This fall is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events associated with the collapse of communism. Paul Hollander, a sociologist who has written numerous works on communism and Western attitudes towards it, has an op ed in the Washington Post, noting some of the lessons of the communist experience, and the failure of most Westerners to fully appreciate them:
The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from “voting with their feet” and leaving a society they rejected. The wall was only the most visible segment of a vast system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of miles along the border of the “Socialist Commonwealth....”
While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans — hostile or sympathetic — actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media’s fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states....
The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology....
In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn’t mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.
Hollander expands on his analysis in this longer article.
As he points out, communist atrocities have not received their full due in the West, despite the fact that the victims of communism (including some 100 million dead) far outnumber even those of the Nazis. Part of the reason is that the communists, unlike the Nazis, were perceived as having noble motives. However, this is a poor distinction. After all, Hitler and his supporters also believed they were doing the right thing, every bit as strongly as Lenin or Stalin did.
The second distinction often drawn between the two is that the Nazis killed people because of immutable characteristics such as race and ethnicity, while the communists did not. This argument also fails, for two reasons that I discussed in greater detail in this series of posts. First, Communist regimes often did kill people based on immutable characteristics. For instance, they often murdered people because of their class origins; no one could help being born a “Kulak” or a “bourgeois.” Also, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and several other communist rulers targeted various ethnic minorities for deportation and extermination. Second, it is not clear that the distinction between killing innocent people for immutable characteristics and killing them because of mutable ones carries any moral weight. In my view, the case for distinguishing them falls apart on close inspection (see here and here).
Yet even if one ultimately concludes that the Nazis were somewhat worse than the communists, that still does not justify the massive size of the disparity between the enormous attention paid to the crimes of the former and the relative neglect of the latter.
UPDATE: One of the few Western organizations specifically devoted to promoting public awareness of communist crimes is the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has a website with lots of helpful information. I will probably mark the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall by making a contribution. Political scientist Rudolph Rummel, a leading academic expert on mass murder, has this website with lots of quantitative data on the extent of communist crimes (as well as those of other dictatorships).
drunkdriver says:
Many in academia and the media (Walter Duranty being one of the most grotesque examples) were sympathetic to communist states through most of the Cold War. (I recall a college history text opining that Stalin’s creation of an East European empire was a “legitimate” reaction on his part to WW2). Looking back now, you wonder what the hell was wrong with them. But if you want to re-examine that issue, you’re portrayed as beating a dead horse.
As for why the communist atrocities are perceived as less bad than the Nazis– there are lots of reasons for that, including that we naturally emphasize the badness of the people we fought a war against. Probably also, the same people who papered over the known crimes of Communist regimes while they existed, are in no mood to now pick up the banner of denouncing them.
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November 6, 2009, 5:30 pmgeokstr says:
What’s the mystery?
If the left were to actually face up to what Marxism is and what it inevitably leads to, the social “sciences” departments at our universities, the leftwing think tanks, half of Hollywood, a whole bunch of African-American churches, the ACORN-SEIU Axis of Evil, and now a number of executive offices in our own government would implode from a fatal case of cognitive dissonance reaching critical mass.
Bill Ayers is now beloved in the teaching ranks, and he has been quoted by the FBI agent who infiltrated the SDS as saying that 25 million Americans would have to be killed if they couldn’t be re-educated. The left all loves the current crop of Marxists in Central and South America. Well, sure, an avowedly Marxist regime in Zimbabwe has reduced a recently prosperous nation to a stone-age basket case, but their intentions were also beautiful.
If the left finally gets to consolidate its power, so what if there are another couple billion eggs to break this time, there’s going to be a fabulous omelette at the other end. That’s because they’ll do it right this time, and usher in the paradise of the proletariat.
We could have been there already, if it hadn’t been for the evil right wing, and Bush. And Limbaugh. And Palin — especially Palin.
Truth is, not only were Hitler’s intentions as pure as those of Stalin and Mao, his political philosophy and ideas of governing weren’t all that different from theirs either. Many on the left here loved Hitler too until he turned on their beloved USSR, and suddenly he was relegated to being called a rightwinger instead of just another horrible offshoot of the socialist international movement.
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November 6, 2009, 5:39 pmMikhail Koulikov says:
Perhaps the reason is much simpler — Nazi Germany was defeated, surrendered, and lost all claim to legitimacy. The communist regimes never were not, and to a degree, the current FSU/CIS states still see themselves as successors to the USSR.
Well, that, and Nazi victims (in particular, Jewish victims) did have better publicity...
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November 6, 2009, 5:40 pmSteve says:
It must be delightfully loopy to believe that Sarah Palin is the main force standing between the Left and their desire to slaughter millions of innocent people all over again. The rest of us can only imagine.
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November 6, 2009, 5:43 pmRandy says:
Part of the reason the atrocities received less coverage is because Americans are generally not interested in what is going on around the world. Sure the Nazis were heavily reported, but that is more the exception than the norm. Where was the coverage of the genocide of the Armenians as it happened over 100 years ago by Turks? Surely, you can’t blame the lack of coverage on the left’s fawning over Turkey?
Did we get much coverage of the Rape of Nanking by Japan prior to WWII? Who today knows anything at all about it?
Another reason is because for so long, communist countries were shut off from the world, and hard news of any type was difficult to come by.
On the other hand, there were terrible atrocities happening in Idi Amin’s Uganda, and Rwanda not too long ago, and they received quite a bit of press.
So to make blanket assessments that what happened in communist europe is the result of leftist sympathy may contain some elements of truth, but it’s hardly the whole story.
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November 6, 2009, 6:01 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
The Russian Communists were preparing their own holocaust when Stalin died, the Doctors Plot. The camps were being formed.
I think the article is correct, many believe Communism was a good idea that went off the rails a little bit. The idea that a few smart technocrats should run everything because they could do better than slovenly voters remains pretty common.
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November 6, 2009, 6:05 pmHadur says:
Yeah, the immutable/muttable characteristics things smells like a ex post, ad hoc argument that exists because it is custom tailored to condemn one particular evil regime (that nobody is allowed to apologize for in our society) while allowing non-criticism of other evil regimes (which, in some circles, it is perfectly acceptable to apologize for).
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November 6, 2009, 6:11 pmTheBadness says:
It also bears keeping in mind that, rightly or wrongly, the victims of Communism are perceived as victims of policy rather than as having been killed intentionally (in raw numbers, at least). By contrast, Nazi atrocities are presented as 100% intentional. A gas chamber is a much more vivid example of evil than is a Five Year Plan.
Plus, as Mikhail noted, Nazism died a spectacular death about which we can congratulate ourselves. Communism continues to peter out, and its tally is ongoing. Which is all the more evil, but difficult to package and sell.
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November 6, 2009, 6:14 pmAnderson says:
many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil
Does he give any examples of these “many intellectuals,” or is he just making shit up?
If the former, then it might be worthwhile for me to read him. If the latter, then why bother.
Yes, Communism was evil. Can we go home now?
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November 6, 2009, 6:33 pmConstantin says:
Many in academia and the media (Walter Duranty being one of the most grotesque examples) were sympathetic to communist states
“Were”?
(And you might want to throw the government in there, too. That’s why it’s nice Barack is going to Berlin to celebrate the anniversary of the Wall coming down, so as to repudiate this kind of nonsense.)
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November 6, 2009, 6:39 pmFrater Plotter says:
Similarly, there were plenty of people in business and government who were sympathetic to the Axis, especially to Nazi Germany and its racial and antisemitic policies — at least up until America entered the war. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh are the usual examples, both of them much more influential personages than Duranty.
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November 6, 2009, 6:43 pmgeokstr says:
It’s known as sarcasm, with a dash of ridicule thrown in. I understand that only leftwingers are allowed to use those things under current PC rules, but, hey, too effin’ bad.
