Rather than admit it was wrong about Mugabe, Europe made excuses instead

A FRIEND spent the weekend in Prague and came across open-air stalls in the side streets where they sell old Soviet memorabilia.

Big sellers to visitors, particularly stag-party visitors, those caps and belt buckles embossed with the hammer and sickle.

It’s a curious thing. Even the most reckless stag-party tourist would not tend to bring home from overseas items associated with Hitler’s regime. But nobody worries much about owning items associated with that of Stalin. Older tourists remember Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” the smiling guy in the pictures with Churchill and Roosevelt as the three rulers tied up the loose ends after the second World War. Maybe he was a bit on the tough side, those older people felt, but you need a tough guy as your ally when you’re setting out to defeat someone totally evil, like Hitler, who exterminated six million human beings in the Holocaust. Younger people — except those who studied his era as part of a modern history degree — hardly know Stalin at all. His name, for them, is not instantly synonymous, as is Hitler’s, with torture, starvation, anti-semitism and concentration camps.