Perhaps it’s a case of ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’

Tom Switzer, freshly appointed executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and founding editor of Cut & Paste, on the CIS website yesterday:

Next week marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution. November 7, 1917, was not just one of the most influential events of all time, it ushered in the most terrifying period in human history. In the matter of scale, the Russian revolutionaries and their later successors in China and elsewhere achieved a record of far more deaths than either world war. According to the London-based project to create a Museum of Communist Terror, 15-18 million people died in World War I; 40-80 million died in World War II; and 80-100 million died under communist regimes.

But 100 years later, Switzer says, many Western young people are ignorant of the ideology that inspired Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky:

According to YouGov surveys, only 55 per cent of American millennials think communism was, and still is, a problem. A third of young people believe US president George W. Bush murdered more people than Soviet dictator (Joseph) Stalin did. And about 70 per cent of young British people have never heard of Mao Zedong … whose regime murdered tens of millions of Chinese.

Socialist Alternative plans to celebrate the Russian Revolution in Melbourne (where else?) next week. Its website in January this year:

We will carry material in each issue of our paper this year to bring out the truth about the Russian Revolution and the role of the Bolshevik Party which has been the subject ever since of a relentless campaign of distortion and disinformation by its capitalist opponents. In fact it might be said that this was the greatest “fake news” campaign of the past century.

In its August 2015 obituary of eminent historian Robert Conquest, an expert on Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Economist said:

The intellectual history of the West in the 20th century was dominated by arguments over totalitarianism: its causes, effects — and possible justification. Even after flag-waving supporters of the Soviet Union had dwindled to irrelevance, the conviction that communism was a good idea poorly executed persisted in certain quarters. Others still thought the communist threat overstated, or drew equivalences between crimes committed in the name of socialism and those of Western anti-communism. The position that communism was a monstrously evil system responsible for unprecedented atrocities was held by only a minority of scholars. Robert Conquest … was one of the most eloquent and implacable members of that camp. To the chagrin of his opponents, he turned out to be right.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg denies he may be a Hungarian dual citizen. The ABC yesterday:

In a cruel twist of fate, Mr Frydenberg has faced questions about the possibility of being a dual national in the country that persecuted his Jewish mother. Erica Strausz was born in Hungary and escaped the Holocaust to Australia, arriving as a child via a refugee camp in 1950.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Hungary became a satellite state of the Soviet Union. The BBC reports in a 2009 documentary:

The purges that followed saw approximately 350,000 officials and intellectuals imprisoned or executed from 1948 to 1956. Many free thinkers, democrats … were secretly arrested and extra-judicially interned in domestic and foreign Gulags. Some 600,000 Hungarians were deported to Soviet labour camps, where at least 200,000 died.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

During the German occupation … Hungarian police deported nearly 440,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz. Nearly all of these were murdered.