Alexander Solzhenitsyn was not the only witness who told the world the truth about what communism really meant -- mass murder, misery and tyranny -- but he was arguably the most important witness. What Solzhenitsyn accomplished by coming out of the gulag with his testimony was an act of heroic conscience that may be paralled, but never exceeded.
His passing reminded me of 15 years ago, meeting a friend for a drink at a new hipster bar in Washington, DC, the name of which I've forgotten. The theme was Soviet kitsch. There were hammers-and-sickles everywhere, and all kinds of Soviet junk on the walls. We were all meant to laugh at it. I found the whole thing unnerving, and left after my first drink. I would never have gone to a Nazi kitsch bar, and indeed such a place would never have opened.
I believe we in the West have an unjustifiable double standard when it comes to Nazism and communism: we rightly find Nazism utterly abhorrent, but we -- at least we in the media, and in academia -- don't judge communism by the same standard. We're so bought into the Red Scare myth that we -- at least we in the media and academic overclass -- are more afraid of anti-anti-communism than of the real thing. (By "Red Scare myth," I don't mean to deny that there was a Red Scare, but only to deny that its excesses in any way balance out the Red Terror). It ought to be just as morally obscene to traffick in Soviet kitsch as it is to do with Nazi kitsch. There is no moral difference between Nazism and communism, and that we act as if the former was the embodiment of evil, but the other was an unfortunate mistake, tells us more about our corrupted understanding than it does about the nature of these twin totalitarianisms.
Hitler and Stalin were blood brothers. But Stalin got better press, by which I mean a less critical press. Still does. I am reminded of what the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm said about the Spanish Civil War, and how the intellectual class, which favored the communist side heavily, has shaped the West's memory of that complex conflict:
But it is largely due to the intellectuals, the artists and writers who mobilised so overwhelmingly in favour of the republic, that in this instance history has not been written by the victors.
The philosophical differences between communism and Nazism are real, obviously, but I do not see that there is any real moral difference between them, and how both stood to crush the individual for the sake of state power and the realization of a secular utopia (racial for the Nazis, proletarian for the communists). Those who would denounce Nazism while maintaining any sympathy whatever for communism have to deal with Solzhenitsyn.
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A little late to the discussion here, but for the record, in terms of sheer body count, communism is responsible for more than 90 million dead:
20 million in the Soviet Union
65 million in the People's Republic of China
1 million in Vietnam
2 million in North Korea
2 million in Cambodia
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
150,000 in Latin America
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power."
While communism = atheism is an overly simplistic formulation, it is clear that communism has always had as one of its central goals the abolition of "traditional" morality and religion, as well as a clearly materialistic outlook on the world. Under Marxist tenets, faith is to be seen as a sickness (in much the same way that Dawkins himself has explicated). Abolition of religion and hostility to God are not ancillary goals, nor a "perversion" of the essentials doctrines of communism. The USSR's persecution of religion, and the "purifications" of Maoist China were perfect expressions of what Marx had desired and foreseen.
As Karl Marx put it, "The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion." In poem, Marx went a bit further: "I wish to avenge myself on the One who rules from above."
And as Solzhenitsyn put it, "The World has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice.”
Dawkins has continually called it "an old chestnut" when people point out that communism is driven by atheistic hatred (as when Lenin exhorted his followers that hatred was a ground basis for communism).
Does being an atheist make one a communist? Of course not. In fact, I believe that Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame was a committed atheist and huge Dawkins fan, leading Dawkins himself to say he "mortified" to learn of Skilling's infatuation. Notice how it's always someone else's fault for "misinterpreting" the purity of their words? No doubt more mortification is to come for Dawkins, as when hateful atheists begin to fully embrace Paul Zachary's call for holy war. Dawkins "mortified" reaction reminds me of the final climactic sequence in the movie "Rope" when Jimmy Stewart's character realizes with stunned horror the real consequences of his prior teachings to school boys.
There's no doubt that the "central pivot" of communism, as Solzhenitsyn put it, is atheism. It's not an old chestnut at all, and very relevant to our discussions today, to wonder what "no religion, too" (in Lennon's words, not Lenin's) might look like. But we don't really need to wonder. Global communism showed us. And Solzhenitsyn made sure we couldn't turn away from what we saw.
