Posted on 10/16/2017 4:10:10 PM PDT by SJackson
In the new normal of 2017, in which far-right and far-left militants clash openly in America’s public square, a contentious 20th century debate is newly relevant: is the extreme left as dangerous and repugnant as the extreme right? Should the hammer and sickle be as offensive as the swastika? Was Communism as evil as Nazism — a question sure to generate plenty of heat as we approach the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution?
Conservatives have long complained of a double standard for Nazi and Communist crimes. To manyon theleft, on the other hand, equating Communism and Nazism is an obscenity bordering on Nazi apologism. Some whose life’s work is focused on the Holocaust, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Ephraim Zuroff, also object to what they see as a pernicious false symmetry.
It is a question of particular personal relevance to me, as a Jew born in Soviet Russia, where I lived until coming the United States as a teenager in 1980. There were victims of both Communist and Nazis barbarism in my own family. My paternal grandparents were survivors of Stalin’s gulag, imprisoned for trying to escape to Israel and thankfully released early because of Stalin’s death. My father’s uncle was killed in one of Hitler’s death camps.
In the closet-dissident, mostly Jewish milieu where I grew up, the belief that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and that Communism was Nazism’s equally odious twin was entirely commonplace. More than that: there was a not-uncommon view that Communism in its Stalinist incarnation was worse. To a large extent, this reflected the influence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose works (especially “The Gulag Archipelago”) were clandestinely and reverently read, and who was quoted as an authority on Communism’s higher body count and greater cruelty.
Later, in the United States, I had the jarring experience of seeing American liberals use “anti-Soviet” and “anti-Communist” as pejoratives, and frustrating conversations with people who thought Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an evil empire was crude warmongering.
But I also encountered the fact that the crimes of Communism were sometimes used to minimize the Holocaust or suggest that the mass murder of Jews was getting too much attention. At worst, those parallels were given an overtly anti-Semitic twist by people who blamed Communist mass murder on “Jewish Bolsheviks,” suggesting a moral equivalence not just between Communists and Nazis but between Jews and their persecutors. (Such arguments now flourish on the “alt right,” with references to the “Jewish Holodomor” — the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1932-33 — as a counterpart to the Holocaust; never mind that by 1932, the twelve-person Soviet Politburo bolsheviks had precisely one Jewish member.)
Today, I agree with Elie Wiesel’s judgment, in his 1975 essay “Why Solzhenitsyn Troubles Me” (published in the 1978 collection, “A Jew Today”) that there is something troubling about Solzhenitsyn’s tendency to treat the Holocaust as a lesser crime than Stalin’s butchery. However, Wiesel’s point was not to dismiss Communism’s crimes as lesser, but to argue that “there is a limit in evil beyond which comparisons are no longer relevant.” And in a 2004 interview, he observed that Communism was similar to Nazism in its conviction that the end justifies murderous means.
For many, it’s the ends that make a key difference. As British historian Orlando Figes wrote in his 1997 book, “A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924,” Communism is viewed as an expression of “humanity’s historic striving for social justice and comradeship,” a noble dream turned to horrific nightmare. Nazism, on the other hand, stood for racial supremacy and brutal oppression of “lower” races. Thus, Figes argues, the Communist experiment inspires some sympathy or at least respectful understanding, while the Nazi project “can only fill us with revulsion.”
But how meaningful is this distinction? Figes himself shows that from the first days of the Revolution, terror was an essential part of Bolshevik creed, enthusiastically embraced by Vladimir Lenin and his comrades-in-arms. Mass murder of the “class enemy” was openly and explicitly advocated, not only as revolutionary strategy but as a tool of social transformation.
“We must win over to our side 90 million of the 100 that populate Soviet Russia. There is no talking to the rest — they must be eliminated,” declared Grigory Zinoviev, Bolshevik leader and close Lenin associate, at the September 1918 Petrograd conference of the Russian Communist Party. Two years later, fellow revolutionary (and in less than two decades, fellow victim of Stalin’s terror machine) Nikolai Bukharinwrote, “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions by shooting to compulsory labor, is, paradoxical though it may sound, a method of molding Communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist era.”
