English Test 57
Directions for Questions from 1 to 5:
The passage given below is followed by a question. Choose the most appropriate answer to question.
Fifteen years after communism was officially pronounced dead, its spectre seems once again to be haunting Europe. Last month, the Council of
Europe‘s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,“ linking them with Nazism and complaining that
communist parties are still legal and active in some countries.“Now Goran Lindblad, the conservative Swedish MP behind the resolution, wants to go
further. Demands that European Ministers launch a continent-wide anti-communist campaign - including school textbook revisions, official memorial
days, and museums - only narrowly missed the necessary two-thirds majority. Mr. Lindblad pledged to bring the wider plans back to the Council of
Europe in the coming months.
He has chosen a good year for his ideological offensive: this is the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev‘s denunciation of Josef Stalin and the
subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. Paradoxically, given that there is no
communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have if anything, become more extreme as time has gone on. A clue as to why
that might be can be found in the rambling report by Mr. Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public
ownership, he explained different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many “and a sort of nostalgia for
communism is still alive.“ Perhaps the real problem for Mr. Lindblad and his right-wing allies in Eastern Europe is that communism is not dead
enough - and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart.
The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror,
there was no Soviet