By Douglas Murray
Monday, October 30, 2017
Note: This article originally appeared in the
October 30, 2017, issue of National Review magazine.
If there is one line we surely will never hear uttered,
even in these times, it is any variant of this statement: “I grant that the
Nazis committed excesses, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be
said for Fascism.” While there certainly are groupuscules of neo-Nazis around,
they do not get a polite reception on campuses, let alone tenure. Watered-down
versions of Fascism do not emerge in the manifestos of mainstream political
parties in the West. No student is ever seen sporting a T-shirt with a chic
Reinhard Heydrich likeness emblazoned across the front.
If the bacillus of Fascism is never dormant, then at
least we appear to have retained significant stockpiles of societal antibiotics
with which to counter it. It is unlikely that Richard Spencer will address the
Conservative Political Action Conference anytime soon. Unlikely that there will
be celebratory centennials for Mussolini’s rise to power. And less likely still
(despite the cries to the contrary of professional anti-Fascists, who need
Fascists for business purposes) that anyone dreaming of a fairer Fascism will
reach the White House in any coming electoral cycle.
Yet 100 years on from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917,
can the same be said about the Communist dream? Only the wildest optimist could
say so. For in fact wherever you turn in the world today, it seems that the
virus of Communism — in every Marxist, socialist strain — remains alive and
well. Conditions for its spreading range from moderate to good.
In June, Russians were asked in an opinion poll to name
“the top ten outstanding people of all time and all nations.” Perhaps it is
unsurprising that the joint second most commonly given name was Pushkin. Even
less surprising that Russia’s national poet should have shared this position
with the country’s current strongman, Vladimir Putin. What is more startling
for any outsider is that the person whom the largest number of Russians
declared the “most outstanding” person in world history was Joseph Stalin. It
is true that the man responsible for the deaths (around 20 million, by most
moderate estimates) of more people than any other in Russian history has
slipped slightly. This year he was at 38 percent, down from 42 percent in a
2012 survey. Yet still he leads the polls. Were the greatest mass murderer in
Russian history able to return from his grave today, he could resume power
without even needing to fix the ballot.
Of course, if Adolf Hitler remained the most popular
figure in modern Germany, the world would be worried. But with the Communists
it was always different. An admirer of General Franco who opposed Primo de
Rivera is somehow not the same as a Trotskyist who opposed Leninism (a type
that remains a staple of the media and academic worlds). Perhaps the 20th
century’s greatest remaining mystery is how, between the twin totalitarian
nightmares, it remains acceptable to have spent a portion of your life envying,
emulating, or celebrating the global cataclysm that commenced in 1917.
It is not surprising that Russians have not reckoned with
their past. Five years ago, on a visit to Stalin’s birthplace in Gori, Georgia,
I paid a visit to the Soviet-era museum that still stands alongside the tiny
wooden hut where the dictator was born and that is still preserved, like a
relic. Here you can view the train carriage in which Stalin traveled, a
suitcase he used, his writing implements and furniture, and, of course, gifts
from the many people who admired him. The last room you enter on this tour of
the house is somber and contains his death mask. This whole tour uncritically
celebrates the great leader who, from the moment he succeeded Lenin, caused a disproportionate
number of deaths of people from this region of his birth.
Then, in 2012, the Georgian authorities were only at the
start of what would turn out to be a failed attempt to transform their fawning,
Communist-era memorial to the region’s most famous son into a museum of
“Stalinism.” At that stage they had made only one half-hearted effort to put
the man into anything other than a hagiographical context. After learning about
his astonishing rise and rule, and before being presented with a slim volume of
his early poetry (“The lark sang its tune / High up in the clouds. / And
nightingale joined / In the jubilating song”), visitors were taken under the
main staircase. There two rooms had recently been added, to commemorate all the
people who died in the Gulag, with a desk to re-create an interrogation cell
from the time of his rule. It was like visiting a museum dedicated to the
career of Adolf Hitler only to learn at the last moment (after due recognition
of the Führer’s skill as a watercolorist) that there had been this thing called
Auschwitz. The gift shop sold Stalin wine (red), lighters, and pens. No
memorial to the victims of Fascism can finish with an attempt to sell visitors
a Heinrich Himmler tea towel.
