Apologists For Chinese Genocide

Some historians believe Potemkin merely redecorated towns along the czarina’s route, rather than fabricating them entirely for the sole purpose of the visit. Either way, Potemkin’s name has come to be associated with this particular kind of deceit.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was a master of Potemkinism. In the 1920s and 1930s, Western visitors to the USSR were taken to see Bolshevo, which was presented as an example of the Soviet Union’s “progressive” prisons without walls or guards, where criminals were educated and inspired to become productive citizens.

Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw went so far as to claim that the only problem in dealing with the typical Soviet prisoner was “inducing him to come out at all” when his jail term ended. In reality, Bolshevo had been created to impress foreigners. It was populated largely by informers whose reward was to live in the sham prison. The slave labor camps of the Soviet gulag remained hidden from foreign eyes.

Adolf Hitler used Potemkin-style deception to help camouflage the mass murder of the Jews. In June 1944, the Nazis invited a delegation from the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt, the Jewish ghetto they created in Czechoslovakia as a transit point for Jews being shipped to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. In the Nazi Potemkin version, the camp was presented as an ‘Endlager,’ a final destination where Jewish prisoners lived happily.

One inmate wrote in his diary of the Nazis’ preparations for the Red Cross visit: “They rain down order after order.  Kindergarten children are to sing during the visit, the workers are to return home.  Plays and cultural events and sporting activities must take place. Even the few lambs left here roam about on the grass around the city.  The children, the workers, the sheep–a perfect idyll.”

Another prisoner recalled:  “A playground was laid out with sandboxes and swings, a ‘children’s pavilion’ was built and painted from inside with big wooden animals as toys.  Behind a glass veranda you could see a dozen cribs.  It was like a story book–but children were only allowed to enter this little paradise on the day the commission visited Theresienstadt.” Houses were freshly painted–but only those portions that would the Red Cross inspectors would see as they walked by.

The delegation’s final report to Red Cross headquarters described conditions in the camp as “relatively good.” They never asked why the population of Theresienstadt at the time of the visit was 30,000 less than what the Red Cross knew it had been a few weeks earlier.