“They seem clear enough categories to me.”
“Yes, of course, but not proof of the equivalence of Nazism and communism, as the logic of this proof is that all regimes are the same – right-wing dictatorships, constitutional monarchies, autocracies, authoritarian regimes of the left including communist ones and democracies.”
“Democracies?”
“Yes, even democracies – and that leads to the important distinction between these regimes. The relationship between the victims changes vastly between one kind of regime and another. If we look at the regimes that dominated the mid-twentieth century, we see an incredible difference. At one extreme, Nazism murdered the other – first the communists, then the socialists and trade-unionists and then the ‘inferior’ peoples as they perceived them, such as Jews, Gypsies but also all Slavs and thus nearly all peoples to the east. For Nazis, the category of Jew included German Jews, even German Jews who fought patriotically in the First World War. Nazism was a dictatorship not only of xenophobia, but also of perceived myths of a perfect self.
“The madness of communist slaughter was that it weighed most heavily on its own: communists, as Koestler makes clear in Darkness at Noon, were at risk in both communist and fascist states, even if they were orthodox, even if they themselves had been the purveyors of the most foul denunciations against other communist ‘comrades’ – that ill-used word worthy of a Newspeak dictionary. In Koestler’s novel, the central character has already sacrificed his lover for a stay of his own execution, justified by a belief in the importance of his ‘work’. In this communism was unique, although the Soviet Union did have a period of anti-Semitism too and Stalin was quite capable of punishing minority nations. As always, things are complicated.”
“And democracies?”
“So you believe that democracies are above such things? Then you are no different from so many ‘honest’ communists and Nazis, who were often more sheltered from the truth and entirely immersed in their own regime’s propaganda. Of course, democracies do not engage in wholesale slaughter of their electorates, but do export it either through proxies or, on occasions, directly. As they are usually the more powerful countries, they have economic interests to defend, even at the cost of other peoples’ democracies or attempts at democracy. Democracies have to ensure that their electorates get their cheap commodities at whatever human cost.”
The autobiographer looks bored. His expression mutters, “Bleeding hearts, how they drain your will to live,” but he actually says, “There is no comparison between the crimes of Nazis and communists and those of democratic regimes. It is simply perverse and pig-headed to say anything else.”
“There may be a difference of degree, but perhaps not if we examine the question within the historical cycle. There is a particular type of crime that unites both centrally planned economies and ‘liberal’ economic models, and that is the unnecessary famine. Paradoxically, right-wing authoritarian regimes are not usually guilty of these, as they use an interventionist capitalist model that is not resistant to a reorganisation of resources through state intervention, albeit in a manner that is least likely to harm vested interests. Forced collectivisation in Russia, the Great Leap Forward in China and the Potato Famine in Ireland are examples; the absolute figures were much higher in the first two cases, and the percentage figure higher in the last one; in all such cases, an unbending ideological rule prevents any kind of flexible and contingent reaction to the crisis.”
“Again there is no comparison.”
“You are the ideologue. Ireland continued to export foodstuffs in large quantities while its people starved. A similar famine in the Scottish Highlands was averted by the allocation of relatively small sums from the Church. In the Soviet Union and China, the folly of untested, large-scale economic experiments often meant that there was no real opportunity to reverse the situation in the short-term, given the perennial scarcity of those societies. And in Russia, America colluded with Yeltsin to fix the election and he introduced a Capitalist ‘Great Leap Forward’ that broke the country and left it standing still. They changed the wrong part of society. Russians wanted openness and democracy, and a chance to tentatively experiment with economic change – not necessarily in a capitalist direction. Our governments’ concerns were never with democracy and human rights. Twice in the last century the Chechens suffered terrible injustice, and on both occasions the West remained silent for its own strategic reasons.”
“So, having finished your scholastic analysis, what am I meant to think? That, after all, communism produces a charming society, and we should overlook the odd peccadillo.”
“Not at all. The problem with arguing an unpopular position is that people are always ready to ascribe absurd arguments to you in an attempt to close down the whole debate – to prevent it going where the orthodox do not want it to go. Let me ask you a question: do you think that Catholicism should be condemned for eternity for the extermination of all the Arawak population of the main Caribbean islands or British free-market policies for the extinction of the indigenous population of Tasmania?”
“Of course not.”
“So why should communism be condemned for all time because of the criminal acts of the Stalinist regime, condemned in part by the Soviet Union itself?”
“If you apply this argument, then Nazism too could be exonerated.”
