Why Today's World Must Understand the Crimes of Communism In Order to Survive

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
14 August '10

(Worthwhile to become familiar with the issue. Y.)

A relentless campaign has been waged by a tiny group of people to persuade Jews and Israelis to oppose the June 3, 2008, Prague Declaration, as if it were some horrible antisemitic document. This is a slanderously wrong claim. In fact, it is in the interest of Jews and Israelis to support this statement and the ideas that lie behind it. Here’s why.

The declaration was signed by a number of Central European leaders, former dissidents against the Soviet empire, and historians, all with impeccable democratic credentials and known as people fair and friendly toward the Jewish people. It states that Europe must have “an honest and thorough debate on all the totalitarian crimes of the past century.”

As part of this debate, it argues, “Communist ideology is directly responsible for crimes against humanity” and that “consciousness of the crimes against humanity committed by the Communist regimes throughout the continent must inform all European minds to the same extent as the Nazi regimes crimes did.”

On what basis is this declaration misrepresented? The argument is that the proposal would “equate” the crimes of the two systems and thus somehow subvert the memory of the Holocaust against Jews as a unique event.

Yet in fact what this posture does is:

--To make Jews the defenders of the Communist totalitarian system that murdered millions and tortured millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of Jews.

--To bury the fact that the Soviet Union systematically destroyed Jewish society including religion, community, and Yiddish.

--To make it impossible to acknowledge fully the sufferings of Jews under Communism which, in the post-1945 period, emerged as a major world force for antisemitism.

--To divide Jews from those who suffered under Communism, at least the non-Russians, intensifying the friction between them.

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