Profile: Victor Davis Hanson. USA needs a dose of ancient Greece's warrior culture

In the popular media of today, PINEs are depicted as dirty, bearskin-wearing, barbarians, (kind of the way Southerners are depicted--minus the bearskins) which recent archeological work has shown was most definitely NOT the case.

Then the media never heard of Sinis the Pine-bender.

An essential part of the culture of those Greek Armys was homosexuality. I wonder why the author left out that small detail

Any suggestions on how we should read Greek literature then?

Still, Rome's victory at its core was a Greek victory because Rome's dominance over Greece was born out of how well they incorporated the ideas of the Greeks and improved upon them. In essence, they had become bigger believers in the Greek approach than the Greeks themselves.

In the 4th century AD they moved the capital of their empire to Greece (Constantinople), accepted Christianity in the interpretation of Greek Fathers of the Church and in the end adopted Greek as their primary language.

This new Christian Rome lasted another thousand years while in the West the "Rome has fallen".

Pinging you to a local historian.
Victor Davis Hanson has been on local talk radio many times since 9-11-2001. I've heard him mostly on Bill Manders Show.

Please provide a scholarly source that backs up your claim that the "rights of free men" (creator driven rights-even Magna Carta is not a solid source of such rights)was a solid idea in Anglo Saxon culture. I'm finding nothing before Magna Carta.

Further study has revealed to me that the first Model Parliment of Edward the First-1297, and subsequent creations of Parliment to it's present form today probably has no connections with the Icelandic All-thing. It developed independently, with influence from AS England, the Latin Church, and continental influence. A reading of the English bill of rights of 1689 shows it as the definite father to our own Bill of Rights.

We may have to concede that we agree to disagree. However, without a solid scholarly source, subjected to peer review (that means no internet drivel from the likes of us), I remain steadfast in my claim that the US government and legal systems are more influenced by Roman and Greek methods than by purely Viking methods of governance. I agree that the Germanic influence is large (as it must be, seeing that the English are of Germanic stock), but not dominant as you say.

I have enjoyed this, as it as made me do some further research into an enjoyable field. thanks, TL

"I agree that the Germanic influence is large (as it must be, seeing that the English are of Germanic stock), but not dominant as you say."

I'll use an analogy as I don't have time to play your "scholarly reference" games. The representative government/"rights of free men" concept in Greece and Rome DIED--fini, kaput.

Although preseved in written form (by the Arabs for the Greeks, by the Church for the Romans), they were no longer practiced anywhere in Europe. The representative government concept independently arising from similar socio-economic roots in peninsular and islandic Northern Europe did NOT die out (for whatever reason)--witness the continuous existence of the Icelandic parliament from 920AD. With the increase in literacy, the Greek and Roman ideals were re-discovered and grafted onto the pre-existing North European policital "rootstock".

Folks like you only see the pretty apples on the tree, not realizing that those apples are nurtured (and indeed owe their entire existence) to a not-so-pretty wild crabapple rootstock. It is in this sense I mean when I say that American representative government owes more to nothern European "roots" than to Greece and Rome.

Although preseved in written form (by the Arabs for the Greeks, by the Church for the Romans), they were no longer practiced anywhere in Europe.

Arabs/Muslims did not preserve anything for Greeks. They were learning from conquered Greeks/Byzantines and passing this in Spain to the Westerners. The Church preserved some learning in the Western Europe. In the East the learning was wide-spread until Muslim takeover of Constantinople and Balkans in 1453. About that time (and earlier) many Greek scholars went for Italy and inspired the Renaissance .

I WANT EVIDENCE! IF YOU CANNOT OR WILL NOT PROVIDE EVEN A HINT OF FURTHER STUDY, DO NOT READ FURTHER AND DO NOT REPLY. LET US THEN END OUR FEUD AND CONTINUE ON WITH OUR BROWSING OF THIS GREAT SITE-WITH THE HOPES OF CROSSING OUR SWORD/PEN AGAIN!

Do not for one second assume that I am "stuck in my ways" and not open to your view-I can be persuaded, yet you have offered nothing but the same repeated argument, with no empirical evidence to back it. Scholarly work is no game-any real historian would never make that statement.

I have indeed conceded that we owe much your so called "rootstalk," but a simple browse through the writings of say, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, many of the other founders, show their reverence for the ways of republican Rome, and even that they thought much of the fallicies of democracy in Greece-see Samuel Adams. No where do they mention a non-functioning parliment in long forgotten Iceland. Yes, they inherited the traditions of Europe-and you are right, the ideas of Rome and Greece DID "die" (but strangely not in Italy and the Byzantine empire [to a much less extent than Italy]-where the ideas of representative government continued to exist and flourish, where many a North European learned to govern), only to be "reborn" with the Enlightenment, and to take a dominant role in the creation of new governments, (ours).

