[This article is reprinted from the National Post]
In 1968, naive anti-establishment American and Canadian students considered themselves courageous for locking supine university presidents in their offices, throwing computers out of windows and even burning out-of-favour academics’ research work. They knew that in the free, indulgent West, their childish parody of a revolution would result in nothing more than a suspension from their studies.
In the same year truly courageous Moscow academic Yuri Glazov signed the famous “letter of the twelve,” protesting illegal arrests and trials of dissidents, knowing full well that this real act of revolution would result in a suspension of his human rights.
Glazov was predictably fired, meaning he was henceforth unemployable and deemed a “parasite” on the state. Warned by a friend, he narrowly avoided imprisonment on a trumped-up narcotics-dealing charge. Finally, through a stroke of luck, Glazov came with his family to the West, and in 1975 took up residence in Halifax as chair of the Russian Studies department at Dalhousie University, a position he held until shortly before his death in 1998.
[Yuri Glazov's family shortly before departure from Russia. From left to right: son Greg, Yuri, daughter Elena, wife Marina and son Jamie.]
An outstanding Canadian, Glazov deserves recognition, and so do many other brave dissidents for whom Canada has been a refuge. Nine million Canadians — that’s almost a third of us according to the 2006 census — came to these shores from communist-ruled countries. Many are now dead or very old. Their descendants deserve to see their sacrifices acknowledged and Canadians exposed to the full panoply of communist atrocities.
Prospects for educating Canadians about the human toll exacted by communism through their stories will brighten when a long-sought Ottawa Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarian Communism is completed, a project singled out for endorsement in the recent Throne Speech.
This memorial isn’t just a good idea, like an also-promised national Holocaust memorial, it is a necessary idea.
The exhaustively researched Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten. The highest term of opprobrium in Western culture, whether from leftists or rightists (rightly or wrongly) is “Nazi,” not “communist.” That’s not because Nazis and communists have been compared and Nazis found to be worse. It’s because people don’t know how bad communism was and is.
In 2006 the Swedish Ministry of Education initiated programs teaching the crimes of communism because a poll had revealed only 10% of Swedish youth could identify the Gulag. Canadian youth would not fare better. All educated Canadians associate the word “Auschwitz” with “genocide.” The equally horrific “Holodomor” is more likely to draw a blank stare.
Why has communism escaped the moral condemnation Nazism attracts in such exuberant degree? In recent years several scholars have addressed the question and provided a litany of reasons, amongst them:
z Stalin was a war ally and therefore escaped the postwar censure he deserved;
z Only since the fall of the Berlin Wall has the most damaging data emerged; by then witnesses were aging and focused on economic priorities;
z There was no Nuremburg, no Truth and Reconciliation moment for communism as there was for other genocidal regimes;
z Communist propaganda machines are extremely efficient at positive branding (Trudeau bought in; his fawning patronage of Fidel Castro was beyond contemptible).
But all reasons pale beside the glaring failure of left-wing intellectuals to admit — and to teach — that communism isn’t simply an unfortunate contingency of socialist passion but an ideology as immoral and implacably ruthless and dramatically consequential as Nazism.
Actually it is more than intellectuals’ failure, which suggests passivity; it was, and is, active avoidance. Yuri Glazov was proud to become a Canadian citizen, but was shocked and chagrined at the ignorance and even denial of communism’s crimes he found amongst his fellow academics. As his son Jamie Glazov noted in his 2009 book, United in Hate: the Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, “[W]hile we were cherishing our newfound freedom, we encountered … intellectuals in the universities who hated my parents for the story they had to tell …”
Left-wing intellectuals’ laundering of the truth about communism has translated into a vast lacuna in the teaching of 20th century history in our schools — one we can only hope the new memorial will help to fill.
The word “memorial” is somewhat misleading, though, suggesting that communism is a closed historical chapter. The fall of the Berlin Wall notwithstanding, communism in one guise or another still determines the fate of millions of hapless people around the globe. Victims in communist regimes are still starved, imprisoned, tortured and denied the most basic of human rights.
“Centre”? “Testament”? It is not too late to find a word to remind communism’s ongoing victims that right-thinking Canadians know the truth and will not abandon them.
To learn more about Yuri Glazov and the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award, click here.
Great article. I had students type a formal, cited research essay regarding the topic of their choice. One young lady researched the Cold War. Slowly, the light of veiled, violent facts is surfacing in our youth. I provided two of your articles for her to read to further her understanding.
