re: "Biden's defense secretary pick pledges to 'rid our ranks of racists and extremists'"

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Austin said he would focus strategically on Asia, and China, in particular. Asked about China’s goal of developing a military that is superior to that of the United States, Austin said he aimed to work to ensure that “never happens.”

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The first hint of the slaughter to come emerged at a conference of the Communist Party in March 1937, just as Stalin’s Great Purge was reaching its heights of terror. The craven, incompetent commissar for war, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, told those assembled: “Happily, we have not as yet discovered many enemies in the army. I can say happily in the hope that there are not very many enemies in the Red Army.” But Stalin’s ranking lackey, Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, immediately contradicted Voroshilov. “If we have wreckers in every branch of the economy, can we imagine that in one place alone, the War Department, there are none?” said Molotov ominously.

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The rigorous examination of the army that Molotov had threatened actually had started seven months earlier with the arrest of a divisional commander in Kiev, Dmitri Shmidt. A supporter of Trotsky, Shmidt once had threatened to lop off Stalin’s ears with his sword. In what would become standard treatment at the hands of the NKVD, Shmidt confessed to plotting to assassinate Voroshilov, then received what became the standard consequence for such apostasy—a bullet to the back of the head. A corps commander close to Tukhachevky was arrested next, confessed in turn to plotting with Trotsky, and was shot as well.

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In Nazi Germany, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich forged documents showing Tukhachevsky and other generals were plotting with them against Stalin, and had them passed to Stalin through the president of Czechoslovakia.

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It took just two days for Tukhachevsky to sign a confession to being a Nazi spy. When his interrogation record was uncovered decades later after the fall of communism, the pages were splattered with blood—chilling evidence of the kind of force used to break the physically imposing Tukhachevsky.

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"The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies. But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks,”

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