The Longest Road to Hell

Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association ^ | December 22, 1997

[John Lenin]

The Longest Road to Hell

As written in The New York Times, December 22, 1997

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By Tony Judt

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"Le Livre Noir du Communisme" ("The Black Book of Communism") was published in Paris last month and has immediately aroused controversy. Edited by Stéphane Courtois, a respected historian of French Communism, it is an 800-page compendium of the crimes of Communist regimes worldwide, recorded and analysed in ghastly detail by a team of scholars.

    The facts and figures, some of them well known, others newly confirmed in hitherto inaccessible archives, are irrefutable. The myth of the well-intentioned founders -- the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs -- has been laid to rest for good. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew.
    The book has been angrily debated in Europe, with some of its contributors regretting their participation. It was even the subject of a heated exchange in the French Parliament.
    This is because Mr. Courtois, in his introduction, claims that we can no longer insist on the conventional distinction between Communism and Nazism, which sets Hitler's state apart as a singularly terrible regime to which nothing can compare. Those very features of Nazism that we find most repellent have now been proved endemic to Communism from its inception. The time has come, he says, to acknowledge that mass crimes, systemic crimes, crimes against humanity marked both systems in equal measure. "Recent emphasis on the singularity of the genocide of the Jews, by concentrating attention on an exceptional atrocity, blurs our perception of affairs of the same order in the Communist world."
    Mr. Courtois has a powerful case. In the course of a few decades, Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people. It is now estimated that in the Soviet Union about 20 million deaths, in Communist China perhaps 65 million deaths and in Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam and Eastern Europe a further six million deaths can be directly attributed to the actions of Communist governments.
    These mass murders were not the accidental byproduct of misguided policies but the outcome of willful, sometimes genocidal calculation and intent. By March 1918, Lenin's Bolshevik regime, then just five months old, had knowingly killed more of its opponents than Czarist Russia had in the whole preceding century. In 1932-33 the famine deliberately engineered by Stalin in the Ukraine destroyed about six million men, women and children.
    Whole categories of people, real or imagined -- "Cossacks," "kulaks," bourgeois," "reactionaries" -- were exterminated not for anything they had done, but just for being who they were. Concentration camps, forced labor and terror were elevated to a system of government. Communism transposed the language and conditions of wartime onto a civil and ideological "front," bequeathing to modern radical politics a paramilitary language of interminable "conflict." A permanent civil war of party-state versus society was inaugurated; its goal was a Gleichschaltung -- an atomized oneness -- different from that of Nazism only in its invocation of "class" instead of "race" and in its distinctive euphemisms: Nazis applied "special treatment" to the useless people they murdered, Communists "liquidated" those whom history, in their eyes, had already condemned.
    Mass murder, then, was not an unintended consequence but part of the project from the start. "The archives, and numerous witnesses," Mr. Courtois writes, "confirm that terror was from the outset a basic feature of modern Communism."
    And because Communism started earlier, lasted longer and covered more continents than Nazism, he explains, its "achievement" was all the greater: "The fact is that Communist regimes committed crimes affecting about 100 million people, against some 35 million for Nazism."     Why do so many, including some of Mr. Courtois's fellow scholars, still instinctively recoil from his conclusions? In part because we are still heirs to the victorious alliance with the Communists that defeated Hitler -- if Nazism was Absolute Evil, then the allies who helped us destroy it cannot be utterly evil themselves. In part because so many well-intentioned men and women beyond the reach of Communism deeply needed to believe in it and defend it. I will remember sitting in the graduate lounge of Cambridge University in 1969 while a tenured member of the economics faculty assured us that the Chinese Cultural Revolution, then at its paroxysmic height, was the last best hope for humankind.
    Communism was applied in the "East" and justified in the "West," whereas Nazism was a western abomination whose evils were experimented closer to home ( and one that left behind a fuller, more accessible visual record of its achievements). It is thus difficult for the for the left-liberal intelligentsia of the West, and not just in Paris, to let go of its memories and illusions, to reconcile itself to having been no wiser or better that Fascism's many foreign admirers in the 1930's.
    For this is the most enduring temptation of all -- to distinguish Communism from other political evils by virtue of its self-presentation as a path, however crooked, to human liberation. The road to Communist hell was undoubtedly paved with good (Marxist) intentions: But so what? In the words of the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, revolutions -- like trees -- are known by their fruits.

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'The child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved to death by the Stalinist regime is worth no less that a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved to death by the Nazi regime.'
       --Stéphane Courtois
    'The Black Book of Communism'

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    Those are bad reasons for denying Mr. Courtois his conclusion. But there are better ones. The main weapon of worldwide Communist mass murder, statistically speaking, was state-induced famine. Is this analogous to industrial-scale racial genocide? Is it "Communism" that links and explains the deeds of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot and all their lesser acolytes in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Poland and elsewhere? In name, yes, but in practice the Cambodian massacres, to take just one case, have more in common with the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia than with Stalin's' secretive, paranoid, targeted purges.
    The tale of human cruelty in our times is too complicated and variegated to be captured by ideological labels alone, whether "left" or "right." And while "kulak" or "bourgeois" are arbitrary categories that authorize those wielding them to kill and torture anyone they like, their very arbitrariness also allows for redefinition, "re-education" or clemency in a way that was not open to people defined by rigorous criteria of inherited race and killed accordingly.
    From the point of view of the exiled, humiliated, tortured, maimed or murdered victims, of course, it's all the same. And in the sorry story of our century, Communism and Nazism are, and always were, morally indistinguishable. That lesson alone took too long to learn, and it justifies a complete recasting and rewriting of the history of our times.
    But if we are not to wallow in helpless despair when it comes to explaining why it came to this, we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself.

