LETTERS: IS COMMUNISM REALLY DEAD

To the editor:

Recently I received this letter from my son, Ted, who contends that communism is criminal in nature. And that is surely true. Ted is a former professor at Southeast Missouri State University who lives at Lehigh Acres, Fla. Here is his letter:

Nearly 10 years after the crackup and fall of the Communist system, I am still waiting for an explanation of the most murderous form of government in human history. So far, none has been offered by the media for public consumption.

All we have seen is a slow return and readjustment to the prerevolutionary days in Russia.

It is as though a country lost 70 years of its own history.

There were no victory parades with confetti raining down on Wall Street, no long-winded speeches by members of Congress and the president, no universal day of celebration with days off from work and school.

No war-crimes tribunals or charges of crimes against humanity. No depositions and demands for reparations by survivors of concentration camps. No condemnations by the United Nations. No confessions and apologies by the perpetrators. No prison sentences or executions meted out in the name of justice.

Seventy years of inhuman Soviet-style slavery and a policy of ethnic extermination and displacement passed away into an eerie and unnatural silence, aided and abetted by the American media, which has given communism a pass and free ride through the sin of omission.

I am still waiting for CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, TLC, A&E, the Discovery and History channels to offer extended, in-depth series focusing on the lives and crimes of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and thousands of their anonymous henchmen who remain unpunished and have been quietly rehabilitated into the mainstream of history.

The reason for this oversight and trivialization of history is both deliberate and programmatic.

Communism is alive and well, thriving in our universities, the arts, the media, in race-baiting, class warfare, the field of entertainment, in artificially induced gender wars, ethnic hyphenations, in the stifling of majority dissent, proactive hostility to Christianity and the undermining of common law. It is called political correctness.

A single example will suffice to make my larger point. Most American universities now have political commissars in place (affirmative action officers) who oversee the ideological purity of the campus and whose purpose is to inspire fear and suppress the expression of free thought and speech in the classroom.

One could begin to balance the scales of history by admitting to the fact and invention of the concentration-camp system in Soviet Russia (gulags) and by naming names.

Some 200 million human beings perished in the holocaust of socialist utopias in our century, yet 97 percent of the collective victims are forgotten in favor of a diminutive 3 percent who receive 97 percent of the unrelenting media attention, amounting to overkill.

This constant preoccupation and obsession with a select minority of victims raises suspicions of hidden guilt hiding behind too much protestation in the name of special interests.

I'm still waiting for a free and open museum complex for the victims of communism to be built right next door to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C.

This gesture by our government would go far to correct the balance sheet of evil perpetrated by criminals on a worldwide basis in the name of communism.

The criminal nature of communism should be taught in our schools and given yearly observances, supported and publicized by newspapers, films a la "Schindler's List" and with prizes awarded for the best student essays written on the subject.

Whole nations have been condemned to collective and ethnic guilt in our century, yet when it comes to the revelation of the origin and evils of communism, it apparently seems as though nothing ever happened as far as the media and popular imagination are concerned.

It is an old truism and observation of human nature that victims become victimizers. This has been the main theme of American history in the last 40 years, disguised under the label of universal equality. It is equally true that repression, revision and censorship of the objective truth ends in history always repeating itself ad nauseum.

Signed Ted Hirschfield.

HERBERT HIRSCHFELD

Cape Girardeau