To assume that I ignore the contributions of North Europe is again a fallacy of your argument. I do not in any way consider the medieval past in any way inferior to Roman thought. But I suggest you delve deeper into your studies of the area you presume to know anything about. You will find that what you consider an unbroken chain of events dating from Viking incursions is instead a tornado of events that caused the death and rebirth of both feudal and representative government. I greatly encourage you further study the parliment of Iceland-you will again find that it ceased to be a functioning paliment before Edward I model parliment.

Finally- You have moved from specifically Viking forms of governance to "North European"-a bold move that assumes uniformity of thought throughout the area-any good teacher of medieval studies would laugh you out of the classroom. Unless you hold a PHD in medieval studies with a emphasis on government I would never take what you say with more than a grain of salt. You should likewise demand the same from me. Yet it is only I that has given source material. Your argument is a FANTASTIC one indeed, this is one of the first times I have actually heard anyone argue of the importance of Germanic thought on our government, but you fail to cap it with good evidence. And that is a shame.

Do not take the following as an insult, if I choose that route, I would not hesitate to do so: It is indeed unfortunate that you choose the route of intellectual laziness-I'm going to assume your university or college or wherever you received your education in things medieval allowed such things. I was hoping for further study. You have proved by empirical evidence, NOTHING.

"[W]hy are the Greeks not in charge now?

Want to know? Read Polybius' "Rise of the Roman Empire". Or, to put it simply, in the Romans, the Greeks encountered a people who copied everything worthwhile from the Greeks and improved on it. When the Romans' cultural parity was joined with its economic superiority (via the domination of the Italian peninsula)and military virtuousity, the Greeks (who were divided into several rival and mutually distrusting factions) were toast.

Or, to put it simply, in the Romans, the Greeks encountered a people who copied everything worthwhile from the Greeks and improved on it.

I would not say that Romans really improved or even equalled Greek culture. Rather Romans were very practical and more efficient at implementation and conquest. Greeks were more interested in knowledge and art for its own sake. It was wiser choice and anyway in the end Romans gave up their empire to the Greeks (Byzantium).

My impression was that Plato and company were elitist homosexual socialists, that democracy was practiced in only one city-state, Athens, where it dismally failed, and that the Greeks, including the vaunted Spartans, ultimately were rolled over by a bunch of mountain hicks known as the Macedonians under Alexander the Great's father. According to archeological finds, even the Pythagorean theorem appears to have been lifted from Babylon.

Given the accomplishments of our respective civilizations, I do believe that if a time portal could be opened up, the ancient Greeks should come and humbly study at our feet. More likely, though, any such visitors would probably stay as illegal immigrants working in fast-food restaurants: "Cheezburgher! Cheezburgher! Cheezburgher!"

Given the accomplishments of our respective civilizations, I do believe that if a time portal could be opened up, the ancient Greeks should come and humbly study at our feet.

Study what?! Let me see - for example in philosophy it must be the school of pragmatism represented by C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Hmm.

Now which writer would humble Euripides and Aischylos?

Careful. I resemble that remark.

Careful. I resemble that remark.

Resemble or resent? Or both?

''Maybe,'' he suggests over lunch at a Mexican restaurant near Fresno, ''the war was so surgical and quick that the Iraqis don't really think that they lost.''

Absolutely correct.
They do not act like a defeated people because they have not yet been defeated.
Saddam's army was defeated and "they" are a separate animal altogether.

The concept that a despot cannot accumulate and wield power without at the very least the tacit approval of the people is lost on them.
That the Iraqis immediately began making "demands" (an activity usually reserved for the victors), makes this disconnect crystal clear.
Surgical war (used to be called "limited war" or not necessarily "win" war) is a non-sensical concept the consequences of which have not been examined, discussed and recognized.

Its effects may actually be worse in the long term than the wish to minimize death and damage suggests.
Worst of all, the additional damage and deaths will shift to the innocent and the well meaning.

A real perversion of the assumed motivation for limited war.

Any suggestions on how we should read Greek literature then?

LOL

YOu asked for it, here it is in part.
Also another article by Anne Applebaum on this subject.
This also contains her quote which I posted from her book.
Long, but worth it.

After a bit of reflection I have decided to put
Ms. Applebaum's article first to put the second article in
context.

The Gulag

What We Know Now and Why It Matters
By Anne Applebaum
Posted: Tuesday, May 13, 2003

SPEECHES
AEI Bradley Lecture (Washington)
Publication Date: May 12, 2003

To set the historical context, I’d like to begin by pointing out that I am standing before you today in 2003, the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death. In commemoration of that event, I’d like to read a very short excerpt from the memoirs of his daughter, Svetlana, who sat by his deathbed until the very end. For the last twelve hours, she wrote:

The lack of oxygen became acute . . . the death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed to be the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane, or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.

