The Communist holiday, May Day, continues to be widely celebrated. No one would openly celebrate a Nazi holiday today. But the evils of communism largely remain hidden.
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.Follow the links for an excellent discussion of the reasons our elite class is not interested in documents uncovering the horrors of the old USSR. The City Journal article also discusses what is happening with parts of the Soviet archives which became available to scholars a few years ago. Imagine a world in which a huge totalitarian country more-or-less dissolves and the scholars of the world are not interested in its formerly-secret archives. We live in that world.
Dennis Prager, who studied the Soviet system in graduate school, gives several reasons for the differences in the way people think of Nazis vs. Communists. At the end of the piece, he notes:
Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.One way to help the Left face reality: Turn May Day into "Victims of Communism Day".
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