Park here.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more -- why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion than "Nazi?"

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-shirts.
This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a great deal about ourselves today.

Here, then, are seven reasons.

1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example, were members of other Soviet nationalities.

The Nazis, on the other hand, killed very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs and members of other "non-Aryan" and "inferior" groups.

"World opinion" - that vapid amoral concept - deems the murder of members of one's group far less noteworthy than the murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from "world opinion." But if an Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it makes the front page of world newspapers.

2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories.

Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history, are seduced by words -- so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less significant. Communism's words are far more intellectually and morally appealing than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis. The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine (though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine), whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and inevitable results of Nazi ideology.

This seduction by words while ignoring deeds has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about vile deeds?

3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia, Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian historian Donald Rayfield, "people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin's holocaust."

Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China.

Until Russia and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism, communism's evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of the German state under Hitler.

4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.

5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man, woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder. The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe communism. As the French put it, "pas d'enemis a la gauche," which in English means "no enemies on the left." This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban communism. Check your local university's courses and see how many classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the number of classes about Nazism's immoral record.

7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last "good war" America fought was World War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard America's wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and Chinese) communism is simply ignored.

Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely, the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.

Linky

Recently, I posted a piece at Townhall in which I suggested that Mrs. Obama is not, to put it mildly, my ideal. I stated that so long as the president and the first lady are Democrats, the media can’t stop rhapsodizing about them. So it was that John Kennedy, who had huge jowls, Bill Clinton, who looked like a taller version of W.C. Fields, and Barack Obama, who has Dumbo’s ears, have all been described in terms that would have made Cary Grant blush.

Hillary Clinton, so far as the media was concerned, was nothing less than the most brilliant woman in America. Now we have Mrs. Obama, a rather plain woman, being passed off as a movie queen.
I did go on to admit that the First Lady was not my ideal representative of American womanhood. And, yes, I used the b---h word. Intemperate? Perhaps. But with all the kissing-up she gets from the MSM, I felt someone should use honest language when pointing out that the empress is naked.

In my defense, I did it in context. I reminded you that this woman sat in Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years, soaking up his racist rants, and then had him marry her and Barack, as well as baptize their children. Furthermore, she had gotten into an Ivy League school, thanks to Affirmative Action, and then showed her gratitude by writing a racist screed for her college thesis. For good measure, she used that degree to get a $125,000-a-year job in Chicago, which coincidentally jumped to over $300,000 once her husband went to the Illinois state senate. And, finally, after all that, she announced to the world that America is a mean country and that the first time she was proud of this nation was when her husband deigned to run for president.

Suddenly, I was receiving scores of angry and obscene e-mails, mainly from blacks, taking me to task for, one, saying that Michelle Obama is ugly because she’s black, and that I was a bigot because I thought blacks should all be back on the plantation.
Now God knows I have received more than my share of negative e-mails. When I suggest that it’s time to end the War on Drugs or give credit to George Bush for preventing another 9/11 or that Israel deserves the support of all decent people in its nonstop battle with Islamic barbarians, I fully expect to hear from readers who disagree with me. It’s a point of pride with me that I answer all my e-mails, whether they’re complimentary or otherwise. But these e-mails were nearly without exception vicious, crude and, what’s more, not on point. It’s bad enough being attacked for what you’ve actually written without getting clobbered for what you haven’t.

While it’s true that I stated that I thought it was absurd for Mrs. Obama to be posing for every glamour magazine, as if she were a movie queen, I never said that she was ugly because she’s black, anymore than I took their race into consideration when I set the record straight about the looks of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
Finally, I received an e-mail with a link to the Huffington Post. I clicked on it and all was revealed. It seems that a fellow named Chris Kelly had devoted a column to me.

To be fair, which is more than Mr. Kelly was, all the words he quoted had appeared in my piece. The only thing missing was the context, but that’s likely to happen when you excerpt a hundred or so words out of a piece that ran about 750. Of course he peppered the piece with nasty comments, but that at least was his prerogative.
For good measure, he put Townhall in its place. At least he tried to, although writing that Townhall is the “Internet home of culture warriors Dennis Prager, Bill Bennett and Michael Medved” sounds more like an advertising slogan to me than a putdown.