“You see where your lack of analysis leads you! The difference is in the intent. Nazism preached the mistreatment of ‘non-Aryans’. It set about this task with determination to the detriment of all its other policies, including its own war aims. Sure, some Nazis may not have known about what was happening in the death camps, but they must have known about the endless petty humiliations, beatings, expropriations and the camps themselves. They must have known that fundamental injustices were being inflicted on one group of citizens, and this did not surprise them, because this was what they signed up for. Communism, on the other hand, propagated the ideas of equality and international solidarity. Like Christianity and Islam, it was universalist. This does not exonerate it – perhaps it makes it guiltier because of the mismatch between ideological intent and practical outcome, but it certainly means that it is something fundamentally different.”
“So you’re a communist then,” he sneers.
“Call me what you like: communist, socialist, leftist. I am very ecumenical about these things, and if there is one thing I hate about the Left, it is its ability to split over matters of dogma. We should not be divided over whether or not we are Marxists; we should not be divided over matters of historical analysis; and, good God, we should not be divided over whether the Soviet Union was ‘state capitalist’ or a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. Some of these things are worthy of intellectual debate, but politics is the art of the possible, and more can be done through alliances.”
“All one happy family.”
“To talk about these things is impossible in these conformist times, and you represent for me an archetypal conformist – an establishment intellectual. Of course, we’re not a happy family. We’re not a family. And there are fundamental distinctions within our ranks, but only two of them: the first is the distinction between non-violent gradualism and the violent overthrow of society to be rebuilt from year zero, and the second is the distinction between liberals and authoritarians.”
“They sound like the same distinction.”
“They’re not. They’re not theoretically and they’re not in practice, although I grant you that in practice they do converge, because the ranks of liberal revolutionaries are swelled by those who are revolutionaries for reasons of fashion or posture, and would run a thousand miles from any revolutionary situation with its uncertainties, disruptions, civil wars and economic misery – just as revolutions attract chancers, adventurers, thieves, sadists, idealists and tourists, who may not have had until the day before any sympathies for the Left.”
“You’re talking complete nonsense. How can you be liberal and communist
?”
“Quite easily. At the Grunwick picket line, there was a bearded hippy who sold a newspaper called The Anarchist. I never bought it, as I considered the state to be an unfortunate necessity.”
“Your closed mind.”
“Possibly, or perhaps I just had too many newspapers. Anyway, he changed the name to The Libertarian Communist.”
“And did you buy it?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Not at all bad.”
“What a relief! I suppose you are going to come to the point. This is not much of a conversation – more of a lecture.”
“In Italy they had a liberal-socialist movement – and that is just as good a term. They were big in the anti-fascist movement, bigger than the communists perhaps, but when it came to the elections, they got a handful of votes, while the Communists and Christian Democrats leapt ahead. And that is another important point: it is democracy that creates ideology in the negative sense of the term, because only simple arguments can be successful in elections. To win them you need slogans not analysis, and flags and banners in place of books and magazines. And where did those liberal-socialists go when their Action Party was wound up? They went to join the communists, the socialists or the rabidly anti-communist social-democrats, the latter being men of principle you would have admired, and they never lacked a ministerial chair.”
“Look, social-democracy won. No one in Europe argues against the need for free education and health care. Now the argument is just about how to deliver those services.”
Now it’s my turn to feel the pointlessness of our conversation. When you disagree about the big things, it is very difficult to find a fixed point on which to lever up an intelligent dialogue. “It seems to me that all politicians are in agreement: public services should be delivered through further privatisation by agencies that pay their staff less and keep them on temporary contracts. The link between the individual and the workplace community is dying.”
“Enough of politics, it is a dull subject.”
I don’t agree in general, but here he is right. I decide to take a different tack. “Having read your book – a good book on the whole – I realise that you are not a political writer. You like Peter Mandelson, because he was polite when you interviewed him, but you must also like him because he allows the wealthier middle classes to feel completely relaxed and even virtuous about their wealth. He is a man entirely of his time; he can do that because he is a politician. You, a poet and essayist, cannot, particularly if you are concerned about posterity. You are right about Leni Riefenstahl, the film-maker who rose to prominence under Nazism. As with Gustav Gründgens, made famous by Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, Riefenstahl’s case is starker because of the criminal brutality of the regime, but her story is also instructive for those who live in more open societies. The most important thing for writers, reviewers and artists is not their careers because, if they believe that it is, then they are diminished as writers, reviewers and artists – activities that must all occur within society without being of that society. You have to avoid the slightest whiff of temporal provincialism – the tendency to interpret the world strictly within the methods and prejudices of one’s own age.”
“But I don’t, and I don’t have to agree with you or love communism.”
