If our schools and universities cared about history, Anne Applebaum's magisterial work, Gulag would be required reading. Not because our children need to master the enormous body of detail concerning the infamous Soviet forced-labor system — made famous by Solzhenitsyn's works some 30 years ago — but because it is only by working their way through the chilling details, year by year and camp by camp, that they can begin to understand the horrors of Communism and the magnitude of our successful war against it.

From a great review by Michael Ledeen. One of the reasons I loathe Leftists is their hypocrisy, and no phenomenon--with the possible exception of the Cambodian genocide--better illustrates this then the gulag. For over fifty years, all the while whining and raving about the evils of the West, the Left has systemically lied, obfuscated, and actively covered up the truth about Stalin's death camps, all in a desperate attempt to hide the horrible truth about their totalitarian ideology. Worst of all, they brazenly accuse the few survivors willing to recount their experiance as being politically motivated liars. We have a duty as human beings to see to it that the neo-Nazi Left fails in this attempt to rewrite history, to pretend their horrendous crimes never occurred, to wipe out the memory of their victims as totally as they exterminated their lives. Elie Wiesel has said that to destroy the memory of the crime is to slaughter the victims a second time, we must not allow this to happen. We must speak the truth to Leftist power, so the millions they slaughtered can rest in peace, with the knowledge that justice, at least historically, has been done.