April 3, 2006
A NUMBER of recent books, from Anne Applebaum's Gulag all the way to Mao: The Unknown Story, have sought to cast even more light on the demonic excesses of the great twentieth-century Communist project. Far from being a enlightened and scientific endeavour that tried to use the state to bring the best out of every citizen and reward them accordingly, it ended up bringing out the worst in almost everyone, destroying civil society, replacing all traditional allegiances with the compulsory worship of arbitrary government and turning family against family, brother against sister, husband against wife, child against parent.
Sympathisers point out that at least Communism looked upwards, and sought to improve humanity. But as Auden put it in 1939:
Perfection of a kind is what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
For decades, left-leaning historians went along with Auden and chose to blame individuals for distorting the ideology. This, to some extent, explains the left's obsession with counterfactual regimes, with flights of fancy involving Che, Rosa, Lenin, Trotsky, and various other revolutionaries who were killed or deposed before doing any visible damage to their reputation. But Applebaum goes further, explaining that the cruelty of the Soviet system was not a corruption of Leninist ideals brought about by the unfortunate and historically perverse triumph of Stalin, but an inevitable property of the Russian Revolution. The Gulag system of enslavement was actually the only way to keep the Communist state productive. With no market-based incentives to persuade anyone to make anything, the state created an entirely unsustainable system of forced labour that relied on a corrupt and capricious court system to keep the camps filled up. Mao's China, especially during the dark years of collectivisation in the 1950s, relied on similar methods.
You could argue, as many Marxists do, that the countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain had nothing to do with Communism, that they carried with them their own historical baggage, their own traditions of "rural despotism" and random cruelty. The conditions of chaos and instability created the usual monsters and tyrants, but they happened to identify as leftists, partly to get Soviet funding and military support.
But what is it about Communism, and what is it about the fellow travellers? Why do leftists baulk at the idea that China might have been better, and thoroughly more humane, had Chiang Kai-shek not been distracted and terminally weakened by the war with Japan? Why are so many leftists aghast at the suggestion that Stalin's Russia was worse than Hitler's Germany? Why are so many on the left so anxious to point out that Taiwan under the KMT was a militaristic dictatorship until 1987, and did not hold its first election until 1996, tarring the other side with the same brush in order to excuse their own questionable allegiances? Why are they so keen to point out that the economies of North and South Korea were roughly equivalent up to the 1970s, and that the brutalities of Kim Il-Sung were more than matched by the queue of militarists and US-backed demagogues who took charge and took lives in the south? Why, also, were many of them so anxious to dismiss Jung Chang's biography of Mao or Jasper Becker's descriptions of North Korea? They were careful, of course, to preface their denunciations with a few choice statements about how, well, they agree that Mao or Kim were bad men who did bad things, but, well, there were certain circumstances prevailing at the time, and who are we to judge the man-made famines and insane political pogroms of Mao's China or Kim's North Korea when, well, the other side did bad things too?
The philosopher Martin Heidegger, shortly before he disgraced himself by aligning with the Nazis, said that Communism in the east and Capitalism in the west were essentially, metaphysically, the same, . His views reflected that permanent dissatisfaction with what is as opposed to what might be. His conversion to National Socialism was an effort to break the impasse and imperfection of reality, to balance his disdain for the world with his need to belong to a cause. The paradox could not be sustained, and when the what if became the what is, he abandoned politics, retreating to his cabin in the Black Forest and uttering, famously, "Only God can save us now." On the left, we have also retreated to the same "plague on both your houses" mentality.
