We recently had a typically learned VDARE.COM discussion about the "Russian Germans", a distict ethnic group in some Western states. (See here and here). It inspired me to retrieve and post a column I wrote for the London Times back in 1990, about my experience with Russian Germans in Winnipeg, and about a book, Nina's Journey: A Memoir of Stalin's Russia and the Second World War, by Nina Markovna, an ethnic German from the Crimea. Markovna's story is interesting for a number of reasons, but I had completely forgotten writing this paragraph:

One point that emerges quickly is the sheer scale and nightmare intensity of Stalin's purges. One of Markovna's childhood memories is of inadvertently betraying her mother to a night of NKVD interrogation by remarking to a teacher that sugar was common before the Revolution. Another is of watching her mother and her aunt agreeing instantly to part forever after her uncle's deportation and death, fearing that further contact would attract informers and doom their children. Her uncle's crime: dressing a Christmas tree.

Emphasis added. We've noted that this year's Christophobe tactic is to smear resistance to The War Against Christmas as inspired by extremists, i.e. VDARE.COM. But it is the War Against Christmas itself that has long and disgusting roots.

And that makes War Against Christmas Deniers the spiritual, and sometime biological, descendants of Walter Duranty and the fellow-travelling American Left of the 1930s