What’s more, the Soviet ideal of a brotherhood beyond ethnic and racial lines often turned, in practice, to systematic persecution of populations seen as more loyal to their own kind than to the Communist fraternity — be it Ukrainians in the early 1930s or Jews in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Had Stalin lived a little longer, Soviet Jews might well have faced mass deportation to Siberia, a de facto death sentence for many.)
Conversely, Nazi racial supremacism was often masked with proclamations of freedom, brotherhood and justice for (German) workers. It’s no accident that one of the most popular songs of the Russian revolution — “Bravely, O Comrades, march onward” — was adopted as a hymn by the Nazis with barely changed lyrics, except for a line extolling Hitler and a reference to corruption by Jewish gold. Likewise, a look at Soviet and Nazis posters shows a strikingly similar esthetic.
The Holocaust was a unique evil in its diabolical attempt at the total annihilation of a people. Nazism created death camps, while the camps of the gulag were not specifically intended to kill — though in at least some of them, quickly working people to death seems to have been a deliberate policy.
Stalinism had its own distinct evils, including random terror that struck down even those most loyal to the regime. An ordinary German who either supported the Nazi regime or took no interest in politics generally had no reason to fear arrest. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, as British writer Martin Amis wrote in his eccentric but fascinating 2002 study, “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million,” “Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: Everyone except Stalin.” (“Koba” was Stalin’s nickname in his revolutionary days; twenty million is a low-end estimate of Soviet Communism’s human toll.)
You could be arrested and sent to the gulag because someone denounced you for an absurd reason: the aunt of a family friend of ours in Moscow was imprisoned because someone reported that she played a funeral march on the piano the day Bukharin was shot. Or a scapegoat could be needed for production problems at the factory where you worked. My maternal grandfather, a Party member and an aviation engineer, sometimes said to my grandma, “If they arrest me, please don’t believe that I’m an enemy of the people.”
In “Koba the Dread,” Amis struggles with the difference between attitudes toward Communism and Nazism and concludes that, on a visceral level, the “species shame” at the human capacity for monstrous deeds is “deeper in the case of Germany.” He attributes this partly to the Nazis’ “biomedical” approach to extermination.
And yet Amis also notes ways in which Communism was the worse poison: for instance, it destroyed civil society—social bonds and institutions independent of the state—in a way Nazism did not, which made recovery from Nazism easier. Moreover, “Nazism could not be duplicated” (other fascist states did not even come close); on the other hand, “Bolshevism was exportable, and produced near-identical results elsewhere.” Indeed, the Communist experiments in China and Cambodia were far more barbaric than in the Soviet Union, both in terms of total state control over everyday life and in terms of mass slaughter.
Still, sympathy for the noble dream persists; even outright Communist apologetics can still be found on the progressive left. Three years ago, Salon.com ran a piece by activist Jesse Myerson titled “Why you’re wrong about communism,” supposedly a debunking of Americans’ “huge misconceptions” on the subject (but actually a hodgepodge of excuses and red herrings).
In 1999, a group of historians published “The Black Book of Communism,” a monumental examination of the crimes of Communist regimes. Left-wing journalist Daniel Singer took them to task in The Nation for a one-sided approach that left out the good things: “There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions.” Singer was particularly dismayed because he felt that the authors were using Communism’s record to discourage belief in “collective action and the possibility of radical transformation” and promote resignation to the way things are.
But liberal democracy, for all its (currently glaring) flaws, already allows for collective action and social change. And Communism’s record should indeed be a warning against the pursuit of “radical transformation,” especially by violent means — as much as Nazism should be a warning against the dangers of militant nationalism rooted in ethnic or racial identity.
The goals of communism, and left-wing radicalism in general, may not be as blatantly repugnant as the goals of Nazism, fascism, and right-wing radicalism. But that makes left-wing radicalism more seductive to men and women of good will — and in that sense, perhaps, most dangerous.
