Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Communism

From David Pryce-Jones, an excerpt about one of the subjects of his new book: "Remembering Robert Conquest." Conquest was an ex-Communist who became an important anti-Communist and who was one of the first to detail the horrors of Stalin's rule: "The Great Terror, published in 1968, was straightforward in language, firm in tone, and careful in depicting the ruthlessness with which Stalin had sent to their death millions of Party members, soldiers from the rank of field marshal downwards, princes and peasants and anyone else whom he judged fit to distrust." Pryce-Jones reminds us of things that many seem to forget or, more likely, were never taught.
Communism was to the 20th century what sorcery had been to the Middle Ages. The claim of the foundational doctrine of Marxism to be a science was pure witchcraft. Something known as the dialectic was said to be the key to progress, but nobody could make sense of this figment. The state was supposed to wither away, leaving us all to look after ourselves as though back in the Garden of Eden, yet in the starkest of contradictions the Communist state granted itself ever more total power over the individual in every aspect of daily life. The organizing principle of class became a sentence of death, exile, or dispossession for tens of millions of men and women defined as bourgeois, capitalist, kulak, or whatever could be profitably exploited. ....

A mystery of the age is the eagerness with which so many people in the democracies took at face value whatever the Soviet Union said about itself. Suspending their critical faculties, Western Communists and fellow-travelers had no trouble justifying mass murder, subversion, treason, and mendacity. The sophisticated and the unsophisticated alike, the rich and the poor, seemed in a trance, spellbound. ....

Two versions emerged of everything that had occurred concerning the Soviet Union. On the one hand, Bob was the leading historian telling the truth about atrocious events, and on the other hand, Eric Hobsbawm was the leading propagandist falsifying these same events. For him, Communism was bound to triumph because the Soviet Union could do no wrong, whether it was invading other countries or oppressing the defenseless. ....

In an interview in 1994, Hobsbawm gave away that his high hopes for Communism still had a total hold on him. The astonished interviewer picked him up: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” To which the response was “Yes.” ....
Hobsbawn was also British, taken seriously by many. Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, all have people here now eager to believe what they say about themselves.

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