http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1537155/posts
Denying the Soviet Holocaust
Tech Central Station ^ | 12/09/05 | Stephen Schwartz
Posted on 12/09/2005 8:19:55 AM PST by Valin
On Monday, December 5, The Wall Street Journal published a major
commentary by Robert Conquest, the dean of historians on Soviet tyranny
and, for some of us, one of the greatest living moral exemplars in the
world. Few authors have written so much and so well on the horrors of
Communism.
In a column titled "Stalinophilia," Conquest described the case of a
minor Italian academic, Luciano Canfora, who has managed to publish a
pro-Soviet account of 20th century politics, called in its original
tongue "Democracy: History of an Ideology." Canfora's volume has come
out in Italy, France, Spain and England. It is due to appear in the
U.S. next month under the more neutral title "Democracy in Europe: A
History."
A German publisher declined to issue the book, and has been accused of
"censorship," as if the exercise by a private business of its right not
to print and distribute a particular text is somehow a denial of press
freedom. Obviously, if Canfora's contribution had any merit, it could
be published in Germany by another enterprise. But a Swiss journalist,
Joachim Guntner, noted the objectionable character of the work, which
never mentions the word "gulag" but attacks the U.S. for alleged
support of fascism around the world. A German leftist denounced
Canfora's "dogmatic stupidity."
Canfora's professorial credentials reside in the field of Greek and
Roman studies, not that of modern politics. Misadventures by tenured
fools are hardly news. Nor is campus nostalgia for the intellectual
mischief of the Stalin era. In that dark time, democracy, along with
modernist art, psychoanalysis, 20th century developments in physics,
popular culture, and the established labor and socialist movements were
routinely vilified by the robotically-conditioned ranks of the world's
Communist parties.
Hitler would never have gained power without the implicit approval of
Moscow, which restrained its German adherents from uniting with the
social-democratic masses to oppose the Nazis. Stalin and Hitler openly
allied against the democracies from August 1939 to June 1941,
permitting the Russians to occupy such territories as the Baltic states
and Moldova. Only this week, the neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin prevailed
on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) --
which has a history of political corruption and mismanagement in
postwar Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo, as well as rampant
anti-Americanism, even though the U.S. is an OSCE member -- to let
Russian troops remain on the impoverished territory of Moldova, the
last trophy of Stalin's romance with Hitler.
A renewed contempt for democracy has been visible in global politics
since the middle 1970s, when the end of authoritarianism in Spain and
Portugal revived the fantasies of small coteries of radical
intellectuals. Faced with the obvious triumph of capitalism, public
accountability, and popular sovereignty in these former dictatorships,
leftist revolutionaries, who could not escape their own "oppositional"
mental prison, began questioning the value of democracy itself. In
France, some of them turned into Nazi Holocaust deniers. An
antidemocratic idiom was then fostered by the Soviet Communist party,
which reintroduced the traditional Muscovite idiom of violent
Jew-baiting.
After Communism crashed in turn, the remnants of the Soviet
nomenklatura merged with existing and "new" neo-Nazi trends to form a
"red-brown alliance" of Communists and Hitlerians -- against
capitalism, the Jews, and the West in general. Communism and fascism,
as in 1939-41, once again appeared indistinguishable from one another.
So-called "conservative" isolationists in the U.S. defended such bloody
dictators as Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, where "humanist Marxists"
one day suddenly opted for rabid ultranationalism. This situation may
change as racists in countries like Britain and France seize the
initiative in attacking local Muslims, as a substitute for their
historic Jewish target; by contrast, the decrepit left has rallied to
the defense of Saddam Hussein, and even offered support for Zarqawi's
terrorists, as well as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.
I was interested, however, to note that Conquest's polemic against
Canfora coincided with a brief item in the Daily Telegraph of London,
dated December 1, reporting that the parliament of the Czech Republic
is considering whether it should be a criminal offense, punishable by a
three-year prison term, to deny the atrocities of Communism. This
piquant item seems to answer a question implied by Conquest: what
distinction may be made between a denier of the Nazi Holocaust and a
denier of the Soviet Holocaust? (The immediate difference is that the
latter will get a university teaching job without hiding his or her
views.)
