That or something pretty close. Recently I posted concerning Bush's Yalta comments. I included this passage from the British Guardian:
The ordinary Soviet people were not only numberless victims of war, but they failed to achieve any political reform as a result of their triumph. Yet it is their exceptional sacrifice that we should remember as we look back over 60 years. And in the end the peoples of eastern Europe were unquestionably better off under the new communist regimes than under German imperial domination. German plans by the middle of the war foresaw the deliberate starvation of at least 35 million people in the east as "useless eaters", and the genocidal destruction of the Jewish and Gypsy populations. The eastern peoples were described in German documents as the "helots" of the new empire. This grotesque imperial fantasy was won or lost on the eastern front, and who can regret its defeat?
The passage is by Richard Overy, author of The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Today I read this in the Star Tribune:
[I]t was the Russians (and the Chinese, who tied down most of the Japanese Army) who paid most of the price in human lives for defeating the Axis. That deserves respect, as does the fact that the Red Army actually did liberate Eastern Europe from something far worse than Communism. By mid-war, the Nazi regime planned not only to exterminate the Jews and the Gypsies, but to starve 35 million "useless eaters" in Eastern Europe to make room for German settlers.
This is by Gwynne Dyer, author of forthcoming Future Tense: The Coming World Order. That's awfully close to be an accident. I'm skeptical that it amounts to plagiarism, and I have no way of knowing which piece was filed when, but someone saved themselves some effort without giving proper credit.
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