Within days of Stalin’s demise, his henchman, Beria and then Khrushchev, began dismantling one of what had been the dictator’s proudest achievements, namely his concentration camps. They did so for many reasons--some had wives and relatives in the camps, some feared retribution from others who did. Most of all, though, they did so because the camps were an economic disaster, and had distorted the society they were supposed to help build. They were also a political catastrophe, since they created the atmosphere of terror that cramped innovation, and silenced debate. Yet although they knew this, none of Stalin’s Soviet successors--not Nikita Khrushchev and not his reformist successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, neither of whom was far-seeing enough, or politically powerful enough, to finish the job. As a result, both the economic and the moral legacy of the camps continue to distort Russian and East European society today. One might say that Stalin is dead, but his last, terrible gaze still casts its shadow.

But although the legacy of the Gulag will be the ultimate subject of my brief talk today, I do want to begin with a brief account of what we have learned about the camps since the time of Stalin’s death, and in particular what we know now that we did not know ten years ago. For I do not want to claim that in writing a narrative history of the Gulag, I have discovered a new topic that has never been touched upon before: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the history of the camp system that he published in the West in the 1970s, largely got it right. Although he had no access to archives, and based all of his writing on letters and memoirs of other prisoners he did, it now appears, get the general outline of the history right.

In the years I spent researching this book, however, I concluded that archives can make a difference. I was able to work in archives in Moscow and Karelia, and had access to many documents already copied out of archives in St. Petersburg, Perm, Vorkuta, Kolyma, and Novosibirsk. At one point, I was handed a part of the archive of a small camp called Kedrovy Shor, in the far north, and politely asked if I wanted to buy it--which I did, of course. What was available to me was often quite ordinary--the day-today archive of the GULAG administration, for example, with inspectors’ reports, financial accounts, letters from the camp directors to their supervisors in Moscow. Yet by when reading these documents, the full extent of the system, and its importance to the Soviet economy, comes into focus.

For one, the documents enabled me to write differently about the camps. I was no longer measuring the claims of émigrés and exiles against the claims of Soviet propaganda. Instead, I could use archives to back up memoirs, and interviews, of which I did about thirty-five, formally, to back up archives: all of my sources, ultimately, confirmed one another.

Documents also enabled me to be more precise than was possible in the past. Thanks to archives, we now know, for example that there were at least 476 camp systems, each one made up of hundreds, even thousands of individual camps or lagpunkts, sometimes spread out over thousands of square miles of otherwise empty tundra. We know that the vast majority of prisoners in them were peasants and workers, not the intellectuals who later wrote memoirs and books. We know that with a few exceptions, the camps were not constructed in order to kill people--Stalin preferred to use firing squads to conduct mass executions. Nevertheless they were, at times, very lethal: nearly one quarter of the Gulag’s prisoners died during the war years. They were also very fluid: Prisoners left because they died, because they escaped, because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army or because they had been promoted, from prisoner to guard. There were also frequent amnesties for the old, the ill, pregnant women, and anyone else no longer useful to the forced labor system. These releases were invariably followed by new waves of arrests.

As a result, between 1929, when they first became a mass phenomenon, and 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, some 18 million passed through them. In addition, a further 6 or 7 million people were deported, not to camps but to exile villages. In total, that means the number of people with some experience of imprisonment, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, could have run as high as 25 million, about 15 percent of the population.

We also know where they were--namely everywhere. Although we are all familiar with the image of the prisoner in the snowstorm, digging coal with a pickaxe, there were also camps in central Moscow, where prisoners built apartment blocks or designed airplanes; camps in Krasnoyarsk where prisoners ran nuclear power plants; fishing camps on the Pacific coast. The Gulag photo albums in the Russian State Archive are chock full of pictures of prisoners with their camels. From Aktyubinsk to Yakutsk, there was not a single major population center that did not have its own local camp or camps, and not a single industry that did not employ prisoners. Over the years, prisoners built roads and railroads, powerplants and chemical factories, manufactured weapons, furniture, even children’s’ toys. In the Soviet Union of the 1940s, the decade the camps reached their zenith, it would have been difficult, in many places, to go about your daily business and not run into prisoners. It is no longer possible to argue, as some Western historians have done, that the camps were known to only a small proportion of the population.

