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Entry: Hitchens's Trotskyite Morality Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/hitchenss_trotskyite_morality#30714 Post contents: It's not the crime, it's who commits it; an offense is only condemnable if it's perpetrated by a condemnable person or group. For instance: The murder tally in Bolshevik Russia from 1918-1941 is 20 to 30 million victims, depending on your sources. No one puts the figure at less than 15 million. The revolution, the subsequent civil war, the terror, enforced collectivization, the engineered Ukrainian famine, purges... A Marxist omlette demands cracking an entire generation of eggs. Will that blood-drenched horror ever attract the relentless memorialization of the Nazis' World War II Holocaust? Of course not. Stalin's victims are faceless nonentities, sacrificial offerings to a noble cause. Yes... the methods may have been... <i>extreme</i>. But, after all, the Soviets were attempting to create a workers' paradise on our imperfect earth. Evidently, that required genocidal purgatory to temper and forge the New Soviet Man into the pure Communist automaton so cherished and idealized. Marx and Lenin had little use for Gentile peasants - just read their stuff if you doubt that. And Lavrenti Beria wasn't exactly a Southern Baptist, <i>now was he</i>. One group is always victim, another group is always <i>victimizer</i>. Same methods, different appraisal. One slaughter is a world-shattering crime, the other a... misguided experiment. One never, ever, ever forgotten - the other <i>chronically</i> forgiven. The Soviet Union's victims were stamped "peasants" and forgotten. No books, no movies, no PBS documentaries, no awareness training seminars, no endless museums and officially mandated public grief/guilt rituals. Peasants. Forgotten. History belongs to the winners. Sent at: 2008 12 01