[Sillaycheg]

On small rider to #27, when I mentioned the Lithuanians, I saw on the BBC website:

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Crossing Continents | Reopening Lithuania's old wounds

As for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they would be hilarious, if they weren't so sad:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I don't sit on the sidelines, I try to untangle, for myself, the tangled skein of truth and lies, when it comes to Nazi persecution, Communist persecution, and so on.

Finnish author Sofi Oksanen asks, pertinently, in an article in the Estonian press (must find my printouts of articles by her) why it is that the swastika is banned throughout Europe, but the hammer & sickle, representing the r?gime that sent millions to slave labour camps all over Russia (look at the map in Applebaum's book on pages 120-121), is regarded as quite OK to have on T-shirts, along with the head of Lenin (imagine Hitler's head T-shirts!). The article is at the following link. You won't be able to read it, but it is proof that I'm not making things up: http://www.epl.ee/artikkel/384915 ; (sirp & vasar = hammer and sickle; haakrist = swastika).

Let's stop quibbling about whether Joseph Stalin in person was as bad as Hitler in person, and look the facts squarely in the face: Stalin's r?gime was as murderous as Hitler's, if not more. That is what Solzhenitsyn was trying to convey by publishing his several works of non-fiction, or fact disguised as fiction to get it past the censor.

The specific aim of the Denisovich book, published during the Khrushchev thaw in 1962, was a brave attempt to draw the attention of ordinary Russians to the fact that their leaders had set up an irrational system of repression and slave labour, and what it felt like to be there in its midst.

The problem, when it comes to anti-Semitism is, as I have said, that there were indeed a lot of Jews that rose to key positions under the Soviets. That cannot be airbrushed away. But to liken the Soviet r?gime to a Jewish r?gime is calumny.

The fact that there has been anti-Semitism all over the world over the centuries is not relevant to the discussion as to whether the two r?gimes are comparable. (We even had a pogrom in York, England, in 1190.)

As for Russian pogroms, see:

Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The motto of all this is: "Two wrongs don't make a right". The dangerous double-think that is prevalent in some circles is that while the Nazi atrocities were structural, the Soviet ones were "mistakes". Rather a concatenation of mistakes to create a whole system like the Gulag...