We also understand better the chronology of the camps. We’ve long known that Lenin built the first ones in 1918, at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, as an ad hoc, emergency measure to contain "enemies of the people," prevent counter-revolution and re-educate the bourgeoisie. Archives have also helped explain why Stalin chose to expand them in 1929. In that year, Stalin launched the Five Year Plan, an extraordinarily costly attempt, in human lives and natural resources, to force a 20 percent annual increase in the Soviet Union’s industrial output and to collectivize agriculture. The plan led to millions of arrests, as peasants were forced off their land, and imprisoned if they refused. It also led to an enormous labor shortage: suddenly, the Soviet Union found itself in need of coal, gas and minerals, most of which could be found only in the far north of the country.

The decision was taken: the prisoners should be used to extract the minerals. And to the secret policeman charged with carrying out the construction of the camps, it all made sense. Here is how Alexei Loginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps, north of the Arctic Circle, justified the use of prisoner labor north in a 1992 interview:

If we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build houses for them to live in. And how could civilians live there? With prisoners it is easy--all you need is a barrack, a stove with a chimney, and they survive.

None of which is to say that the camps were not also intended to terrorize and subjugate the population. Certainly prison and camp regimes, which were dictated in minute detail by Moscow, were openly designed to humiliate prisoners. The prisoners’ belts, buttons, garters, and items made of elastic were taken away from them; they were described as "enemies," and forbidden to use the word "comrade." Such measures contributed to the dehumanization of prisoners in the eyes of camp guards and bureaucrats, who therefore found it that much easier not to treat them as fellow citizens, or even as human beings.

In fact, this was an extremely powerful ideological combination--the disregarding of the humanity of prisoners, combined with the overwhelming need to fulfill the Plan. And nowhere is this clearer than in the camp inspection reports, submitted periodically by local prosecutors, and now kept neatly on file in the Moscow archives. When I first began to read them I was shocked, at first, both by their frankness and by the peculiar kind of outrage they express. Describing conditions in Volgolag, a railroad construction camp in Tatarstan in July 1942, one inspector complained, for example, that: "the whole population of the camp, including free workers, lives off flour. The only meal for prisoners is so-called ‘bread’ made from flour and water, without meats or fats." As a result, the inspector went on indignantly, there were high rates of illness, particularly scurvy--and, not surprisingly, the camp was failing to meet its production norms.

The outrage ceased to seem surprising after I had read several dozen similar reports, each of which used more or less the same sort of language, and ended with more or less the same ritual conclusion: conditions needed to be improved so that prisoners would work harder, and so that production norms would be met. Yet very little was actually done. While it might have been expected that camp living conditions would be poor during the war, as they were all over the Soviet Union, a nationwide inspection of twenty-three large camps in 1948 still concluded, among other things, that 75 percent of the prisoners in Norillag in northern Siberia had no warm boots; that the number of prisoners unfit for hard labor in Karelia had recently tripled; that death rates were still "too high" in half a dozen camps--too high, that is, to allow for efficient production. The reports reminded me of the inspectors of Gogol’s era: the forms were observed, the reports were filed, and effects on actual human beings were ignored. Camp commanders were routinely reprimanded for failing to improve living conditions, living conditions continued to fail to improve, and there the discussion ended. The level of detail also, however, clears up any remaining doubt about who was in control of the camp, the central government or the regional bosses. Back in Moscow, they knew what the camps were like, and they knew in great detail.

Without question, the expansion of the camps distorted the Soviet economy. With so much cheap labor available, the Soviet economy took far longer than it should have to become mechanized. Problems were solved by calling for more workers. With so many poorly trained people working under coercion, construction was not of the highest quality either. By one account, labor productivity among free workers in the forestry industry was nearly three times that of the prisoners working in the forestry camps.

Yet the camps also distorted the way people in the lands of the former Soviet Union think about economics, a point I would like to illustrate by describing a trip I took a couple of years ago to the city of Vorkuta, on the Arctic Circle. Vorkuta’s history begins in 1931, when a group of colonists first arrived in the region by boat, up the northern waterways. Although even the tsars had known about the region’s enormous coal reserves, no one had managed to work out precisely how to get the coal out of the ground, given the sheer horror of life in a place where temperatures regularly drop to -30 degrees or -40 degrees in the winter, where the sun does not shine for six months of the year, and where, in summertime, flies and mosquitoes travel in great, dark clouds.

But Stalin found a way--by making use of another sort of vast reserve. Vorkuta’s twenty-three original settlers were, of course, prisoners, and the leaders of that founding expedition were, of course, secret policemen. Over the subsequent two and a half decades, a million more prisoners passed through Vorkuta, one of the two or three most notorious hubs of the Gulag. With the help of prisoners, the Soviet authorities built shops and swimming pools and schools. Yet the cost of heating shoddy Soviet apartment blocks for 11 months of the year was astronomical, far more than the value of the coal itself. The city’s infrastructure, built on constantly shifting permafrost, required huge efforts to maintain. Miners could, instead, have been flown in and out on two-week shifts, as they are in Canada or Alaska. Nevertheless, Vorkuta, now a city of 200,000 people, kept going throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and still exists today.

