Monday, December 27, 1937

EDITORIAL

Site Ed. Note: As history has long recorded, but as we are want to forget--as he became our ally and a major and indispensable ally at that--it is likely, though actual numbers are unknown, that as many atrocities as were committed by Hitler, were committed under the reign of Joseph Stalin, lasting until his death in 1953, and including his many post-war political "purges" of "enemies of the State", once his party allies--the difference of course being that the Stalinist atrocities were not systematically aimed at a particular group of people, identifiable only by a badge warn which read "Jude".

Moscow celebrated Christmas by disclosing that sixteen persons have been put to death for offenses against the Soviet. These high crimes ranged all the way from "stocking stores with buttons nobody wanted" and "storing window dummies in the cellar where they were ruined by water" to "killing a peasant woman worker."

And though there is an absurd incongruity in the nature of these misdeeds, though according to our Western standards it seems incredible to mete out identical punishment, capital punishment, at that, to the spoiler of window dummies and the murderer of a human being, by Papa Stalin's method of figuring the two crimes have a common denominator. The window dummies were State property. So was the peasant woman. She was a worker, and by gad, sir, you'll preserve Soviet property or feel the icy breath of the Communist Party officials on your neck!