November 30 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the most misunderstood but instructive conflicts of the 20^th century: the “Winter War” between Russia and Finland.

There is no “ideological spectrum,” and all those vile misologies that arose in the last century – Fascism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism – are masks that hide men obscenely obsessed with godlike power over other men.  Orwell grasped this perfectly when he wrote of those “nasty little isms,” and anyone who has read 1984 sees how the absence of any real coherent system of values is not only possible in, but indispensable to totalitarianism.  The notional ideology of Oceania, for example, was “Ingsoc,” or English Socialism, but that term was devoid of any real meaning. 

It was also Orwell who penned that vital principle of all totalitarianisms: “He who controls the past controls the future.  He who controls the present controls the past.”  So Eastasia, which had recently been an ally of Oceania, not only ceased in one day being that ally, but became the enemy of Oceania…and the politically correct history was rewritten so that Eastasia had always been the enemy of Oceania.  The Winter War shows this in practice. 

The whole period of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was meticulously rewritten after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941.  Almost at once, communist operatives around the world discovered that Stalin had been “playing for time” and had always known what Hitler had been planning.  This is utterly wrong.  As Solzhenitsyn famously noted, Stalin trusted only one man his whole life, and that man was Hitler.  The Non-Aggression Pact was actually a firm alliance between Nazism and Communism, which pointedly excluded Fascism. 

I cover all this exhaustively in my two-volume book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, which relies exclusively on books published while history was actually being made.   During the Winter War, Fascist Black Shirts angrily stormed the Soviet embassy and threw rocks through its windows.  Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Fascist foreign minister denounced the attack on Finland as the worst example of big-power aggression in modern history.  Hundreds of Fascist pilots volunteered to fight for Finland, and Italy supplied its most modern warplanes to the Finns to fight the Soviets.  Mussolini withdrew the Italian ambassador from Moscow, ending what had been a long romance between the Fascists and Bolsheviks (largely aimed against the Nazis), and Il Duce wrote an angry letter to Hitler regarding the Soviet attack on Finland, which Hitler did not even deign to reply to for months.  

What was the Nazi reaction to the Soviet invasion of Finland?  Most historians simply note that Finland was part of the Soviet sphere of influence in the nonaggression agreement, so Germany could not openly oppose Russia.  In fact, Germany strongly supported the Soviet attack on Finland.  German media simply reproduced as its own stories the Soviet reporting of the Winter War.  The Nazis blocked the shipment of arms to the Finns, threatening Sweden (and also Denmark) with war if Sweden allowed transit of arms from the West, and blocking arms from every other nation that tried to help the Finns. 

The Nazis provided shelter for fleeing Soviet diplomats in the German embassy.  When the Red Army was bogged down in hopeless fighting along the Mannerheim Line, the Nazis provided Stalin not only with the plans for that line (which had been built earlier with German help), but also provided military advisors who showed the Soviets how to break through the Mannerheim Line.  Not only that, but the German Army helped in the complete reorganization of the Red Army, which included (1) complete dissolution of the military commissars, (2) reintroduction of ranks in the army and navy, (3) strict insistence upon the salute and other features of military discipline, and (4) elite formations. 

This tight alliance of Communists and Nazis against the rest of the world extended throughout Scandinavia.  The only nation that recognized the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States was Nazi Germany, and the only nation that recognized the Nazi occupation of Demark and Norway was Communist Russia.  The Red Navy broke through with icebreakers a path for German merchant raiders to operate against British shipping in the Pacific.  The German Navy put specific major naval vessels at the disposal of the Kremlin. 

As in so many other areas leading right up to the day that Operation Barbarossa began, the Communists and Nazis – the “Communazis,” as patriotic Americans rightly described them – worked in concert against liberty and the Judeo-Christian values of the West.  Hitler and Stalin fell out, as leaders of vile gangs so often do, because each in his dark soul believed only in power itself.  That is the hidden history of the Winter War.