The truth, of course, is that Vorkuta was and still is completely unnecessary. Why build kindergartens and university lecture halls in the tundra? Why build a puppet theatre? Vorkuta has three. Yet in Vorkuta you cannot ask such questions, even now. You cannot ask them, for example, of Zhenya, a retired geologist with whom I spent the better part of a day. Together, we walked around the city, around the prisoners’ cemeteries, around the ruined geological institute, a once solid structure, complete with columned, Stalinist portico and a red star on the pediment. Although her Polish parents were arrested and deported here in the 1940s, although she knows and willingly recounts the city’s gruesome history, Zhenya nevertheless railed against the "thief-democrats" and "greedy bureaucrats" who had, rather sensibly, decided to shut the institute down. If your whole life has been associated with a place, it is hard to admit that the place need never have existed. Even if that place is widely famed for atrocity and stupidity, even if that place is notoriously unpleasant and ugly, it is even harder to admit that it ought never to have been built at all.

But if Zhenya, herself the daughter of victims, was unable to understand the why her city now needs to be dismantled, then who can? And this question brings me to the next part of my talk tonight, in which I would like to ask why the Gulag, about which historians now know so much, and whose economic impact we now understand so much better, is so seldom debated and discussed by Russians. One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin’s execution squads and concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national monument or place of mourning. Worse, fifteen years after glasnost, ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate whatsoever. This was not always the case: during the 1980s, when glasnost was just beginning in Russia, gulag survivors’ memoirs sold millions of copies, and a new revelation about the past could sell out a newspaper. But more recently, history books containing similar "revelations" are badly reviewed or ignored. The president of Russia is a former KGB agent, who describes himself as a "Chekist," the word for Stalin’s political police.

The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Life is genuinely difficult in Russia today, and most Russians, who spend all of their time trying to cope, do not want to discuss the past. The Stalinist era was a long time ago, and a great deal has happened since it ended. Post-Soviet Russia is not the same as post-Nazi Germany, where the memories of the worst atrocities were still in people’s minds. The memory of the camps is also confused, in Russia, by the presence of so many other atrocities: war, famine, and collectivization. Why should camp survivors get special treatment? It is further confused by the link made, in some people’s minds, between the discussion of the past that took place in the 1980s, and the total collapse of the economy in the 1990s. What was the point of talking about all of that, many people said to me: it got us nowhere.

There is also a question of pride. Like Zhenya, many experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a personal blow. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel, but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad.

But the most important explanation for the lack of debate is not the fears and anxieties of the ordinary Russian, but the power and prestige of those now ruling the country. In December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists, as were many of the satellite states. To put it bluntly, former communists have no interest in discussing the past, it tarnishes them, undermines them, hurts their image as "reformers." Sometimes they end discussion subtly, sometimes they do so bluntly. Just a few weeks ago, Hungary’s new post-communist government cut the funding and fired the board of directors of Budapest’s new museum dedicated to the history of communism and fascism, which the previous government had erected at great cost.

And this matters: the failure to acknowledge or repent affects politics and society across the region. Would the Russians truly be able to conduct a war in Chechnya if they remembered what Stalin did to the Chechens? During the Second World War, Stalin accused the Chechens of collaboration with the Germans. But instead of punishing collaborators--if there were any--he punished the whole nation. Every Chechen man, woman and child was put on a truck or a cattle car and sent to the deserts of Central Asia. Thousands wound up like camps. Half of them died. To invade Chechnya again, at the end of the twentieth century, was the moral equivalent of Germany re-invading Poland, yet very few Russians saw it that way.

Yet the failure to fully absorb the lessons of the past has consequences for ordinary Russians too. It can be argued, for example, that the Russian failure to delve properly into the past also explains the insensitivity to the growth of censorship, and to the continued, heavy presence of the secret police, whose ability to tap phones and open mail without a court order is seldom questioned. It may also explain the stunning absence of judicial and police reform. In 1998, I visited a criminal prison in Arkhangelsk, and emerged reeling from what I’d seen. The women’s’ cells, with their hot, heavy air and powerful smells, made me feel as if I were walking back into the past. Next door, in the juvenile cell, I met a sobbing, fifteen year old girl who had been accused of stealing the ruble equivalent of $10. She had been in jail, without a hearing, for a week.

Afterwards, I spoke to the prison boss. It all came down to money, he said. The prison warders were rude because they were badly paid. The ventilation was bad because the building was old and needed repairs. Electricity was expensive, so the corridors were dark. Trials were delayed because there were not enough judges.

