http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUGkKKAogDs
Prager has an excellent point (actually a half-dozen of them).
On one location we had a Directional Driller trainee shipped in from Russia. (It's not uncommon for foreign nationals to show up as trainees for major service companies in the US oil patch, as those companies do work worldwide, and bring the foreign trainees over here to teach them how we do it).
I talked with the guy, and asked him what he thought of Stalin.
Stalin was his hero, the 'strongman' who had defeated Hitler and saved Mother Russia. He looked at Stalin like we might George Washington, and said almost all Russians felt that way about him. We never had the opportunity to discuss Lenin, but I must note that 'history' is colored by its teachers, who, in turn, will cater to those in power, warts and all.
The Company Hand (
The boss of the drilling location) had grandparents who had emigrated from the Ukraine and caught wind of that. The Russian was gone (off our location to parts unknown) within 24 hours. The Company Hand had heard of Stalin at his grandparent's knees.
As long as the Left controls the teaching of history and sees Communism as morally superior to Nazism because of the 'kinder, gentler', rhetoric of Communism that masks the bloody and brutal imposition thereof, and the ability to drown out the scattered staccato of those firing squads or the torment of the gulags with another starry-eyed chorus of 'This Land is Your Land', Communism will not be seen for the murderous system it is.
Apparently the seeming randomness of sporadic mass murder gets a pass over efficient, organized mass murder every time, and Siberia (for one) is a long way from the sympathy of a microphone. As long as you only murder your own, it is perceived as somehow less criminal (like the 50,000,000 sacrificed on the altar of convenience since
Roe).
Getting back on topic, though, the German atonement for the depredations of the Nazi regime has reached the point where being the 'not Nazi' has left Germany open to exploitation, and indeed conquest by elements of a religion that was known to admire the Nazis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrLyWWCNLRgThe seminal difference is that the Fuhrer was a man. Those who acted for him, acted for the philosophy of a mere mortal, no matter how they admired him, and the more they were reminded of his fallibility in the growing piles of rubble that were the trappings of their 'Thousand Year Reich', the easier it was to divest themselves of their indoctrination and walk away from the beliefs they held. It is usually only when confronted by the destruction of a philosophy that people will discard it, if then.
But those who go forth in Islamo-fascism have done so with the full support of their holy men, in the fulfillment of what they have ever been assured are the wishes of their deity. They create, through destruction of things 'offensive to the Prophet', a world that is difficult to bomb to worse than that which they surround themselves with. The idea of defeating that with the wonders of a more modern and free society has hit a snag in that some of those wonders will be embraced in the service of the initial goals, the remainder destroyed along with the objects of that
haram world that spawned them.
That will be a far harder philosophy to remove from Germany, and in doing so will bring forth ghosts of the deportations, the camps, and the horrors of the Holocaust. That penance for the past may be Germany's undoing.
Those spectres will make the task even harder to support, and even while that battle is being fought, there remain the philosophies of Marx and Engels to overcome, seductive to the young in their apparent naivete, but murderous in eventual result. Once again, the shadows of evil swirl above the German People, I only pray that somehow they can focus on the light.
