ZGram - 8/26/2002 - "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million"

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Mon, 26 Aug 2002 15:59:50 -0700


ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 26, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite"

Mainstream Revisionism is making inroads - slowly but surely1

[START]

Still struggling with Stalin

By Cathy Young

The Boston Globe | August 26, 2002

AS WE GRAPPLE with the problems and perils of the 21st century, the great
debates of the 20th have not gone away. Some of the most contentious
questions have to do with the history of Communism, whose unholy ghost
continues to haunt us more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet
Union. Was Communism as evil as Nazism? Did the Western left collude in its
evil?

These issues are powerfully confronted by the British novelist Martin Amis
in his new book ''Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.'' Koba
was a nickname for Stalin, and the 20 million are the victims of Soviet
terror.

Some of the most stirring pages in this short book chronicle Soviet crimes
against humanity, many of them preceding Stalin - from catastrophic famines
(caused by confiscation of grain from peasants) to mass executions to labor
camps where millions lived, and often died, in hellish conditions. Much of
this story will be familiar to those who have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
''The Gulag Archipelago'' or Robert Conquest's ''The Great Terror.''

But one of Amis's main points is that it's not familiar enough. Everybody
knows of Auschwitz and Belsen, he writes. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and
Solovetsky.

Writing in The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens, who comes under some sharp
criticism in ''Koba the Dread'' for his own flirtations with the left,
challenges that statement as an insult to all those, including leftists,
who have denounced and exposed Stalin's atrocities for at least the last 50
years. But it should be obvious that nobody, like everybody, is a
hyperbolic figure of speech. What Amis means is that Soviet terror has not
entered general consciousness, the consciousness of the average literate
person, the way the Holocaust has. With a few obscure exceptions, it has
not been dramatized on film or on TV. The name of Stalin does not
viscerally evoke evil incarnate the way the name of Hitler does.

Amis concedes that regardless of overall body counts, Nazism's purposeful,
systematic extermination of human beings based solely on their ethnicity
was more evil and repugnant than Communism's more haphazard slaughter. But
this tiny moral differential between the two regimes does not justify the
vast gap in general awareness of their crimes - or the stark double
standard in their public judgment.

Thus, Amis notes that at a 1999 public event in London, Hitchens's joking
remark about his Communist past was received with affectionate laughter; a
similar casual reference to one's past as a Nazi sympathizer would be
unthinkable.

There is an even more striking example of this double standard that Amis
does not mention. In 1996, a firestorm erupted over the scheduled
publication of a biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels by British
Holocaust revisionist David Irving. After vehement protests, the publisher,
St. Martin's Press, withdrew the book.

Around the same time, the Yale University Press published ''Life and Terror
in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941,'' by Miami (Ohio) University professor
Robert Thurston, who argued that the death toll of Stalin's terror had been
greatly exaggerated.

Thurston also asserted that Stalin never planned to rule by terror, he just
reacted to events and let things spin out of control - ironically, much the
same argument Irving makes about the Nazi murder of the Jews.

While the critical response to ''Life and Terror'' was generally negative,
it sparked no outcry. In Publisher's Weekly, Irving's book was called
repellent; Thurston's book, controversial.

Why the double standard? Unlike Nazism, Communism claimed to champion the
noble ideals of equality, fairness, and brotherhood. To many well-meaning
liberals and progressives, it was an expression of the enduring human hope
for a good and just society; a nostalgic fondness for that hope, Amis
argues, endures to this day. That's why, he says, Hitchens can still
profess admiration for Lenin and Trotsky, who laid the foundations for
Stalin's brutal police state. (In his essay, Hitchens evades Amis's blunt
question: Do you admire terror?''

Today, the issues raised in ''Koba the Dread'' could be seen as purely
academic; but they are not. The left's reluctance to acknowledge that
Communism wasn't just a failure but an evil is due to more than
stubbornness. Such an acknowledgment would amount to (1) validating a view
of the West, Communism's Cold War adversary, as good (albeit imperfect),
and (2) admitting that the left spent much of the 20th century 
cozying up to mass
murderers and therefore has precious little moral authority to criticize
the West today. And that's very relevant to present-day global conflicts.

[END]

  Cathy Youngis a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her column appears
regularly in the Globe. <end>

(Source: 
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/238/oped/Still_struggling_with_Stalin+.shtml)