First, I would like to say that I am further left in the political spectrum than most Americans. That doesn’t mean that I support the idiotic rantings of the Spartacist League. In his letter to the editor, the president of the Spartacus Youth Club, Jesse Alt, made some very disturbing comments (“Block U.S. imperialism in Iraq,” Mar. 6, pg. 10). To say that the Soviets under Stalin and the Chinese under Mao were any better than the Nazis is an insult to the dozens of millions of people their regimes murdered.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but Stalin was responsible for at least twice as many deaths as Hitler. And when he was in his final days, there were even plans to massacre the Soviet Jews, who Stalin believed had supplied the doctors that were trying to poison him. This time the Zyklon-B would be marked with a hammer and sickle instead of a crooked cross. Luckily, Stalin died before this ever happened. Mao, being the leader of the most populous country in the world, could have been responsible for even more deaths, but the numbers and specifics are of course still covered up by the Chinese government.
Granted those two men represent the most perverse form of communism, but even under reformers like Khrushchev, the USSR crushed uprisings in Hungary and Poland. To say that the people of Eastern Europe and the USSR are more miserable now than before is also disgusting. In most of the countries that were part of or dominated by the USSR, the people lead freer and, in most cases, happier lives. Just ask anyone from those countries. Maybe the Spartacus League should stop regurgitating the party line and start to think for itself.
James Downing
CAS ’06
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