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November 6, 2009, 6:45 pmDavid Welker says:
I would absolutely agree that there is no justification for giving enormous attention to one compared to the other. Of course, I would expect someone who knew actual victims from anyone of them to give more attention to the event that affected them more as an individual. Perhaps the differences in your perceptions can be explained by the differing experiences of those with whom you interact.
I am not sure to what you are referring to exactly. I do not think that the crimes of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot are overlooked compared to the crimes of the Nazis, at least in my experience. I wouldn’t doubt the validity of your differing experiences with respect to the emphasis of such things, however.
That said, I think you are somewhat sloppy. The Nazis (based on context) obviously refers to a specific regime. The term “communists” is much more ambiguous and can refer to governments, particular elites or rulers such as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, or Mao and to ordinary individuals. You could definitely be more clear.
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November 6, 2009, 6:54 pmgeokstr says:
Oh, please. It’s still here, only it’s called “Marxism” or “Progressivism” or “Black Liberation Theology” now.
And no one, even right wingers like me, say that the left is just itching to kill millions of people. However, based on that pesky little thing called “history”, it seems that if you can’t get the danged proles to listen up when you tell them what’s good for them, well, eventually, you just have to do whatever is necessary to get to the golden omelette. For their own good, of course.
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November 6, 2009, 6:55 pmBeldar says:
This is a useful post, for which I thank and congratulate you, Prof. Somin.
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November 6, 2009, 7:02 pmModa says:
Has it completely slipped everyone’s mind that the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II, against the Nazis? Are they not teaching history anymore?
That’s reason enough that history would be sanitized to downplay communist atrocities — because we played nice with the Soviets when we needed to. Nobody remembers “Uncle Joe”?
Nobody wants to talk about how we allied with the greater evil to defeat the lesser evil. I mean, that’s sort of an implication of what you’re saying, isn’t it, Professor Somin? I’m not even saying this it’s wrong, but doesn’t it imply we should have allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2 and helped them defeat the Soviet Union, instead of vice-versa?
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November 6, 2009, 7:04 pmDavid Welker says:
You should remember that things like sarcasm often do not come through in email or on blogs. No one reading you can detect your tone of voice or facial expressions or the other non-verbal cues you would use to communicate sarcasm in-person or over the phone. So, instead of lashing out at someone for not understanding that you are being sarcastic, you should recognize that there are limitations to this medium and try to compensate for them.
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November 6, 2009, 7:08 pmmariner says:
The title of this post is misleading.
Communism hasn’t fallen. It isn’t falling. It isn’t even showing signs of slowing down.
The implosion of the Soviet Union was a bump in the road, which Putin and his allies are working now to undo.
After setbacks during the 80s and 90s Marxism is resurgent in Central and South America.
And right here in America, the “Arsenal of Democracy”, we have a self-avowed Marxist as president.
Reports of the death of Communism are greatly exaggerated.
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November 6, 2009, 7:13 pmAnderson says:
... Okay, no examples in the op-ed. Glancing at the paper, I find this assertion –
By contrast, many (mostly Western) commentators
argued that the system had little or
nothing to do with Marxism, and it collapsed
because theory and practice diverged as the ruling
elite made no serious attempt to realize the
humane and liberating ideals of Marxism.
– without a citation. I’m sure *some* people argued this — it’s a big West — but there’s a difference b/t (1) noting that there was little “Marxist” about the Communist dictatorship and (2) thinking that Marxism was valid and attainable, as opposed to a mistaken economic theory of dubious value.
Again, if Hollander’s admirers will point me to exempla of his straw men, I’d be much obliged.
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November 6, 2009, 7:18 pmloki13 says:
Let see:
If the left were to actually face up to what Marxism is and what it inevitably leads to, the social “sciences” departments at our universities, the leftwing think tanks, half of Hollywood, a whole bunch of African-American churches, the ACORN-SEIU Axis of Evil, and now a number of executive offices in our own government would implode from a fatal case of cognitive dissonance reaching critical mass.
The “left” is a bunch of Marxists, and by Marxists, I mean Stalinists. If only they’d own up to the fact that they, personally, were responsible for the death of millions of, inter alia, Ukrainians, then I’d finally have the proof that ACORN caused this recession.
Bill Ayers is now beloved in the teaching ranks, and he has been quoted by the FBI agent who infiltrated the SDS as saying that 25 million Americans would have to be killed if they couldn’t be re-educated. The left all loves the current crop of Marxists in Central and South America. Well, sure, an avowedly Marxist regime in Zimbabwe has reduced a recently prosperous nation to a stone-age basket case, but their intentions were also beautiful.
There was an election a while ago, and not enough people listened to my crazy rants about Bill Ayers, so I’m just going to keep ranting. I think he was somehow involved with Whitewater. And did you know that Mugabe used a credit card to contribute to Obama’s election, after hiding the evidence that BHO was born in Zimbabwe?
If the left finally gets to consolidate its power, so what if there are another couple billion eggs to break this time, there’s going to be a fabulous omelette at the other end. That’s because they’ll do it right this time, and usher in the paradise of the proletariat.
If the left ever consolidates their power, you know, beyond winning the Presidency and both houses of Congress, they’re going to make a swell breakfast!
We could have been there already, if it hadn’t been for the evil right wing, and Bush. And Limbaugh. And Palin — especially Palin.
I can see crazy from my house!
Truth is, not only were Hitler’s intentions as pure as those of Stalin and Mao, his political philosophy and ideas of governing weren’t all that different from theirs either. Many on the left here loved Hitler too until he turned on their beloved USSR, and suddenly he was relegated to being called a rightwinger instead of just another horrible offshoot of the socialist international movement.
Of course, I guess this post doesn’t really matter. I mean, serious historian Goldberg *proved* with, like, research and stuff that Hitler was a commie, and that Liberals were fascists, and that everthing I don’t like (the LEFT, Acorn, Hillary Clinton et al) isn’t just wrong– it’s evil!
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November 6, 2009, 7:19 pmRyan Waxx says:
Oh, believe me, it’s nothing compared to believing that only your ability to create utter strawmen stands between the Right and their delusional fantasies.
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November 6, 2009, 7:25 pmAnderson says:
Ah, pages 19–21 .. cherry-picked quotes from Jimmy Carter that don’t prove his thesis, heavy reliance on Bill Ayers, and a few kooks, along with the interesting but not-very-useful case of Eric Hobsbawm, about the only Marxist historian with much appeal, and even then his biases are easily recognized.
It really speaks poorly for anyone who reads that 28-page paper and comes away thinking any substantial number of “Western intellectuals” think communism was anything other than bad. There are plenty of mainstream condemnations of Stalin and Communism — why rely on this Hollander character, whose paper resembles nothing so much as a talented Freshman Comp II term paper?
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November 6, 2009, 7:27 pmAnderson says:
... Also, apropos of almost nothing in this thread, what does it say that Stalin’s “Short Course” was an exceptional find in my local library book sale, whereas the local Barnes & Noble carries TWO paperback and ONE hardcover copies of Mein Kampf as part of its standard inventory? I have probably mentioned that before ... it puzzles me no end who they think is buying the deluxe copy, or why those people shouldn’t be put to the trouble of ordering it.
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November 6, 2009, 7:31 pmSara says:
Mariner — The President is a “self-avowed” Marxist? I don’t think self-avowed means what you think it means.
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November 6, 2009, 7:31 pmAnderson says:
The President is a “self-avowed” Marxist? I don’t think self-avowed means what you think it means.
Foolish Sara! Don’t you know Obama checked that box on his REAL birth certificate?
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November 6, 2009, 7:35 pmAnderson says:
And if you needed any more proof of Obama’s Communism, look at this hammer-and-sickle sign carried by one of his fervent supporters.
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November 6, 2009, 7:47 pmIlya Somin says:
As for why the communist atrocities are perceived as less bad than the Nazis– there are lots of reasons for that, including that we naturally emphasize the badness of the people we fought a war against.
True, but we actually fought two wars against the communists — Korea and Vietnam. To say nothing of smaller scale military operations such as Grenada.
