In June, the Victims of Communism Museum opened in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House—but with none of the attention that greeted other recent additions to the city’s cultural landscape. Yet its mission, Gary Dreyer argues, is more important than ever, with the horrors of Communist rule little known, especially by the young, while the Russian and Chinese governments, along with a number of Western leftists, wish to cover them up. Dreyer discusses the moral imperative of ensuring that this history is remembered correctly, and its special importance for Jews:
My grandparents, having survived the twin evils of Stalinism and Nazism as children, spent their adulthoods grappling with the corrupt, economically backward, and authoritarian police state of the post-Stalinist USSR, trying to bring up families in a climate of ratcheting anti-Semitism that deprived them and their children of work, education, and housing opportunities.
[Yet] discussing the history of the victims of Communism is hard. It takes intellectual honesty, empathy, and courage to do it right. And it is also controversial, not least because of the inevitable comparisons and contrasts between Soviet Stalinism and German National Socialism. Historians and Shoah survivors and their families and advocates have been loath even to discuss the notion of Communism having “victims” who can be analogized to those of the Nazis.
For many, the notion that these Soviet crimes can be described as “genocide” is deeply suspect and rooted in a desire, on the part of non-Germans in Europe, to evade responsibility for their participation in the murder of Jews during the Shoah. At worst, it is seen as a racist cudgel and perpetuation of the widespread myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which was central to Nazi propaganda and far-right conspiracy theorists both before and after World War II.
But in its quest to prevent the distortion of the historical record and preserve the distinctiveness of the Nazis’ crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, this approach not only gives short shrift to victims of Communism as a whole; it also erases the history of Soviet anti-Semitism and xenophobia, all while stilling the voices of Jewish victims of Communism from the former Soviet Union and eastern bloc. Public education and commemoration of the victims of Communism and National Socialism is not a one-or-the-other choice. Rather, both are essential for a healthy society that can proceed into the future with sufficient awareness of the errors and horrors of the past, whatever extreme end of the political spectrum those violent ideologies come from.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-dreyer/revive-american-anti-communism/