JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 917
[This post is a hybrid category bridging “Blank and Empty
Things” and “A History of Holes”—it is really an entry for blank and missing
things making holes]
1. The Soviet Union’s foreign minister Molotov1 wanted to make it very clear
to the rest of the world that his country was not bombing civilian targets in Finland during
the winter war of 1939/1940.
2. Molotov insisted that targets that were being bombed near
Finnish cities were actually airbases.
2.1 Also, since the
complaining FDR was over 4000 miles away there was no way that he could “see”
what was being bombed.
3. If there were civilian targets that looked as though they
were being bombed, then
3.1 they weren’t being bombed; and
3.2 if anything at all was going on the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was dropping
bread on the town’s/city’s starving inhabitants.
4. So far as
undefended, non-military targets were concerned, the Soviet
Union redefined “bomb” as “bread”.
5. Therefore, what
we’re seeing in this image above are not bombs, but bread; that, or the houses
were airbases, which would turn the bread back into bombs.
Molotov insisted that no civilians were direct targets of
Soviet bombing campaigns in Finland. Also, if there were people being killed in
these bombing raids they would necessarily and by definition be aircraft
workers or air bases support staff or other military personnel.
This strikingly designed image is from the 17 February 1940
issue of The Illustrated London News;
the design is by G.H. Davies, the phenomenal ILN draftsman, and elegantly (and forcefully) depicts the innards
of the bomb and its effect on its target.
It is a spectacular and brilliant presentation of the
new(ish) Soviet hybrid terror bomb that was being used in the non-existent
attacks on Finnish cities. [The 5’ bomb
was made to be deployed in two sections:
the front end of the bomb inside the false nose cone contains dozens of
incendiary bombs, released by a revolutions-generated cap propeller, which fall
away from the main section of the bomb, which contains a high explosive.]
Since the non-existent bombs that were not being used against
non-military installations and were actually bread, the Finns gave the weapons
the nickname of “Molotov’s Breadbaskets”.
This was just a down-right nasty bomb, and the illustration
shows it falling on and destroying a quiet town with no visible military
advantage. The town not being bombed was called Sortavala, which—after numerous Soviet
attacks in December 1939—was in actuality destroyed by Soviet air power on 2
February 1940.
The man ultimately responsible for this campaign and the
murder of millions of his own countrymen through means of induced starvation,
disappearances and ruthless killings—Joseph Stalin—was post mortem dispatched
in much the same manner as the reasoning listed above. Stalin was ignored to the point of
non-existence, de-Stalinized and left
entirely out of the 50-volume second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia2 published just a few years after his 1953
death. Stalin executed his brutal and long-time political compatriot Lavrentii Beria, (1899 - 1953)
right before his own death, ordering that people who owned the GSE to physically cut out the
Beria entry. It is unfortunate that Stalin could not have been denied his
existence 30 years earlier.
Molotov, on the other hand, in spite of his enormous sins
against humanity (as principle architect of the Great Terror, the extermination
of millions of Ukranians, and etc.) was finally removed from government
following Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns (i.e. by 1962) and managed to live out the rest of his life
alive, not dying until 1986 at the age of 96.
(The "Molotov Cocktail" by the way was not named for him by
Soviet soldiers or freedom fighters or whatever fighting for the USSR—it was
named for the petrol bomb used by Finnish soldiers and civilians fighting
against the Soviets invading their country in 1939/11940 and again in 1943/4)
Notes
1. In 1940 Molotov was the foreign minister of the Soviet Union, and had just completed negotiating the
Non-Aggression pact with Nazi Germany.
This gave the USSR free range for its relations (read “occupy/annex”)
Estonia, Bessarabia, Latvia and the Ukranian/Belorussian-occupied section of
Poland (to the Curzon Line), and to also conduct its war with Finland. The fierce Finns never lost their
independence, though they did lose a part of their country.
2. The GSE had a somewhat complicated publishing history,
winding up with 65 volumes over its two editions, constructed with very
questionable state-controlled X-Ray communist vision spectacles. There is so much in these volumes that is wrong/sanitized/fiction that I have no idea how a non-specialist might be able to use the thing.
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