Monday, May 19, 2014

Something you will never see in a US university

Communist regimes in the USSR under Stalin and China under Mao murdered tens of millions of people. Millions more perished under communism in Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, East Central Europe, and Afghanistan. Many of those killed such as ethnic Germans and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, Tibetans and Mongolians in China, and Vietnamese and Chams in Cambodia were deliberately targeted for persecution on the basis of their ancestry, that is their race. It is not a political system with a good record for human rights, civil liberties, or racial equality. It is fully comparable on these matters with systems like National Socialism or the worst excesses of colonial rule. Yet, the sign to the right here would never appear on the walls of any US university. With a very few exceptions, US academics refuse to recognize that there ever was any racial discrimination or genocide in the USSR under Stalin. The regime is militantly defended against these specific charges in a way that no non-communist regime guilty of these same crimes has ever been defended in US academia. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the racist genocide committed by Stalin against the Crimean Tatars. This crime was commemorated throughout Ukraine by ordinary citizens. On the other hand the standard orthodox line in the US university is that the whole sale deportation of nearly the entire Crimean Tatar population to Uzbekistan and the Urals where tens of thousands of them died was neither a case of genocide or even an act of racial discrimination. Can you imagine somebody denying that the Holocaust was a case of genocide or even racism by claiming Jews are not a race and still getting tenure at a US university? Yet that is exactly what has happened regarding people who deny the true nature of Soviet crimes against humanity.

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