IN A typically snide article last week, The Times newspaper, owned by the republican Rupert Murdoch, informed us that the Queen would not be attending the Holocaust Day ceremonies and that she would be "going on a shooting trip with her husband instead".
Apart from the fact that the Queen has a perfect right to absent herself from any event which she does not care to attend, Holocaust Day ceremonies were attended by Prince Charles. But do we really need another commemoration of the Holocaust? There are already plenty of such commemorations and I think that to add another is likely to dilute their impact - much in the way that too much wine makes you overused to it and so eventually spoils its good effects.
I do not say this out of any disrespect for the tribulations of the Jews in the Second World War. I have been to the original and most important Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and it was one of the most heartbreaking experiences imaginable: all those little lights in the darkness - little lights representing children murdered by the Nazis. Six million Jews were rounded up and slaughtered by Hitler's regime in what was surely one of the most appalling examples of human cruelty: we are driven to say "inhuman" cruelty. But it was by no means the only genocide and certainly not the biggest. To give credit to the promoters of the new Holocaust Day, they accept that fact; and that is why they ask for other acts of mass slaughter to be remembered too - such as the Rwanda massacres.
But in all this commemoration there is one genocide which gets forgotten, the Soviets' slaughter of their own countrymen. Hitler murdered his millions, but Stalin murdered his tens of millions. In the 1930s and 1940s, upwards of 40 million Russian workers were systematically killed in the interests of the Communist revolution. Yet this, the greatest enormity, is forgotten. Why? Because left-wing sympathisers in the West cannot bear to hear anything bad of the Soviet Union; cannot abide having their delusions stripped away. They refer to the Soviet system as "an experiment that failed" - as if it might once have had a chance of success. But no system built on lies and the deliberate falsification of reality can survive for long. Just you try believing that "up" is "down" or that you can pour a quart into a pint glass and see how far it gets you.
But the left-wing fellow travellers and university Marxists - Stalin called them "useful fools" - still have a romantic yearning after Communism that flies in the face of all reason and reality. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, supporters of the Socialist Fabian Society in England, wrote during Stalin's reign of terror: "Old people are always absorbed in something, usually themselves. We prefer to be absorbed in the Soviet Union." In 1931, that superannuated fantasist and transcendental egoist (who esteemed himself higher than Shakespeare) George Bernard Shaw, went on a visit to Stalin's Russia. So enamoured was he that he later wrote: "It is a real comfort to me, an old man, to be able to step into my grave with the knowledge that the civilisation of the world will be saved. It is here in Russia that I have actually been convinced that the new Communist system is capable of leading mankind out of its present crisis and save it from complete anarchy and ruin."
As Shaw was writing those words, "Uncle Joe" Stalin was murdering tens of millions of peasant farmers in the interests of "Socialism". It was all lies and corruption and a vision of hell on earth. Harold Laski believed the Soviets had the best health system in the world when the facts were that they had no health system at all and a TB epidemic was raging in Moscow. HG Wells was taken in by Communism and thought that we in Britain should emulate it - and also practise eugenics to help achieve it.
They are still around, these deluded fellow travellers. They have never apologised; never repented of their monstrous folly. The historian and lifelong Soviet sympathiser Eric Hobsbawm was interviewed by Michael Ignatiev on TV in October 1994. Ignatiev repeated what everyone knows, that in the 1930s millions were being murdered in Russia. He asked Hobsbawm: "Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?"
Hobsbawm answered, "Yes".
Quite apart from the fact that there never was a chance that Stalin's lies could ever lead to a decent political way of going on, rational politics must be governed by the principle that it is never right to do wrong in the hope that good may come of it. Will all those who sympathised with the evil empire please say a belated "Sorry" this morning?
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