Raymond Lloyd Questions Georgia's Celebration of Stalin

Attention John McCain: Did you know that Georgia still worships Stalin and has a large statue of the dictator on display in Gori? I didn't, until Raymond Lloyd emailed this question he asks of President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia

Apart from sending the Georgian military into South Ossetia on 8 August, the opening day of the Beijing Olympics and the Olympic Truce period, and the subsequent devastation of its capital Tskhinvali, democratic Georgia may have lost some sympathy by the sight in the centre of Gori of a statue of Stalin (and the portrayal of Josif Dzugasvili on a 500 lari gold coin of 1995), despite this tyrant being responsible for 42.6 million non-war dead, according to conservative estimates made by Rudolp Rummel in Death by Government ISBN 978-1-56000-927-6, democide by Stalin and his fellow Georgian Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria, head of the OGPU/NKVD/MVD predecessors of the KGB, which so traumatized the Russian people that few persons over the age of 65 have tried to stem the current slide into ex-KGB-dominated authoritarianism;

while the longterm guarantor of Georgia' democratic prosperity may be admission to the European Union, somewhat as Ireland's membership transcended five hundred years of British oppression, could not Georgia meanwhile claim some higher moral ground, beginning, say, on 9 April 2009, your 20th Day of National Unity, itself commemorating the massacre of 20 women by the soviet army in 1989, when you might consider making compensation payments for some of the crimes against humanity initiated personally by Stalin, such as to needy 80-90-year-old Ukrainian survivors of the worst genocidal famine in European history, when 6 000 000 persons were starved or beaten to death in 1932/1933; or to needy widows and orphans of the 22 000 Polish officers shot in Katyn, Kalinin (now Tver) and Kharkiv on the orders of Stalin and Beria of 5 March 1940, compensation which would not be expected to match that of democratic Germany to nazi victims, but more like independent Montenegro's decision in 2006 to make reparations for damage to Dubrovnik after it was shelled by the Montenegrin military in 1991/92?

Raymond LLOYD
Editor & Publisher
The Parity Democrat Westminster
www.shequality.org