He begins by recounting his experience as a young man in high school at a time when communism was the greatest plague ever to beset human civilization. He writes that despite communism's obvious evil it astounded him that, "a great many people -- specifically, all leftists and many, though not all, liberals -- hated anti-communists far more than they hated communism."
To those born after say 1975 the history of communism may be a bit murky so Prager offers a summary of the horrors it inflicted upon the world:
Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil, already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to say, as a Jew and as a human, I hated Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.This is still true today, amazingly, but today there's yet another evil roaming the world, militant Islam, and the same bizarre hatred of those who oppose it can be found everywhere:
Communists murdered about 100 million people -- all noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people, including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just two years: 1932-33). Mao killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed about 3 million people, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979. The North Korean communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people, not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North Korean communists.
For every one of the 100 million killed by communists, add at least a dozen more people -- family and friends -- who were terribly and permanently affected by the death of their family member or friend. Then add another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and their loss of dignity.
You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated anti-communists, dismissing them as "Cold Warriors," "warmongers," "red-baiters," etc.
At the present time, we are again witnessing this phenomenon -- hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do evil -- with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of course, in universities.This hatred for Israel has always struck me as irrational and inexplicable, but it's ubiquitous. Here's Prager:
Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, independent opposition press, and equal rights for women, gays and its Arab population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies -- the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah -- allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More relevantly, their primary goal -- indeed, their stated reason for being -- is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing, absolutely nothing, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against Israel and its Jews.Prager concludes by offering a possible explanation for this human tendency to hate those who resist evil more than those who perpetrate it, and I encourage you to read the rest of his column. His explanation is probably correct, but I think, too, that another factor in the explanation is that there exists among much of humanity a kind of moral sickness that blinds people to what is right and true.
After all, anyone who can look at the historical facts relating to the crimes of communism or the depravity of militant Islam and somehow defend them really is morally purblind.