The beauty of the Internet is that it allows serious dissident voices an immediate reply to what Matt Giwer calls "slut media." Take this Wall Street Journal article of October 25, 1999, titled "The Gruesome Consequences Of a Political Idea." Its author is one Jacob Heilbrunn:
Heilbrunn:
The history of communism has not just been about terror, torture, deportations and massacres. It has also been about the illusions of Western intellectuals. Whether it is Günter Grass receiving the Nobel Prize partly for his novelistic effusions about the coziness of East Germany or revisionist historians playing down Stalin's culpability for the great purges, communism has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a reputation as an ideology that supposedly pursued lofty humanitarian ends, even if it went astray at times. Indeed, the big intellectual no-no has been to liken it to the other great totalitarian movement of the 20th century -- Nazism.
Zundelsite:
That is rich! Notice how this author attempts to both blur and discredit Revisionism. No true Revisionist has downplayed Stalin's crimes. Communist apologists in academia - many of them old line Stalinist Marxist intellectuals - have downplayed the revelations of the Red Terror. Revisionist scholars have been vilified by these Ivory Tower Parlor Reds for years for alerting the world to the Red Menace.
Heilbrunn:
So when "The Black Book of Communism" appeared in Europe in 1997 detailing communism's crimes, it created a furor. Scrupulously documented and soberly written by several historians, it is a masterful work. It is, in fact, a reckoning. With this translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, English-language readers may now see for themselves what all the commotion was about.
Zundelsite:
1997? Germany's National Socialist press and book publishers produced hundreds of books from 1933 on about the Soviet Gulag Terror System - publications which the foreign press dutifully ignored, running interference for the Soviet Terror System. Durante of the New York Times is one notorious name that springs immediately to mind.
Heilbrunn:
In his introduction, StÈphane Courtois, himself a former communist, breaks with the postwar taboo on comparing the Gulag with the Holocaust. He notes that the communist body count of more than 100 million exceeds that of the Nazis. He compares the "class genocide" of communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism and states that both were "crimes against humanity."
Zundelsite:
Imagine that! Cooly jumping from an implied "six million" to a cool 100 million in one terse sentence! That is how history is being "revised" by the system - with utter chutzpah and total disregard that people can think for themselves and can add and subtract on their fingers!
No wailing or gnashing of teeth? No detailing of the horrors? Just coldly "revising" the numbers up by 90 plus million people? No wonder liberalism is bankrupt.
Heilbrunn:
So controversial was this comparison that two of Mr. Courtois's editor-collaborators -- Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin -- later distanced themselves from what he wrote. And predictably, the French left lashed itself into a frenzy, denouncing the book's contributors for traducing the noble communist fight against fascism.
Zundelsite:
So what have we here all of a sudden? A new school of neo-Marxist revisionism?
Heilbrunn:
In Germany, by contrast, Mr. Courtois's views met with a somewhat less chilly reception. A decade before a bitter historians' dispute had erupted when leftist intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas accused conservative historians of attempting to whitewash the Nazi past by playing up communist atrocities, which some, not all, were indeed trying to do. But this didn't justify the left's refusal to confront the horrors of communism.
Zundelsite:
It seems the Revisionist movement has held the leftist establishment historians' feet to the fire long enough that their toenails are finally melting and their iron grip around the liberal mindset is loosening. When that avalanche begins to roll and the Jewish involvement in the planning and execution of these millions of Bolshevism's victims become public - that will be one spectacle to behold!
Heilbrunn:
Eventually, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the revelation of communist abuses in East Germany helped to overturn old dogmas, and "The Black Book" prompted many Germans to take another look at the relationship between communism and Nazism.
Zundelsite:
Still desperately trying to salvage what can no longer be salvaged? 20 million German soldiers and civilians who had seen and experienced Bolshevism at work first hand did not need to take another look. Most lie in unmarked graves.
Heilbrunn:
That relationship may never be fully understood. But the Russian Red Terror, in its emphasis on the elimination of entire classes of peoples, in its description of opponents as "vermin" to be exterminated, does seem like a precursor of the German concentration camps. Moreover, Nazism profited greatly not only from Lenin's and Stalin's Gulag system -- Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, solicited reports about the operations of Soviet camps -- but also from Bolshevism itself, which served as both a whipping boy and, at times, a political idea that could be collaborated with. The two ideologies validated each other.
Zundelsite:
Interesting. Hitler, the sworn enemy of Bolshevism, had a non-aggression pact, negotiated with Stalin, in the vain hope that this could keep the peace in Europe. Only when Stalin's plan to invade Western Europe became known to him, did he launch his preventive strike in 1941. And who collaborated, armed, supported, financed and protected that murderous Stalin Gulag regime? The ever-so-smug Western Allies. It was Hitler who tried to defeat this curse of mankind. The West saved it and helped it to succeed.