“I’m not asking you to do either of those things. Nor would I expect that. People often shift from left to right as they get older, and become some of the more extreme exponents of their newly adopted views. Very rarely do people move from right to left as they get older, but in the few cases they do, they become the best exponents, retaining somehow an understanding for the territory they have abandoned. My plea is that people such as you should take nothing for granted and at least admit the validity of the opposing argument so that you have to argue against it, rather than dismiss it with a sneer. I am also saying that your thoughts have to come down on one side or other of the class divide, which has now been globalised. I am not a ‘class warrior’; I don’t hate anyone, and communism from its inception was unnecessarily contemptuous of others, I admit. This is a danger for all movements based on a moral precept. I am not defending just communism, but also socialism and any other movement that takes the side of the ‘have-nots’, which includes Tolstoyans, Gandhians and Liberation Theologians. The radical Italian priest, Don Milani, would say, ‘the communists think they are classist; I am classist.’ For a long time after his death the Catholic Church kept the priest they found contemptible at arm’s length, but now it seems that they embrace him. Nothing changes. They will find a way to make him a posthumous champion of orthodoxy. But communists, who were they? Danilo Dolci, who recorded the real experiences of the disinherited, tells the story of a child who was sold by his parents to a criminal gang in Naples, which used him as a lookout. As a young man, he abandoned the relative prosperity of criminality to work in an even more dangerous field as a communist organiser during the Sicilian land battles. The mafia had engaged a bandit to assassinate the communist leaders, and when the land battles failed the bandit was shot by the police. He was no longer of any use to anyone except a few British intellectuals who wanted to lionise him.
“Those intellectuals missed the main story: they worshipped the Sicilian peasant turned gangster and not the nameless Neapolitan gangster who abjured his past and risked his life so that Sicilian peasants could own the land they worked. And that is why your claim that fascism and communism were two brands of totalitarianism and effectively identical is so disgraceful. Nazism never inspired anyone to a good act. There may have been and almost certainly were misguided but not entirely evil persons amongst the Nazi ranks, but it was not the Nazism that redeemed them, it was the part of them that had not been entirely Nazified. The fine ideals of communism inspired many to great acts of sacrifice: most of them, contrary to Marx’s expectations, were peasants, like the ones described in Isaac Babel’s short stories. Very possibly Marx was right, or rather the Marx of the Bernstein tradition was. The immense courage of the peasants who fought the revolutionary wars of the twentieth century could not make up for their pitiful lack of political savvy. They had no ownership of the victory they obtained in the name of a class that barely existed in the countries where they were successful. It may be that revolution itself requires terror because all regimes attract legitimacy of a kind, precisely because most people are provincial. It takes great effort to go beyond the boundaries imposed by our times and by our geographical location. If you had been brought up in the Soviet Union during the sixties, you – we – would have a different viewpoint, even if we were dissidents. Trifinov, who was published during that more open period, was always a communist, but in his major work, The Old Man, he is critical of the regime not under Stalin, which we might think of as the absolute limit for dissidence, but under Lenin, the regime’s founder.
“Primo Levi, who you admire, would get angry at the idea of an equivalence between Nazism and communism even in the specific area of human rights abuse and the camps. I think he was wrong on that strictly legal point. Murder is murder, and mass murder is mass murder; it makes no difference who is doing it to whom. The crimes should be punished, and international law needs to develop so that such atrocities do not recur, but what do they tell us about the nature of regimes who were guilty of them? Do the British massacres in Kenya and India define the British political system and way of life? Does American connivance in the overthrow of democracy in Iran and Chile and with Suharto in the massacre of half a million Indonesian communists and the imprisonment of many others in camps mean that America should be reviled? I know that your answer is no. But there was a time when even the broadsheets worried about these things. I remember an interview with an Indonesian poet in a camp on an island where he had been rotting for twenty years. Who knows how long he had to remain after that? I suppose you think the author of that article was part of what you call the perpetual dimwit left-consensus?”
“Did I say that?”
Henry asks and stops drumming his fingers on the table.
“You did and you claim that it must eventually disgust every liberal.”
“Look,” Henry adopts the irritated expression of those who are misunderstood by the stupid. How do you explain it to the slow-witted? he appears to be thinking. “It is quite obvious that mistakes have been made. Big mistakes, no doubt. But no, they don’t define us. I don’t have time to explain these things, which should be obvious to anyone except a dimwit leftie. To some extent, we have to defend ourselves against a greater evil.”
“The very argument – foul and illiberal argument – adopted by the Soviet Union.”
“Give us a break. Western capitalism has its faults; I don’t deny it and you have no right to imply that I do, and it may well be that it doesn’t stand up too well against your abstract ideal of the perfect global system, but it is better than anything else. It has brought great wealth to most of the population in the West, and will eventually pull the rest of humanity out of the mire.”
“No, Keynesian policies and the nationalised industries of Social Democracies rebuilt Europe after the war and provided growth rates unheard of before or since.”
Can the Gods Cry? Page 18