Sunday, March 10, 2013

A Tale of Two Birth Towns--Stalin's and Hitler's

In Gori, Georgia, where Stalin was born, plenty of folks are proud of their native son:
"Some people here will be very upset if you compare Stalin with Hitler," one Georgian told me. 
"They see him as our local hero, the Georgian boy who won World War II and changed the world. But other people - especially the Westernisers - hate him, as a bloody dictator who suppressed Georgian independence." 
"I am not trying to equate the two men," I replied. "I am just curious to see how each town deals with the legacy." 
In Gori, the row over Stalin has changed the town's appearance.  
For years, the main boulevard, Stalin Street, was dominated by a huge statue of Stalin.  
But in 2010, it was taken down by the pro-Western government of Mikhail Saakashvili, much to the dismay of many in Gori. 
"I used to ride my bicycle round it when I was a kid," Lella, who is 39, told me as she served me tea.  
She showed me a photo of the statue taken in the 1950s, which she keeps on her mobile.  
"We need it back," she said. And her wish is about to come true - partly because of a political upheaval in Georgia.  
Last year Saakashvili's party was defeated in parliamentary elections by the Georgian Dream coalition, which wants to repair Georgia's relations with Russia.  
A few weeks ago, Gori city council, now run by Georgian Dream, allocated funds to re-erect the statue.
By contrast, in Braunau, the Austrian town where Hitler was whelped, they would never think of doing such a thing:
In Braunau, having a Hitler Street would be unthinkable. 
The 17th Century former inn where he was born, is unmarked. All that links it to Hitler is a stone on the pavement, which says, "Never again Fascism. In memory of millions of dead." Hitler's name does not appear. 
"We thought about putting up a plaque on the house - just to mark the historical fact," a town official told me. "But the owner would not let us." 
He lowered his voice. "She is difficult," he said. "And so is the subject of Hitler." 
Braunau is torn between those who think Hitler should be more openly discussed, and those who just want the issue to go away.  
"We are not guilty because Hitler was born here," one man told me. "We do not need to apologise for our town." 
But Florian, a local historian, disagreed. "Even though Hitler only spent three years of his life here, Braunau is contaminated," he said. "We have to speak out against Nazism."
Interesting, no?, that Gorians (Goriers? Goriites?) don't think that their town is contaminated by virtue of association with a mass-murdering dictator, or feel the need to speak out against Communism, a doctrine every bit as toxic as Nazism.

1 comment:

Carlos Perera said...

One can hardly improve on Osama Bin Laden's formulation, that, when shown a weak and a strong horse, men are naturally drawn to the strong horse. By losing WWII, the Nazis showed themselves to be the weak horse, whereas the Commies, by being on the winning side, were identified with the strong horse. (The perception of Communism as the strong horse was reinforced by the string of revolutionary victories they had post-WWII: China, Indochina, Korea [where they won by not losing], Cuba, Indochina Part II).

The West looked like the stronger horse for a brief period following the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and its East European satrapies, but, alas, we threw the moment away as we became entangled in the spider's web of political correctness and multiculturalism woven by the Leftist fifth column in our opinion-molding institutions; it made definitive victory against Islamic jihadism impossible, no matter how many spectacular military successes we scored against them. So now, we must deal--if one can so call our increasingly feckless response--with resurgent Communism (albeit often camouflaged by euphemisms, like "Progressivism"), as well as with resurgent Islam.