If you’re a Jew I want you to say these next five sentences out loud, because they are true, and hard to say if you were brought up on Holocaust-centered Judaism.
Stalin was worse than Hitler, and killed at least twice as many people.
Mao was MUCH worse than Hitler, and killed nearly eight times as many people.
The communist holocaust was worse than Hitler’s Holocaust.
Communism is worse than Nazism.
Hiter’s Holocaust was not unique.
I never go out of shul during Yizkor. I stay in, even though both my parents are alive, thank God. I say Yizkor for my grandparents and give tzedaka in their memory. But when everyone comes back in and says אל מלא רחמים for our six million that were murdered by Nazis, I say another one for the 55 million murdered by Communists…
Hitler’s Holocaust should be remembered and commemorated by Jews. It is a Jewish issue, and that’s it. If non Jews want to also commemorate it, good, fine. But there should be absolutely no government involvement in Holocaust education. And if there is, all holocausts should be covered equally in proportion to the amount of people murdered in each, and it should be explained that government is the cause of all holocausts, every single one of them.
Let me add one final, important thought. People, especially Jews, see Holocaust commemoration as of paramount importance because if you forget history, it will repeat itself. We remember the Holocaust with the mantra “never again”. I will say that the danger of another Communist-type holocaust caused by overzealous government regulators trying to “innocently restructure the economy” because they are so wise and are trying to create a socialist utopia is much more likely than a repeat of a Nazi-type Holocaust where a bunch of racists try to create a master race by killing everyone else.
* A decade ago, Ernst Nolte, then of the Free University of Berlin, ignited the Historikerstreit, or dispute of historians, and became the target of a campaign of defamation led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, by asking: “Didn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ come before Auschwitz? Wasn’t the ‘class murder’ of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the ‘race murder’ of the National Socialists?” These are still good questions. In fact, Stalinist—and Maoist—offenses, while acknowledged, are generally downplayed and have achieved nothing remotely approaching the publicity of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. In the United States, it is possible for a person who keeps abreast of the news media to encounter references to the Holocaust virtually every day of his life. Yet who has heard of Kolyma, where more people were done to death than the present official count for Auschwitz? The figures for the victims of Maoist rule that are starting to come out of China suggest a total in the range of tens of millions. Do these facts even make a dent in public consciousness?
Pointing to Communist crimes is not meant to “trivialize” the destruction of European Jewry, nor can it do so. The massacre of the Jews was one of the worst things that ever happened. But even supposing that it was the worst thing that ever happened, couldn’t some arrangement be worked out whereby Communist mass-murders are mentioned once for every ten times (or hundred times?) the Holocaust is brought up? Perhaps also, if we must have publicly- financed museums commemorating the foreign victims of foreign regimes, some memorial to the victims of Communism might be considered, not on the Mall itself, of course, but maybe in a low rent area of Washington?