Heilbrunn:
After World War II, the prestige of the Soviet Union was at its height. The country had fought on the side of the democracies, U.S. war propaganda had painted pipe-smoking "Uncle Joe Stalin" as a friendly fellow. In Europe, communists made a comeback in France, Italy and Germany with the flowering of the myth that communists were merely heroic anti-fascist freedom fighters. Thus the gruesome Soviet record was suppressed.
Zundelsite:
And who fostered that fuzzy, confusing image? Mostly Jewish intellectuals in the West who had infiltrated the media and diplomatic circles. Think Alger Hiss, Blunt, the Rosenbergs etc.
Heilbrunn:
"That the Soviet Union had paid the heaviest human toll for its victory over Nazism," writes Mr. Werth, "served to mask the character of the Stalinist dictatorship." In fact, "the Soviet prisons had never held as many prisoners as they did in the year of victory: a grand total of nearly 5.5 million people."
Zundelsite:
Those prisoners, obviously anti-Stalin system people, were there because the U.S., Canada, Britain and the other Allies never objected to their incarceration. They thus share responsibility and guilt for their dreadful fate.
Heilbrunn:
Mr. Werth astutely notes that the Gulag was filled with "criminals" because almost any action, however innocuous, could be branded as illegal dissent. The Gulag, you might say, was the distilled essence of the Soviet Union. Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes, the Soviet Union began to unravel, however slowly, having lost its reason for being.
Zundelsite:
Yep! Just like it is happening in Germany today - where once again the media and political leaders of the West (once again many of them Jewish!) blithely ignore the anti-democratic repression practiced by their German puppet state. Just like they did with Stalin when he criminalized people who were in his way and dangerous to their Marxist-Jewish agenda.
Heilbrunn:
After the halo wore off the Soviet Union, China emerged as a new beacon for credulous Westerners. Mr. Margolin writes that "one myth was common in the West: the idea that China was far from being a model democracy, but that at least Mao had managed to give a bowl of rice to every Chinese person." In fact, nothing was further than the truth. Mao, like Stalin, deliberately engineered a famine that killed untold millions.
Zundelsite:
Note: Not even an estimate is given of the number of victims! Why? Because China is still a useful tool - and the powers that be dare not offend them.
Heilbrunn:
Today the hermit kingdom of North Korea is, by all accounts, continuing this tradition by systematically starving much of its population. Pierre Rigoulot estimates in "The Black Book" that the regime has already killed 500,000 people through malnutrition. Over the past 50 years, he concludes, North Korea's Communist Party has wiped out three million people in a country of 23 million. The more we learn about communism, the worse it appears.
Zundelsite:
Yet they teach Marxism as a legitimate and viable alternative in American, German, British and Canadian schools and universities! No Marxists are drummed out of school or otherwise financially punished - like Keegstra, Ross, or Doug Collins. Marxists still get mollycoddled by the courts and subsidized by the governments.
Heilbrunn:
Still, communism remains in better odor than Nazism. Martin Malia, in his fine foreword to this edition of "The Black Book," observes that, whereas Nazism was defeated at the height of its evil, "by the time of communism's fall the liberal world had had fifty years to settle into a double standard regarding its two late adversaries." Indeed, almost no communist officials have been put on trial and communist parties have become reborn under new names in Poland, the former East Germany and other countries. Yet when Jörg Haider, the far-right leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, comes in second in national elections, as he did a few weeks ago, the Western media sound the alarm.
Zundelsite:
Artificial hysterical is the term - meant to reflect from the evil deeds and murderous record of Bolshevism, Marxism etc. The age-old "Hold the thief!" is employed by those in charge to save face and not to have to take responsibility for the fact that the Western elites were accessories to mass murder since 1919.
Heilbrunn:
Is this a double-standard? Or was there something uniquely odious about Nazism that justifies the different response? This work is surely not the last word on the subject, but it superbly illuminates the shocking record of communist regimes and their Western votaries.
Zundelsite:
Keep digging, Mr. Heilbrunn! Keep digging. More than a double standard will appear.
(Mr. Heilbrunn is a senior editor of The New Republic.)
The New Republic has confused more American intellectuals for longer than any other publication - with the notable exception of the New York Times, which has lied about the goals, tactics and record of Marxism's monstrous spawns since their inception! And now these scribblers are trying to join the "Revisionist" ranks?
Ever heard of rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic?
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Thought for the Day:
"The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
(- Benjamin Disraeli, first Prime Minister of England, in a novel he published in 1844 called "Coningsby, the New Generation")