[lbo-talk] Eagleton on fascism

[John Lacny]

It's appears from the context that the reference to "Stalin" in the Eagleton article was a typo. There are lots of accusations you can make about Stalin's treatment of Ukrainians, but to say he "slaughtered Ukrainian peasants BECAUSE they were Jews" [emphasis mine] is not among them. Certainly the vast majority of famine victims were not Jews. From the context, it's obvious that Eagleton is making a point about fascism's "carnival of unreason," specifically the Nazis' insistence upon ideological goals (i.e., genocide against the Jews) even above the practical imperatives of winning the war. And whatever else you can say about Stalin, that's also not something you can say about him: if anything, left purists have long been critical of Stalin for "betraying" revolutionary principles for the "narrow" purposes of statecraft. The fact that the war was waged as a "Great Patriotic War" and that the "International" was dispensed with to make way for a more national-patriotic hymn is proof of that. 

Much of the controversy about Babi Yar centered on the fact that people of all Soviet nationalities, especially many prisoners of war, were murdered and then dumped there by the fascists. Nevertheless the mass graves at Babi Yar began with the Nazi murder of all of the Jews of Kiev, and there was a movement to get a marker there specifically to mark that event, but the Soviet government was reluctant to "single out" the Jews for a memorial because many of the local people had been collaborators and had actually helped the fascists hunt down Jews, and the postwar mythology -- not just in the Sovet Union, mind you, but just about everywhere -- was that all of the peoples were united in the struggle against Hitler. Eventually the memorial was erected, during the Krushchev period I think. This period of "thaw" was also when Shostakovich composed and performed his thirteenth symphony, where he set Yegveny Yevtushenko's poem to music.

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John Lacny
http://www.johnlacny.com

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