I was not convinced. Money is a problem, but it is not the whole story. If Russia’s prisons look like a scene from a Gulag memoir, if Russia’s courts and criminal investigations are a sham, partly because the Soviet legacy does not haunt Russia’s criminal police, secret police, judges, jailers or businessmen. But then, very few people in contemporary Russia feel the past to be a burden, or an obligation, at all. Like a great, unopened Pandora’s box, the past lies in wait for the next generation.

But do we, in the West, remember the Soviet past any better? One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I really encountered this subject only while living in Eastern Europe, and I started to wonder why. Since there are a lot of writers in the room tonight, I think I can also confess that I was also inspired by an irritating New York Times review of my first book, in 1994, which was about the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Although largely positive, of course, it contained the following line:

…Here occurred the terror famine of the 1930s, in which Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West remember it? After all, the killing was so--so boring, and ostensibly undramatic.

Were Stalin’s murders boring? Many people think so. Put bluntly, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler. Ken Livingstone, a former British member of parliament, now Mayor of London, once struggled to explain the difference to me. Yes, the Nazis were "evil," he said. But the Soviet Union was "deformed." That view echoes the feeling that many people have, even people who are not old-fashioned members of the British Labor Party: the Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler’s Germany was wrong.

Until recently, it was possible to explain this absence of popular feeling about the tragedy of European communism as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances. The passage of time is part of it: communist regimes really did grow less reprehensible as the years went by. Nobody was very frightened of General Jaruzelski, or even of Brezhnev, although both were responsible for a great deal of destruction. Besides, archives were closed. Access to campsites was forbidden. No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims, as they had done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. No images, in turn, meant that the subject, in our image-driven culture, didn’t really exist either.

But ideology twisted the ways in which we understood Soviet and East European history as well. In fact, in the 1920s, a great deal was known in the West about the bloodiness of Lenin’s revolution. Western socialists, many of whose brethren had been jailed by the Bolsheviks, protested loudly and strongly against the crime of the Russian revolution. In the 1930s, however, as Americans became more interested in learning how socialism could be applied here, the tone changed. Writers and journalists went off to the USSR, trying to learn lessons they could use at home. The New York Times employed a correspondent, Walter Duranty, who lauded the five-year plan and argued, against all evidence, that it was a massive success--and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, a part of the Western Left struggled to explain and sometimes to excuse the camps, and the terror, which created them, precisely because they wanted to try some aspects of the Soviet experiment at home. In 1936, after millions of Soviet peasants had died of famine, and millions more were in camps or in exile, the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb published a vast survey of the Soviet Union, which explained, among other things, how the "downtrodden Russian peasant is gradually acquiring a sense of political freedom."

These sentiments reached their peak during the Second World War, when Stalin was our ally and we had other reasons to ignore the truth about his repressive regime. In 1944, the American vice-president, Henry Wallace, actually went to Kolyma, one of the most notorious camps, during a trip across the USSR. Imagining he was visiting some kind of industrial complex, he told his hosts that "Soviet Asia," as he called it, reminded him of the Wild West: "The vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all kinds of climate--from tropical to polar--her inexhaustible wealth, remind me of my homeland." According to a report that the boss of Kolyma later wrote for Beria, then the head of the security services, Wallace did ask to see prisoners, but was kept away. He was not alone in refusing to see the truth about Stalin’s system: Roosevelt and Churchill had their photographs taken with Stalin too.

All of that contributed to our firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly just war, and even today few want that conviction shaken. We remember D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the children welcoming American GI s with cheers on the streets. We do not remember that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another.

During the Cold War, it is true, our awareness of Soviet atrocities went up--but in the 1960s, they receded again. Even in the 1980s, there were still American academics that went on describing the advantages of East German health care or Polish peace initiatives. In the academic world, Soviet historians who wrote about the camps generally divided up into two groups: those who wrote about the camps as criminal, and those who downplayed them, if not because they were actually pro-Soviet, then because they were opposed to America’s role in the Cold War, or maybe Ronald Reagan. Right up to the very end, our views of the Soviet Union, and its repressive system, always had more to do with American politics and American ideological struggles than they did with the Soviet Union itself.

Together, all of these explanations once made a kind of sense. When I first began to think seriously about this subject, as communism was collapsing in 1989, I even saw the logic of them myself: it seemed natural, obvious, that I should know very little about Stalin’s Soviet Union, whose secret history made it all the more intriguing. More than a decade later, I feel very differently. World War II now belongs to a previous generation. The Cold War is over too, and the alliances and international fault lines it produced have shifted for good. The Western Left and the Western Right now compete over different issues. At the same time, the emergence of new terrorist threats to Western civilization make the study of the old communist threats to Western civilization all the more relevant. It is time, it seems to me, to stop looking at the history of the Soviet Union through the narrow lens of American politics, and start seeing it for what it really was.