Later in the piece, Kelly quoted the following from an article I wrote a while back: “If we were a racist society, Oprah Winfrey wouldn’t be a billionaire; she’d be fetching someone’s mint julep. And Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice wouldn’t grow up to be secretaries of state; they’d be sweeping out the stables. And Will Smith and Denzel Washington wouldn’t be movie stars; they’d be in the fields picking cotton.”
Even taken out of context, it seems pretty clear that I was simply drawing a comparison between America in 2009 and Mississippi in 1859, a comparison that even those, like Attorney General Holder, who insist this is still a racist nation, could easily grasp.

Along the way, Mr. Kelly took a couple of gratuitous pot shots at Christians because Townhall is owned by a Christian radio network, a fact I was aware of, and that Hugh Hewitt is its executive editor, which is something I hadn’t known.
The worst thing about being labeled a racist is that denying it gets you nowhere. Still, a long time ago, I wrote, and still believe, that anyone who hates another person because of his race, his religion or his sexual proclivity, is just being lazy, because, with just the slightest effort, you can usually find a far better reason to despise him.

That brings us to Mr. Chris Kelly and the introduction to his piece, in which he wrote: “Burt Prelutsky was a TV writer a long time ago. Then he aged out of it and became a crank. This wasn’t one of those major losses like Steinbeck. Now he writes a column for Townhall.com, the popular website owned by a Christian radio network.”
For openers, I can’t tell you what the crack about John Steinbeck means. I’m afraid you’ll have to figure that one out for yourselves. But, for the record, I have always been cranky and I hate to see it attributed to age. I do know, however, that someone who writes for a website owned by Arianna Huffington is in no position to be throwing stones at anyone else’s website.

All kidding aside, when this schnook dismisses ageism in Hollywood, an insidious practice that has led to suicide, bankruptcy and broken homes, in such a cavalier fashion, I take it personally and he should be ashamed of himself.
I must confess that I had never heard of Kelly and had to research him on the Internet. His writing career began in 1990, so I am assuming he’s in his mid to late 40s. In which case, ageism being as rampant as it is in this town, Mr. Kelly, all I can say is, tick, tock, tick, tock.

My research also disclosed that he has written for the following TV series: “Sports Monster,” “TV Nation” featuring Michael Moore, “She TV,” “House of Buggin,” “The Whizzard of Ow,” “Twins,” “Grounded for Life” and “Cavemen”. Have you ever seen any of these shows? Have you ever even heard of them?
Along the way, he put in a year with David Letterman. Of late, he has tied his career to Bill Maher, and his nose to Bill Maher’s heinie, following him from “Politically Incorrect” to “Real Time.”

Now, far be it from me to criticize a fellow writer, but being one of eight or ten guys sitting in a room with Bill Maher coming up with lame jokes about Rush Limbaugh isn’t the sort of thing that John Steinbeck or I considered real writing.
I mean, it’s bad enough having a bunch of boorish illiterates calling me a lot of dirty names. But when your credits include “MASH,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “McMillan & Wife,” “Bob Newhart,” “Rhoda,” “Diagnosis Murder,” “Family Ties” and a bunch of award-winning TV movies, you really have to wonder what the world is coming to when you wind up being insulted by some schmo who wrote for “House of Buggin” and “The Whizzard of Om”.

Link

G-20 ENDS US ECONOMIC SOVEREIGNTY
This is the second video clip. I was thrilled that over 53,000 people watched the first one! The media about the G-20 is filled with the news of $1.1 trillion in stimulus spending, but the larger point is almost missed entirely: the tremendous grant of regulatory and supervisory power over our economy to international -- primarily European -- organs! I call it the repeal of the Declaration of Independence.
dickmorris.com

In my defense, I did it in context. I reminded you that this woman sat in Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years, soaking up his racist rants, and then had him marry her and Barack, as well as baptize their children. Furthermore, she had gotten into an Ivy League school, thanks to Affirmative Action, and then showed her gratitude by writing a racist screed for her college thesis. For good measure, she used that degree to get a $125,000-a-year job in Chicago, which coincidentally jumped to over $300,000 once her husband went to the Illinois state senate. And, finally, after all that, she announced to the world that America is a mean country and that the first time she was proud of this nation was when her husband deigned to run for president.

A long day. 8 am to 8:30 pm with no power naps!