Man’s experience with totalitarian regimes in the last century seems not to have taught us much. The rise of Communism under Stalin and the Nazis led by Hitler were marked by the most brutal genocidal acts and the murder of fourteen million men women and children between 1933 and 1945. None of these were combatants and most of them were Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles and Balts; people native to Central Europe. The Holocaust has been well documented but Stalin’s deliberate policies of starvation leading to the deaths of millions in the Ukraine and purges that resulted in the execution of three quarters of a million in the 1930’s, is less well known.
The response by the world’s leading Democracies was to suspend belief in the atrocities as though it was impossible for such evil to exist. There was a determined resistance in western governments and the press to believe what was happening in Germany before the start of hostilities. Similarly both Britain and the United States suppressed information that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn massacre in the belief that they could build a working post war relationship with the USSR. The denial of Holodomor that resulted in the death by starvation of millions in the Ukraine is another example of a complicit press that also thought Mussolini a jolly good fellow.
After the Second World War the Nuremberg trials exposed to the world the horrors of the extermination camps but it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that the true extent of the gulag and the deliberate policies of starvation were fully exposed. And the world said “never again”.
Then came Cambodia – two million; Rwanda – eight hundred thousand; and Bosnia – two hundred thousand. This century has started with the continuing genocide of the Darfuri in The Sudan where reporting is scant and the response timid.
It is against this background that we now witness the totalitarian regime of Iran developing nuclear weapons while espousing the national objective of eliminating Israel from the face of the earth. Should we not have learnt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf where the utterances of dictators reveal their true objectives and not dismiss them as hyperbole or for internal political consumption? Is it too much trouble to see the world as it is rather than how we would like it to be?
The Iranian persecution of its minority citizens is vigorous and accelerating. Only half of the Iranian population is Persian, the other half is made up of numerous minority groups including Azeris, Kurds, Balouch, Awazi Arabs and a small group of non-Muslim including Jews, Zoroastrians and Baha’is. All of them are viewed by the mullahs with hatred and are subject to property confiscation and forcible resettlement.
The bench mark of how Iran will treat its neighbours is how it treats its minorities with rigged trials, torture and extra-judicial killings. Such is the nature of totalitarianism wrapped in a cloak of religious extremism. After the recent elections there was a brutal repression of the opposition who protested the rigged election process, and there is a continuing quest to root out and suppress any dissent.
This past Wednesday Hugo Chavez, a friend and ally of the Iranian mullahs, started ruling by decree in response to a moderate change in a balance of power in the Venezuelan parliament. This is another step in his drive for absolute power. Many observers think that the best way to deal with Chavez is to ignore him but his extra territorial ambitions in the region make this a dangerous course of action. It is time for reasonable men and women to speak out against the assumption of absolute power and the destruction of democratic institutions in Venezuela and the spreading influence of Chavez in the region. The cancer of totalitarianism must be resisted at all cost by those that cherish freedom.
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