I should say, of course, that our failure in the West to understand the magnitude of what happened in Central Europe does not, of course, have the same profound implications for our way of life. Our tolerance for the occasional "gulag denier" in our universities will not destroy the moral fabric of our society, and the fashion for hammer-and-sickle t-shirts will not corrupt our youth for good. But there will be consequences. For one, our understanding of what is happening now in the former Soviet Union is distorted by our misunderstanding of history. Again, if we really felt--if we really, viscerally felt--that what Stalin did to the Chechens amounted to genocide, it is not only Vladimir Putin who would be unable to do the same things to him now, but we who would be unable to sit back with any equanimity and watch them. In fact, our response to the shocking invasion of Grozny, to the murder of many thousands of civilians, has been to turn away and call it an internal Russian matter, or worse, a legitimate part of the war on terrorism. Nor did the Soviet Union’s collapse inspire the same mobilization of western forces as did the Nazi collapse at the end of the second world war. When Nazi Germany finally fell, the rest of the West created both NATO and the European Community, in part to cement Germany into the West, in part to prevent Germany from ever breaking away from civilized "normality" again. By contrast, it was not until September 11, 2001, that the nations of the West began seriously rethinking their post-Cold War security policies.

But in the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will forget our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was "one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time." Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as "forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion." Already, we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of "the West" together for so long

And this is not only about the politics of the West. For if we do not study the history of the Gulag, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars. Every one of these events had different historical and philosophical origins, and arose in circumstances that will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been--and will be--repeated again and again: our transformation of our neighbors into "enemies" our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration, or expulsion, or death.

Yet the more we understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. I wrote my book about the Gulag not "so that it will not happen again," as the cliché has it, but because it will happen again. We need to know why--and each story, each memoir, each document is a piece of the puzzle. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

Then this from the Guardian, which is a part of what was printed in Spectator.

Comment

The Soviet threat was a myth
Stalin had no intention of attacking the west. We were to blame for the cold war

Andrew Alexander
Friday April 19, 2002
The Guardian

On a long and reluctant journey to Damascus, as I researched the diaries and memoirs of the key figures involved, it dawned on me that my orthodox view of the cold war as a struggle to the death between Good (Britain and America) and Evil (the Soviet Union) was seriously mistaken. In fact, as history will almost certainly judge, it was one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time, and certainly the most perilous.

The cold war began within months of the end of the second world war, when the Soviet Union was diagnosed as inherently aggressive. It was installing communist governments throughout central and eastern Europe. The triumphant Red Army was ready and able to conquer western Europe whenever it was unleashed by Stalin, who was dedicated to the global triumph of communism. But "we" - principally the US and Britain - had learnt from painful experience that it was futile to seek accommodation with "expansionist" dictators. We had to stand up to Stalin, in President Truman's phrase, "with an iron fist".

It was a Manichean doctrine, seductive in its simplicity. But the supposed military threat was wholly implausible. Had the Russians, devastated by the war, invaded the west, they would have had a desperate battle to reach the Channel coast. Britain would have been supplied with an endless stream of men and material from the US, making invasion virtually hopeless. And even if the Soviets, ignoring the A-bomb, had conquered Europe against all odds, they would have been left facing an implacable US: the ultimate unwinnable war. In short, there was no Soviet military danger. Stalin was not insane.

Nor was he a devout ideologue dedicated to world communism. He was committed, above all else, to retaining power, and ruling Russia by mass terror. Stalin had long been opposed to the idea that Russia should pursue world revolution. He had broken with Trotsky, and proclaimed the ideal of "socialism in one country". Foreign communist parties were encouraged to influence their own nations' actions. But it was never Stalin's idea that they should establish potentially rival communist governments. Yugoslavia and China were to demonstrate the peril of rival communist powers.

The cold war began because of Russia's reluctance to allow independence to Poland. Stalin was held to have reneged on promises at Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill had demanded that Poland be allowed a government that would be "free" and also "friendly to Russia". It was a dishonest formula. As recently as 1920, the two countries had been at war. No freely elected Polish government would be friendly to the USSR. Furthermore, as Stalin pointed out at Yalta, Russia had been twice invaded through Poland by Germany in 26 years, with devastating consequences. The invasion of 1941 had led to the deaths of 20 million Russians. Any postwar Russian government - communist, tsarist or social democratic - would have insisted on effective control at least of Poland, if not of larger areas of eastern Europe, as a buffer zone against future attacks.