***
Anyone hoping that such attitudes would remain confined
to what was once the Soviet Union will feel deflated when they look about the
rest of the world. Not only because there are still countries attempting to
perfect the experiment (North Korea most ascetically, Cuba and China with
increasing laxness) but because, away from the scenes of the 20th-century
charnel houses, the experiment is barely remembered at all. And where it is, it
is not remembered in a negative light.
Last year, the research firm Survation conducted a poll
to ascertain the attitudes of young British people in the 16–24 age bracket.
The oldest among this group would have been born in the year the Soviet Union
collapsed, the youngest around a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The
respondents were asked to look at a list of names and say which ones they most
associated with “crimes against humanity.”
Adolf Hitler finished first, with 87 percent of young
people seeing him in a negative light. Much further down (below Saddam Hussein)
came Joseph Stalin, whom 61 percent of young people associated with such
crimes, with 28 percent of all respondents admitting that they had never heard
of him. Half of young people admitted they had never heard of Lenin. And while
8 percent were ignorant of Adolf Hitler, and therefore clearly as ignorant as
swans, it is what happened farther down the name-recognition list that was more
alarming.
Fully 39 percent of young people associated George W.
Bush with crimes against humanity, and 34 percent associated Tony Blair with
the same. Which were higher percentages than for either Mao Tse-tung (20
percent) or Pol Pot (19 percent). The cause is not fellow-traveling but sheer
ignorance. No less than 70 percent of young people said they had never heard of
Chairman Mao, while 72 percent had never heard of the Cambodian génocidaire.
Were the low numbers replicated for historical figures
related to the Holocaust or Fascism, they would cause an outcry. There would be
calls for great education drives and the erection of museums and monuments to
the victims of Nazism and Fascism. If young people were discovered to know so
little about those crimes, every teacher in the land would be hollering about
the inevitability of replaying history we do not remember.
But it is always different with the Communist virus let
loose on the world a century ago. The figure of 6 million Jews murdered in the
Holocaust is rightly set in our collective consciousness and conscience during
our years of education and constantly reinforced through popular culture,
political reference, and a whole panoply of institutions devoted to keeping
memories alive. Consider the recent film Denial,
about the attempt by David Irving to sue the American historian Deborah
Lipstadt for accurately identifying him as a Holocaust-denier. Some people
might have thought this comparatively tangential corner of Nazi history to have
been well furrowed, only to discover that a new generation hadn’t seen it done
and that it was understandable and even necessary to see it furrowed again.
But what are the consequences of societies with so little
memory of 20 million deaths in the USSR? Or the 65 million deaths caused by
efforts to instill Communism in China? If those 65 million Chinese deaths
cannot detain us, what are the chances that anyone will care about the 2
million deaths in Cambodia? The million in Eastern Europe? The million in
Vietnam? The 2 million (and counting) in North Korea? The nearly 2 million
across Africa? The 1.5 million in Afghanistan? The 150,000 in Latin America?
Not to mention the thousands of murders committed by Communist movements not in
power, a number that could almost seem meager compared with the official
slaughter?
Who could survey this wreckage — 100 million deaths in a
century alone — and not recoil? Who would stand on top of these 100 million
tragedies and think “Once more, comrades, though this time with subtly
different emphases”?
Few would do so boldly. Of course there was the
celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm, who remained in the Communist Party even after
the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and earned his place in infamy in
1994 by saying in an interview that, yes, if another 20 million deaths had been
necessary to achieve the socialist utopia of his dreams, then 20 million deaths
would have been fine by him. Irving claimed that 6 million Jews had not been
murdered, and he achieved rightful ignominy. Hobsbawm expressed approval of
several times the number of Communist murders and subsequently received from a
Labour government one of the highest civilian honors.
