Evening star., 1953-03-06
The End of Stain

bonum-that one should say nothing Of the
dead unless it be something good. But that
ancient admonition, wholesome as 1t is, cannot
reasonably be followed in the case OF Joseph
Stalin For his name Is inscribed In history IN
letters too large and too lurid to be ignored,
and the mere mention Of it requires also
mention o. all the wickedness associated
with it.
The death Of this man has caused much
sorrow in Russia Gloriied into kind OF
divinity by his gigantic propaganda machine,
he was genuinely revered by vast number OF
his subjects educated to regard him with awe
as the supreme genius of the ages, and with
affection as a leader full of boundless kindness
and virtue beyond compare. So let 1t be SAID
of him that he was not entirely unloved. Let
it be said of him. too, that he was truly great
in his own perverse fashion, that he was a
figure of tremendous historical Importance,
and that none of us-because none of us Is
all-wise, adjust, all-seeing or all-knowing-
should presume to equate our judgments OF
him with the judgment he may face IN the
eternity now stretching before him.
Nevertheless, as finite human beings with
Western minds all of us are impelled to think
of Stain in terms of evil. Here was man who
turned from priestly studies in the Russian
Orthodox Church to embrace atheism and
organize the blackest tyranny in modern history.
In the three decades of his dictatorship, he
made his name synonym for terror. First
of all, he rose to poWer-above TrotSky and
others-with unprecedented violence and blood
shed. After that. in the 1930s, he deliberately
and Systematically carried out a policy that
starved to death millions of Russian peasants,
and in the same period he initiated his terrible
blood purges of Soviet military and political
leaders. Further, in addition to driving upward
Of 10 million of his subjects into slave-labor
camps, he wiped out in his time the 1nde-
pendence of the Balts, the Poles the Bulgarians,
the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Czechs
and the East Germans And then he moved
in Asia, bringing the Chinese under his control
and making the cold war hot in Korea. The
whip, the secret police firing squads, political
oppression, religious persecution, the Iron Cur
tain, rigid censorship, ceaSeless propaganda
of monumental lies, an almost lunatlc SELF
glorification of his leadership virulent obstruc-
ton in the United Nations, ceaseless hate
campaign against America and the West IN
general-all this was lis contribution to the
peace of the world and the well-being and
happiness of mankind.
Yet Russian tears are being shed today for
Joseph Stain. Why? Why should he be mourned
anywhere? If one seeks an answer, one could
do worse than re-read George OrwelPS 1884"
In the Soviet Union most of the old values have
been transvalued into the exaSt opposite OF
themselves. The mass mind, exposed to a
never-ending barrage of truth-upending propa-
ganda, has begun to lose the meaning OF
meaning. Slavery is freedom; wrong is right;
bad is good; villains are heroes; and the now
dead dictator was a man who championed
human liberty strove earnestly with con-
centration camps and one of the worlds lowest
living standards) to make his country para
disc, and fought to the last to preserve peace
with such measures as the aggression in Korea.
The end of Stain, of course, does not
mean the end of the conspratorial system that
has thus turned everything upside down and
pushed mankind toward the brink of global
catastrophe. Indeed, conceivably, his passing
may make that system even worse Possibly
he himself may rest in peace now, but the
living world, because of the evil he and his
dictatorship have wrought in it, can know no
real security until the thing he personihed
ceases to be the terrible threat it still is.