Posted on 08/09/2018 2:27:44 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Of all the extraordinary things about "Schindler's List," perhaps the most striking is that it was nearly 50 years after Oskar Schindler's risky acts of heroism before someone made a movie about him.
In coming to terms with genocide-something we've had to do a lot of in this century-there seem to be several stages. The first is denial. The second is to acknowledge what happened. And a third is to look for the Schindlers.
Because so much has been written about Germans coming to terms with the Holocaust, we often forget that Russians face a similar task. Stalin held power twice as long as Hitler, and died more recently. During his rule, most historians now estimate, he was responsible for 20 million deaths.
Recently, I lived in Russia for six months to study how Russians, now that they could talk and write freely, were dealing with this.
For there were brave souls in Russia, during even the darkest of times. Most did not survive. I found, however, that few Russians care to remember such people. Their lonely heroism sheds too harsh a light on all those who collaborated with the regime, who satisfied the secret police's relentless appetite for denunciations, even when it meant sending friends or neighbors to their deaths.
The guilty, in this sense, include millions of parents and grandparents of people now alive. Most people don't yet want to look at this all too deeply. It is too painful.
Hence, few Russians are searching for their Schindlers. It will be a measure of Russia's health when [they] are at last recognized-and honored.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.chicagotribune.com ...
Ping.
Interesting. Anne Applebaum’s book on the Gulag suggested that the Russians wanted to ‘talk about something else’. Denial-even when it comes to their heroes. Their feet should be held to the fire on their past. Just ask the Polocks and the Ukrainians. As for the Russians still living in Eastern Europe that should be brought out in the open.
Curious how leftists are continually calling everyone Hitler and fascists. Never a mention of Stalin or communism or Mao.
Maybe the quick comeback to their name calling is call them communists and Stalins.
Yes, absolutely. If Solzhenitsyn told us anything, its that Communists tried to extinguish morality and conscience by brute force and murder.
Russia will become moral again by embracing its Christian past, not through post-modern liberalism, Wall Street finance, consumerism, materialism or multiculturalism.
Are they succeeding? I don't know. I'll let others predict.
Polocks?
Polaks-sorry.
And just think:
Democrats here can’t WAIT to play Stalin, Mao, Che, all over again... because like, you know, THIS time, it’ll work...
Well put PGR. Russia was uniquely placed to be the moral leader of the free world, but this failure to reckon with their past is precisely what held them back!
Trump’s America with all its quirks and imperfections is now re-leading the Western world which now includes Poland, Hungary, and much of the decommunized, de-Sovietized Eastern bloc.
This new post-Cold War coalition is charting the moral course for the world and it’s up to Russia to choose to follow.
Right now, they lag.
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