Solzhenitsyn and the West's double standard on communism

No mention of our current relationship with Communist China?

Rod,

The bar in DC was called "State of the Union", situated near the intersection of U St. and 14th St, NW, back when that neighborhood was still a bit sketchy. My old band played there many-a-night. It closed its doors about 5 years ago, I think.

The Soviets were a US ally for part of Stalin's tenure, not so Hitler. Doesn't make it right, but WWII is the context for much popular discussion of both figures.

I look at it this way, and almost everyone here is going to disagree:

First of all, the Soviets were not evil during most people's lifetimes. With the death of Stalin, and in fact during most of the cold war, they were our enemies, and they were not very nice places to live, but they weren't murdering people en mass. It was not a free nation, but many places are not 'free', and that's a very low standard for 'evil'.

And, honestly, did we even care about the Soviets before then? We were their allies for part of it! The Soviets were evil, and were our enemies, but they weren't really both at the same time, except for the tiny amount of time post WWII before Stalin died.

Whereas there's no time that the Nazis existed (Once they got enough power) that they were not murdering people en mass, and they were (practically) always our enemies.

Now, certain, rather crazy people on the left use the symbols and words of the Soviets, and that's bad. Although I'll point out the right has been just as culpable in diluting 'communist' by accusing the left of wanting it and being members of it. Socialized medicine isn't communism, and when you call it that, you make light of the millions that died under communism.

But, honestly, the real issue is I see a lot more imagery of fascism from the right. Stirring up fear of 'the other', claiming 'patriotism' as the greatest virtue and accusing others of lacking it, focusing on symbols like lapel pins and flag burning, worship of the military and military might... (And I've deliberately left out anything the Bush administration alone does, which goes well past sounding like fascism and actually being it. I just listed general right-wing behavior.)

It's fascist talk, but fascism that's been oddly forced inside the framework of political correctness the left has defined as acceptable dialog, so it's somewhat stunted and crippled fascism. They can't come out and call Obama 'inpure' or a traitor, although McCain came close with the latter the other day. But it's there nonetheless.

Hitler's regime arose in a modern, Western, educated society and not some pre-modern peasant culture off in Asia. So the horror hits closer to home for Western intellectuals and they come down harder on it.

The mass murders of Communism tended to happen in places that had famines and mass killings in the millions just a few decades before Communism.

Stalin's victims' families don't have the same sort of political and media power in the US that Hitler's victims families have built. We are extremely sensitive to Hitler's evil because, frankly, so many of its survivors have a voice here that Stalin's victims don't.

Uhm, no. Rod's revisionism ignores that Russians are considered at very best marginally a Western people by most of the rest of Europe. In Europe they're sort of what a combined Texas, Prarie States, Michigan, Alberta, and Alaska would be/are to the United States/Canada.

Naziism put Western civilization at risk by selectively annihilating some necessary components of it. Communism only threatened to crudely damage most parts.

For people whose conceit is that Western civilization=Christianity it's an impossible thought that a small population proportion of Jews might be more important to the long term prospects of the West than the whole of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the peoples of the Soviet Union. But it's probably the case.

Further to my associating the first Solzhenitsyn post of the day with the Twentieth Century of Death (blog.beliefnet.com /crunchycon/2008/08 /alexander_solzhenitsyn_witness_comments.html @ 2:31pm ) may I humbly submit that left-wing Obamamania portends a toxic form of "liberty" under the guise of Government-mandate:

"A year ago today, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) stood before Planned Parenthood (PP) and vowed that his first priority as president would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA)... If enacted, FOCA would obliterate hundreds of state laws that protect women, parents, children, and health care workers, while forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for millions of abortions. It would overturn commonsense laws like parental notification, conscience protections, abortion waiting periods, informed consent, and regulations for women's health."

As a Pole, I am often appalled by the double standard that Rod is pointing out. Almost everyone knows the Nazis killed 11 million but when you mention Stalin or Mao, the response is often "who?" There are two obvious reasons for this phenomenon that come to mind. One is that Communism had and still has universal appeal while Nazism was limited to Germany. Enthralled with the doctrine of historical progress, many western intellectuals hoped that the Soviet experiment would be successful. Indeed, they deluded themselves for decades that things in the USSR were rosier than they were.

In no way, however, do these factors change the fact that numerous so-called "thinkers" defended a monstrous system of inhuman oppression. I'm glad Solzhenitsyn was there for so many years, sticking his finger in the eyes of the morally blind Soviet sympathizers in the West and pointing out the deficiencies of the modern West in equal measure.

Please restrain me next time I see some moron walking down the street with a Che Guevara or CCCP T-shirt...

As a liberal/progressive, I actually agree with everything in this post. Surprise! I would also remind Rod and readers that it was the liberals that got us into the Cold War through the internationalism of liberal anti-communism, which has since morphed into neo-conservatism (for the worse).

My mother-in-law came to this country as a refugee from Latvia during the War. She tells me that Latvians actually preferred the Natzis to the Russians because of how evil the Russians were to Latvians. Never in a thousand years would I have heard of anyone worse than the Nazis. I guess it depends on who you were during those times. Stalin was pretty good at mass-murder, too. What horrible, horrible people. I can't even imagine it.

I'm old enough to remember very well Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late fifties and early sixties and then the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties. Estimates of the dead range from 20-40 million.

And yet I don't recall any outrage from the elitist liberal claques.

No monuments or museums for the victims.

Nothing to see here, folks. Keep moving!

Rod's correct. Double standards!

Hey, by the way, whatever happened to those commie apologists, Herbie Marcuse and Angela Davis?

newenglander

I'm old enough to remember very well Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward in the late fifties and early sixties and then the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties. Estimates of the dead range from 20-40 million.

And yet I don't recall any outrage from the elitist liberal claques.

Then you are in dire need of a history lesson about the interaction between the communists and the Democratic party, and when the Democrats throw out the communists. (Hint: It was before China went communist.)

And before you start throwing stones, you might want to check the Republican's attitude towards Nazi Germany. And who actually got us into that war.

Granted, no one knew what the Nazis were doing, so the right's support of him isn't as bad as it looks, but, OTOH, no one knew what the Soviets were doing when some Democrats were fans of communism, which was way back in the 20s and 30s.

No monuments or museums for the victims.

Ah, yes, and it's so sad we've never had Republicans in the majority for those to be built. Nationally or in any state. Or even in power enough to have them built, which would be a simply earmark.

In reality, monuments get built by the survivors, or at least, by pressure from them. There are a lot of American survivors of Nazi Germany. There are not a lot of survivors from either the Soviet's or China's murders living in America.

But, you're right. The Democrats appeared to have no trouble with China's mass murder. So little trouble that during the Cultural Revolution, Democratic president Richard Nixon normalized relations with the entire lot of mass murderers.

Something about that last sentence seems a bit off, but I'll sure it's not important.

Maybe that is some weird double standard, although in honest it's because, in the long run, it seems like Nazism really was (And still is) a threat, whereas communism is an absurd joke that no one takes seriously.
Posted by: DavidTC | August 4, 2008 7:38 PM

Here's my gut-level summary of what DavidTC wrote -

It is easier to imagine a future homegrown Nazified America than a Communized America.

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.

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.

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'.)