Yet Hobsbawn’s infamous admission is striking for its
uncommonness as much as for its drawing-room barbarism. Commoner, especially
among the denizens of the academy in the West, is a form of evasion that goes
hand in hand with emulation. This is the process, familiar to anyone who has
studied the sewers of thought in which some people seek to diminish Nazi
culpability in World War II, by which small platoons of intellectuals fight to
divert blame from the Communist cause. They blame a few rogue elements and
diminish the body count to form some kind of equivalence of their own with
whatever crime of the West they can find within reach.
***
For decades, America’s public intellectuals have been
noteworthy for chipping away at the lower reaches of the Communist canon. It is
over the genocide in Cambodia that America’s most cited public intellectual,
Noam Chomsky, retains some notoriety. As reports of Pol Pot’s genocide emerged,
Chomsky was one of those who wished to ignore the reporters accurately describing
what was happening. Instead he relied on Richard Dudman, a source who after two
weeks in Cambodia described working conditions in the country as “hard” but “by
no means intolerable.” For Chomsky it was clear that, in the wake of America’s
involvement in Vietnam, it remained the capitalist U.S.A. that must be focused
on as the source of all crimes. Local actors, especially socialist and
Communist actors, could be viewed only in a secondary light, and even then with
the presumption of innocence, while always and everywhere America met with the
presumption of guilt. This is the trick that Irving attempted with the
Holocaust and the number of deaths resulting from the bombing of Dresden.
American college students are of course not fed — or encouraged to digest — a
diet of Irving.
Other prominent intellectuals in the years since have
also viewed the “excesses” of the Marxist dreamers as being either a necessary
evil or a necessary evil that did not even happen. Some have managed to hold
both thoughts in their heads, as Paul Hollander among others has chronicled.
Consider that other present favorite of American
students, Slavoj Zizek. This is a man who praised the Khmer Rouge “for
attempting a total break with the past” and criticized them for being “not
radical enough” and for failing to “invent any new form of collectivity.” Thus
the jocular imbecility that constitutes Zizek’s style also reveals its moral
imbecility. This is a man who, while praising the “humanist terror” of
Robespierre, asserted that the French revolutionary “redeemed the virtual
content of terror from its actualization.”
The campuses of the West too often loosen up the politics
of the young through such immoral effusions. While the concepts and realities
of borders and national identity, which are erroneously believed to encompass a
“Fascist” worldview, remain so tainted as to be unusable before any audience of
people under 30, the concepts of solidarity, equality, and other benign
spillages from the Marxist-Communist worldview remain wreathed in halos. What
their exponents mean in practice, what endpoint they seek and what restraints
they would ever exercise, never gets asked. But it is in this environ of spilt
Marxism that such figures as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren now address
their growing young audiences. Were equality (which they press instead of
fairness) to have been tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that
heaped on the concept of borders, then our current conversation would be very
different.
But it is not. And amid the ignorance and the deliberate
efforts, the presumption remains that while the perpetrators of Fascism always
meant to do evil, the inheritors and emulators of 1917 meant to do good. Only
accidentally (and even then only arguably) did they do unparalleled harm. All
the while, the people whom students might study and revere to correct this view
are disappearing into history. While everybody knows the stories of the good
anti-Nazis from more than seven decades ago, the heroes of anti-Communism are
becoming forgotten. That 2016 poll of British youth found that 83 percent of
young people had never even heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
***
‘Well, young people don’t know anything about anything
very much” is one response to such findings. But they can, and they do.
Alternatively, they can be encouraged to pile optimism on top of ignorance.
Consider what the simple iconography and popular history would suggest to an
impressionable young mind (what other is there?). It is there not just for
anybody who seeks it out — such as at the May Day marches, where banners
depicting Lenin, Stalin, and Mao are still carried proudly aloft across the
West, all without a single hostile demonstrator (let alone Antifa) in sight.
It is there even for those not hoping to seek it out.
Recently, schoolchildren in Cuba gathered to honor Che Guevara on the 50th
anniversary of his death. “Be like Che,” they chanted. But it is not only in
Cuba. Also this month, the Irish postal service issued a new commemorative
stamp to honor the 50th anniversary of the death of the Argentinian Marxist
mass murderer. On and on it goes. When Fidel Castro died last November, it was
not Kim Jong-un but Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, who issued a
statement describing the late despot as “a legendary revolutionary and orator”
who had “made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his
island nation.” About Castro’s skills at running the trains on time, Trudeau
remained perhaps self-consciously coy.
