Historical Falsification in the Service of Pro-War Propaganda - World Socialist Web Site

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Historical falsification in the service of pro-war propaganda - World Socialist Web Site

 Excerpt:

It is within this context that Kramer [NYTIMES] puts forth the astonishing claim that World War II started with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland. He writes:

World War II began in what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine, at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in a military alliance. When that pact broke down in 1941, Germany attacked and fought from west to east across Ukraine.

This assertion is a violation of the basic chronology of the war. World War II began not with the Soviet entry into the eastern one-third of Poland on September 17, 1939 but with the Nazi blitzkrieg against the country’s eastern two-thirds on September 1, 1939.

The Times, confronted with a flood of hostile letters, cynically altered the sentence, without explanation, and in a manner that perpetuates the aim of the original falsification. The sentence was changed to read, “World War II reached what is now Ukraine in 1939 with a Soviet invasion into territory then controlled by Poland in western Ukraine…” The surreptitious verb swap does nothing to alter Kramer’s intention. The reader is meant to believe that the Soviet Union “started” WWII.