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 & --------- Begin forwarded message ---------- 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 --------- End forwarded message ---------- --part0_883698986_boundary-- --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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