patrick.net

No one cares how many millions were killed by this dictator or that warlord. These are mere numbers, the output of cold equations, processed by a part of the brain that has nothing to do with emotions. What matters is that, for decades, our media have produced an endless stream of lurid histories, novels, movies, documentaries, and television shows depicting the horrors of the Holocaust. These images have burned themselves into people’s minds. Small children are traumatized with them at an impressionable age – made to watch Schindler’s List or read Elie Wiesel’s Night or study The Diary of Anne Frank as part of their education. The victims of the Holocaust become, not mere numbers, not decontextualized names listed on a memorial somewhere, but real people, human beings with faces, hearts, souls, dreams, families, friends, lovers, and quirks of personality ... they become, in people’s minds, friends who were abused and murdered. Thus the Nazi who murdered them becomes the ultimate beast, not a mere villain of history, but a personal enemy.

The horrors unleashed by communism, however, are never talked about in such terms.