By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, February 14, 2014
Hannah Arendt coined the term "the banality of
evil" to describe the galling normalcy of Nazi mass murderer Adolf
Eichmann. Covering his trial in Jerusalem, she described Eichmann as less a cartoonish
villain than a dull, remorseless, paper-pushing functionary just "doing
his job."
The phrase "banality of evil" was instantly
controversial, largely because it was misunderstood. Arendt was not trying to
minimize Nazism's evil, but to capture its enormity. The staggering moral
horror of the Holocaust was that it made complicity "normal."
Liquidating the Jews was not just the stuff of mobs and demagogues, but of
bureaucracies and bureaucrats.
Now consider the stunted and ritualistic conversation ("controversy"
is too vibrant a word for the mundane Internet chatter) about the Soviet Union
sparked by the Winter Olympics. The humdrum shrugging at the overwhelming evil
of Soviet Communism leaves me nostalgic for the Eichmann controversy. At least
Arendt and her critics agreed that evil itself was in the dock; they merely
haggled over the best words to put in the indictment.
What to say of the gormless press-agent twaddle conjured
up to describe the Soviet Union? In its opening video for the Olympic Games,
NBC's producers drained the thesaurus of flattering terms devoid of moral
content: "The empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint; the
revolution that birthed one of modern history's pivotal experiments. But if
politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it's passion that
endures."
To parse this infomercial treacle is to miss the point,
for the whole idea is to luge by the truth on the frictionless skids of
euphemism.
In America, we constantly, almost obsessively, wrestle
with the "legacy of slavery." That speaks well of us. But what does
it say that so few care that the Soviet Union was built -- literally -- on the
legacy of slavery? The founding fathers of the Russian Revolution -- Vladimir
Lenin and Leon Trotsky -- started "small," merely throwing hundreds
of thousands of people into kontslagerya (concentration camps).
By the time Western intellectuals and youthful folk
singers like Pete Seeger were lavishing praise on the Soviet Union as the
greatest experiment in the world, Joseph Stalin was corralling millions of his
own people into slavery. Not metaphorical slavery, but real slavery complete
with systematized torture, rape and starvation. Watching the opening ceremonies
of the Olympics, you'd have no idea that from the Moscow metro system to,
literally, the roads to Sochi, the Soviet Union -- the supposed epitome of
modernity and "scientific socialism" -- was built on a mountain of
broken lives and unremembered corpses.
To read Anne Applebaum's magisterial "Gulag: A
History" is to subject yourself to relentless tales of unimaginable
barbarity. A slave who falls in the snow is not helped up by his comrades but
is instantly stripped of his clothes and left to die. His last words:
"It's so cold."
Hava Volovich, a once-obscure newspaper editor turned
slave laborer, has a baby, Eleonora, in captivity. Eleonora spends her first
months in a room where "bedbugs poured down like sand from the ceiling and
walls." A year later, Eleonora is wasting away, starving in a cold ward at
slave "mothers' camp." She begs her mother to take her back
"home" to that bedbug-infested hovel. Working all day in the forest
to earn food rations, Hava manages to visit her child each night. Finally,
Eleonora in her misery refuses even her mother's embrace, wanting only to drift
away in bed. Eleonora dies, hungry and cold, at 15 months. Her mother writes:
"In giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there
is."
Multiply these stories by a million. Ten million.
"To eat your own children is a barbarian act."
So read posters distributed by Soviet authorities in the Ukraine, where 6-8
million people were forcibly starved to death so that the socialist Stalin
could sell every speck of grain to the West, including seed stock for the next
year's harvest and food for the farmers themselves. The posters were the Soviet
response to the cannibalism they orchestrated.
If it is conventional wisdom that the Nazi Holocaust was
worse than the Soviet Terror, you would at least think earning the silver in
the Devil's Olympics would earn something more than feckless wordsmithery and
smug eye-rolling from journalists and intellectuals. Imagine if instead of
Sochi these games were in Germany, and suppose the organizers floated out the
swastika while NBC talked of the "pivotal experiment" of Nazism.
Imagine the controversy.
But when the hammer and sickle float by, there's no
outrage. There is only the evil of banality.
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