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fourier jr
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from Bill Blum's latest Anti-Empire Report:
some "liberal media" they are...
ahhh the perfect antidote to the NYT, CNN, FOX, etc etcThe Wonderful World of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism is alive and well in the Washington, DC area. There's going to be a new statue, very near the Capitol: The Victims of Communism Memorial, which will honor an estimated 100 million people killed or tortured under communist rule, a monument established by an Act of Congress.
Also coming soon: A Cold War Museum in nearby Virginia, to be located on a former Nike Missile Base and affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. The state of Virginia has allocated a $125,000 matching grant for the museum. Francis Gary Powers, Jr., son of the man whose U-2 spy plane was forced to crash land in the Soviet Union in 1960, is the motivating force behind the museum and the associated online magazine Cold War Times. The journal is hardly a corrective to the many anti-communist myths Americans were spoon fed, from their church sermons to their comic books, which have hardened into historical concrete.
It may be difficult for young people today to believe, but the lies fed to the American people and the world about the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and communism (or "communism") were much more routine and flagrant than the lies of the past few years concerning Iraq and terrorism, the most flagrant and basic lie being the existence of something called the International Communist Conspiracy, seeking to take over the world and subvert everything decent and holy. (In actuality, what there was was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes that didn't coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the US moved to crush those governments and those movements, even though the Soviet Union or China was playing hardly any role at all in the great majority of those scenarios.)
I don't know how those behind the memorial arrived at their figure of 100 million victims. I would guess that they'd be hard pressed to explain it themselves. On their own website one finds this: "In less than 100 years, Communism has claimed more than 100 million lives." So here they're saying it's more than 100 million even without including those tortured.
We've all heard the figures many times ... 10 million ... 20 million ... 40 million ... 60 million ... died under Stalin. But what does the number mean, whichever number you choose? Of course many people died under Stalin, many people died under Roosevelt, and many people are still dying under Bush. Dying appears to be a natural phenomenon in every country. The question is how did those people die under Stalin? Did they die from the famines that plagued the USSR in the 1920s and 30s? Did the Bolsheviks deliberately create those famines? How? Why? More people certainly died in India in the 20th century from famines than in the Soviet Union, but no one accuses India of the mass murder of its own citizens. Were millions actually murdered in cold blood in the Soviet Union? If so, how? The logistics of murdering tens of millions of people is daunting.
The ideological hijacking of history is never a pretty sight. Who, it must be asked, will build the Victims of Anti-Communism Memorial and Museum? To document and remember the abominable death, destruction, torture, and violation of human rights under the banner of fighting "communism", that we know under various names: Vietnam, Laos, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, El Salvador, Cambodia, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil, Greece, Argentina, Nicaragua, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and others.
some "liberal media" they are...
But i think we can agree that bolshevism is not communism, nor leninism, trotskyism, stalinism, etc.