Why don’t we remember the victims of communism?

Nov 25, 2017 by

by Tim Montgomerie, unherd:

Online now (eg on iTunes) is the latest of UnHerd’s audio documentaries.

Presented by Douglas Murray and produced by Sean Glynn – and which you can listen to, via Soundcloud, below –  examines our failure to remember the victims of communism, in the way that we, rightly, remember the victims of Nazi-ism.

Within this 35 minute production, Douglas travels to Budapest and to that city’s House of Terror museum. It is actually the location in the heart of the Hungarian capital where, first, the country’s fascists tortured and imprisoned their opponents and, later, using similar techniques and often against  the very same people, communists sought to neutralise their opponents. Very unusually the museum, open since 2002, records the horrors of the two periods in Hungarian history, by the two sets of totalitarian ideologies, with equal prominence. Having travelled to Budapest myself, a couple of years ago, I can testify to what Douglas recounts in the documentary – it’s a harrowing experience  to witness the parallel barbarities under the roof where they were carried out.

Talking to a wide range of people including David Aaronovitch, Anne Applebaum, Janos Horvath, David Pryce Jones and Giles Udy, Douglas explores why the communist ideology that killed many more people than Nazi Germany – and in many more parts of the world, from Russia to China and to Cambodia – is so poorly remembered in art, education or in public monuments and museums. He begins by noting that young people in Britain might overwhelmingly and correctly identify Adolf Hitler as a source of evil. Most, tragically, don’t even know who Lenin or Mao or Pol Pot are.

Read here

 

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