David Axe
In a bloody bid to consolidate his power and eliminate anyone he considered insufficiently loyal to himself, Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union for 29 brutal years starting in 1923, led what is now known as the Great Purge. Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin’s goons killed a million people. Some got show trials. Many didn’t.
The victims included tens of thousands of military officers. And in that sense, the entire Soviet Union fell victim to the Great Purge.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the German army faced a gutted Red Army – one that couldn’t think and wouldn’t fight, and very nearly lost the whole country to the Nazis before emergency reforms began to undo the Purge. Without bringing any justice to its victims, of course.
This is why US President-elect Donald Trump is so dangerous. In vowing to lead his own purge, Trump threatens to do to the US military what Stalin did to the Soviet military. Trump doesn’t plan to kill American military officers, but he may sack them in considerable numbers. (That said, Trump did post on social media that General Mark Milley, at the time head of the US armed forces, had committed a “treasonous act” that was “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Milley’s supposed crime was speaking to a Chinese general on a phone call.)
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