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November 6, 2009, 7:57 pmIlya Somin says:
Has it completely slipped everyone’s mind that the Soviet Union was our ally in World War II, against the Nazis? Are they not teaching history anymore?
That’s reason enough that history would be sanitized to downplay communist atrocities — because we played nice with the Soviets when we needed to. Nobody remembers “Uncle Joe”?
Nobody wants to talk about how we allied with the greater evil to defeat the lesser evil. I mean, that’s sort of an implication of what you’re saying, isn’t it, Professor Somin?
One has to remember that the “lesser evil” was a greater military threat to the US at the time. Also, the Nazis racked up a smaller body count than Stalin in part because they were overthrown relatively quickly. Had they won the war and retained control of most of Europe, the number of their victims would surely have grown (and that of the communist victims been smaller, since Stalin would have lost control of the USSR and Mao would likely never have come to power in China).
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November 6, 2009, 8:00 pmDangerMouse says:
The Nazi/Communist distinction is the biggest reason why the left is a continuing problem in Western society. I agree with the various reasons why Nazis are more reviled than Communists, and that there are difficulties in explaining the evils of Communism to many people whereas with the Nazis it’s much more clear. If more people knew how communism sapped the will and soul of people it oppressed, they’d be much more critical of similar leftist oriented policies.
It is undeniable that many elites in America are outright fans of Communism. Hell, most universities sport at LEAST one or two open communists (typically in the sociology departments or english departments), if not ultra-libs that are Commies in name only. I’m willing to bet that everyone on this blog can tell a story about their nutso commie professor. They are much, much more common than professors who are open conservatives or Republicans, for instance. And I don’t think this is a regional thing either.
But I don’t think that most libs are commies. There are plenty of classes of lib: you’ve got your “white guilt” lib, your “black liberation theory” lib, your homosexual rights lib, your abortion-loving feminist libs, etc. Libs all want to stick it to the man, but among all classes of lib they’re all generally cowardly enough to avoid violent confrontation. That separates them from the commies, who are unafraid of violence and show up at protests to engage in violence.
For the left to continue to promote their programs on the backs of working men and women who struggle under a harsh tax burden and stupid pieties of liberalism, ignorance of Communism is a blessing to them. You can’t stick it to the man if people realize what sticking it really entailed.
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November 6, 2009, 8:08 pmbartman says:
As Eddie Izzard so eloquently put it, Stalin and Pol Pot killed their own people, and we’re fine with that. Hitler killed the people next door, and we can’t have that.
More seriously, the unusual thing about the Nazi holocaust was that it was actually remembered. As others have said, there have been lots of worse mass kilings that get little notice, including the near-eradication of the American Indian. We just don’t care to remember those things, it makes life too complicated.
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November 6, 2009, 8:09 pmChad says:
I disagree with Hollander’s main premise:“here is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths).”
Look at Poland, for instance.
How many people were murdered there during the 5 years under Nazi control (1939–1944) versus the 45 years under Communism (1945–1989)?
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November 6, 2009, 8:19 pmSara says:
True, but we actually fought two wars against the communists — Korea and Vietnam.
If I recall my Constitution, niether of those were “wars” and, if you think abou it, I am sure you will agree they are in no way comparable to WWII, in a host of ways.
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November 6, 2009, 8:20 pmMark Field says:
As Anderson notes, this and other assertions aren’t very convincing. I will agree, though, that a great many in the West believe that cupiditas is the root of all evil.
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November 6, 2009, 8:34 pmSL says:
Also, the Nazis racked up a smaller body count than Stalin in part because they were overthrown relatively quickly. Had they won the war and retained control of most of Europe, the number of their victims would surely have grown (and that of the communist victims been smaller, since Stalin would have lost control of the USSR and Mao would likely never have come to power in China).
Is this the reason you don’t talk about the evils of imperialism? According to Prof. Rummel (whom you cite in he OP) Imperialism caused more deaths in the 20th century than Nazism.
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November 6, 2009, 8:52 pmtamerlane says:
Fascinating how a fair number of the lefty posters on this thread provide supporting evidence for Hollander’s thesis — perhaps without even realizing it.
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November 6, 2009, 9:24 pmjhubme_24 says:
I think the argument here (from the right/from the libertarians) is:
Under Communism the ends justify the means when the means are the deprivation of (personal) property, liberty, and life. Under (the modern conception of) liberalism the ends justify the means when the means are the deprivation of (personal) property and (to a lesser extent) liberty. As such, there has been a natural alliance between the two groups who each believe that ends can and do justify means, at least insofar as “individual rights” are concerned.
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November 6, 2009, 9:54 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
It’ll be a cold day in Hell before many American academics take up a study that could lead to their having to admit that J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon may have known what they were talking about. Imagine trying to explain that to your colleagues!
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November 6, 2009, 9:59 pmBobN says:
from the quoted article:
these numbers are but a delusional fantasy. A simple examination of population dynamics of Soviet Union easily discredits them.
If you’d like to see a really scary population dynamic, though, look no further:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Russia.PNG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_of_Ukraine_v.2.PNG
The crux of the curves coincides with the end of communist rule.
The crimes of communism (which are numerous and horrible, no doubt) are not neglected in the West. The disasters that followed the fall of communism are. Ironically, many Russians blame “democracy” for these disasters, and this is why the rhetoric of democracy is often deeply distrusted there.
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November 6, 2009, 10:06 pmRandy says:
geokstr: “it seems that if you can’t get the danged proles to listen up when you tell them what’s good for them, well, eventually, you just have to do whatever is necessary to get to the golden omelette.”
Absolutely. Which is exactly why I’m sick and tired of the right wingers in this country always telling me what’s good for me. Among them:
- Our health care system is the best in the world, and we can’t change it. If you don’t have insurance, it’ll do you good to get sick and not be able to pay for treatment — that will encourage you to work harder, which is what’s best for you.
- Protecting the environment is for wusses. It’s better for the industry to pollute than to keep clean, and we know that’s best for everyone. Corrollary: We know we can despoil the environment because that’s what you need, despite what you might say.
- Gays are better off closeted because then no one will have to deal with their issues anymore. And gays are much happier there anyway. And they’d be much happier still if they just go through conversion therapy.
- Bailing out Wall Street is good for you. Bailing out Detroit isn’t.
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November 6, 2009, 10:28 pmanonymous says:
No mention of Ronald Reagan? How can any honest commentator fail to mention his leadership and commitment to freedom that led to the downfall of communism?
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November 6, 2009, 10:29 pmHarry Eagar says:
One reason Americans shrug off the nastiness in Russia under the Bolsheviks or in China under the Maoists is that they — correctly — don’t see a change of direction in either place. It isn’t as if the overthrown governments in Russia and China were big favorites in American public opinion.
Hitler, on the other hand, brought night and fog to a place that had been regarded by many Americans as one of the leading centers of civilization.
If there’s a history today that most Americans don’t know, it is the near-adulation of German science and culture among late 19th-early 20th c. American elites. Owen Wister’s little book of 1915, ‘The Pentecost of Calamity,’ reveals the shock when Prussian militarism was exposed to a Germanophile.
During the ‘30s, it was seriously argued among elites that Naziism couldn’t be so very bad, because no nation that composed such glorious music etc. etc. Nobody ever argued, however, that Bolshevism wasn’t bad because Russians had composed fine symphonies.
Anyhow, Reagan went to Bitberg to make peace with Naziism. I fail to recall any US politician of the left ever doing anything similar for the solace of Communism.
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November 6, 2009, 10:31 pmAnderson says:
One has to remember that the “lesser evil” was a greater military threat to the US at the time. Also, the Nazis racked up a smaller body count than Stalin in part because they were overthrown relatively quickly. Had they won the war and retained control of most of Europe, the number of their victims would surely have grown (and that of the communist victims been smaller, since Stalin would have lost control of the USSR and Mao would likely never have come to power in China).
