For an intense if brief expression of unambigous evil, there is no beatting the Nazis. The immoral purity of the holocaust, the eradication of a people as a grand ideal, so clearly evident in the final solution, is unmatched anywhere else in human history. Still, communism murdered and enslaved far more human beings over a much longer stretch of time than national socialism ever did. So it's something that a responsible left ought to worry about that communism has so little opprobrium attached to it. Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe addresses the double standard:
The glamorization of communism is widespread. On West 4th Street in Manhattan, the popular KGB Bar is known for its literary readings and Soviet propaganda posters. In Los Angeles, the La La Ling boutique sells baby clothing emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's notorious henchman. At the House of Mao, a popular eatery in Singapore, waiters in Chinese army uniforms serve Long March Chicken, and a giant picture of Mao Zedong dominates one wall.
What can explain such ''communist chic?" How can people who wouldn't dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems of communism be anything less?
Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazis slaughtered some 21 million people, but the communist nightmare has lasted far longer and its death toll is far, far higher. Since 1917, communist regimes have sent more than 100 million victims to their graves -- and in places like North Korea, the deaths continue to this day. The historian R.J. Rummel, an expert on genocide and government mass murder, estimates that the Soviet Union alone annihilated nearly 62 million people: ''Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions; they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of . . . nothing."
Now I confess to owning a copy of the KGB Bar Reader, a collection of short stories first presented at that location. I suppose I would have purchased a Gestapo Bar Reader if the fiction were as good. But its hard to imagine anyone, let alone a conservative, giving the latter name to any enterprise. Don't get me wrong: the modern left is largely free from communism. But it is not yet offended by communism, and that strikes this reader as a moral problem for the left.
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