A small article appearing in today's papers restores in me a small modicum of hope for the future of humanity.  From today's news wires:

A Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin's grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people to their deaths.

Apparently, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, took umbrage at a newspaper article which matter-of-factly portrayed the genocidal dicator as a genocidal dictator.  Dzhugashvili sued the newspaper, seeking a ruling that would have denied history's judgement on the man generally considered responsible for the deaths of millions in the Gulag, and for the famine that resulted when he destroyed the agricultural foundation of his country.

OK, you may be thinking this is no big deal, and I really wouldn't blame you if you did.  What does a silly court case in Moscow have to do with the price of milk in Milwaukee?  Everyone knows Stalin was a monster, right?  Surely he is writhing in Hell's most notorious quarters, right next to Hitler, and down the hall from Pol Pot, Ghengiz Kahn, and the full host of history's psychopaths.

Unfortunately, however, we live in a short-sighted, hyper-partisan world.   After all, no sooner had the grass grown green over the mounds of Dachau's dead,  than there arose from the shadows formerly respectable men who claimed the Holocaust was all a lie.  Incredibly, seemingly intelligent people believe that evil nonsense.  It isn't just a delusional demi-dictator in Teheran who makes those claims.  If you don't believe me, just do a Google search on "holocaust denial".

There are less extreme examples, too.  Everyday, millions of Americans are told the greatest president of the last century was none other than Ronald Reagan, the man who oversaw huge increases in the national debt, who sent hundreds of Marines to their deaths in a Lebanese civil war, who sent money to Iran's mullahs and sent arms to their enemies in Baghdad.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Even now, the revisionists are working on their script to recast the administration of Bush II as one of great success, even as the economy struggles to overcome the disaster he helped create, even as a gaping hole still exists where once proudly stood two gigantic monuments to America's economic might, brought down while the Commander-in-Chief played cowboy on his faux ranch and read about a pet goat to kindergartners.

Reagan's face may yet replace Roosevelt's on the dime, and Bush may belatedly be hailed as a hero,  but at least I can take comfort in knowing that historical revisionism has limits.  Josef Stalin is still a genocidal autocrat.  Or, as the Russian courts confirmed, "a bloodthirsty cannibal."