Very good point by Prof. Somin.
Also, remember that the Nazis’ crimes were discovered — we captured their documents, we tried their surviving leaders. They were exposed. The Communists’ crimes were secret by comparison and have taken years to expose, and we still don’t have the same degree of detail that we have for the Nazis’.
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November 6, 2009, 10:31 pmmarkm says:
Yes, Stalin was our ally for 3–1/2 years. Then Communism was (again) our enemy for 45 years. That’s “again” because there were American troops in Russia fighting the Communists after WWI.
Why does that 3–1/2 years outweigh all the rest, in the eyes of many American intellectuals? Because they never were committed to the struggle against Communism.
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November 6, 2009, 11:38 pmJohn Moore says:
Errr... show us all the books, plays and movies about, say, the Gulag. Or how about the “cultural revolution” or even the killing fields (1 movie). Compare that to the many that (rightly) showed the horrors of the holocaust.
I think a significant factor in the very real difference is that Hollywood had a lot of lefties/communists who were against either knowing, or showing the horrors if communism, or even individual regimes.
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November 6, 2009, 11:54 pmJohn Moore says:
I think this is not an important issue. Little attention has been paid to either the overall horrors of communism or the individual regimes or dictators. “The Black Book of Communism,” composed by those rabid right wingers — French intellectuals — claims that research shows every single communist regime was substantially evil — every one.
That this is not a well known lesson is a story in itself.
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November 6, 2009, 11:59 pmrpt says:
Two examples of beyond sarcasm:
“1. the ACORN-SEIU Axis of Evil”
2. How Goldman Sachs getting access to H1N1 vaccine is different than the members of the Politburo. Not much difference there.
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November 7, 2009, 12:03 amSenatorX says:
“I think the argument here (from the right/from the libertarians) is:
Under Communism the ends justify the means when the means are the deprivation of (personal) property, liberty, and life. Under (the modern conception of) liberalism the ends justify the means when the means are the deprivation of (personal) property and (to a lesser extent) liberty. As such, there has been a natural alliance between the two groups who each believe that ends can and do justify means, at least insofar as “individual rights” are concerned.”
Yes Jhubme_24, definately. Though the wording “natural alliance” might be tweaked.
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November 7, 2009, 12:06 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Paul Hollander on the Fall of Communism -- Topsy.com says:
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no relation says:
Formal declarations of war are not necessary for a state of war to exist. Doe v. Bush, 323 F.3d 133 (1st Cir. 2003); Massachusetts v. Laird, 451 F.2d 26 (1st Cir. 1971).
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November 7, 2009, 4:11 amMike G in Corvallis says:
Well sure, there were some regrettable incidents in communist nations.
But their intentions were good!
If only the right people had been in charge ...
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November 7, 2009, 4:13 amArrowSmith says:
Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave. All his hard work for nothing. His “shining city on a hill” turned to garbage.
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November 7, 2009, 5:18 amArrowSmith says:
That’s not entirely true. Voluntary communism(f.e, the Israeli kibbutz) was quite successful without violence. The problem is communism doesn’t scale well beyond tiny communities. There has never been a successful Communist nation.
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November 7, 2009, 5:20 amJohn Skookum says:
Apropos of the leftist notion that one must “break a few eggs to get an omelette”, I think it was George Orwell who had the proper response to this callous fatuity: “So, where’s the omelette?”
Communists and Nazis are equally abhorrent in my view, and there are few means of excising them from public life of which I would disapprove. It would be a great thing to revive a harsh and pitiless McCarthyism, and expel the Gramscian filth from all our institutions root and branch.
This is just one more reason that the Kenyan heap of dung is unfit to be my President. For his entire adult life, he has deliberately chosen to keep company with the bloodthirsty would-be omelette makers. Some of them draw salaries from the public purse and work in his White House.
Bill Ayers wanted to slaughter 25 million Americans to bring about the revolution. Does anyone doubt that he would now be Secretary of Education if his terrorist background had remained secret? That’s the kind of pond scum that Barack Obama chooses for friends and professional associates.
I’ll go further. I personally have little doubt that deep down, the useless oxygen thief Obama has the heart of a Stalinist himself. I believe that if he thought it would succeed, he would also be willing to kill tens of millions to bring about a Communist utopia. I hate his guts, oh yes I do, I hate him and all his friends and associates and everything he stands for, and I hope his name replaces Carter as the new byword for failure and incompetence. I’ll say it loud and proud: I want Obama to fail spectacularly, because his success means abject misery and squalor and destruction for my beautiful country.
Come the counter-revolution, there will be a long overdue reckoning with the leftist scum.
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November 7, 2009, 5:21 amPersonFromPorlock says:
John Moore:
It should be noted that the Holocaust was pretty much of a fading memory until it became a useful distraction from the ongoing Cambodian holocaust. IIRC, there were typically three columns of entries about Holocaust-related articles in the New York Times Indexes of the late ‘70s, with a sudden rise in the number of entries from 1979 onward, peaking at around seventeen columns circa 1983 (sorry about the vagueness but it’s been a long time since I did the research). Those of sufficient antiquity will also recall that PBS became all-Holocaust-all-the-time for most of the 1980s.
What more self-flattering way could there have been to cover our ears and shout LA-LA-LA, than by invoking the safely-over and chanting “never again?”
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November 7, 2009, 6:47 amBenP says:
I’d disagree to a certain extent, in that I think this confuses the particular Russian brand of authoritarianism with Communism.
Lenin, Stalin et al were definitely communists, and definitely perpetrated many many atrocities, but they were also Russian dictators. If you were to draw a venn diagram there’s a lot of overlap between dictators who commit atrocities and “russian dictators” whether or not they’re communist.
In my experience from studying in Russia a few years ago, the current government does something between glossing over and completely ignoring the USSR. Rather, they very much punch up “Russia.” and the Rhetoric almost happens back to the time of the Tsars.
Putin definitely borders on wanting to be a dictator, and he may well have semi-imperial ambititions for Russia, but I’ve never gotten any sense he thinks of himself as a heir to the USSR, just that he’s the most recent in a long line of authoritarian russian leaders. Which isn’t the same thing as communist leaders.
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November 7, 2009, 8:01 amegd says:
Yes, I figure a venn diagram between communists and dictators would look something like this.
Communism requires totalitarianism. Either through force (as in nations) or through voluntary association (as in religious communities).
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November 7, 2009, 8:30 amInstapundit » Blog Archive » THOUGHTS ON the fall of communism…. says:
[...] THOUGHTS ON the fall of communism. [...]
Mikhail Koulikov says:
Putin may not, but I would argue that most of the other institutions of the Russian government (the ministries/bureaucracy, the intelligence services, definitely the military in general) do see — and present — themselves as straight successors not to the same institutions in Imperial Russia, but to their USSR predecessors. Having said that, I can’t think of any research or studies that have been done on this, or for that matter, on whether this really does hold for the other FSU states (the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia obviously excluded).
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November 7, 2009, 10:01 amDrew Kelley says:
Stalin killed more in the Ukraine than the Nazi’s did in all of their death camps (the names of which we all know, but how many know the names, or locations, of the camps in the Gulag), and that all happened before National Socialism came to power in Germany.
The quest for Marxism was an excuse to impose total terror upon populations around the world.
Also, don’t forget that America has experimented with Communism, and found it severely wanting in the early days of the Plymouth Colony.
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November 7, 2009, 10:48 amdicentra says:
Who cares what the label is: communist, fascist, Nazi, Marxist, monarchist, etc.?
What we have is a theory of governance that holds that a group of ruling elite ought to control the masses in minute detail. In none of those theories (and especially not in practice) is there a way to prevent the most brutal and sociopathic among us from being in that ruling group, especially because the Cult of Personality dominates rather than objective standards of whom is actually fit to rule.