The cold war warrior Harry Truman came to office in April 1945. The existing White House, including the belligerent Admiral Leahy, convinced him that he must make an aggressive start. In May, Churchill told Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, that the Americans ought not to withdraw to the lines previously agreed. There had, he said, to be a "showdown" while the Allies were still strong militarily. Otherwise there was "very little prospect" of preventing a third world war.

Churchill's iron curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946 - the phrase originated with Dr Goebbels, warning of the same red peril - reflects the great warrior's view of the Soviet menace. Not surprisingly, however, it was seen by the Russians as a threat. Referring to the new "tyrannies", Churchill said: "It is not our duty at this time when difficulties are so numerous to interfere forcibly in the internal affairs of countries." The inevitable implication was that there would be a time when difficulties were not so numerous.

Truman had adopted an aggressive attitude to Russia the previous October. He produced 12 points which he said would govern American policy, including the importance of opening up free markets. The programme would be based on "righteousness". There could be "no compromise with evil". Since half his points were aimed at Soviet rule in eastern Europe, the evil he had in mind was plain. He added that no one would be allowed to interfere with US policy in Latin America.

So Russian interference in countries essential to its safety was evil. But exclusive US domination of its own sphere of influence was righteous. In any case, a programme based on "no compromise with evil" is a preposterously naive basis for a foreign policy, destining a country to permanent warfare. (Perhaps, as the war against terrorism suggests, this is the capitalist world's version of Trotskyism.) The Atlantic Charter of 1941 was another example of humbug, with its declaration that countries should be free to elect their own governments. Churchill had later to explain that this did not apply to the British Empire. Molotov inquired what Britain intended to do about Spain. Spain was different, Churchill insisted.

Churchill's hostility to the Soviet Union was longstanding, despite the wartime alliance. He had proposed in 1918 that the defeated Germans should be rearmed for a grand alliance to march on Moscow. He supported the allied intervention in the Russian civil war. More important was his wartime theme that the Germans should not be disarmed too extensively because they might be needed against Russia. Moscow also suspected, with reason, that some British politicians had hoped appeasing Hitler would leave him free to attack Russia.

Against this background, it is unsurprising that the Soviet attitude was nervous and suspicious. The west made virtually no moves to allay these fears, but adopted a belligerent attitude to an imaginary military and political threat from an economically devastated and war-weary Russia. The fact that the cold war continued after Stalin's death does not, as some claim, prove the Soviets' unchanging global ambitions. The invasions of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were brutal acts, but were aimed at protecting Moscow's buffer zone. The same may be said of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 (as a result of which, with the help of the CIA, the Taliban came into existence). In none of these cases was there a territorial threat to the west.

At times even Eisenhower seemed ambivalent about the cold war, warning about the vested interests of the American "military-industrial complex". Under his presidency US foreign policy had fallen into the hands of crazed crusaders such as John Foster Dulles. Followers of Dulles's crusading approach remained prominent, especially under Reagan, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Revisionist views of the cold war regularly surface in the US, though the case is sometimes spoiled by the authors' socialist sympathies (something of which I have never been accused). In Britain, the revisionist view has not had much of a hearing.

One can, of course, understand why few in the west want the orthodox view overturned. If that were to happen, the whole edifice of postwar politics would crumble. Could it be that the heavy burden of postwar rearmament was unnecessary, that the transatlantic alliance actually imperilled rather than saved us? Could it be that the world teetered on the verge of annihilation because post-war western leaders, particularly in Washington, lacked imagination, intelligence and understanding? The gloomy answer is yes.

· Andrew Alexander is a Daily Mail columnist, and is writing a book about the cold war. A longer version of this article appears in the current issue of the Spectator

I'm finding nothing before Magna Carta.

Charter of Liberties of King Henry I A.D. 1100

Note that Henry is acknowledging and promising "restoration" of the laws of King Edward (Saxon laws).
Which he had to do in order to receive legitimacy by election from the "rump Witan". Under Norman rules of primogenture the rightful ruler would have been Duke Robert of Normandy. (William Rufus had been king because William I, who held England by right of conquest, was able to make it as a personal gift)

Indeed for a couple of centuries the grievences of the English against the Normans were for a return of those Rights held under the pre-conquest "Laws of the Good King Edward"

Think of it this way. If a modern day American scholar went back in time to Greece and used the words drama, comedy, democracy, tyranny, legal, idiot, senate, republic, empire, liberty, science, etc., the ancient speaker would understand because they would not be just understood concepts, but the words themselves are if fact the exact same words as 2,000 years ago. However, if you use these words in a "modern" Islamic society, they really won't know what you're talking about although they sometimes do a good job of pretending they do.

Most excellent post bump.

An essential part of the culture of those Greek Armys was homosexuality. I wonder why the author left out that small detail?

And this has what to do with the price of tea in china?