So what are they loosened up for, these young people who
view the 20th century as having had only one besetting evil? The answer is in
the politics bubbling up all around us: the politics at which conservatives are
everywhere losing. The politics that got away with its crimes in the 20th
century only to reboot itself with a softer, friendlier façade in the 21st.
That movement includes people who have consistently
chipped away at the top as well as the bottom of the barbarism of their
forebears. Nine years ago on a television program in Britain, Diane Abbott, a
prominent Labour backbencher in Parliament and a rising star of TV punditry,
said in passing that “on balance Mao did more good than harm.” For her, the
move away from feudalism and the alleged agricultural advances that Mao instituted
made up for the 65 million deaths. Back then Diane Abbott seemed as far from
the center of power as the even more obscure backbench MP Jeremy Corbyn. Yet as
a result of the global financial crisis and specific local political shifts,
Corbyn is now the leader of the Labour party and of Her Majesty’s loyal
opposition. If there were a general election in Britain today, the polls
suggest, he would become prime minister.
This is a man whose consigliere
Seumas Milne used to distinguish himself as a staffer at the Guardian by, among other things, working
to whittle down the number of people claimed in articles to have been killed by
Comrade Stalin. How everyone laughed at Milne’s persistent Stalinism — until
his closest political ally took over the party of the Left and made Stalinism
mainstream again.
Two years ago, after Corbyn first became Labour leader,
his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, stood at the dispatch box in the House
of Commons and waved a copy of Mao’s “Red Book” to give the Conservatives some
lessons in economics. McDonnell has also called for a popular “insurrection”
against the elected government. He later said the stunt was a “joke.” He is a
man who has consistently advocated violence in the pursuit of political goals
and who would be the second-most-important person in government — the man in
charge of the nation’s finances — if an election were called in Britain today.
Suddenly it has become acceptable on the political left, including the
parliamentary left, to open the whole socialist possibility up again. Labour
politicians openly debate the merits of forcibly removing private property from
“the rich.”
And so we see revealed the persistence not just of this
ideological worldview but of the edifice its modern adherents have been hoping
to reconstruct all these decades. Not in Venezuela, or in Cuba, but in a
developed modern Western democracy.
How hard they have worked, these people. And how hard
they work still. Never leaving a comrade behind. Never demoralizing those who
are working towards similar goals. In recent years they exercised considerable
energy defending their comrades in Venezuela. Today, as Venezuela’s troubles
have burst into everybody’s view, they lament the tiny mistakes they consider
their allies to have made along the way. But the result is always the same. As
are the excuses. The problem is never the dish. The problem is that the dish
has just not yet been perfectly served. How often it brings to mind that famous
exchange between George Orwell and a Stalinist. Orwell was eventually able to
make his Stalinist concede that there had been excesses and mistakes — the
famines, the show trials — in the attempt to attain the state they were
striving towards. And finally the inevitable cliché leaked out: “You can’t make
an omelette without breaking eggs.” To which Orwell replied, “Where is the
omelette?”
The question lingers still: not just in Russia, Cuba, and
Venezuela but now again in the West. How come we are still watching this
attempt to make this horrible, bloody recipe, which aims for utopia yet always
leaves the same catastrophic, bloody mess?
There are some people who worry that T. S. Eliot was
right: “We do not know very much of the future / Except that from generation to
generation / The same things happen again and again. / Men learn little from
others’ experience.” Perhaps the only way that the next generation will learn
the horror of the Communist experiment is if they experience a bit of it. It is
a dangerous gamble to take. It was a theory among some on the moderate left
before Corbyn took over their party. Instead of being a healthy working
organism that could benefit from the careful inoculation, it turned out that
the party was deracinated and weak and ended up getting a full-blown outbreak
of the virus it was seeking to inoculate itself against. It is a parable that
social democrats and conservatives across the developed world should study with
caution. One hundred years on from 1917, it turns out that our stocks of
inoculation to this virus remain not just low but dwindling.