Anyone who says that the atrocities of the USSR and other dictatorships gets the same public horror as the Nazis is being disingenuous. As John Moore pointed out, our popular culture does not use the Communists as The Symbol of Ultimate Evil. Nobody in their right mind would approvingly quote Adolf Hitler, whereas Our Current Crop sees no problem with publicly admiring Mao and Chávez and Castro and Che the like, whose symbols have become “chic” in many circles.
I’ve been reading The Forsaken by Tim Tzouliadis, which tells the stories of naive Americans who went to the USSR in the 1930s to participate in the great Soviet experiment (or merely to get a job) and were caught up in Stalin’s various purges. Also highlighted is the criminal naivete of people such as Joseph Davies, Henry Wallace, and even FDR, who knew (or should have known) of the mass executions and the Gulag but were willfully blind. Also there were many (Walter Duranty, Harry Hopkins) who were outright agents of the USSR.
Our Current Crop may not be interested in Gulags and purges — that’s the Punishing Father version of tyranny — but they’re not averse to corralling us in their loving zoo and taking such care of us that we’re helpless and dependent — the Smothering Mother version of tyranny.
The chains of the Father may be more painful, but the chains of the Mother are no less debilitating.
You cannot convince me that Our Current Crop doesn’t think that they’re entitled to rule over the mouth-breathing, WalMart-shopping, Sarah Palin–voting, Glenn Beck–watching heartlanders. They’re The Smart Ones, dontcha know, and everyone else is a moron. Such people arise in every advanced society. We’d do well to recognize that and keep the levers of power away from them.
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November 7, 2009, 10:56 amFearsome Tycoon says:
I don’t think the average American thinks any more highly of the Communists than he does of the Nazis. It comes back to academia. In philosophy and the social sciences, Marx is considered a respectable intellectual from whom one can draw a rich tapestry of ideas. Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department. You simply cannot expose the atrocities of Communism and keep Marx on his pedestal. You have to maintain that the Bolsheviks, who were obsessed with Marx and dialectical materialism, at least had their hearts in the right place. Both professional journalism and the entertainment industry have roughly the same romantic love of Marx and Marxist revolutionaries that academia does. That’s why we don’t get a lot of movies and books about gulags, the Great Leap Forward, etc. There have been a few–The Killing Fields comes to mind, but overall, the people in charge of entertainment think rather highly of Communists.
The contrast with Nazis is that the academy has largely separated Nazism from its philosophical origins. Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man are as beloved as Marx, but somehow, they’ve managed to successfully isolate fascism from its philosophical roots.
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November 7, 2009, 10:58 amEinhverfr says:
I think there are two reasons why the Nazis are generally seen as more evil than the Communists, but these are unconscious and hence don’t tend to be directly a part of the debate.
The first is that we fought a shooting war directly with the Nazis on a scale which we never did with Communists (neither Vietnam nor Korea reach anywhere near the scale of WWII). There was a huge amount of investment in wartime propaganda which has stuck with us. Similarly, the propaganda against the Communists tended to be more nuanced because, while we could take on Nazism in its entirety, we didn’t really want to go to war with both China and the USSR in the same way. Consequently the portrayals were different.
The second, though, has to do with the fact that the Nazis just simply resonate with our sense of evil better than the Communists do. Their uniforms, etc. allow a better presentation against them than the Communists. In retrospect, the Nazis were less competent in every area of mass murders, genocides, etc. than the Communists, but the history of wartime propaganda often becomes the history of the war.
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November 7, 2009, 11:13 amAnderson says:
Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department.
Do you know anything about American universities? Seems not.
You simply cannot expose the atrocities of Communism and keep Marx on his pedestal.
One, what pedestal? Two, blaming Marx for Soviet atrocities is like blaming Nietzsche for the Holocaust.
What the main post, and such comments, demonstrate is NOT that Marxism has any kind of hold on “Western intellectuals.” Rather, it’s that a senseless caricature of “Marxist intellectuals” has a grip on “many” in the Right.
Both professional journalism and the entertainment industry have roughly the same romantic love of Marx and Marxist revolutionaries that academia does. That’s why we don’t get a lot of movies and books about gulags, the Great Leap Forward, etc.
How many movies about the Holocaust are there, really? And look at the Hollywood spin. Hollywood hates downers, and the gulags, Mao’s atrocities, etc. are D-O-W-N-E-R-S. No avenging Allied armies swooping in to rescue everyone. The bad guys win. If Steven Spielberg *did* make a Gulag movie — were there Kute Kids in the Gulag system? — it would have to invent some kind of positive spin and might well be nauseating.
Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man are as beloved as Marx
Are you just conjuring with names you don’t know? Heidegger is popular with a few folks, but most have no use for him. De Man’s star was already falling when the Le Soir articles broke after his death; ironically, De Man’s work (which I am actually pretty familiar with) was considered insufficiently political for the 1980s and 90s, when “identity politics” was the rage. And I would really challenge anyone to spot the “fascism” in The Resistance to Theory or Blindness and Insight. If you have anything educated to share on that subject, please do so.
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November 7, 2009, 11:13 amBenP says:
That’s a slightly different concept, and I’m somewhat more inclined to agree with you there, except I’m not sure what it means.
Through Gorbachev and Yeltsin and into Putin although a new constitution was written, the government never really fully dissolved, and the people who created the new government were most familiar with the structure of the old one. So, yeah, most of the “institutions” within the government are more closely related to the institutions that existed during the last days of the USSR than the Tsarist days, and many of the people at higher ranks today still started their careers in soviet institutions.
But I’m not sure one can go from “today’s FSB occupies the same position as the old KGB and is even still headquartered in Lubyanka” to the contention that modern Russia sees itself as carrying on the legacy of the USSR in some sense. I guess it’s more tied up in the type of connotation that you read into “Successor,” dividing the idea of a mere physical successor in that one came after the other, to a spiritual successor.
I really never got the sense that most leaders in Russia see themselves as the spiritual successors of the Soviet Union, with the possible exception of the military (and I’m not really sure there). They seem to draw more from some overarching idea of “Russia” that may have always existed during the soviet times, (See: WWII and the communists co-opting of imperial and historical Russian imagery for patriotic purposes) but has more in common with the imperial past.
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November 7, 2009, 11:21 amexhelodrvr says:
Moda,
“I’m not even saying this it’s wrong, but doesn’t it imply we should have allied with Nazi Germany in World War 2 and helped them defeat the Soviet Union, instead of vice-versa?”
Pat Buchanan discussed that theory awhile back.
George Patton wanted to continue on against the Soviets after Germany was defeated.
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November 7, 2009, 11:35 amTBlakely says:
What a lot of people don’t know about the 1930’s was that because of the Great Depression many in the West had given up on Democracy and Capitalism. They viewed both as failures in comparison to the Communist and Fascist totalitarian governments. So it’s not surprising that many industrialists supported Nazi’s before WWII because that regime was willing to let them live and keep their positions (as long as you followed their orders) compared to Communists who just wanted them dead. Were some of those industrialists racist? Yup, but then so were many Communists.
Both Communism and Fascism are extreme versions of Socialism. They just differ in how they execute their policies.
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November 7, 2009, 12:29 pmGringo says:
David Welker:
Let’s have a short lesson in detecting online sarcasm without having to be overtly told that it is sarcasm. You maintain that one could not detect that the following reference to Palin was sarcastic.
Here is a paragraph that preceded it.
Here is a lesson in sarcasm detection. When one reads paragraphs that shout against Marxism, as the above paragraph does, it does not require a Ph.D. in Sarcasm Detection to ascertain that when one later reads “evil right wing” in a subsequent paragraph the writer is switching from the dead serious mode to the sarcastic mode. Once in the sarcastic mode, one does not require a Ph.D. in Sarcasm Detection to ascertain that further passages in the paragraph, such as the reference to Sarah Palin, will be sarcastic.
I grant you that in many or most cases, it is difficult to determine sarcasm in online writing.It is especially difficult when the writer changes from dead serious mode to sarcastic mode.This was not one of those difficult cases.
