Madam, - Imagine a bookshop, nestling along Dublin's quayside, that specialised in the literature of the disgraced far right; a bookshop that happily proclaimed allegiance to regimes that had slaughtered millions of their citizens, and where torture and repression were commonplace; a bookshop where, among other things, one might find the seminal "works" of Hitler, Hess, Milosevic and Pinochet.
Imagine, too, that Ireland's leading newspaper coyly profiled such a store as representing a "feisty" ideology.
Yet one may today find such a place - although the political coloration is red, rather than brown. In your newspaper's warm feature on the bookshop of the Irish Communist Party (Arts, February 28th), it is recorded, without comment, that over the years one would have here found books by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, as well as a number of cut-price titles produced by Progress Publishers, Moscow, the publishing house of the Soviet Union.
What is more, a fond portrait is painted of the shop's owner, who seeks to keep the "red flame" alive, and who evinces deep regret over the collapse of the Soviet Empire, as well as disgust at the "betrayers of socialism" who brought it about.
What more proof is needed that the historical tragedy of communism - under which tens of millions of innocents met their death - has gone unrecorded by Western Europe? In Dublin, bars and restaurants are named after a mass murderer (Mao) and an institution of propaganda and deceit (Pravda). Young people wear T-shirts emblazoned with the minatory initials CCCP, or decorated with the hammer and sickle.
The names of Kolyma and Solovetsky do not conjure the same dead ring of evil created by Auswitchz and Treblinka - but they should. In a recent debate in your pages on the origins of concentration camps, it was nowhere mentioned where such camps found their mass apogee - on the steppes and frozen plains of Soviet Russia, where many millions were literally worked to death in a vast network of slave labour.
A deep fissure in historical understanding plagues the West. Places such as Connolly Books serve only to widen and deepen it. - Yours, etc,
SEAN COLEMAN, Lindisfarne Lawn, Clondalkin, Dublin 22.