J.C. Smith, in the Public Forum on Oct. 8, was upset because a Utah legislator has proposed a “Victims of Communism Memorial Day” and the letter writer stated that “It was Nazis, not communists, behind the Holocaust.”
I think we are well aware of that. However, if we think in terms of crimes against humanity, the Holocaust comes in third. To quote a nybooks.com article:
“Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.”
In fact, Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” accounted for 30 million deaths and the Stalin regime 20 million. So, as the Holocaust has been written about extensively and there are numerous memorials, maybe it is time to recognize the crimes of communism.
And, in a look to the future, the former chairman of the psychiatry department at Duke University, Dr. Allen Francis, claimed on CNN that President Trump is as bad as the worst dictators of the 20th century, and that his presidency might lead to even more deaths than they did — because of his actions toward the climate. Now that is a scary thought!
Kermit Heid, Salt Lake City