On Holocaust, Stalin's persecution campaigns, and attempts to minimize tragedy

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MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) - The U.S. Interfaith Alliance has made an unexpected statement. It has released an open letter to other religious leaders, politicians, and pundits calling for civility in public debate and to specifically refrain from using inappropriate references to the Holocaust and Nazis.

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) - The U.S. Interfaith Alliance has made an unexpected statement. It has released an open letter to other religious leaders, politicians, and pundits calling for civility in public debate and to specifically refrain from using inappropriate references to the Holocaust and Nazis.

In the letter, they write that they "have seen an alarming number of public figures use the Nazis and the Holocaust as metaphors in public debate on issues critical to" the United States.

For example, Richard Land, a leader and spokesperson in the Southern Baptist Convention, bestowed a "Joseph Mengele Award" on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief health care adviser to President Barack Obama.

Mengele was a sadistic Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on death camp inmates during World War II.

The American religious leaders, who usually appeal to the world never to forget the tragedy of Jews during the Nazi rule, have this time warned against attempts "to minimize the Holocaust, ...a tragic event in which the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews."

When the tragedy is mentioned too often and out of place, with ignoble intentions, is an insult to its victims.

Stalin's persecution campaigns were Russia's national Holocaust. Stalin's modern supporters in Russia say it never happened, while Western anti-Stalinists present our tragedy in a way that is painful to its victims and clearly pursues dishonest objectives.

For example, the recent article by Andrew Rettman published by EUobserver claims that RIA Novosti plans to "improve the image of Joseph Stalin", and "is trying to recruit one of the top 10 PR firms in Brussels to put the project in play."

The journalist apparently has a black-and-white view of the world, which, in his opinion, is divided into the flourishing and humane United States and European Union, and Putin's retrograde Russia, which is crawling back into the Stalinist era.

This is a silly and trite claim.

I can see where this burning desire to present Russia as the devil's advocate comes from. For years, Russia has been a "constituent other" for the West, first of all the U.S. and Western Europe. The news that there is a poor and totalitarian Russia somewhere east of Europe helps the Western media audiences to feel that they live in a prosperous and democratic country.

There is nothing new in the "I am good because I am not him" formula. Unfortunately, Russians also often use this self-contentment formula, seeing African countries, the poor countries of the Muslim East, etc., as the "constituents others."

This is an unworthy method that is no longer true to facts. Not all of Russia is poor and rightless, just as not all of Africa is backward and hungry. But EUobserver.com is still using this method. Indeed, why search for a better explanation or try to get one's bearings in the complexities of life in Russia when the old methods still work?

The attitude of the United States and Western Europe to Stalinism and its opponents is often questionable.

The bulk of American intellectuals stopped hailing Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a hero dissident back in the 1970s, when he questioned the perfection of the modern type of liberal democracy in his Harvard lecture.

The Western media often quoted John Paul II at the beginning of his papacy, when he mostly criticized the communist regime in Poland and other Soviet bloc countries. But when late in his life he turned his wrath on capitalism and its irresponsible way of life, his criticism was either disregarded or provoked evil attacks against him.

When Solzhenitsyn remained a patriot of Russia even under Putin, the West stopped writing about him at all.

The only Russian the West still respects is Andrei Sakharov, an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist, but that is only because he died in 1989. Given the current ideological intolerance in the United States and Western Europe, he and his convergence theory would have long been denounced.

In essence, the theory proposes that capitalism and communism - driven by the irresistible scientific and technological forces that control modern industrial states - will eventually coalesce into a new form of society, blending the personal freedom and profit motive of Western democracies with the communist system's government control of the economy.

Moreover, Western attitude to anti-Stalinist literature has recently deteriorated. The dramatic reduction of allocations to Slavic studies in the West, from Vancouver to Tokyo, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union showed that the West needed poets Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva only for political reasons. This is evidence that a free Russian literature has no independent value for an overwhelming majority of Western decision-makers.

And now these people, who clamped down on Solzhenitsyn's late-period work and described John Paul II as a supporter of Fidel Castro after the Pope's visit to Cuba, want to teach us how to combat Stalinism. This is silly and dishonorable.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

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