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November 7, 2009, 12:39 pmTatterdemalian says:
My father, a Ph.D. in History and a college professor for years, has a very simple way of dealing with the actions of Communist leaders without losing faith in Communism.
If a mass slaughter by Communist leaders is ever proven beyond a rational doubt, he simply decides they were evil Nazis all along, just pretending to be noble Communists. Thus, Communism as an ideology remains pure and unblemished, it’s just that the Nazis are really sneaky and skilled at leading supposedly Communist revolutions.
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November 7, 2009, 12:44 pmHarry Eagar says:
At first I was ready to consider Hollander’s proposal seriously and to regard it a special pleading but not not contemptible. Thinking it over, though, and prodded by Anderson’s posts, I have changed my mind.
It’s complete crap. And I have evidence: Hogan’s Heroes.
I’ll change my mind when Professor Somin presents an example of comical Stalinists in popular culture.
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November 7, 2009, 12:47 pmDavid R. Graham says:
Negative. The Soviet Union and East Germany fell. They were nation states, which can fall in the sense of cease to exist because they are mundane structures, like bodies.
Communism is alive and well, usually as co-opted legitimate concerns, such as equal justice (co-opted to “diversity”), tolerance (co-opted to “multiculturalism”) and ecological and medical sanity (co-opted to “environment” and “health care,” respectively), and enforced by terrorist ideologies (“protected class” and “political correctness”).
Communism is an ideology and ideologies neither fail nor fall nor cease to exist because they inhabit a dimension of life which transcends the merely mundane, the potentially fall-able: http://bit.ly/2VGSgI
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November 7, 2009, 1:19 pmGlenn Bowen says:
The rats in Washington are attempting to revive it, and they’re the same kind of lying rats as the originals.
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November 7, 2009, 1:28 pmMikhail Koulikov says:
Harry,
Like, every James Bond movie up until Goldeneye. Also, very much so, A Pennant for the Kremlin.
- M.
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November 7, 2009, 1:50 pmWaterhouse says:
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming
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November 7, 2009, 2:01 pmAnderson says:
Good catch, Harry. And I don’t recall the Commies in “From Russia with Love” being comical — only early ones I recall. They got jokey in the Moore pix, but so did the pix.
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November 7, 2009, 2:03 pmhappycynic says:
In addition to communist sympathy within academia, I think another factor is that Germany is considered to be a full fledged member of western civilization while Russia and Eastern Europe are not. Nazi Germany is so traumatic to the intellectual because they had come to believe that in the civilized west, human nature had evolved beyond the point where such atrocities were possible. Atrocities in eastern Europe and Russia are ignored, in part, for the same reason that atrocities in Africa, Asia, and South America are ignored — human society isn’t as advanced and isn’t held to the same level of scrutiny by the intellectuals. Now, of course the intellectual would be horrified at being accused of such ethno-centrism, but I think it is in play, even if at a subconscious level. Western intellectuals routinely hold western civilization to a higher standard in almost any area of ethics or morality.
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November 7, 2009, 2:15 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
There’s one other difference to consider: Unlike Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany actually declared war on the United States, and did it before we declared war on them.
Newt Gingrich’s much-derided novel1945 was based on a premise that’s worth thinking about: Germany and Japan had a mutual defense treaty, but neither nation was obligated to come to the other’s aid in any situation other than an attack. Imagine what might have happened if Hitler had not declared war on the United States, but instead had said after Pearl Harbor, “We are shocked — shocked! — at this attack on an Aryan nation by the Empire of Japan. Whatever our differences with the American government, we see no reason to inflame the situation, and we hope that both parties can come to a peaceful resolution of their grievances.”
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November 7, 2009, 2:55 pmAnderson says:
Is that what Newt’s Novel is about? I might have to give it a look — that’s always been an intriguing possibility to me.
(Btw, those with too much free time should look up Newt’s copious Amazon reviews, which can be interesting.)
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November 7, 2009, 3:02 pmtamerlane says:
Also Burgess’s Honey for the Bears, Wilder’s One, Two Three, Ninotchka, etc. etc.
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November 7, 2009, 3:12 pmAnderson says:
The obscurity of the “comical Stalinists!” examples is not, I think, hurting Harry’s case.
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November 7, 2009, 3:41 pmdicentra says:
Five years at Cornell, literature PhD program. So, yes, I do know the American university.
Marxism is the opiate of the intelligentsia. It flatters them by telling them that they ought to be in charge instead of those knuckle-dragging inbreds in the heartland. Marxism holds that If Only You Put The Right People In Charge, you can build a classless society where all are economically equal.
Again, the intelligentsia are wholly unaware of their capacity for evil (which we all have) and have not a shred of humility. They figure that if they can converse intelligently about lofty affairs in the abstract that they are equally capable of directing an enormous economy from the top down.
That dozens of groups large and small have tried and failed to achieve this ideal stymies them not. They will get it right, if only they get their turn at the whip.
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November 7, 2009, 3:45 pmGreek Geek says:
Dicentra’s first post wins the thread. Everyone else can continue trying, but really, what’s the use?
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November 7, 2009, 4:00 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Paul Hollander on the Fall of Communism -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by SarahWW and SarahWW, Joe Brooks. Joe Brooks said: Paul Hollander on the Fall of Communism http://ff.im/-b6sQf [...]
peter jackson says:
Boris and Natasha...
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November 7, 2009, 4:18 pmrpt says:
This sounds like a critique that could apply to ideologues of any stripe, including the Randians.
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November 7, 2009, 4:31 pmAnderson says:
Five years at Cornell, literature PhD program. So, yes, I do know the American university.
No, it sounds like at most you know the Cornell lit program. The physics department is devoted to Marx?
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November 7, 2009, 4:48 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Is that what Newt’s Novel is about? I might have to give it a look — that’s always been an intriguing possibility to me.
I didn’t read the novel, just a couple of chapters that had been posted on the Web. If I recall corectly, the initial premise was that Hitler had been in a traffic accident that put him in the hospital for the second week in December 1941, and by the time he got out the urge to take on yet another opponent in the war had passed.
Apparently there was to have been a sequel, but it wasn’t published.
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November 7, 2009, 4:56 pmWaterhouse says:
Yeah, the absolute annihilation of his thesis hasn’t ‘hurt’ it.
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November 7, 2009, 5:21 pmRich K says:
OK All you really sharp folks, Explain to me how if the west defeated communism then why are there still China,Cuba,VietNam,Burma,North Korea Etc practicing that failed system.Ive been hearing this meme for over two decades and while the soviet style went the way of the dodo for now its still a major feature of at least a third of the worlds population.I was one of many who said yea when the wall in the west came down but for the last 20 years I heard little about that wall in the east.But at least its made good fodder for many authors over the years to sell books.
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November 7, 2009, 5:37 pmGringo says:
Anderson says:
A similar question could then be posed to you. Since you discount experience in one’s major, and demand a wide ranging knowledge of various departments perhaps you should document how well you know the American university. Such as your published study of political opinions of professors at twenty different departments at one hundred different universities.
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November 7, 2009, 5:39 pmtamerlane says:
That you think the examples are obscure is a reflection of your ignorance rather than their obscurity.
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November 7, 2009, 5:41 pmTennwriter says:
Um, not so much. The idea of Randians is that of limited government, and self-directed individuals. Randians are pretty much on the opposite side of this.
*Um, granted there are a few libertarians who are starting to realize they’re never going to win with a popular vote.
*Um again, yes, Randians have an ideology which does not conform to reality, and they’d like to impose it on reality, but the result is not gulags.
*Um and Um, its odd for me to defend Randians. I think of them as counterfeit Christians puffed up with pride, but still, they’re not authoritarians.
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November 7, 2009, 5:44 pmAnderson says:
Things have gotten confused b/t F. Tycoon and Dicentra; the contention was
Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department.
