0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
"Let there be floods of blood," declared Krasnaia gazeta, the official newspaper of the Red Army in 1918. From the enemies of the revolution, there should be "more blood, as much as possible."A few months before, the Bolsheviks had seized power from the provisional government that had been installed in the final days of Russia's Romanov dynasty. The revolution ushered in what would become a century of ghastly sadism.The world will mark the 100th anniversary of that revolution this November 7. Yet while the Soviet Union is no more and communism has been discredited in most eyes for many years, it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism.Few now dare question the degree of human misery that communism inflicted. Yet there were many, during its height, who fell victim to what Solzhenitsyn called "the desire not to know." They either refused to acknowledge the facts staring them in the face, or actively tried to cover them over with lies . . .. . . Despite this gruesome butcher's bill, you still find those who harbor a soft spot for communism. You see it in the posters and T-shirts lionizing the murderous Che Guevara. And in The New York Times' current series on the "Red Century," which includes pieces on "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism" ("Yes, there was repression behind the Iron Curtain. But it wasn't sexual") and "Lenin's Eco-Warriors" ("How did Russia... become a global pioneer in conservation? Much of the answer begins with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.")Pause for a moment to read those sentences with "Naziism" and "Hitler" in place of "socialism" and "Lenin." Yes, Hitler murdered millions of Jews, but...But?Moral vacuity like that partly explains the results of a poll last year for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. It found that 21 percent of young people said they would be willing to vote for a communist. It also found that a third of millennials think more people died under George W. Bush than under Stalin. Twenty-five percent of millennials who had heard of Lenin had a positive view of him.Santayana probably was not speaking the literal truth when he said those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. But forgetting the past certainly makes its repetition, or at least its imitation, more likely. Which is why the world would be doing the future a favor if it spent the next couple of months reflecting somberly on the past century of communism's blood-soaked history.
