Communism's victims deserve to be remembered

CFP ^ | May 13, 2005 | Michael M. Bates

[MikeEdwards]

On a reviewing stand next to Lenin’s tomb, President Bush watched as goose-stepping Russian soldiers paraded by with their hammer and sickle flags. It was a surreal moment. The threat of Communism was for many decades the defining geopolitical reality of our times.

The Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the gulags, show trials, re-education camps, the specter of nuclear annihilation, duck and cover drills at school and bomb shelters were all part of it. So were our military struggles in Korea and Vietnam, in which we lost more than 54,000 and 58,000 U.S. soldiers respectively.

Communism would bury us, the Soviet dictator haughtily proclaimed. We and other nations responded with increasingly powerful arsenals. Maintaining the strongest possible military preparedness wasn’t cheap, but our very existence was in jeopardy.

Mr. Bush was in Moscow for celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Allies defeating Nazi Germany. Victory over the Nazis was indispensable. They were led by a depraved monster whose crimes against humanity will never be forgotten.

That’s as it should be. Schools still teach about the estimated six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. They educate children in the despotic evil of Nazism.

At the same time, it should also be remembered that Hitler, with an estimated ten million deaths attributed to him, wasn’t the biggest killer of the 20th Century. He didn’t even rank second.

China’s Mao Zedong and Russia’s Joseph Stalin are the greatest mass murderers in history. They weren’t, like Hitler and his Nazis, national socialists. No, they were international socialists supposedly devoted to human liberation but in fact dedicated to the extermination of anyone deviating an iota from the often changing party line. . . . .

[Rocko]

Bump.

[GSlob]

Duplicate: The same article by the same author, may have been published in a different outlet:[www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1401987/posts]