On the eve of the 60th anniversary of liberating the civilization from Hitlerism, a world explores the essence of Holocaust lessons for a multitude of socio-political issues.
Regrettably, an article “Never forger communist crimes” by B. James (31 January 2005, page 18) has not been assessed with an Internet edition of Herald Sun (www.heraldsun.com.au), which narrows possibilities to broaden impression of a publication refereeing to a variety of recent media releases.
As understood a Melbourne writer alarms a world at a state of a public “so ignorant of communism and knowledgeable about Nazism when communism killed so many more”: “Why have so many Australians heard of Nazi criminals such Mengele and Eichman, while so few have heard of communist mass murderers such as Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov and Beria? We all know something about Auschwitz but how many of us could name any of camp complexes in China or the Soviet Union where millions suffered and died?”
Although your reader knows no name of camp complexes in China, North Korea or even in the former USSR, but a general definition “Gulag”, which murderous nature was at first stage disclosed to a Soviet reader and the world by the then prominent dissident, Russian writer, Nobel prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsin having deployed his own living expertise and attitudes towards national minorities, similarities and differences between Soviet methods and Hitler’s Kampf were gauged by your letter-writer much prior to visiting Auschwitz and many other Holocaust-era memorials.
Completely sharing a notion outlined with Herald Sun article that is “One of the imperatives for maintaining our knowledge of the Holocaust is to remind us of how many people were sucked into supporting it, and to prevent such a thing ever happening again” must definitely understand these obvious similarities and differences to avoid even a shadow of any confusion might be seen as “to dispute the facts, in some sort of parallel to Holocaust denial”.
As quite clear, similarities lie along the lines of murdering the infinite numbers of civilians to achieve political goals –communism in the USSR and erecting the Third Reich for the Aryans in a case of Nazi Germany. While annihilating the political enemies regardless of victims’ origins was a policy declared by communist forefathers much prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917 (and it was not their innovation, viewed from all run of the history), out-of-the-courts capital punishment -simply murdering the “biologically inferior” harmless population with any means possible, deploying specially developed technologies to industrialize the mass-killings, no further political/military gains, but to have particular human groups fully annihilated, had overshadowed all atrocities in the history recorded.
To many, this significant difference makes a parallel between Nazi-arranged Holocaust and worldwide communist crimes much less transparent.
Yes, communist crimes should much more substantially have been disclosed, aired and remembered – and in today’s mateship -ruled Australia if even “the number of dedicated communists could be fitted into a good-sized telephone box” locally. Ignorance of these crimes is probably not simply “a result of an embarrassment” of “Western leftists… who dominate the education institution and media…, as shamed of the extreme Left’s appalling record of liquidating opponents”, as concluded in Melbourne publication.
It seems, hereby is relevant to also mention Auschwitz-linked Richard Cohen’s suggestions (Evil Too Great to Grasp –or Remember, “The Washington Times”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40071-2005Jan26.html )
” For most people, it may become –it is already becoming –too dense a historic burden, a hideously heavy truth about who we can be, not just who we would like to be. Prince Harry just chucked it all. Someday, I fear, so shall we all and then –as it has in Rwanda and at Srebrenica –it will happen again. And again.”
Michael Kerjman (Australia) is member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
