No Need To Go Back To 1792
From a Correspondent The persecution of the Jews in Germany, so much publicised in this country, has sent the historically-minded in search of comparisons.
A correspondent writing to the Daily Telegraph draws a parallel between the September Massacres in France in 1792 and the recent pogrom.
Is it necessary to go so far back? Postwar persecutions in Russia, Spain, and Mexico have been much worse than anything hitherto done in Germany.
Take Russia: In December, 1934, after the murder of Kirov, in Leningrad alone, 50,000 persons were arrested and deported to concentration camps and the number of arrests and deportations in the whole of the U.S.S.R. ran at that time to several hundred thousand.
Official Figures During the collectivisation drive of 1930-32 over one million of " kulak " households comprising over five million persons (official Soviet figure), were destroyed. The men were either killed or sent to concentration camps, the women and children were left homeless and destitute. A majority of them consequently have perished from hardships, starvation and diseases. All the property of the "kulaks" officially estimated at 1,000 million gold roubles (over £100,000,000) was confiscated and the " kulaks," to use the Soviet phrase, were " liquidated as a class."
This pogrom of the Russian peasants by its dimensions and cruelty far exceeds anything that has been done to 600,000 German Jews by the Nazis.
The Very People . . .
And yet the very people—Communists, Socialists, Radicals, and even Christians (like the Dean of Canterbury)—who raise hue and cry about the Nazi cruelty to the Jews, maintained silence when the Communists in Russia indulged in their orgy of terrorism.
There are, at the moment, at least seven million persons in Russian prisons, concentration camps, and places of exile.