Why don’t we talk about ‘Uncle Joe’?

NOT only does the Nazi period of European history now dominate our schools curriculum but it is hard to avoid it on the telly. The History Channel gives us Hitler and the Nazis night after night. One wonders when they will ever tire or run out of themes on which to make yet another Nazi documentary. Yet there is one yawning absence.

I cannot recall a single mention of the even more genocidal crimes of Joseph Stalin. And more genocidal they were. Scholars have attested that Hitler murdered 14 million victims thus: six million Jews, five million Russians (excluding soldiers), two million non-Jewish Poles and a million mixed others.

But Stalin, with his orchestrated famines, executions and the insatiable appetite of Siberia and its slave camps, disposed of 40 million human beings. How odd that he and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have been virtually airbrushed out of western European study.

While Nazism and fascism have rightly been excoriated, the matching horrors of communism appear to have vanished as an example of what they were – genocidal cruelty. Dedicated communists, especially academics, remain perfectly respectable in a manner impossible for a Nazi apologist. The result is that ultra-Left politics seem to be coming back.

WHEN we see self-styled anti-fascist students smashing up lectures and debates featuring conservative speakers two things emerge. One is that none of them is salt-of-the-earth working class. They are all mollycoddled middle-class snowflakes. The other is that they are using exactly the same tactics that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power.

So why can our young people, who are quite rightly being educated to loathe Nazism, not also be informed in class about the other truly horrible perversion that scarred the 20th century? At the moment it looks as if they are learning only about Hitlerism while Stalinism is being academically brushed under the carpet.

Could it be that the huge preponderance of the Left-wing that prevails throughout the teaching profession has endorsed the imbalance? And do we not have a Conservative Government in office, hard though it is sometimes to perceive it?