Best-selling
author and columnist ROBERT
HARRIS
("Fatherland") comments: The
West prefers its dictators red HERE
ARE two little tales of modern history
that tell us a lot about the world we live
in and which, by chance, happened to
surface together last week. The
first concerns the historian Vladimir
Brovkin, whose story is described in a
fascinating article in the current issue
of the American magazine The New Republic.
Brovkin's specialist field is Soviet
history (he is "perhaps the West's finest
scholar of that period", according to
Robert Conquest) and last year he
was invited to submit a proposal for a
study of the Gulag system. The
academic work was to be published by Yale
University Press as part of its Annuals of
Communism series - a prestigious project
designed to make newly released Soviet
documents more widely available to
scholars. Brovkin's
idea was to produce several volumes which
would, he wrote, "explain how and why a
monstrous system of mass terror came into
being, developed, and ultimately was
phased out". The editor of the Yale series
was enthusiastic ("I strongly support your
work and your point of view"), but on
August 19 he wrote to Brovkin to tell him
that he couldn't do the books after
all. The
reason, it now emerges, was that Brovkin's
academic peers on the Yale advisory panel
thought he was too hostile to the Soviet
Union. When the editor circulated
Brovkin's proposal for consideration he
was admonished by one colleague for "its
excessively anti-Bolshevik tone . . . I
have no doubt that the system was
repressive and that millions suffered and
died at its hands. But do you really want
to publish three volumes of documents that
do nothing else but beat this fact into
the reader's consciousness?" It would, he
said, "piss off a lot of people". Another
shocked Sovietologist insisted that the
Gulag prisoners were in any case only sent
there "in accordance with the laws of the
land". As
The New Republic points out, this is not
an isolated incident of "historical
correctness". Brovkin has been unable to
find a full-time teaching post anywhere in
America, while historians who are more
sympathetic to the old Soviet Union are
everywhere ascendant: historians like
Robert W Thurston, who argues that
"Stalin was not guilty of mass
first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941";
Professor J Arch Getty of the
University of California, who numbers the
victims of Stalin's purges in "thousands"
rather than the widely accepted millions;
Mark von Hagen of Columbia, who
described the Gulag as containing "the
kinds of criminals who are incarcerated in
every viable state"; Donald J
Raleigh, who bemoans recent attempts
"to demonise Vladimir Lenin"; and
Sheila Fitzpatrick of the
University of Chicago, who applauds the
"high social mobility" of the Stalin
era. The
point about all this is not so much that
these historians are wrong (although I
think they are) or that they are entitled
to their views. It is that they all, in
their various ways, offer apologies for,
or seek to excuse, aspects of a murderous
system that killed more people than
Hitler's.  And
they do so, moreover, in a way which -
were they to apply similar arguments to
the Third Reich - would certainly lose
them their jobs and would possibly land
them in prison.
|
2. Which
brings us to the week's second tale from
history. On Tuesday the European
parliament decided, by 420 votes to 20, to
suspend
the legal immunity
of one of its members, Jean-Marie Le
Pen, the leader of the French National
Front. This clears the way for Le Pen to
be tried in Bavaria for remarks that he
made there last December. "I have said and
I repeat, at the risk of being
sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a
detail of the history of the second world
war," he said. "If
you take a 1,000-page book on [the
war] the concentration camps take up
only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to
15 lines. This is what one calls a
detail." Now,
it is not the function of this column to
defend the views of French fascists, or
any other kinds of fascist for that
matter. But I cannot for the life of me,
having puzzled over it for several days,
see how Le Pen's behaviour is essentially
much different from that of the American
Sovietologists. One side dismisses an
overemphasis on the Gulag as
"anti-Bolshevik", the other calls the
Holocaust "a detail". Both
invite us to consider the Nazi and
communist regimes in a wider
context.
Indeed, it is arguable that Le Pen is less
offensive than the Americans because his
Bavarian speech did not (as far as I know)
get into the revisionist game of
questioning the numbers killed, which
revisionist Sovietologists do all the
time. It would be tempting to dismiss all
this as another classic example of the
left's capacity for Orwellian double-think
- millions killed by fascism equals evil,
millions killed by communism equals
justified by the necessities of history -
but that is too easy. Look at that vote in
the European parliament: such a majority
must mean that almost the entire
centre-right also voted for the suspension
of Le Pen's immunity. Similarly, it is
right-wing politicians, traditionally, who
have been most willing to turn a blind eye
to the crimes of communist mass-murderers:
one thinks of Churchill's letter of
"sympathy and regret" on the death of
Josef Stalin, or the warm embraces
Richard Nixon and Edward
Heath bestowed upon Mao
Tse-tung. No.
Regretfully, there is only one conclusion
to be drawn: that the
whole of western political morality is
founded on the most gross
hypocrisy.
The 840-page Black Book of Communism -
compiled by six French academics and
published in Paris nearly a year ago but
still not available here - estimates that
communism has killed four times as many
people as Nazism: roughly 100m to Hitler's
25m. Yet
it is only the Nazis we seem to bother
about. They are the "warning from
history", the useful totem of evil before
which we can make our routine gestures of
loathing and disgust. Why is this? Is it
because Stalin's cause was somehow nobler
than Hitler's? (Possibly so: one can, I
suppose, name some noble men and women who
used to be communists; it is hard to think
of any decent ex-fascists.) But
the fundamental reason is surely simpler
and less palatable. It is that communism
defeated fascism. If the war had turned
out the other way, I suspect we would now
live in a mirror world, in which western
statesmen would visit Albert
Speer's Berlin, proclaiming their
belief in detente and trade. Of
course, they might raise matters of human
rights as well, as Tony Blair did
in China last week (whose death toll from
communism, incidentally, is 65m so far)
but you can be confident that it would
always be off-camera, behind closed doors,
as it was with the British in Beijing a
few days ago. So
the lesson of the week is to choose your
dictator wisely. What you say about Hitler
in chilly Bavaria may put you in a prison
cell. But say the same thing about Stalin
in sunny California and your reward, my
boy, will be a comfortable tenure in
Soviet studies.
 |
write to David Irving