The true crime genre is not big enough for what Communists and socialists did in Russia in the 20th century. It demands a new genre — perhaps call it true horror.
Bill Whittle’s newest season of “What We Saw” on Daily Wire Plus dips its toe in the oceans of blood Russia’s Communist revolution released. It’s grisly and difficult to take in. Whittle attempts to quantify the myriad forms of mass killings by comparing their death tolls to the erasure of several U.S. cities, yet still the numbers are numbing.
What’s not numbing is the question he includes in the season’s trailer comparing the Nazi Holocaust with the Soviet mass murder of an estimated 20 million: “Why are we encouraged to never forget one, and then intentionally taught to forget the other?”
As Whittle points out in episode one, all educated people know immediately what images like these depict:
But how about here?
Daily Wire Plus / Screenshot
That’s the Kommunarka “shooting range,” where during Russia’s Great Terror an estimated 10,000 to 14,000 people were dumped after being murdered by the state. It’s a mass grave that today sits near a busy highway. Before being used as a mass dumping ground for victims of Communism, it was the recreational country estate for a Russian chief of secret police.
“Many of the people who called for the execution of people that they knew to be innocent were later executed themselves, and dumped here,” Whittle notes.
While