I have never been a supporter of any legal restriction, aside from
libel laws, on speech or writing, no matter how repellent it may be. I
am opposed to the censorship of al-Qaida and similar internet sites,
because as an activist opponent of Islamist extremism I need to track
and study the enemy; I have also been opposed to laws against Holocaust
denial because I believe it is more important to expose the moral
treachery of such a posture than to pretend, according to canons of
political correctness, that such hallucinated discourse does not exist.
And while living in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo, I have opposed
restrictions on hate speech because I believe it is better for rage to
be vented than suppressed. A great thinker once argued that liberty is
defined by its preservation for what we oppose, not what we approve.
The point is undeniable.
Nevertheless... also because I lived in ex-Yugoslavia, and have
personally seen the baleful effects of Stalinism in Romania, Albania,
and Poland, the Czech adoption of a law against denial of the Soviet
Holocaust is more than provocative. It is tempting. Suppression of the
truth about Stalinism was the main characteristic of global
intellectual life throughout the four and a half decades from 1945 to
1990. The left falsely claimed that Russia wanted peace, when Slavic
imperialism planned and executed continuous aggressive adventures, from
the attempted coup in Greece in 1944 to the experiments in
totalitarianism that have continued in Cuba and a handful of other
countries. Today Castro urges on Hugo Chavez, a profound embarrassment
to Venezuela, just as the Russians manipulated the leftist military
dictatorship in Guatemala in the 1940s.
For its part, most of the right was so wedded to "realism" that an
accommodation with Soviet expansionism -- containment rather than
liberation, to paraphrase the immortal formulation of James Burnham --
was made to seem inevitable and salutary. The horror of the Soviet
legacy -- in which mass purges, the betrayal of the Spanish Republic in
that country's 1936-39 civil war, the assassination of exiles
including, but not limited to Trotsky, and similar atrocities, had
competed with the brutalities of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese
imperialists -- was largely forgotten. Only a few individuals in the
West, among them Robert Conquest, broke the consensus about Sovietism.
To see the respectable caste of mediocrities in Western media and
academia exposed as liars and charlatans -- those who still insist, to
cite a few examples, that the so-called International Brigades in the
Spanish civil war were heroes rather than secret police murderers; that
the banal Russian spy Alger Hiss was innocent; that the evil Rosenbergs
who helped hand Stalin the atom bomb were victims of prejudice; that
the so-called Hollywood blacklist, in which a few people lost
opportunities for employment, was comparable with the Soviet purges in
which millions were slain -- that would be something, to say the least.
To see this reptile breed (as Trotsky once described the writers of The
Nation magazine) called to account for a generation's worth of history
betrayed, hope prostituted, and ideals treated as a pretext for
belly-crawling propaganda... is, to repeat, tempting. Perhaps too
tempting.
The Hiss case is especially germane to this discussion. That is because
much conclusive evidence about Alger Hiss was disclosed long after the
original Hiss affair of the 1940s. It showed Hiss and his circle to be
wretched traitors and accomplices of terror. And this evidence
originated in the files of the Czech Communist Party and the statements
of a fellow-spy of Hiss named Noel Field, who was once notorious but is
now forgotten.
I intend, at least, to find out if the Czech law passes the country's
upper legislative house, whether foreigners will have standing to enter
complaints against other foreigners under Prague's "Soviet Holocaust
denial" law. As much as I am, to repeat, opposed to any restriction on
spoken and printed argument, to see the issues debated in a Czech
courtroom, with someone like Noam Chomsky or Victor Navasky as a
defendant, would be memorable, to say the least. Even as we protect the
rights of those we despise, some people undeniably need to learn that
arguments have consequences. At least in today's Czech courts, unlike
those of Stalin, the defendants can be expected to get a fair hearing.
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