TONIGHT! 6pm PDT/9pm EDT Unspun With AnnaZ and Guest Hostess DIOTIMA!
ELECTIONS and OMISSIONS!
Plus, let's hear from FReepers around the country about what you're doing in YOUR local area with the midterm elections!
Call in! 1-868-RadioFR!
Posted on 10/17/2002 6:09:27 PM PDT by gcruse
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
By Martin Amis
Talk Miramax, 306 pages, $24.95.
By LEONARD KRIEGEL
A friend laughed as he told me the following story: At a 50th reunion of the Class of 1952 of one of New York's municipal colleges, a man sings "Los Quatros Generales," the Spanish Loyalist song known to everyone on the left during the 1950s. He sings a few verses, stops, then says, "I have followed the communists all my life. And I can't do it any longer because of what they're doing with Israel."
I was reading Martin Amis's new book on the horrors of Stalinism, "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million," when I heard that. ("Koba" was Joseph Stalin's nickname, and "the Dread" is an obvious echo of "the Terrible" by which Czar Ivan was known). I offer it here as an example of the slavish loyalty to Stalinism that, although already long discredited by 1952, has plagued the left to this day. George Orwell and Arthur Koestler and others preceded Amis in testifying to the horrors the Bolshevik Revolution brought in its wake. Yet few commanded greater loyalty than Stalin, one of two catastrophic figures whose evil indelibly stamped the past century. By the time the man who sang "Los Quatros Generales" graduated in 1952, Stalin's tyranny and the nature of the system he headed were well documented and the Communist Party had already ended its early support of Israel. But the faithful had been promised socialism's "new man," and for his sake the horrors of Stalinism were ignored.
That new man was conceived in blood and raised in terror. Even now, more than a decade after the death of the Soviet Union, we struggle to stay afloat in the dregs of what Stalinism created. For Amis, the Gulag along with the Holocaust is the measure of the terror unleashed by that new man's creation. And his book squares off against what is still a painful topic, even for our intellectually denuded left. He has handled it well, for while no new revelations fill these pages, few writers have faced the implications of modern political terror as well as Amis has. In "Time's Arrow" (1991), he looked at the savagery of Nazi genocide, and in this book he looks at what "progressives" spent their lives trying to ignore — glossing over the reality of Stalinist brutality and choosing in its stead the religious certainty characteristic of messianic politics. Murders committed in the name of Marxism could be — and were — justified with slogans so banal that to remember them is to offend language. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," Vladimir Lenin said. And would-be cooks have eagerly waited on line since he said it for the chance to place their talent at the service of the revolution.
Why choose so deadly a subject when Stalinism lies relegated to what Marxists loved to call "the dustbin of history"? Yet if there are no new revelations in "Koba the Dread," rarely has this reader — and I have read rather extensively in that 20-century literary genre, the literature of political horror — experienced a book in which moral disgust is so palpable and personal. Amis's anguish seems to control the very physical rhythm of his sentences. Like Stalin's murders, the prose possesses the ring of excess — precisely what writing about murder on so vast a scale should possess. Hitler and Stalin are "the little mustache" and "the big mustache," brothers beneath ideology, despots fueled by hatred of ordinary life. But by 1952 Hitler was dead, whereas Stalin was still riding high. And even in 1952, the Stalinist record was readily available. Murder had been a staple of the revolution even before Stalin became the Soviet Union's master chef. Early illustrations of omelet-making can be readily found in Leon Trotsky and Lenin.
From the murder of the Kronstadt sailors in 1921 to the party purges of the 1930s, the Stalinist system remained consistent in insisting that the sole morality Marxism had to acknowledge was the morality of power. Mao Tse-tung was not the first Marxist to believe that power stemmed from the barrel of a gun. As for the antisemitism that bothered our reunion singer, Lenin had defined antisemitism as "counter-revolutionary." But Lenin was merely a despot, not a racist. (Lenin's distaste for antisemitism is quoted in much the same way as writers of anti-Israeli screeds invoke August Bebel's "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." All too often, the intention is not to defend Jews but to distinguish the learned left from more ordinary Jew-haters.) By 1952 the re-emergence of the antisemitism that had been a staple of czarist Russia was obvious to all but the blindest of party followers. What took that reunion singer so long? By 1952 the persecution of Yiddish poets and actors, the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia, the murder of Isaac Babel, the way that Osip Mandelstam was driven insane, the attacks on Zionism and its twin sin in Soviet theology, cosmopolitanism — all were apparent even to casual readers.
The purposeful ignorance of Stalin's murders practiced by intellectuals and party hangers-on, those who willingly blinded themselves in the name of the revolution, is the core of "Koba the Dread." Stalin's followers were willing to accept almost any absurdity to remain in the vanguard of history. Like Hitler, he was the subject of sickeningly sycophantic praise from some of the major intellectual figures of the 20th century. To read what men such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells said of him is like rereading "Ozymandias," except that we are embarrassed not for the dead king but for the craven courtiers. Extravagance is its own ironic commentary. And what rightfully infuriates Amis is that the 20 million murdered are still not real to so many on the left.
"Koba" concludes on a peculiar note. After attacking Stalinism and anguishing over the acceptance of the horrors committed in the name of socialism by writers and intellectuals, Amis writes two letters — the first to his friend, Christopher Hitchens, the second to his dead father, Kingsley Amis. Each was involved with left politics at some point in his life. Although he died a Tory, Kingsley Amis was a member of the English Communist Party from 1941 to 1955. And Hitchens remains an admirer of Trotsky and Lenin to this day. It may be that the letters are meant to allow Amis to make the horror even more personal. Yet they threaten to generalize the murderous events he writes about, to make them a mere synonym for death itself.
When Amis writes of the death of his sister, his anger is undermined and turned into sadness about the passing of a loved one. What he has to say is moving enough, yet if death rather than Stalinism is what he sees as his villain, then it isn't the 20 million murdered whose deaths we should protest but the idea of death itself. Jeremiah and John Donne did that for us during times that were just as violent as the 20th century but were, perhaps fortunately for them, far less meretricious.
Leonard Kriegel, who has written for Partisan Review and Harper's, last appeared in these pages June 7 reviewing Francine Du Plessix Gray's "Simone Weil" and Richard Wolin's "Heidegger's Children."
TONIGHT! 6pm PDT/9pm EDT Unspun With AnnaZ and Guest Hostess DIOTIMA!
ELECTIONS and OMISSIONS!
Plus, let's hear from FReepers around the country about what you're doing in YOUR local area with the midterm elections!
Call in! 1-868-RadioFR!
This is why my guess of Communist regimes of the 20th Century around the world killing almost 200 million people for being enemies of the state probably isn't far from the truth. :-(
The Priests wives and children were also imprisoned...and most died as a result.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.