Having recently published a book on fascism, I think I understand why so
many people refused to see the evil in communism. It was well-intentioned.
The Soviets were our allies in World War II. Communists spoke of socialism
and liberation, and their agents, friends and apologists in the U.S. were
comrades in arms with Americans battling racism. But it's worth remembering
how evil Communist governments really were. Stalin murdered more people than
Hitler. The hammer-and-sickle's stack of bones towers high above the
swastika's. "The Black Book of Communism," a scholarly accounting of
communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed
champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say
that number is too low.
If, after the moral cataclysm that was the Holocaust, you wish to say that
the Nazis were more evil than the Soviets, fine. But don't roll your eyes at
serious people who consider anti-communism no less honorable and righteous
than anti-Nazism. Look to the Holomodor in Ukraine, where 4 million to 6
million people were murdered and a culture largely erased. Terror, purges,
massacres, assassinations and the forced starvation of millions - these are
all horrors that we rightly associate with Nazism but somehow fail to
correlate with communism.
In 1974, when the New Yorker reviewed Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag
Archipelago," George Steiner wrote: "To infer that the Soviet Terror is as
hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral
indecency." When Ronald Reagan denounced the "evil empire" - because it was
evil and it was an empire - he too was accused of absurd oversimplification.
The real brutal oversimplification is the treacle we hear from Obama, that
victory in the Cold War was some Hallmark-movie lesson in global
hand-holding. The reality is that it was a long slog, and throughout, the
champions of "unity" wanted to capitulate to this evil, and the champions of
freedom were rewarded with ridicule.
"This is the moment," Obama proclaimed, "when every nation in Europe must
have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of
yesterday." Rodman and Solzhenitsyn understood that such talk was
dangerously naive. People free from the "shadows of yesterday" forget things
they swore never to forget.
Solzhenitsyn and Rodman are gone now, and a generation that learned such
hard lessons is leaving us too quickly. The amnesia bites a little deeper.