Neo-Con quarterly book review. The F. Furet book, btw, is excellent. Esp. the chapter on anti-fascism and the Comintern.
<URL: http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2003/alexander.html >
> ...
***
If it's difficult to decide which mass murder was worse, we should probably place them in a single roomy category. Amis and Applebaum do something like this. But both observe with a certain anger that Leninism/Stalinism does not come close to matching the Holocaust as a conventional image of political crime. This is partly the result of simple ignorance. Amis says that was long the obstacle for him. But the bad news is that education is unlikely to remedy a disparity that is only partly the result of mere ignorance. There is, so to speak, a "sociology of knowledge" aspect to who has, and especially who has not, integrated Stalinism into their moral imagination. Many who downplay Stalinism do so willfully.
Consider one forum. In the past five years, the Weekly Standard, National Review, and The Nation, have each run a similar number of book reviews relating to the Holocaust, it is everyone's genocide. But the left-liberal Nation reviewed noticeably more books than the other two on the crimes of, say, Latin American militaries, while the two center-right magazines each ran roughly three times as many reviews as The Nation of books touching on Communist repression.
Arguably, it is worse when The Nation does review such books. When The Black Book of Communism and Francois Furet's Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century appeared, The Nation's review angrily dismissed them as polemics deployed by capitalist elites to "exploit a tragedy" and discredit reformism of any kind. You might not think it possible to review a book about "everyday Stalinism" without once using the words arrest, prison, shot, forced labor, gulag, or camp, and referring to famine only in the passive construction. But somehow, The Nation in another review found a way. Their treatment of Applebaum's book does not deny the suffering, but criticizes her for "exploit[ing] the gulag" for political reasons, emphasizing that it "is no easy matter...to separate the innocent from the guilty" (not even Stalin?) and insisting that the gulag cannot be connected to any larger political or moral narrative. Not even the fact that all Communist regimes created gulags and killed far more people than the regimes which came before or after them.
This isn't ignorance; it's an agenda.
Nonetheless, might it be considered as part of a legitimate ideological division of labor, in which "progressives" focus on the crimes of "right- wing" regimes and conservatives focus on left-wing ones? The implication of symmetry is grotesque. The problem is not that we should take lightly the 3,000 Chileans commonly said to have been killed by the Pinochet regime (we shouldn't). The problem is that the Soviet regime killed that many people, inside the camps alone, in 1942 alone, on average every three days. Devoting equal time to Pinochet and Stalin is to take Russian lives very lightly indeed. Even the 100,000 killed in Guatemala would be a footnote to historians of Stalin or Mao; 3,000 is a rounding error. Simply put, one of the two sides in this division of labor is focusing on the greatest mass murders in history, while the other is consistently looking away. -- Michael Pugliese
From "Marx at the Millenium, " by Cyril Smith, Pluto Press. Footnote 5, pg. 178, "...The Three Priciples of Democratic Centralism...by Don Cuckson: 1 Father Knows Best 2 Not in front of the children 3 Keep it in the family.
-- Michael Pugliese
From "Marx at the Millenium, " by Cyril Smith, Pluto Press. Footnote 5, pg. 178, "...The Three Priciples of Democratic Centralism...by Don Cuckson: 1 Father Knows Best 2 Not in front of the children 3 Keep it in the family.