They Killed My Lawyer
>>It is also a story about how Stalinism and the gulags are alive and well in Russia today.<p>It is difficult to convey the depth of my disgust after reading the above sentence from the first paragraph of the article. I share both Russian and Jewish heritages and to my dismay I frequently encounter writings that belittle the history of Holocaust. In comparison, Stalinism and gulags are less known to the Western audience.  It is just as despicable to use Holocaust as Stalinist atrocities to score points against political opponents. A death of a single lawyer behind bars or the deaths of numerous enemies of the modern Russian state should never be compared to systematic killing of millions of innocent people.<p>To borrow from a comment by rms further in this thread, it is "an argument about a difference of orders of magnitude". However morality of killing human lives should not be counted in orders of magnitude -- there is a qualitative difference between killing a man, a family, an ethnicity or a race. Saying that "Stalinism and the gulags are alive today" establishes a false moral equivalence.<p>Foreign Policy magazine editors should resign for allowing to publish drivel hurtful to lives of so many people.<p>EDIT: With respect to comments by 'cema', I also have family in former Soviet Union. None of them would compare the famine, repressions, kidnappings, prisons or gulags under Stalin to what is happening in Russia today.