The Goons of August

It's the 75th anniversary of something polite leftwingers usually pass over in silence;

Just one week after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (officially the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) on August 23, 1939, the Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. Two weeks later, following the terms of the pact, Soviet troops also invaded Poland.

The two sides celebrated their victory with a "brotherhood" parade of Red Army and Wehrmacht units who marched arm-in-arm through occupied Brest, watched over by Soviet Brigade Commander Semyon Krivoshein and German General Heinz Guderian, who stood side by side.

Poland found itself under two dictators, as did many baffled German Communists.

This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. Here Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labor camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbrück. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behavior of the guards, supervisors, police, and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler’s methods of dictatorship and terror.

And not only European Communists had some 'splainin to do to themselves. Including someone who became a mentor to a future POTUS;

That would be Frank Marshall Davis, an orthodox Stalinist of exceptional ferocity, with an absolutely sulfuric hatred of the United States. Davis joined the Communist Party USA after the Pact was signed, at the same time others were leaving the ranks, never to return. The Pact memorial would be an opportunity for Obama to provide a full profile of the man his handlers disguised simply as “Frank” in “Dreams From My Father.” If Frank Marshall Davis ever believed, said, or did anything with which Obama disagreed, a Stalin-Hitler Pact memorial would be the ideal time to set the record straight. After all, the Obama administration is the most transparent in history, with not a smidgeon of corruption. And of course, it would be another photo op he could use to raise funds. He could even bring along his travelling studio audience.

And possibly a future President;

Former First Lady and current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could also benefit. One of her mentors is Robert Treuhaft, a Stalinist lawyer who joined the Communist Party USA after the Stalin-Hitler Pact and served faithfully in the USSR’s alibi armory. Hillary Clinton, who interned for Treuhaft, could use a Pact memorial to clarify Treuhaft’s career, and explain why he left the Communist Party in 1958, as he claimed. And she could go on record if she ever disagreed with anything her Stalinist mentor believed, said or did.

That could prove enlightening, but as with Benghazi she might just say “what does it matter?”