Behind the scenes, there are totalitarian nightmares
On September 19, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, passed a resolution on the Importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe. For the first time, an international organization officially judged National-Socialism and Communism by the same moral standard.
Of course, everyone knows how evil Nazism was, and how obnoxious is any kind of neo-Nazi resurgence. People have learned to hate and fight the Nazi idea, and combat neo-Nazism from the cradle.
The same cannot be said, however, of Communism, which, for two main reasons, for a long time has been presented as a lesser evil.
First, because the Communist Soviet Union joined the Western Allies in the military effort against Nazi Germany in World War II.
Second, because Soviet-directed regimes were in power in many Central and Eastern European countries after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and were thus able to control the historical memory of large portions of the non-Soviet world through a clever use of propaganda.
But Communism is no lesser evil. It has harassed, tormented, unjustly jailed, tortured and killed innocent human beings just like Nazism. Entire populations have been deported, sovereign countries dismembered, once independent nations militarily occupied. The Soviet Gulag has paralleled the Nazi lager in cruelty. Cynicism in war and peace has been always the rule for both ideologies. The totalitarian management of occupied societies has been the same.
And persecution of Jews took place also in Soviet Russia. Svetlana Alliluyeva (born Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina, 1926-2011), the daughter of Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili, 1878-1953), acknowledged it in her 1969 Only One Year: A Memoir. Louis Rapoport (1942-1991), an American writer and senior editor of The Jerusalem Post, documented the persecution in his Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990). German writer and journalist Arno Lustiger (1924-2012) confirmed that Jews were persecuted in Stalinist Russia in his Stalin And The Jews: The Red Book (New York: Enigma, 2004).
Read the article by Marco Respinti on MercatorNet.