A posting in Debating Europe: Should it be illegal to deny the crimes of communism?
discussing democracy and freedom of speech and hate speech. My two cents on the subject:
Crimes against humanity should not be proscribed and forgotten. We should not allow ourselves to forget and forgive actions which are unforgivable. Some ideologies are criminal by design, such as fascism and nazism with their base of racism and national superiority and they should not be allowed to exist in our society. Many crimes were committed in the name of communism and they shouldn’t be forgotten either. I once heard a nazi occupation and holocaust survivor ask a man who was deported by the Soviets to Siberia during WWII: “What’s the difference between nazism and communism, if they both murdered people on a massive scale?” the reply was: “Nazis intended to exterminate people, communists just did it because it was the war”. The man wasn’t a communist sympathiser, by any measure, although it was before Solzhenitsyn’s books described the full extent and horror of the Soviet gulags. Every day there are fewer witnesses who saw these horrors in person, that’s why it’s essential that we remember and remind the younger generations that nazism wasn’t only cool uniforms, and communism wasn’t only cool anti-Americanism.
And we are not talking about collateral damage, however brutal the war may have been, whether WWII or the Gulf War II. We are talking about the systematic, intentional elimination of millions of people, which was perpetrated with scientific precision by nazis and with less organisation but still very effectively by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Not to mention the Khmer Rouge or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which beat records of their own. Incidentally, Stalin is still revered in Russia, while Mao’s portrait still hangs on the walls of Tien An Men square.