Jeff Jacoby righteously – and rightfully – condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism.
If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Leading publishers would never have brought out his books, his works would not have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the head of Portugal’s government would never have said on his death — as Prime Minister José Sócrates did say last week — that he was “one of our great cultural figures and his disappearance has left our culture poorer.” But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an “unabashed” (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s hardline Communist Party, Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist’’ who in all the years since had “found nothing better.” …the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Armando Valladares and Dith Pran. In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power. Mass murder and terror have always been intrinsic to communism. “Many archives and witnesses prove conclusively,’’ wrote Stéphane Courtois in his introduction to “The Black Book of Communism,’’ a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, “that terror has always been one of the basic ingredients of modern communism.’’ The uniqueness of the Holocaust notwithstanding, the savageries of communism and of Nazism are morally interchangeable — except that the former began much earlier than the latter, lasted much longer, and shed far more blood.
[…] are (or should be) nauseated by anybody who expresses sympathy for Nazism, and we should have the same approachfor those who express any support for its sister ideology of […]
[…] Just as with those who try to defend of justify Nazism, those who try to defend and justify Marxism deserve nothing but scorn from all decent people. […]
[…] are (or should be) nauseated by anybody who expresses sympathy for Nazism, and we should have the same approachfor those who express any support for its sister ideology of […]
[…] are (or should be) nauseated by anybody who expresses sympathy for Nazism, and we should have the same approach for those who express any support for its sister ideology of […]
[…] I’ve weighed in on that issue, and I strongly recommend what Jeff Jacoby wrote on the issue as […]
[…] Amén. He analizado este tema y recomiendo encarecidamente lo que Jeff Jacoby también escribió sobre el tema. […]
[…] I’ve weighed in on that issue, and I strongly recommend what Jeff Jacoby wrote on the issue as […]
[…] I’ve weighed in on that issue, and I strongly recommend what Jeff Jacoby wrote on the issue as […]
[…] of all decent people to condemn all forms of totalitarianism. Frankly, I’m not interested in the debate over whether communism was worse than Nazism, or […]
[…] resulting in mass murder. As Dennis Prager noted in his video, both communism and Nazism are horrid ideologies. Yet for some bizarre reason, some so-called intellectuals still defend the […]
[…] in mass murder. As Dennis Prager noted in his video, both communism and Nazism are horrid ideologies. Yet for some bizarre reason, some so-called intellectuals still defendthe […]
[…] resulting in mass murder. As Dennis Prager noted in his video, both communism and Nazism are horrid ideologies. Yet for some bizarre reason, some so-called intellectuals still defend the […]
[…] resulting in mass murder. As Dennis Prager noted in his video, both communism and Nazism are horrid ideologies. Yet for some bizarre reason, some so-called intellectuals still defend the […]
[…] I have a new reason to admire Estonia. Having experienced the brutality of both fascism and communism, they have little tolerance for those who make excuses for totalitarianism. And the issue […]
[…] I have a new reason to admire Estonia. Having experienced the brutality of both fascism and communism, they have little tolerance for those who make excuses for totalitarianism. And the issue has […]
[…] like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the North Korean Kim dynasty either killed more than Hitler, or butchered higher proportions of their […]
Communism and Nazism- The Great Similarities http://iakovosalhadeff.hubpages.com/hub/Communism-Nazism-Two-of-a-kind
[…] pena ler na íntegra A Grim Reminder of the Pervasive Evil of Communism, de Dan Mitchell. Like its evil twin of Nazism, communism is an utterly despicable ideology that explicitly elevates the state over the […]
[…] its evil twin of Nazism, communism is an utterly despicable ideology that explicitly elevates the state over the […]
[…] Is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra really oblivious to the monstrous nature of Soviet Communism? Would they feature a swastika in an ad for concert featuring the music of a German composer who produced works in 1938? I hope not, just like I can’t imagine an architecture exhibit on the work of Albert Speer featuring a swastika (other than in a way designed to connote evil). Nothing positive should be associated with horrid regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. […]
[…] Is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra really oblivious to the monstrous nature of Soviet Communism? Would they feature a swastika in an ad for concert featuring the music of a German composer who produced works in 1938? I hope not, just like I can’t imagine an architecture exhibit on the work of Albert Speer featuring a swastika (other than in a way designed to connote evil). Nothing positive should be associated with horrid regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. […]