A lot of time is spent educating people on the atrocities of the Holocaust. The Nazis exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other “undesirables” in their crusade for racial superiority. What generally isn’t covered are the atrocities committed by one of our World War II allies, the Soviet Union. Like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union exterminated millions of innocent people but those genocides are seldom covered in schools because it’s only genocide when the enemy does it:
The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.
The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.
Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
Needless to say the United States government was willing to sweep the Soviet Union’s genocides under the rug because they were our friends and our friends could do no wrong. This story really demonstrates the extent states will go to propagandize people into believing in a war’s just cause. World War II is often considered a “good” war because the Nazis were really bad guys. That justification requires ignoring the Soviet Union, who we befriended, because they were also really bad guys. Effectively World War II can be defined as one set of really bad guys fighting another set of really bad guys. The United States sided with one genocidal state while other countries sided with the other genocidal state. Ultimately the side the United States allied with won so the genocides committed by the Soviet Union were thrown down the memory hold as the history books were written.