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Bust of Stalin is An Insult
Veterans organizations, visitors to the site, and local residents are among the many expressing their outrage
at the erection of a bust of Jozef Stalin at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. All agree the statue of the Soviet madman bust should be taken down, but the National D-Day Memorial Foundation says the
bust is not to honor Stalin, but to acknowledge his place in history as one of the Allied leaders in the fight against Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
The bust joins existing likenesses of U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, as well as
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, one of the organizations involved in the
protests against the statue, said he and others thought the prospect of a bust of Stalin was a joke when they first heard about it.
It was “too misplaced and ill-timed,” he said.
Edwards said the foundation tried to deflect some of the criticism by installing the bust at a private ceremony
and by adding a plaque that describes Stalin both as a wartime leader and as a genocidal dictator.
Stalin is infamous for his dictatorial rule of the Soviet Union, which ultimately led to the deaths of at least
20 million people, the largest number perishing during the terror famines he engineered in the early 1930s to collectivize Soviet agriculture. He also entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany, and only
became an ally of the Western democracies when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
To Poles, he is also the man who ordered the Katyn Massacre and was responsible for countless other crimes against Poland.
Placing his image at the D-Day Memorial is not only an insult to all who suffered under his control, but
historically incorrect: no Soviet troops were part of the D-Day invasion.
“This is not a World War II memorial,” Edwards said. “This is a D-Day memorial. If we focus
on the fact of it being a D-Day memorial, then there is … hardly any justification whatsoever” for Stalin being there.
The bust of Stalin must be removed. It is an insult to veterans, and all who suffered under his rule.
Contact your representatives in Washington and let them know how you feel.
Jeffery Fulgham is the Director of Development for the Day-Day Memorial Foundation (www.dday.org). You can contact him directly at jfulgham@dday.org; tel. (540) 586-DDAY. If you have internet access, you can sign an on-line petition in favor of the bust’s removal at the website http://stalinstatue.com/.
He Who Laughs Last ...
At a Pennsylvania Society luncheon in December 2008, then-Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) told some jokes
about Polish tickets deemed “tasteless” by a local paper. He asked first if there were any Polish people in the audience. When about ten people raised their hands, Specter went on, deeming the
number insignificant.
He forged ahead with some supposedly funny jokes, including the old one about the man who interrupted him
once, saying, “Hey, careful. I’m Polish!” Specter said he responded, “That’s OK — I’ll tell it more slowly.” He also told two other tasteless jokes in the same vein.
“No one walked out, but it was offensive,” one person told The Huffington Post. “I was offended, and I’m not Polish.”
Shortly after this incident, the PAJ reminded Specter that — whether he remembered it or not —
there were quite a few Poles in Pennsylvania, the state he represented, and they would remember him at election time.
And they did:
Rep. Joe Sestak defeated Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary, knocking the five-term senator
off the ballot in the upcoming election.
Now that’s funny! Szkoda!
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