1918, and still exists today. The KGB didn’t start until 1954, and was disbanded in 1991.

The breadth of the international communist conspiracy can be seen in the GRU, which was active all over the world, and employed people from many different nations. Richard Sorge was a German, employed by the Soviets, working in China against the Japanese, and working with communists from the United States and Britain.

As of the latter 1930s, Sorge was a ten-year veteran of the GRU (military intelligence) and head of an extensive pro-Red network based in Shanghai. His group was a veritable microcosm of the Soviet global project, including as it did the Red Chinese apparatchik Chen Han Seng, the American pro-Soviet writer Agnes Smedley, the German-born naturalized Briton Guenther Stein, and influential Japanese Communists Hotsumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji.

Born in 1895 in Azerbaijan to a German family, Richard Sorge grew up in Berlin, and studied political science and economics at the universities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Kiel, earning a Ph.D.

Like many people of his era, WW1 caused an internal crisis of belief for Sorge. He developed a belief in communism.

Sorge was a battle-wounded German veteran of World War I, disillusioned by the carnage inflicted by that struggle and accompanying economic chaos, who became convinced that capitalism was the source of these social evils. In 1929 he joined the German Communist Party and would later be sent to Moscow for training as an agent of the Comintern, dealing in “political intelligence.” He was subsequently transferred to Soviet military intelligence, specializing in Far Eastern matters.

Because Stalin’s Soviet Socialist government was allied with Hitler at the time, Richard Sorge joined the Nazi party in 1933. The USSR and the Nazis were allied until June 1941, when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Socialist homeland.

Sorge travelled frequently and during the 1930s was in China, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. In 1941, he was discovered in Japan and arrested by the Japanese government. He died in 1944.

Terrorists are Social

Although terrorists often operate in a murky underworld of secret communications, they are by nature networkers. Terrorists inspire and teach other terrorists.

Terrorists plan with, and work with, other terrorists – even if they carry out their attacks alone.

The majority of terrorists meet other terrorists face-to-face. They train together and meet as groups.

Those who don't meet face-to-face do their networking online.

When the media report about an allegedly ‘self-radicalized’ terrorist, such an individual was in fact radicalized by other terrorists. Someone posted the website which instructed him; someone operated the Twitter account which motivated him.

Someone wrote jihadi texts which nudged him toward destructive behavior. The phrase ‘self-radicalized’ is therefore not accurate.

Psychologist Steven Hassan, who studies ‘unethical influence’ and other forms of ‘mind control’ writes:

People are being incorrectly described as “self-radicalized” into becoming terrorists. These folks can be better understood as being on the fringes of a destructive cult – but in the “sphere of influence” of mind control. They are absolutely being recruited – by people in person and online. Cult recruiters are expert at targeting vulnerabilities and activating motivation. Political and religious cults that use terrorist tactics are aggressively recruiting and some people are being sucked into their vortex.

Likewise, the phrase ‘lone wolf’ does not well describe an Islamic terrorist. Far from operating ‘alone,’ these terrorists are under the direction and influence of other terrorists. There are in communication – even if oneway communication – with other terrorists.

Finally, the phrase ‘homegrown’ is not truly applicable to Muslim extremists, even those found in the areas of Mecca and Medina. The ideas which inhabit the mind of such terrorists have a source in time and space.

The words of the Qur’an – the Koran – and the concepts of the Hadith and Sunnah were compiled in various parts of the Near East over several centuries. They are imported into other parts of the world, and into the modern era.

From some source, terrorists learn destructive ideology. From some source, they learn to yell Allah-hu Akbar.

The existence of some such external source shows that this terror is not ‘homegrown.’

These three phrases, then – ‘homegrown,’ ‘lone wolf,’ and ‘self-radicalized’ – are inaccurate, and should not be used when reporting about terrorism.

Terrorism is, to the contrary, imported from the Middle East, imported from other times, necessarily part of a network, and implanted in the mind of a potential terrorist by another terrorist.

Merkel and Her Germany: Providing Stability in a World Filled with Change

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States provided a sense of global leadership. It emerged as an unrivaled economic power after WW2, and the only other military superpower asserted itself but did not provide leadership.

At the close of the century, the EU had emerged as another leader. A powerful trading bloc, it had achieved unprecedented economic cooperation.

But early in the twenty-first century, both of these entities faced problems which sapped the energy which they had available to devote to leadership.

The U.S. dealt with a lethargic economy, starting with the 2008 burst of the “real estate bubble.” Attempts by the federal government over the following years to fix the economy only made it worse.

Diplomatically, Obama’s troop surge sent over 100,000 soldiers into Afghanistan – in the previous decade, troop levels there had averaged under 20,000 and peaked at 30,000. The “Obama surge” required getting consent from various allies, which consumed American political capital and left the U.S. with little remaining leverage in other global questions.

U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated after January 2009. American ability to manage Putin departed with outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the incoming Hillary Clinton’s use of the word “reset” created an ambiguity which Vladimir Putin saw as a chance to press his expansionist imperialist agenda.

The EU faced its own problems: dealing with debt crises in the economies of its weaker member states, dealing with Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, and dealing with flood of immigrants, some of who claimed to be refugees and others of whom were terrorists in disguise.