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Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York Univeristy.

[SWake]

Just in case you're looking for a copy in English:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0674076087/qid=1033197782/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/002-5847443-5314443?v=glance&n=507846

[John Lenin]

Thanks, I like the summary they have posted on Amazon.

When it was first published in France in 1997, Le livre noir du Communisme touched off a storm of controversy that continues to rage today. Even some of his contributors shied away from chief editor Stéphane Courtois's conclusion that Communism, in all its many forms, was morally no better than Nazism; the two totalitarian systems, Courtois argued, were far better at killing than at governing, as the world learned to its sorrow. Communism did kill, Courtois and his fellow historians demonstrate, with ruthless efficiency: 25 million in Russia during the Bolshevik and Stalinist eras, perhaps 65 million in China under the eyes of Mao Zedong, 2 million in Cambodia, millions more Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America--an astonishingly high toll of victims. This freely expressed penchant for homicide, Courtois maintains, was no accident, but an integral trait of a philosophy, and a practical politics, that promised to erase class distinctions by erasing classes and the living humans that populated them. Courtois and his contributors document Communism's crimes in numbing detail, moving from country to country, revolution to revolution. The figures they offer will likely provoke argument, if not among cliometricians then among the ideologically inclined. So, too, will Courtois's suggestion that those who hold Lenin, Trotsky, and Ho Chi Minh in anything other than contempt are dupes, witting or not, of a murderous school of thought--one that, while in retreat around the world, still has many adherents. A thought-provoking work of history and social criticism, The Black Book of Communism fully merits the broadest possible readership and discussion. --Gregory McNamee

[tictoc]

JL, I live in Europe. Nazism deservedly still has an odium so that no one except some deluded tattooed skinheads will admit to being a follower.

Not so, unfortunately, for Marxism. It drives me sheer up the wall how all around me I run into these dupes.

"The communist ideal is still as valid as ever, only it has been implemented wrong."

Aaaargh!!!

I've heard it more times than I care to remember; the last time from a schoolteacher with eternal job security and an outrageously high salary for which I - a self-employed translator and interpreter - pay through the extortionate taxes the government is taking from me so that he can indoctrinate the next generation.

I am no believer in the crackpot "science" of Siegmund Freud (Karl Kraus wrote that psychonalysis is itself the disease which it claims to cure), but maybe he was on to something when he identified a "death drive" in humans that complements the sex drive.

How else to explain that ostensibly sane adults continue to believe in Marxism and its watered-down cousin socialism?

Now excuse me please so I can go bang my head on the wall some more.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

Communism, National Socialism, Islamic Fundamentalism . . . are deadly, and should not be tolerated by anyone in a free society. That communists and their appologists are still granted cushy, tenured positions of influence in our colleges and universities is an outrage.

[moneyrunner]

Following the “pull quote” the author begins a subtle defense of the evils of Communism. For example: ”Those are bad reasons for denying Mr. Courtois his conclusion. But there are better ones. The main weapon of worldwide Communist mass murder, statistically speaking, was state-induced famine. Is this analogous to industrial-scale racial genocide?”

Is it more evil to kill someone in a gas chamber than to take his food and starving him to death? Well, I suppose starving has a certain appeal to those who oppose chemical additives in favor of “organic” foods. To infer that the one is more moral than the other has a certain bizarre New Age flavor to it.

”Cambodian massacres, to take just one case, have more in common with the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia than with Stalin's' secretive, paranoid, targeted purges.”

Actually, no. The Cambodia massacres were purges of ideological and “class” enemies, as were Stalin’s purges. Rwanda and Bosnia were driven by tribal hatreds. And, by the way, Stalin’s purges were not secret, they were simply not publicized by his ideological fellow travelers like Herbert Matthews of the NY Times.

”But if we are not to wallow in helpless despair when it comes to explaining why it came to this, we must keep in view a crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself.”

But the Nazi’s final solution was NOT extermination for its own sake. In their twisted view, the elimination of Jews, Gypsies, etc, was the path to the purification of the Master Race.

Extermination of the enemy, whether class or race is ALWAYS justified by its proponents as a good beyond simply the death of the enemy. Tony Judt shows both his sympathy for communism and his lack of scholarship in the pathetic second half of this essay.

[dennisw]

bttttttttttttt

[ampat]

The key element here is "Freedom". Those who want any form of Marxism, don't want freedom.

[Russian Sage]

"The communist ideal is still as valid as ever, only it has been implemented wrong."

Would sombody explain to me the right way to implement totalitarianism?

[BureaucratusMaximus]

Another good book dealing with more of the history of Soviet communism is "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire" by Brian Crozier. It gets into a lot of the early history of Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky and the atrocities that ocurred in the 1910's, the strange alliances and strategy of the Soviet Union during WWII, Arab/Sino and African alliances, up to Gorbechev and his glasnost.

[fire_eye]

"The communist ideal is still as valid as ever, only it has been implemented wrong."

Next time one of those rodents trots out that tedious old saw, ask them "20 million people have been murdered by people like you who were trying to "implement it right". How many more times do you think we should try, and how many more people's lives should we sacrifice, before we decide that it *cannot* be "implemented right"?"

And don't let them slither out of giving you a numerical answer...

[2banana]

Read the book "The Fall of Paris"

It is about the first time Communism actually took power (in Paris in the late 1800's right after the Franco-Prussian War). It was brutal then and has never changed...

[Mo1]

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