See my 54. Hayek nailed it over 70 years ago.
Great post.
I call all totalitarian governments and philosophies Leftist Totalitarian Fascism and they have as a primary goal that is named in my taglne.
“Leftists today are speaking as if they plan to commence to commit genocide against conservatives.”
I think Jews would disagree.
I couldn't care less. Facts speak for themselves. The Third Reich murdered 11.5 million people in death camps. The USSR systematically murdered more people than the Third Reich, and the People's Republic of China systematically murdered more people than the USSR. Communism created far more death, destruction, and misery around the world than National Socialism ever dreamt of.
Regarding your tagline: I strongly believe in 2A, and I’m not getting on the bus to re-education camp.
One does not have to get in a bus to be genocided. One can be nuked from space, one can be MOABed, one can be killed by drones. Our government is coming up with all sorts of measures of population control. 1984 is here.
I have said, and also written opinions in newspapers, that the new democrat party is the national socialist democrat party of the USA.
Follow the history of the German national socialists party and anyone can come to the same opinion.
The Germans first found a common enemy by accusations through the news industry-jews, etc. Then they took over the education system-if you didnt belong to the system you were taken out and disappeared, then they took over the healthcare industry-death was their focus. Anyone who was mentally unstable, were put to death. Then the brownshirts-ANTIFA here.
It all fits. And the last thing that needs to be done is the disarming of the people and the take over of the military.
National socialism is the mafia on steroids. Communism is the same. A satanic cult,
I like WWII history. When studying Barbarossa I never know which side are the “good guys” and which are the “bad guys”.
Lenin encouraged ethnic tensions and seccesionism for the very same reason leftists in US are fueling BLM and alikes. Divide and conquer. And he was a German spy on top of that. Restoration of Polish sovereignty, seccession of Finland and Baltic states weren’t bad at all but it was exactly what Germans wanted in WWI.
Before making a substantive comment, I have one quibble: it is an absolutely false statement or point of view to believe that the Nazis were right wing. The name of the party, translated into English, is the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Emphasis on Socialist. The only real difference between the Nazis and the Communists is that the Communists believed in fomenting revolution everywhere at once, whereas the Nazis believed in concentrating in one nation and then moving on to others. In terms of the effect on the population, there was no real difference, with the sole exception of the genocidal policies of the Nazis. However, Stalin proved that the Russian Left this also had genocidal policies toward ethnic minorities. What he did to the Ukrainian farmers was horrific, and there is ample evidence that he planned to deport millions of Jews to Siberia shortly before his death. So, again, there is no difference between these Leftists, other than how they present themselves to the outside world.
Now on to substance.
I, just like the author of this piece, had relatives who were victims of both the Nazis and the Communists. On my mother’s side, roughly 100 distant cousins, aunts and uncles were murdered by those German Leftist bastards. On my father’s side, my father’s paternal grandfather had everything that he ever worked for stolen from him in the early 1920s (including a water distribution business and 14 houses that he built with his sons), and was later beaten so badly in prison in 1937, as a 74 year old man, that he died shortly after he was released. In other words, they murdered him. [As an aside, I remember that when my grandfather came back from a visit to his family in the Soviet Union in 1969, and he cried like a baby. I did not know why at the time, but I do know now that he first found out on this trip what had happened to his father]. The rest of my father’s family, with the exception of my grandfather and one of his older brothers, were stuck in a gigantic open-air prison known as the Soviet Union for roughly 75 years. There was literally no single day when they did not wonder whether the NKVD or the KGB would come and do to them what they had done to my great-grandfather. That is the record of the Russian Leftists, at least insofar as my family is concerned.
