Joe must go! Joe must go! Joe must go!
Yes! It’s time for us to take Joe out! I mean, the man is evil! Let’s not just take him out, let’s take him down, six feet down in the cold, cold ground!
Well, Josef Stalin was evil, and if any man deserved hanging, he did. The problem is, Joe’s already dead, and he’s been dead for more than sixty years.
Back in the day, they knew how to handle this. When Charles II took the throne as king of England, his royalist gang dug up the corpse of Oliver Cromwell. They hanged the son of a bitch and then chopped him into four pieces.
Even though Joe can’t be much to look at now1, doing the same to his raggedy ass would be far preferable to starting a shooting war with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, which is obviously becoming the consensus of the Beltway Elite, as described here in an excellent piece by Jeremy Schapiro at Brookings. Schapiro notes that Brookings has, in effect, already gone on record as endorsing “lethal” engagement with Putin in a report cosigned by eight Beltway heavyweights, Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do. It all sounds very grand and very important, but Schapiro notes a few flaws:
“[the report] rings with fury at Russian actions. And Russian actions are indeed outrageous. But moral indignation, no matter how righteous and satisfying, is not a strategy. A strategy needs to describe just how provision of American arms would make the situation better.”
Of course, providing American arms would do the exact opposite. As Schapiro points out, if you box a “monster” into a corner, he will fight, just as Saddam Hussein did. Do we really want to turn Russia into the “new Iraq”? Let’s hang Joe Stalin. It would be so much easier.
Afterwords
I’ve moaned before about the desire to avenge the centuries of suffering in Eastern Europe by taking out Vladimir, mostly using Anne Applebaum as my whipping girl. The crimes of Stalin, and of Soviet Communism in general, are in fact beyond belief, but the U.S. was not complicit in them. Winston Churchill, the neocon hero of heroes, wrote off Eastern Europe as soon as Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R. and, in his history of World War II, explains how he “traded” Poland for Greece with Stalin. FDR’s great (and only) sin at Yalta was not in accepting Stalin’s rule in Eastern Europe, which he could not possibly undo,2 but in thinking, and letting others think, that Stalin would prove “reasonable” once the war was done.
- Stalin was originally embalmed when he died in 1953 and his body put on display, along with Lenin’s, in Moscow. Lenin’s body is still on display, but Joe was taken out and buried in 1961. ↩︎
- In addition, there was no reason to believe that the atomic bomb would be ready for the coming showdown with Japan. Roosevelt had “used” the Soviets to do the killing, and the dying, in the war against Germany, and had hoped to use China to do the same with Japan. When the Chinese didn’t come through, he had “no choice” but to turn once more to Stalin. Fortunately, the atomic bomb did the job, and we didn’t have to accept a joint U.S./Soviet occupation of Japan, which the Japanese would not have enjoyed. ↩︎