I think the burden regarding that extraordinary claim rests fairly on the one making it (or on those who concur with it), not on those who doubt it. Virtually every non-economics university department in America treats Marx as “beloved”? Arrant horseshit, that only embarrasses those who try to defend it.
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November 7, 2009, 6:19 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Does anybody here recall any lefties comparing Bush to Stalin?
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November 7, 2009, 7:55 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The heartland lost big in the 2008 election, although why Alaska is the heartland is a little hard to understand unless we assume that heartland is a synonym for “dominated by white Protestants”. A highly-educated urban black man is President of the United States, which may explain why people in your so-called heartland are going bonkers.
In any event, it is easy to show that the academy is full of Marxists, Communists, and Stalinists if you get to pick the definition of Marxist, Communist, and Stalinist. Attempts to show that any significant number of professors meet the usual definition of Marxist or Communist aren’t very successful.
Does anyone besides me wonder if dicentra acquired his conspicuous humility by not finishing his dissertation?
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November 7, 2009, 7:57 pmDavid N. Narr says:
There are several excellent movies that realistically portray the Soviet regime: The Godfather, Parts I and II; Casino and Goodfellas.
Re a point made above: the formal governmental structure may have crumbled, and the Party’s hold on power may have been hollowed out by corruption; but the fundamental security institutions survived. Read Chekisty by John J. Dziak.
“Certain political systems display an overarching concern with ‘enemies,’ both internal and external. Security and the extirpation of real and presumed threats become the premier enterprises of such systems. . .this fixation demands the creation of a state security service that permeates and penetrates all societal institutions including the military. This security service is the principal guardian of the party; the two together constitute a permanent counterintelligence enterprise to which all other major political, social and economic questions are subordinated. The commonweal is not the principal objective. . .self-perpetuation is.”
Dziak, Chekisty, pp1-2.
Communists have used strategies of conspiracy, subversion, propaganda and recruitment of intellectuals, academics and influential members of the media — their version of asymmetrical warfare — since before the Bolsheviks took power. Lenin and Stalin murdered millions; Putin only disposes of the odd troublesome journalist or dissident. Nothing has really changed.
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November 7, 2009, 8:48 pmuberVU - social comments says:
Social comments and analytics for this post...
This post was mentioned on Twitter by joebrooks: Paul Hollander on the Fall of Communism http://ff.im/-b6sQf...
dicentra says:
The proper refutation to my assertion is to demonstrate that the intelligentsia do NOT look down on heartlanders and other conservatives, nor do they see themselves as more fit to rule than anyone else. Instead, you provided us with evidence that you’re one of the people I’m railing against: Exhibit A: We Won (argumentum ad populum); Exhibit B: You’re All A Bunch Of Racist Inbred Ignoramuses (argumentum ad hominem):
It reveals more about you than about the heartland. See those adjectives you used? “Highly educated” “urban” “black”? Meaning that folks in the heartland are viscerally averse to those things. You’ve proven my thesis rather than refuted it. Well done.
Remember when I said this?
That was my thesis, not “Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department.”
Answer my arguments, not someone else’s.
What? I’ve never heard this insult before! “Dicentra is railing against academia because ‘he’ couldn’t hack it! FAILED ACADEMIC! UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!”
I’ll save you the work of speculating: I did not finish my D (decided I didn’t like teaching), and I’m now working in the real world, learning all kinds of things they don’t teach you in grad school.
Such as humility.
Yes, humility. Not once, NOT ONE TIME on campus did I ever hear people say, “Hey, you know what? We here in the university may be pretty clever when it comes to some kinds of learning and knowledge, but there are all kinds of skills and abilities that we don’t necessarily possess that other people DO possess, and we would do well to not look down on people whose skill sets differ from our own.”
Pity that few academics in their sheltered lives never seem to learn this. They’re like leopards in a zoo who, upon hearing about predators and prey, denounce the predators roundly and then devise theses upon theses against the food chain. All this time eating the meat their keepers toss them, never imagining where it comes from nor what violence dwells in their captive hearts.
Let them out of their safe cages and they’d starve to death or be eaten in a trice. And they sneer at the productive class? Pathetic.
P.S.: I’m a grrrrl. Any guy who chooses the bleeding heart flower as his avatar should turn in his man card immediately.
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November 7, 2009, 9:17 pmMark Field says:
Not Bush himself, but several of us (Anderson and I specifically) did compare Bush’s torture tactics to those of Stalin.
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November 7, 2009, 9:29 pmSara says:
Dicentra — Since when are Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio not the Heartland? As a midwesterner, I think I know the heartland. How about Colorado and New Mexico? Or is this your nativist variation, on they’re not Real Americans?
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November 7, 2009, 9:37 pmAnderson says:
several of us (Anderson and I specifically) did compare Bush’s torture tactics to those of Stalin.
Word. Not that either Bush or Stalin devised them, but generally we were happy to build upon the NKVD playbook.
In a crowded race, the top contender for “most astonishing fact about our torture program” might be that we adopted “Chinese brainwashing” methods (themselves derived from NKVD methods used during the show trials) which, by definition, were designed to extort false confessions. See Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side as a handy reference for that fact. And *that* is how we were supposedly keeping America safe.
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November 7, 2009, 9:44 pmAnderson says:
Dicentra — Since when are Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio not the Heartland?
I think Indiana finally fell for McCain by a hair, but yes, Dicentra’s knowledge of American geography is on a par with his/her familiarity with the pervasiveness of Marxist sympathies in university departments.
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November 7, 2009, 9:46 pmdicentra says:
As to another point:
No one in their right mind would wear a swastika in public. No. One. You only see swastikas anymore in the context of white supremacist prison gangs and the corresponding morons on the outside.
However, the Che t-shirt is trés chic. Mao’s red star adorns the olive-colored handbags of the rich and clueless. Castro and Chávez enjoy popularity among the cultural and intellectual elite. Our own administration failed to recognize that the ouster of Zelaya was a lawful act, designed to thwart totalitarianism. One of Obama’s top advisers felt free to admire Mao publicly.
Public opprobrium toward Hitler, fascists, and Nazis is sufficient that all three are common terms of abuse. No one hurls the terms “MAOIST!” “CASTRO!” or “CHE-LOVER” as epithets. Ask the average teenager who Mao or Che was and get a blank stare. Ask them about Hitler and you’ll get an earful.
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November 7, 2009, 9:46 pmdicentra says:
I’m not talking Red States vs. Blue States, I’m talking the intelligentsia versus the rest of the country. Lots of people vote democrat because they’re union members or dependent on gubmint handouts, or they’re farmers, i.e., NOT the intelligentsia.
But thanks for the willful misreading of my intent (without asking for clarification), for accusing me of nativism, and of assuming that I use the category “real Americans” in the “No True Scotsman” vein.
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November 7, 2009, 9:53 pmdicentra says:
Refute my actual argument: Don’t assume that by “heartland” I am referring to geography (which you know damn well I am not), and don’t act like the humanities aren’t full to overflowing with those who are dedicated to “social justice” and other leftist causes. By obsessing over the exact meaning of Marxism and then declaring that “you can’t know that,” you are seeking only to obfuscate, not refute or clarify.
Or was I accurate in my assessment of the intelligentsia as arrogant know-nothings who believe themselves fit to rule by dint of their inherent and/or acquired superiority?
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November 7, 2009, 9:59 pmdicentra says:
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November 7, 2009, 10:01 pmHarry Eagar says:
‘That you think the examples are obscure is a reflection of your ignorance rather than their obscurity.’
The examples that could be considered to include comic Stalinists are so obscure that I have never heard of them.
My bad, perhaps, but Boris and Natasha as Stalinists? Get a grip.
I note none of the redhot liberty lovers here found a few bytes left over to object to the plea for a revival of a harsher McCarthyism. What exactly is it that you object to?
We have now got it down to teenagers wearing Che T-shirts. The Republic is in danger!