I have studied these people (Leftists) for my entire life. As far as I have been able to discern, the only difference between them is that the Russian ones were more patient and therefore more dangerous. They had, and implemented, long-range plans that are still bearing poisonous fruit throughout the world. They infiltrated American and British universities and the media in the 1920s and ‘30s, and we are far from done in terms of the effects of how this mass poisoning of the Western mind has affected our society. They set up puppet regimes throughout the world, many of which are still in existence, and still murdering and torturing people by the millions. They funded, armed and trained dozens of terrorist organizations throughout the world, and those groups are still murdering people by the hundreds or thousands each year. While the German Leftists were more dangerous on the surface, and certainly more brutish and fear-inspiring, in the long run the Russian Leftists left a far worst Legacy for humanity than the German ones ever did.
For the record, I despise the Communists as much as I despise the Nazis. The same goes for any person who advocates for or defends the Communists, just like those who advocate for or defend the Nazis. They are two sides of the same coin, both evil personified.
But the entire view, or con, was that the Jews were the world’s problem and were to be exterminated at all costs. If Hitler had just banned them from country, and kept pushing them as he attacked and took over neighbors, he might have gotten away with it as he could have stalled the allies from shutting him down a little longer and quite possibly accomplishing world domination. They were close as it was.
rwood
“in some countries even more appeal”
A lot of the countries in the 30’s were in the stages of economical problems thanks to the US market crash and the depression that followed. Probably the one thing, and maybe the only thing, the Nazi regime accomplished they tended to create a strong industrial niche. Many of the countries in Europe at that time were grasping at straws and Germany provided many of them.
rwood
Near the end of Soviet Union hardline Commies were known as Conservatives and centrist Socialists like Gorbachev were called Liberals there.
Stalin himself didn’t believe he was far left. Trotskites were called ‘left-lean’ and they were the enemy no less than ‘fascists’.
Socialism is defined as a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Communism is a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. And Nazism is defined as the political principles of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Literally a regime of control.
True communism and socialism can’t sustain themselves if from human nature alone. The will to improve from the lower on the caste violates it’s principles. And Nazism was brutal and was it’s own executioner. That and Hitler got greedy.
So as long as China stays within themselves, and doesn’t try to push their weight around, they will survive. But they are really getting into economy problems now as scrambling to prop up the country’s growth and protect its near-universal employment, China’s leaders have embraced monetary and fiscal stimulus measures, causing the country’s outstanding debt to balloon to almost 250% of gross domestic product. That can’t continue as the vast majority of Beijing’s investment have been financed by debt, and China has used its control over the banking sector to shape the cost of capital and determine where and how fast it flows. We, here, have also been slow to understand the principles of a free market. Especially the elitist liberals. That’s why we exceed $20T thanks to a boost during the Obama administration who added $7.917 trillion, a 68 percent increase, in seven years which has pushed everyone into panic. China is heading the same way.
rwood
“Commies treat everyone like Nazis treat Jews.”
Interesting perspective. Hmmmm.
“They both suck, are equally odious, and have no place in this Country.”
I might contend one is worse than the other. But generally agree.
“The 7.62 Solution.”
Sounds a lot like “Option E”. And we know who came up with that.
At that point in time, not sure there were any good guys, though I suppose our support for the Brits would be the decisive factor.
You can ask Ukranians but they often rewrite history. Most refuse to accept the reality that Ukranians chose communism and Soviet subjugation in 1921 rather than joining Poland
Facts weren't relevant to Hitler and his cult. To put things in perspective, Gypsies/Roma/Sinti, who were targetted for extermination by the Nazis, are actual Aryans, whereas Germanic peoples are not.
Marx was first Jewish. His father converted later with the whole family. Matter of fact, I think his grandfather was a rabbi.
Marx never really believed in religion and thought that it should bow to philosophy. As far as his being antisemitic. that I do not know, nor do I care.
Karl Heinrich Marx was born into a comfortable middle-class home in Trier on the river Moselle in Germany on May 5, 1818. He came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family and his father, a man who knew Voltaire and Lessing by heart, had agreed to baptism as a Protestant so that he would not lose his job as one of the most respected lawyers in Trier. At the age of seventeen, Marx enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bonn.
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