Posted on 08/27/2002 2:27:53 PM PDT by Senator Pardek
As we grapple with the problems and perils of the 21st century, the great debates of the 20th have not gone away. Some of the most contentious questions have to do with the history of Communism, whose unholy ghost continues to haunt us more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union. Was Communism as evil as Nazism? Did the Western left collude in its evil?
These issues are powerfully confronted by the British novelist Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Koba was a nickname for Stalin, and the 20 million are the victims of Soviet terror.
Some of the most stirring pages in this short book chronicle Soviet crimes against humanity, many of them preceding Stalin - from catastrophic famines (caused by confiscation of grain from peasants) to mass executions to labor camps where millions lived, and often died, in hellish conditions. Much of this story will be familiar to those who have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago or Robert Conquest's The Great Terror.
But one of Amis's main points is that it's not familiar enough. Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen, he writes. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.
Writing in The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens, who comes under some sharp criticism in Koba the Dread for his own flirtations with the left, challenges that statement as an insult to all those, including leftists, who have denounced and exposed Stalin's atrocities for at least the last 50 years. But it should be obvious that nobody, like everybody, is a hyperbolic figure of speech. What Amis means is that Soviet terror has not entered general consciousness, the consciousness of the average literate person, the way the Holocaust has. With a few obscure exceptions, it has not been dramatized on film or on TV. The name of Stalin does not viscerally evoke evil incarnate the way the name of Hitler does.
Amis concedes that regardless of overall body counts, Nazism's purposeful, systematic extermination of human beings based solely on their ethnicity was more evil and repugnant than Communism's more haphazard slaughter. But this tiny moral differential between the two regimes does not justify the vast gap in general awareness of their crimes - or the stark double standard in their public judgment.
Thus, Amis notes that at a 1999 public event in London, Hitchens's joking remark about his Communist past was received with affectionate laughter; a similar casual reference to one's past as a Nazi sympathizer would be unthinkable.
There is an even more striking example of this double standard that Amis does not mention. In 1996, a firestorm erupted over the scheduled publication of a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by British Holocaust revisionist David Irving. After vehement protests, the publisher, St. Martin's Press, withdrew the book.
Around the same time, the Yale University Press published Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941, by Miami (Ohio) University professor Robert Thurston, who argued that the death toll of Stalin's terror had been greatly exaggerated.
Thurston also asserted that Stalin never planned to rule by terror, he just reacted to events and let things spin out of control - ironically, much the same argument Irving makes about the Nazi murder of the Jews.
While the critical response to Life and Terror was generally negative, the book sparked no outcry. In Publisher's Weekly, Irving's book was called repellent; Thurston's book, controversial.
Why the double standard? Unlike Nazism, Communism claimed to champion the noble ideals of equality, fairness, and brotherhood. To many well-meaning liberals and progressives, it was an expression of the enduring human hope for a good and just society; a nostalgic fondness for that hope, Amis argues, endures to this day. That's why, he says, Hitchens can still profess admiration for Lenin and Trotsky, who laid the foundations for Stalin's brutal police state. (In his essay, Hitchens evades Amis's blunt question: "Do you admire terror?")
Today, the issues raised in Koba the Dread could be seen as purely academic; but they are not. The left's reluctance to acknowledge that Communism wasn't just a failure but an evil is due to more than stubbornness. Such an acknowledgment would amount to (1) validating a view of the West, Communism's Cold War adversary, as good (albeit imperfect), and (2) admitting that the left spent much of the 20th century cozying up to mass murderers and therefore has precious little moral authority to criticize the West today. And that's very relevant to present-day global conflicts.
"Maybe if America had not engaged them in a cold war, the Soviet Union might have been able to succeed in their quest to create a viable communist state."
He was appalled when I said the same thing about Hitler's Nazi dream, and couldn't see the parallels.
[The Left's reluctance to acknowledge that Communism wasn't just a failure but an evil is due to more than stubbornness.]
. . . in their little communist hearts, the Left still hold to the same values; so called.
This bears repeating. One of the most irritating things about the left is that those brainwashed people think because they state their good intentions they hold the higher moral ground - particularly in contrast to the greedy and selfish underpinnings of capitalism. The left will never admit that they have supported mass murderers for going on a century now.
BTW, Hillary! is a quintessential leftist. Remember? Hillary! cannot "be responsible for every under-capitalized business..." This is exactly the same attitude and manner in which Stalin implemented the so-called 5-year plans -- Damn the peasants, we must forge ahead with socialist progress.
The difference has nothing to do with "free speech" or any other BS---it has to do with the fact that liberals (while they will never admit this in mixed company) look to the establishment of communism in the United States as their ultimate goal.
That is surely the goal of the 'Left'; daresay, some of the hollywoodites and a few others, do not even know it.
And if the U.S. did not engage Germany, it might have been able to succeed in its quest to create a viable fascist state.
I gotta laugh at folks who are too idiotic to realize that communism is anathema to all that benefits The Individual - even in theory and/or on paper.
Desiring a "viable communist state" is akin to desiring a bus running over you that just got an oil change, new seats to fit everyone, the spark plugs changed, has a driver who tips his cap to the riders, and is always on time.
. . .sad thing is, they are fooling a lot of people while dumbing down the next generation while preparing for the next. . .so that eventually, there will be no one left to fool.
Like Lenin and Trotsky said ... 'he that controls the education and upbringing of the children will control the future...'
Stalin murdered forty million Soviet citizens, not just twenty million. Robert Conquest established this number as the best estimate (and was excoriated by the Left for it), and the Russian government confirmed it to be correct after communism fell in Russia.
This includes the millions of Ukrainians who died in the "Harvest of Despair."
I've studied Russian history. Your "friend" is a total arse. Communism never worked. Ever. It was based on the assumption that the state could somehow make every decision for every person about what the economy should produce for them, what career they should follow, what political opinions they should hold, what books they should read. It never occured to these bastards what to do if they didn't understand the people they were dictating to. Naturally, some resisted. The Communists killed or imprisoned those. And those that remained were too intimidated to speak up - at least until they got the chance.
Ask your liberal friend if he would like to live in a world where every element in his life was dictated by powers beyond his control. That is Communism. If he wants to live like that, then he is a slave, unworthy to discourse with free men.
Regards, Ivan
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