By OCPA President Jonathan Small
In 2009, as the Oklahoma Legislature was considering a resolution commending a local rock band, a member of that band caused a controversy when he appeared in the gallery wearing a shirt bearing the hammer and sickle emblem of the old Soviet Union. One wonders what would have happened had he worn a shirt bearing the Nazi swastika.
Of course, he would have been shunned, and rightly so, for flaunting the emblem of a hateful and murderous system. As we’ve recently been reminded, that swastika symbol is reviled by all decent people. So what was up with the hammer and sickle, the symbol of an equally vile ideology that killed even more victims than Nazism?
Dennis Prager, the national columnist and radio talk show host who will be the guest of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs at our Liberty Gala in Tulsa on Oct. 19, explores that disconnect in one of his Prager University video lectures. Why, he wonders, don’t many people see Nazism and communism as equivalent evils?
Part is ignorance, he suggests. Another reason was that the Nazi-inspired Holocaust was more shocking than the persistent, often hidden, actions of communism through the Russian Gulag and the Chinese purges that led to the murders of at least 20 million Russians and up to 70 million Chinese.
Prager notes that Nazism was, and still is, hateful on the surface while communism hides behind a veneer of nice-sounding slogans like “workers of the world unite!” And there’s the fact that Germany, after World War II, admitted its wrongs while Russia to this day still venerates Lenin and China still displays Mao’s picture on its currency.
Can you imagine the outcry if Germany had a picture of Hitler on the Deutsche Mark?
Prager also suggests that too many leftist intellectuals fail to recognize or teach the evils of communism. World War II was “the last good war” in their view, while efforts to blunt communist oppression like the wars in Korea or Vietnam are often ignored or even opposed.
What is perhaps most baffling is that there are actual faculty members in American universities today who openly describe themselves as Marxists, or adherents to the philosophy of Karl Marx which inspired the Soviet system. Even the University of Oklahoma helps promote communist ideology and propaganda by way of its Chinese-government funded Confucius Institute. Imagine an American university employing a professor who declared himself an adherent of the Nazi ideology.
The simple truth, as Prager notes, is that both Nazism and communism were ideologies that drive murderous, soul-killing regimes. That view is one of intellectual honesty, and the OCPA is proud to welcome Dennis Prager to Oklahoma.
Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (www.ocpathink.org).
