File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 8


From: anticlimacus-AT-juno.com
To: bautiste-AT-aol.com
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 1998 16:37:52 -0700
Subject: John Whalen-Bridge <johnwb-AT-LL.U-RYUKYU.AC.JP>: Communism & 


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From: John Whalen-Bridge <johnwb-AT-LL.U-RYUKYU.AC.JP>
To: PHIL-LIT-AT-postal.tamu.edu
Subject: Communism & 20th C: a book review
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 1998 04:16:45 +0900
Message-ID: <199801011916.EAA05278-AT-ll1.ll.u-ryukyu.ac.jp>

Just came across this in a Singapore paper...JWB/Hamden for two more
hours...

Time to acknowledge the crimes of communist regimes

------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Tony Judt
NEW YORK -- Le Livre Noir du Communisme (The Black Book of Communism),
published in Paris recently, has aroused controversy. Edited by Stephane
Courtois, a
respected historian of French communism, it is an 800-page compendium of
the crimes of
communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analysed in ghastly detail by a
team of
scholars.
The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in
hitherto
inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. The myth of the well-intentioned
founders -- the
good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs -- has been laid to rest for
good.

No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about
the criminal nature
of communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to
remember.
The book has been debated angrily in Europe, with some of its
contributors
regretting their participation.

Mr Courtois, in his introduction, claims that we can no longer insist on
the conventional
distinction between communism and Nazism, which sets Hitler's state apart
as a singularly
terrible regime. Those very features of Nazism that we find most
repellent have now been
proved endemic to communism from its inception.

The time has come, he says, to acknowledge that mass crimes, systematic
crimes, crimes
against humanity marked both systems in equal measure. "Recent emphasis
on the
singularity of the genocide of the Jews, by concentrating attention on an
exceptional
atrocity, blurs our perception of affairs of the same order in the
communist world."

Mr Courtois has a powerful case. In the course of a few decades,
communist regimes
killed tens of millions of people. It is now estimated that in the Soviet
Union there were
about 20 million deaths, in Communist China, perhaps 65 million and in
Cambodia, North
Korea, Vietnam and Eastern Europe, a further 6 million can be directly
attributed to the
actions of communist governments.

These mass murders were not the accidental by-product of misguided
policies but the
outcome of wilful, sometimes genocidal calculation.

By March 1918, Lenin's Bolshevik regime, just five months old, had
knowingly killed
more of its political opponents than czarist Russia had in the preceding
century.

In 1932 and 1933, the famine engineered deliberately by Stalin in the
Ukraine destroyed
about 6 million men, women and children. Categories of people, real or
imagined
"cossacks", "kulaks", "bourgeois", "reactionaries" -- were exterminated.
Concentration
camps, forced labour and terror were elevated to a system of government.
Communism
transposed the language and conditions of wartime onto an ideological
civil "front",
bequeathing to modern radical politics a paramilitary language of
interminable "conflict".
A permanent civil war of party-state versus society began. Its goal was
an atomised
oneness different from that of Nazism only in its invocation of "class"
instead of "race".
Nazis applied "special treatment" to the useless people they murdered.

Communists "liquidated" those whom history, in their eyes, had already
condemned.
Mass murder was not an unintended consequence but part of the project
from the start.
"The archives, and numerous witnesses confirm that terror was from the
outset a basic
feature."

Communism started earlier, lasted longer and covered more continents than
Nazism, he
explains. "The fact is that communist regimes committed crimes affecting
about 100
million people, against some 25 million for Nazism." Why do so many,
including some of
Mr Courtois's fellow scholars, recoil from his conclusions? In part
because we are heirs to
the victorious alliance with the communists that defeated Hitler. And in
part because so
many well-intentioned people beyond the reach of communism deeply needed
to believe in
it and defend it. I well remember sitting in the graduate lounge of
Cambridge University in
1969 while a tenured member of the economics faculty assured us that the
Chinese
Cultural Revolution was the last best hope for humankind.

Communism was applied in the "East" and justified in the "West", whereas
Nazism was a
Western abomination whose evils were experienced closer to home.

It is thus difficult for the left-liberal intelligentsia of the West to
let go of its memories and
illusions, to reconcile itself to having been no wiser or better than
fascism's many foreign
admirers in the 1930s.

For this is the most enduring temptation of all -- to distinguish
communism from other
political evils by virtue of its self-presentation as a path, however
crooked, to human
liberation. Those are bad reasons for denying Mr Courtois his conclusion.
But there are
better ones. The main weapon of worldwide communist mass murder,
statistically
speaking, was state-induced famine. Is this analogous to industrial-scale
racial genocide?

Is it "communism" that links and explains the deeds of Lenin, Stalin,
Mao, Kim Il Sung,
Pol Pot and acolytes in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Poland and
elsewhere? In name,
yes, but in practice the Cambodian massacres, to take just one case, have
more in common
with the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia than with Stalin's targeted purges.

The tale of human cruelty in our times is too complicated to be captured
by ideological
labels alone, whether "left" or "right". And while "kulak" or "bourgeois"
are arbitrary
categories that authorise those wielding them to kill and torture, their
very arbitrariness
also allows for redefinition, "re-education" or clemency in a way that
was not open to
people defined by rigorous criteria of inherited race and killed
accordingly.

>From the point of view of the exiled, humiliated, tortured or murdered
victims, of course,
it is all the same. And in the sorry story of our century, communism and
Nazism are, and
always were, morally indistinguishable. That lesson took too long to
learn, and it justifies a
complete recasting and rewriting of our history.

But we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: There is a
difference between
regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary
objective and those
whose objective is extermination itself.

The writer is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.
He contributed
this comment to The New York Times.


J. Whalen-Bridge
U of the Ryukyus

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