Just a drive-by correction:
I don't doubt that many fascists aren't socialists; I'm not sure whether Franco was actually a socialist. But Mussolini took his economic theories partly from socialism, and as for Hitler, the full name of the party he joined and took over was "The National Socialist Workers' Party."
The Nazi government had five-year plans, and (if not outright nationalization) national control of industry. It guaranteed full employment and, just like the Communists, quashed real labor unions while providing tame "unions" for the workers to belong to. Workers were regimented, just like Communism... there's not enough space to continue listing the similarities.
The major difference between Hitler and Lenin/Stalin, I think, was that Hitler didn't have the immediate power to purge the Army of the old guard, nor heavy industry of the capitalists. But he effected an Army purge in about 1943 or so, and Albert Speer probably kept him from carrying out a similar purge among the industrialists at about the same time. Industrialists who didn't bow the knee were purged, with the connivance of their fellows who were awarded the liquidatees' property. IIRC, of course.
Um, no, Dan.
Mussolini didn't base his economic theories on communism, and simply because he started as a socialist doesn't mean he was one later in life. Fascism Italy was almost nothing like the Soviet's economic system. In fact, it was actually a good deal closer to ours, except theirs was supposed to have government spies from top to bottom.
Fascism, both the German and Italian version, very very explicitly rejected marxism.
Obviously you can find similarities between any totalitarian system like 'Five year plans' and 'Control of industry' and 'Control of the unions', along with control of everything else. That's what totalitarianism is. It attempts to control everything.
Fascism attempts to control it by promoting worship of the state, while communism attempts to control it by promoting worship of the people.
There are actually a huge set of differences, for example fascism always invents enemies to the state because it needs them, whereas communism does not. (Although it feels free to remove people by calling them enemies.) Fascism always has a figurehead, whereas communism often does not. Communism always has a, well, communistic economy, whereas fascism is happy with 'capitalism', as long as they can direct it.
Communism is a subset of totalitarianism, just like fascism is. Communism and fascism are not the same thing.
Although I think a more logical way to state the issue is that communism always gets infected with totalitarianism, if you will. The state cannot run the economy while remaining free. While fascism is having to promote actual totalitarianism from the start, so has to come up with enemies and figureheads and made-up history to get into power. So fascism is, in a sense, people setting out deliberately to do what the USSR did accidentally with Stalin.
There's actually been quite a lot written about this.
Incidentally, North Korea has migrated almost entirely from communism to fascism at this point, without anyone noticing.
DavidTC,
Socialism is not Marxism. Lots and lots of socialists reject Marxism, because they reject one or more of Marxism's tenets. I remain firmly convinced that the Nazis believed in the "socialist" bit just about as much as the "national" bit, though I am happy to accept correction on Mussolini, about whom I know very much less.
I didn't say the Nazis were communists; I said they were socialists. I stand by that judgement.
You cannot have a totalitarian government without some amount of economic control. Totalitarian governments control every aspect of people's lives, and that has to include the businesses.
That said, socialism usually requires the government to own the means of production, and in Nazi Germany, that wasn't true. Not even for military production.
Just watch Schindler's List if you want to see an example of that. Even operating with government-provided slave labor, under the rifles of Nazi soldiers, the company was 'his', and the government purchased the produced goods.
Admittedly, they purchased it at gunpoint, with near worthless scrip instead of actual cash. But they at least pay lip service to an actual economy.
Businesses in totalitarian states, like everything in such states, are subject to absolute control and whim of the government, but they operate entirely different, with actual supply and demand and 'free' enterprise going on in fascism. (Unless they don't like it and shoot you or force you to 'sell' the company to someone they like better.)
If you made toilet paper in pre-Nazi Germany, you still made it under Nazi, and got paid for it, just like normal. Producing the amount of goods decided by the free market and selling them for the amount you thought the market would bear. It was a far cry from the planned economy under Communism, and the government only stepped in WRT to military production...and even then showed a reluctance to actually assuming control of the means of production. (Probably because Hitler understood exactly what had gone wrong in Russia, and was trying to make 'Stalinism' without 'communism'.)
This incidentally means fascism doesn't have the economical problem that communism does, and thus will not inherently collapse due to them. OTOH, fascism has to keep cranking up the rhetoric about enemies, and eventually either invade someone or collapse under its own propaganda. (On the third hand, North Korea, which as I pointed out has managed to migrate from communism to pure fascism, is still hanging in there. If by 'hanging in there' we mean 'starving to death because everyone's in the military and no one farms'.)
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