The Progressive-Left's Communist Holocaust Denial

Judson Phillips, leader of Tea Party Nation, is trending at Memeorandum for his statement that...

I detest and despise everything the left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me...

Actually, the numbers of those killed under communist totalitarianism probably don't reach one billion for the 20th century, but certainly hundreds of millions were killed during the rule of the Soviets to Communist China, with a turn at genocide in the "paradise" of Cambodia. One commenter at Alan Colmes' "Liberaland" compares the history of left-wing genocide to U.S. support for "death squads in El Salvador." That's the kind of moral equivalence that allows the left's search for ideological utopia to continue and thrive. Jamie Glazov wrote on this specifically, "Cold War Revelations and 'Progressive' Holocaust Denial":

The Western "progressive" milieu's refusal to acknowledge Communist crimes is, of course, rooted in that disease with which we have become all too familiar in the second half of the twentieth century: anti-Americanism. It explains well why not one Revisionist historian, including Gabriel Kolko, has come forward to apologize for his errors. However, the refusal to acknowledge grievous faults on the Cold War, and to seek refuge in other politically correct orthodoxies, is all part of a larger phenomenon: Holocaust denial. A clear analogy can be made between the neo-Nazi Holocaust denial and the Left's refusal to acknowledge Communist Holocaust. In denying that the genocide of Jews occurred, Holocaust denial perpetuates anti-Semitism and keeps it alive. By erasing historical memory, Holocaust denial gives birth to moral relativism, which, in turn, instills a mindset that facilitates the possibility of yet another Holocaust. Holocaust denial, in other words, is the craving for another Holocaust.

This is precisely the case in the Western Left's refusal to acknowledge the genocidal consequences of the socialist idea in the twentieth century. The causes of this Holocaust denial are directly rooted in the Holocaust itself. The Nazi Holocaust, for instance, was the logical outcome of anti-Semitism, but anti-Semites need to keep anti-Semitism alive. Thus, anti-Semitism's existence is kept alive easier if its darkest consequences are supported but simultaneously denied. So too, if Stalinism was the inevitable result of the pursuit of equality, then the belief in the possibility of equality must be kept alive by the socialist milieu. The historical memory and significance of the Gulag, however, must be wiped out.

It's the progressive-left's Communist Holocaust denial. It's alive. And it's deadly.

PHOTO CREDITS: Wikipedia Commons.