Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

August 19, 2009

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: “We Need a History Lesson About Nazis”- An interesting column in today’s Miami Herald, a column for which you get an incomplete grade.

Mr. Pitts,

A review of atrocities in the 20th century does not begin and end with Hitler. Alas, for modern American Liberals there is no evil other than him.

The Turks and the Armenians made for some interesting headlines 90 years ago, remember?

Stalin, Hitler’s model, killed between 6,000,000 and 8,000,000 Kulaks in the early ‘30s. No ovens; he starved them to death. Hitler noticed that the West did nothing. Further, they leaped to embrace him. Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent in Moscow, actually reported that obesity was a problem in the Ukraine. For this he won a Pulitzer Prize. Shortly thereafter the United States recognized the Soviet Union.

No wonder Hitler thought he had a pass.

It is good to point out that Hitler partly based his 1934 Nuremberg Race Laws on the writings of Margaret Sanger. She was and is a heroine to modern American Liberals. They get through the days filled with cognitive dissonance by use of the magic formula of “eclectic indignation”.

If killing 6,000,000 people made Hitler evil what will the real number do to you?

Leaving the war dead out he killed 12,000,000 to 13,000,000 people, 6,000,000 of whom were Jews.

If Hitler was evil what word fits Mao of China?

The AFL/CIO said that he killed between 40,000,000 and 60,000,000 people. The Chinese were not as statistically precise as the Germans. Still, respect is due to the Beijing Butcher. That’s a lot of bodies.






Some 2,000,000 Hindus and Moslems killed each other in 1948. The Hindus in Pakistan were trying to get back to India while the Moslems in India were hot footing it to Pakistan before the partition was complete. What ever the British did when they ran the place never included that.

Special mention must be given to Pol Pot of Cambodia. Although he only killed 2,000,000 of his countrymen it was 1/3rd of the total population.

Who remembers the Ibos of Nigeria? Idi Amin? Darfur?

Although the intramural dustup between the Hutus and Tutsis accounted for only 800,000 to 1,000,000 deaths it must be noted that they were armed solely with machetes.

Evil is as real as your boot.

No one has a monopoly on it.

T.S. Eliot, a Nobel Prize winner, wrote
“The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.”

Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel Prize winner, a man who fought Hitler and was jailed by Stalin, said when he left the Gulag, “All this happened when man turned away from God”.

Tell me, please, how many columns you wrote when Bush was compared to Hitler.

Wasn’t it Mrs. Pelosi who threw the first stone? Does she should bear some blame?


Kevin Smith