Article lost me in the first sentence. 1968 – " … throwing computers out of windows …" would have required a crane. What computers existed that could have been thrown out of a window?
Typewriters, then. But you are right. He said "computers being thrown out of windows" so everything else he said in the article is wrong. Communism was indeed wonderful. Good thing we are trying it here now.
Who are you, that you dare say something as that?
Only a Godless bastard who have ben /are part from this criminal Organization can say something like that!
Apropos who is we and where you are traying what?
Computer terminals were common and widely used with the mainframe computers of that era. No crane required.
I agree with the thrust of the article – from the Soviet Union to Mao's China to Cuba, there has been a hideous coverup of the murderous record of Communisim that must be corrected
I saw that line too, but back then there were what were known as dumb terminals. They were the 60's equivalent to today's keybords but some also had a carriage printing mechanism much like a typewriter. There were also punch card stations that existed too. All were peripheral devices for the mainframe computer.
Anyway, students DID take over campus offices and classrooms back then and did a lot of damage. And there are still people who think nothng of the VietNamese boat people who died fleeing Communism but make a big deal out of miniscule mis-statements. These were human beings who lost their lives.
Wow James. You're really focused on am important issue
There were remote batch terminals connected to central main-frames. It'll do as a computer to idiots who also thing communism is anything other than slavery.
I have three propaganda posters in my office to remind me of the three most murderous ideologies in the 20th Century: Stalin taking the salute on Lenin's tomb, Mao with the red-flag waving masses behind him, and a Hitlerjugend poster (it being hard to find a poster of the man himself). In that order, you have the gold, silver, and bronze medal winners in the 20th Century's contest to pile up tens of millions of corpses in shallow graves. Never forget, never forgive.
The following are civilian deaths under Communism, on unofficial estimates based on extensive research, gives some sense of the scale and gravity of Communism's crimes against humanity:
U.S.S.R. – 20 million deaths, China – 65 million deaths,Vietnam – 1.5 million deaths
North Korea, 2 million deaths, Cambodia – 2 million deaths, Eastern Europe (inlcuding Ukraine in the 1930's) – 15 million deaths, Latin America – 150,000 deaths, Africa – 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan – 1.5 million deaths, International Communist parties not in power: – about 10,000 death. The total approaches the astronomical number 110+ million civilians killed by Communists.
Let's not quibble over exactly what the students threw out the window when they rioted and invaded school offices in the sixties and early seventies. The vandalism included typewriters and computer terminals (if that is the correct term).They also destroyed files and stole others to use for various purposes, and did lots of other damage. This happened at Columbia, Berkeley and countless other schools. I was in high school near Berkeley during the Berkeley troubles, and some of my low-life leftist classmates participated in vandalism at Berkeley and bragged about the fun they had. (Where were their stupid parents, you ask? Encouraging it.) The grovelling, appeasing administrations did almost nothing in response to any of this criminal behavior, refusing to press charges and letting the thugs off with trivial or no academic punishment. An exception was Sam Hayakawa, briefly head of San Francisco State, then and now a cesspool of leftist agitation. Sam faced down a mob of thousands and became a hero to decent people.
The United States and other countries also should have a monument to the victims of Communism, comparable in size and effort to the Holocaust Museum, placed on the Capitol Mall or some other location appropriate to its importance. Very few people know the monstrous history of Communicst totalitarianism.
How about a memorial to the victims of US-backed fascist regimes like Pinoshit's, Somoza's, the Shah's, Mobutus's ?
Marco
Most people are not on the left that I speak to. They are only agreeing with everything because it all sounds so decent–clean and green, save the earth, love one another, freedom to choose, equalization of property and wealth, everyone being healthy and cared for, etc., etc. Little do they know, or they don't want to know, that it's all a smoke screen. Like the grandmother I never knew in 1938 Austria said, "Nothing is going to happen in my country."
As the truth of communism and nazism fades away, there is a new and dummified breed coming up from the ranks who have no knowledge of the horrors of a dictatorship government. The U.S. government is glorifying everything to the point of camouflaging the underlying evilness of what their intentions are. My father-in-law was born in Nazi-occupied France. His family ran away to Morocco where his little brother was born. His brother had a wonderful childhood in Morocco. His brother didn't see all the people shot in front of him at the age of 9, or the Nazis bayonetting his mother, or the entire town's people locked away in a church only with paper and rats to eat. Eventually that church was burned down with the people in it. Now that they are in the U.S., my father-in-law is livid with anger about what's going on while his little brother is all excited about everything and will not listen to his older brother.