Red Holocaust

My nephew's junior high school is devoting a month to teach about the Holocaust to him and his fellow eighth-graders, requiring them to read a book, watch a movie and write several reports on this important subject.

As they and students nationwide are taught the horrors of Nazism, however, I won't hold my breath waiting for our educators to teach much or anything about the grand-scale horrors borne of an equally evil ideology: communism.

While growing up during the Cold War era, I'd seen many movies and documentaries and read books, both in and outside of Oceanside schools, about Hitler's atrocities. Why then did it take me until my late-20s to finally discover the collective horrors committed by Communist dictators?

I've become so fascinated with this question that I plan to write a book answering why communism's legacy -- marked by widespread poverty and unprecedented mass death (an estimated 100 million people were killed under Marxist regimes) -- is far less known and taught compared with Nazism's history.

Initially, I discovered communism's legacy on my own by reading Russian authors Ayn Rand and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who both survived the Soviet slave state. Recently, I completed The Black Book of Communism, the most comprehensive tome on Marxist utopias, whose ever-present political imprisonments, tortures and executions continue today.

I've learned that in Soviet Russia the mass murders began immediately under Vladimir Lenin and peaked with Joseph Stalin, who from 1932 to 1933 systematically starved an estimated 6 to 10 million peasants in Ukraine after they rebelled against his collectivized farm system. Under the Soviets, tens of millions of people were deported to forced-labor camps (many in frigid Siberia) where most of them perished.

Mao Tse-tung can unquestionably be called history's worst mass murderer, having orchestrated a massive famine from 1959 to 1961 that killed between 20 and 43 million Chinese, and overall the communist dictator slaughtered some 65 million people.

During Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, a third of that nation's citizens were sacrificed in what is the greatest proportion of a population exterminated under a communist dictatorship.

It is disgraceful that educators either never teach, give short shrift to, or rationalize away the horrors in these and other nations that practiced communism or still do in North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. Yet a fundamental and complete understanding of both Nazism and Communism requires that they be taught together -- since they represent two sides of the same ideological coin.

At root, both ideologies preach that each individual must be sacrificed to a group and the state, be it "the master race" under an Aryan dictatorship or "the working class" under a dictatorship of the proletariat; that the individual has no right to his life, liberty, property or the pursuit of his own happiness; that he must obey the dictates of the state; and that physical force is a justifiable means to effect these ends.

As with the Holocaust, the horrors of Communism have their deniers and apologists. The difference is that Nazi sympathizers are properly condemned and shunned, but gulag deniers hold high positions in our universities. These professors and their former students who are in education, the mainstream media and government still preach that communism is noble in theory but failed in practice. In reality and like Nazism, Communism failed miserably in practice because it is evil in theory.

That their ideologies inevitably lead to mass death is the most important lesson students can learn about their totalitarian regimes. But how will they learn this lesson when communism and its history are virtually ignored, or its ideology is still taught as noble?

For starters, educators can assign their students novels such as Ayn Rand's We the Living, to introduce them to Marxist ideals and the perpetual hopelessness and fear people suffer living under a communist state, and Solzehenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which reveals the brutality of the Soviet labor camps.

We cannot expect the horrors of history's bloodiest regimes to never happen again if our educators fail to teach students about the corrupt ideas that gave rise to them.

Joseph Kellard is a journalist living in New York. To read more of Mr. Kellard's commentary, visit his website The American Individualist at americanindividualist.blogspot.com.