. . . In this, the liberal West and Putin’s regime are in agreement: All memory of Communisms’ crimes must be carefully edited out of all books, films and other media and quickly forgotten.However, if school texts are changed to reflect the truth perhaps then the Discovery Channel and similar outlets will stop telling us the old lie that “Europe was liberated in 1945”. . . .
"On June 1, 2015, a deeply shocking event took place in the former Communist-ruled Hungary. A Court of Second Instance (lower appeals court) voided an earlier court’s finding that a top Communist official and one of the instigators of reprisals against the 1956 Freedom Fighters, Béla Biszku (94), was guilty of war crimes and was responsible for the murder of unarmed demonstrators in Budapest during the dying days of the Hungarian Revolution.
"Figures of these reprisals vary, but over 20,000 people were interned, and another 20,000 were jailed and some 400 executed. A certain number were even kidnapped from nearby states and either murdered on the spot or brought before kangaroo courts.
"One of the main movers behind these shocking figures, obviously a man with blood on his hands, now walks free.
"By contrast, the trial of Oskar Gröning, a Nazi bookkeeper (also 94 years old) who worked at Auschwitz, who killed no one, and who tried to get himself assigned to another job, has been reported around the world. He was found guilty by a court in Germany and sentenced to four years in prison.
"So why did a war criminal go free in Hungary, and why did you likely not even hear about it?
The Communism that did not ‘collapse’
"Firstly, while what the West called the “collapse of Communism” (Central and Eastern European countries use much less triumphalist terminology, such as “the change of system”) did achieve a largely peaceful transfer of power from a brutal party-state dictatorship to a multi-party democracy; and from a non-functioning centrally-planned economy to some version of a free market, because of the unequal relations between former holders of power and their victims it is not surprising that the erstwhile murderers, torturers and perpetrators of genocide, or their children, came out on top and became both the new political elite and the wealthiest stratum of society.
"In other words the members of the all-pervading Communist Party Nomenklatura got into positions where they would be able to take advantage of the “changes”. The lesson to the youth was – and remains -- “crime pays”." . . .
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