Communists Have No Memory

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[This is particularly interesting considering the venue of 
publication.--DC]

Pravda
Communists Have No Memory
Paul Weyrich
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003
The Communist Party is growing again in Russia.

Last year, 18,000 new recruits joined, 80 percent of whom 
are under 40 years of age. The reasons given were to 
"protest current conditions" and because of their "dislike 
of [Vladimir] Putin and Company."

It is understandable why older people might have found the 
Communist system attractive. They were brought up under it 
and were looking forward to retirement on a pension, which 
was worth something, even though there was little they could 
buy.

But to have young people attracted to the Communists is 
something else. Most of them have little remembrance of the 
era when the Soviet system was still going strong. Back 
then, Putin was an official of the feared KGB. What an irony 
for younger people to join the Communists to protest Putin.

In any case, for all its difficulties, Russia today is a far 
different place than it was when Gorbachev took over. While 
the government has curbed independent network television, 
the number of independent print media outlets is legion. 
There are also independent radio stations and out in fairly 
remote places even independent cable channels.

When the Communists ran things, you read and heard only what 
the government wanted you to hear. Broadcasts from outside 
Russia were jammed. You couldn't even buy an independent 
foreign publication outside Moscow. Whereas there used to be 
constant shortages of almost everything, you can buy in 
Russia today whatever you can buy in the USA.

People can travel without getting the government's 
permission. They can even leave the country permanently if 
they wish. That was not possible under Communism.

Russians have the right to worship as they please. Under the 
Communists, all but a handful of churches were closed. 
Today, thousands and thousands of churches have re-opened.

If these younger people want to have an idea of what their 
country was like before Gorbachev began the process that 
eventually led to the fall of the Communists, they might 
visit Cuba. There the people live today as Russians lived 
less than two decades ago.

Or if they would like an idea of what it was like to live 
under Stalin, especially in Ukraine, where Stalin 
deliberately starved 30 million people to death to make 
these very independent people conform to collectivism in 
agriculture, a visit to North Korea would be enlightening. 
There the government starves its own people so what little 
money there is can be put into their weapons programs.

These young Russians should not just be tourists in Cuba and 
North Korea. No, they should live like the ordinary people 
live, if you can call their existence living.

There are some other young people who would benefit by 
living in Cuba and North Korea. They currently reside on 
American college campuses. ABC network reporter and 
commentator John Stossel recently returned from a speaking 
tour of major colleges. He was profoundly shaken by the 
sympathy for Communist ideas he found there and even more 
shaken by the hatred for America he experienced.

These young leftists have no idea what it is like to live 
under totalitarian rule. They are free to hold their 
anti-American views. During the more than 70 years of 
Communist rule, a young Russian who openly expressed hatred 
for his own country and pro-American sentiments would at 
best be sentenced to hard labor in some Siberian camp; or he 
might be confined to a mental hospital where mind-altering 
drugs would be used on him as an experiment; or he might be 
tried for treason in a trial, the outcome of which would not 
be determined by a jury of his peers but rather by the 
wishes of the Communist Party. Found guilty, he would be 
shot. That was happening well into even the Gorbachev Era.

Meanwhile, where is Hollywood in all of this? There are so 
many incredible stories of daring adventure and heroism from 
the Soviet Era in Russia that would be better and more 
realistic than any of the nonsense they now grind out year 
after year.

Movies produced here are often hits in Russia. Well, movies 
of what it was like to live in a vicious, poverty-stricken 
country where there was no freedom or human rights rank up 
with Nazi Germany for potential "entertainment," v only the 
Soviet period was more recent and involved millions more people.

The Jews were hated by the Soviet authorities every bit as 
much as the Nazis hated them. They may not have put them in 
ovens but they made them complete outcasts of society, 
blaming virtually all of the ills their system produced on 
the Jewish people.

One day young people both in Russia and the United States 
may come to understand what Communism was and is all about. 
Let us hope and pray that, for this country and Russia, it 
won't be too late.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress 
Foundation.

--
Dan Clore

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