German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier describes the situations which hamstrung both the U.S and the EU:

Now, the international order that the United States and Europe helped create and sustain after World War II — an order that generated freedom, peace, and prosperity in much of the world — is under pressure. The increasing fragility of various states — and, in some cases, their complete collapse — has destabilized entire regions, especially Africa and the Middle East, sparked violent conflicts, and provoked ever-greater waves of mass migration. At the same time, state and nonstate actors are increasingly defying the multilateral rules-based system that has preserved peace and stability for so long. The rise of China and India has created new centers of power that are changing the shape of international relations. Russia’s annexation of Crimea has produced a serious rift with Europe and the United States. The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia increasingly dominates the Middle East, as the state order in the region erodes and the Islamic State, or ISIS, attempts to obliterate borders entirely.

With the U.S. and the EU both unable to provide their customary leadership, the nations of the world began to look to Germany as role model. Why Germany? This country had not sought a leadership position, and had arguably worked to avoid one.

Germany’s reliable consistency made its situation enviable. Germany had avoided accumulating large amounts of debt, and had worked its way out of a tough situation – in 2003, its unemployment rate was over 12% – and into a decade of prosperity and economic growth.

Various countries began to see Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, as a world leader. She did not take office expecting to confront a major debt crisis in the EU, but, as Stefan Kornelius writes,

Angela Merkel has been forced to confront this event and try to avert its potentially destructive effects. Unlike Helmut Kohl, she does not have the advantage of governing during a relatively easy period in German history. Kohl made the most of the favorable circumstances and the positive dynamics of European movements of political emancipation, and with a sure instinct led Germany to unification and Europe to a new era of prosperity. Merkel, on the other hand, is fighting a defensive war: she is battling against potential ruin. She cannot promise flourishing landscapes – she can only strive to prevent Europe from becoming a place of desolation.

Merkel has now become a regular figure on the world stage. Her habit of calmly and rationally analyzing situations before acting, and her avoidance of inflammatory rhetoric – especially noticeable in contrast with harsh bombastic blasts issued alternately by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have made her a pole of stability.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century, then, have seen Germany pulled, against its will, into a position of global leadership.

Merkel and Germany Pressed into Leadership Roles as EU and USA Falter

Although we’d like to think that the nations of the world come together as equals, it is also true that they look to certain individual nations to provide global leadership.

Over time, various nations have been seen as providing guidance.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States was a world leader. In the late twentieth century, the collected nations of Europe also emerged as a source of counsel.

Although the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were powerful in that same era, they were not necessarily leaders.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we see a shift in the global community. Those who were leaders are not automatically still leaders, as German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier notes:

Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership.

The United States has spent some of its political capital in the Middle East. Calling in favors from other nations to support U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan leaves the U.S. with less leverage in other situations.

Obama initiated a “surge” in Afghanistan, taking troop levels to over 100,000 soldiers. Prior to the Obama administration, troop levels had averaged under 20,000 and peaked around 30,000.

Some other nations were skeptical about Obama’s surge. He failed to stabilize Iraq or Afghanistan. Steinmeier writes:

When U.S. President Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, he began to rethink the United States’ commitment to the Middle East and to global engagements more broadly. His critics say that the president has created power vacuums that other actors, including Iran and Russia, are only too willing to fill.

On a different front, Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, mismanaged America’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. The ruthless and clever Putin had been kept in check until Clinton announced a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations. What the word ‘reset’ was supposed to mean was not clear, but Putin used it as an opportunity for press his expansionist agenda.

As the U.S. faced these challenges in foreign relations, Europe also faced problems. The European Union (EU) struggled with disagreements between its member nations: about immigration policy, about economic policy, about the admission of new member nations, about relations with Russia, and other topics.

As the EU worked on solving its own internal problems, it had less energy to look outward and take a leadership role in global questions. Steinmeier explains:

Meanwhile, the EU has run into struggles of its own. In 2004, the union accepted ten new member states, finally welcoming the former communist countries of eastern Europe. But even as the EU expanded, it lost momentum in its efforts to deepen the foundations of its political union. That same year, the union presented its members with an ambitious draft constitution, created by a team led by former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. But when voters in France and the Netherlands, two of the EU’s founding nations, rejected the document, the ensuing crisis emboldened those Europeans who questioned the need for an “ever-closer union.” This group has grown steadily stronger in the years since, while the integrationists have retreated.

As the U.S. and EU, for their respective reasons, stepped back from influential roles, the nations of the world turned their attention to Germany, and to Angela Merkel.

They looked to Germany because it had maintained an impressive pattern of economic and political stability in the midst of rapid global change. Historian Stefan Kornelius writes:

It was at this moment that Angela Merkel became the focus of attention. Who was this woman who for so long had kept quiet, and who in only a few years had taken control of Germany’s conservative party? Who was this politician who rose almost unnoticed to lead the leaders of Europe? The Germans have been pondering over the mystery of Merkel for many years, trying to interpret her character and the inner workings of her mind. But now the whole world wants to know: how did she get into politics? What is her worldview? What are her values, her yardsticks? Merkel enjoys an interest in her as a person that rarely wanes – yet another reason why she has once more conquered the summit. This time she has come under scrutiny in her capacity as a stateswoman, a foreign-policy expert. What will she do if Germany’s objective increase of power is perceived as a threat? She has managed to make Germany’s dominance seem tolerable so far – but will it stay that way?

Under Merkel’s leadership, Germany has avoided debt and maintained a strong manufacturing and exporting sector.

Merkel’s political thinking is perhaps influenced by her years in chemistry and physics – before she became Germany’s chancellor, she was a researcher. Calm, rational investigation precede her decisions.

Inclined to reticence, her public pronouncements are rarely inflammatory.

Germany, then, has taken a leadership role in dealing both with global economic questions – the loan crisis of 2008 – and with European economic questions – the Greek debt crisis and the “Brexit” vote of 2016.