Che is about the only Stalinist that anybody could assert has a following in the United States, although I can see why you rabid antireds are shying away from that particular example, if the standard is to be hecatombs of kulaks. Unsavory as Cuba is, it doesn’t even aspire to the top 10 among Latin countries when it comes to mass murder. None of the real killer regimes in Latin America is communist.
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November 7, 2009, 10:04 pmdicentra says:
How many high school and college students have even HEARD of the NKVD? They’ve heard of the SS. How about Kolyma? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Walter Duranty? Joseph Davies?
It was all meant to be whitewashed and/or forgotten during the Long March Through the Institutions. And it would have been if it weren’t for those meddling conservatives.
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November 7, 2009, 10:06 pmdicentra says:
Again, a willful misreading. The point was that Communists symbols are not reviled the way Nazi symbolism is, not that Che t-shirts are destroying the republic.
But you knew that was my point. What exactly was yours?
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November 7, 2009, 10:09 pmMartha says:
Advice that even self-professed failed academics might do well to heed.
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November 7, 2009, 10:13 pmSara says:
I think Indiana finally fell for McCain by a hair
Someone should tell their electors. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6YWxJix_rM
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November 7, 2009, 10:17 pmRichard Aubrey says:
So, nobody can recall lefties comparing Bush to Stalin. IOW, the worst guy they can think of to compare their bete noire to is Hitler. When Stalin was worse.
Two possibilities: They don’t know enough. They don’t see Stalin as all that bad and so comparing Bush to Stalin doesn’t do enough damage to Bush.
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November 7, 2009, 10:53 pmSara says:
dicentra -I’m talking the intelligentsia versus the rest of the country. Lots of people vote democrat because they’re union members or dependent on gubmint handouts, or they’re farmers, i.e., NOT the intelligentsia.
Well, it’s helpful to know you hold both the “intelligentsia” and the “NOT-intelligentsia” in contempt. At any rate, it is odd you make these sweeping comments, here, where libertarian bloggers spend a substantial amount of their time arguing that ordinary citizens are, in fact, ignorant.
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November 7, 2009, 10:54 pmRichard Aubrey says:
WRt second possibility: I am assuming they know the broad outlines of how bad Stalin was and don’t really care.
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November 7, 2009, 10:55 pmgeokstr says:
Strawman. No one ever said that the hard sciences are overrun by Marxists, just the Softies.
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November 7, 2009, 11:00 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Lot of straw guys around.
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November 7, 2009, 11:03 pmRandy says:
“However, the Che t-shirt is trés chic. Mao’s red star adorns the olive-colored handbags of the rich and clueless.”
wow. You have a serious misunderstanding of fashion and young people. After the Berlin wall fell, communist regalia of all sorts became rather chic for a period of time, then faded away. Why? Because it was a fashion statement, nothing more. These were the symbols that we were all brought up to revile by the Establishment, so it was fun to don them as ironic symbols. The Che t-shirt is used because it’s from a certain photograph that made him look particularly rebellious and handsome. I don’t think one student in ten even knows that the photo is of a man named Che.
Mao gets special treatment. His face was used by Andy Warhol in a series of silkscreens to make a statement on the subject of celebrity worship in America. (He did similar work on Jackie O and Marilyn Monroe) Mao was, like Stalin, a person who was a willing participant in the ‘cult of personality’ and Warhol was making a statement that this cult of personality isn’t too different from that of Jackie and Monroe. After communism fell, his visage used used ironically as a result as a fashion statement — an ironic statement of an ironic statement, something the Gen X and Gen Y crowd understands and gets. (Why no ironic statement of Stalin and consequent t-shirts? Because Warhol didn’t do any Stalin silkscreens).
Agree with me or not ( and I know plenty will not), but understand this: Any student wearing any t-shirt with the photo of Mao or Che or other communist probably doesn’t even know who there were, or certainly doesn’t care. Doubt me? Then just ask them. Unless you really think Paris Hilton’s friends are a closet commies.
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November 7, 2009, 11:49 pmRandy says:
geosktr: “Strawman. No one ever said that the hard sciences are overrun by Marxists.”
Actually, this is the exact quote:
“Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department.”
One can assume that ‘virtually every other university department’ would include at least some of the hard sciences.
Harry Eager: “The examples that could be considered to include comic Stalinists are so obscure that I have never heard of them.”
You can’t be serious! If you haven’t ever seen Ninotchka (“Garbo laughes!”), get thee to Netflix and rent it right now. It’s probably the best satirical movie ever on communism.
There were plenty of tv comedies that would take the cold war and communism as a plot device. I particularly remember a few episodes of Green Acres that took them to Washington to fight the good fight. I’m sure others can remember other shows.
Additionally, there are quite a few serious films to mention. There is the entire genre of sci-fi theater during the 50s and early 60s that took a non-funny but satiric look at communism, from The Blob to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Other movies about the problems of communism include The Manchurian Candidate, The Last Emperor, Kundun, Before Night Falls, The Buena Vista Social Club, The Red Violin. All of these at least touch on the evils of communism and can’t really be said to be obscure, unless you’ve been living under a rock the past twenty years.
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November 8, 2009, 12:07 amrpt says:
Now that the House has passed the health reform bill, we anticipate a new round of doom-saying comments. Of course, the one R who did vote for it, Rep. Cao, might have something to say in response.
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November 8, 2009, 12:21 amrpt says:
From Rep. Cao’s website:
“Tonight, Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao (LA-2) voted in favor of the comprehensive health reform bill, H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act.
Of his vote, Cao said: “Tonight, I voted to keep taxpayer dollars from funding abortion and to deliver access to affordable health care to the people of Louisiana.
Cao said: “I read the versions of the House [health reform] bill. I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding – if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children.
The bill passed the House at a 220–215 vote.
Cao said: “Today, I obtained a commitment from President Obama that he and I will work together to address the critical health care issues of Louisiana including the FMAP crisis and community disaster loan forgiveness, as well as issues related to Charity and Methodist Hospitals. And, I call on my constituents to support me as I work with him on these issues.
Cao said: “I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people. My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents.”
Since he and his family have first hand knowledge of Communist tyranny and reeducation camps, his vote should put the lie to those here and in the GOP who call health reform “socialistic” or other such nonsense.
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November 8, 2009, 12:50 amPTL says:
Who says Communism died. Look at this administration. More marxists and Maoists than the Kremlin and Beijing. Look at the university faculties.
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November 8, 2009, 1:44 amRicardo says:
Which statements by Nixon did you have in mind?
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.”
Then there is the now famous conversation between Nixon and Graham where Nixon agrees with Graham that the “strangehold” on the country possessed by the Jewish media has to be broken.
Yes, quite the prescient and insightful figure, that Nixon. If he was right about anything, it would be one of those “stopped clock” coincidences.
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November 8, 2009, 2:02 amBarrie says:
I just scanned all the above posts, and failed to read even once the name Solzhenitsyn. This very great man, Nobel Prize author and 20thC hero of freedom alone documented the demented horrors of 60 years of communism, and most people don’t even know his name or read his Gulag. He wrote some 7000 pages on the subject.
Says it all for our media, Western universities and schools, really.
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November 8, 2009, 2:10 amRicardo says:
As Randy pointed out above, Americans don’t have very much knowledge of this history of other countries, period. Can you recall the locations of the five largest locations where massacres of Armenians took place during the Armenian genocide? As easily as you can recall the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Bełzec or Majdanek? I doubt it. While you are at it, can you name the key figures in the Armenian genocide as easily as you can name Goebbels, Himmler, Hitler, Keitel or Eichmann?
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November 8, 2009, 2:18 amChiara Brown says:
My husband and I were just talking about this issue this afternoon. I posited that, unlike Germany, the Soviet Union was never really defeated. It kind of gradually fell apart under its own weight, but it wasn’t simply defeated and held to account like Germany was. In fact, none of the other genocidal and mass murdering nations were flatly defeated and held to public account like Germany was, and that is why there can still be debate in Russia over whether Stalin was misunderstood and was actually good for the country, or Turkey can say that the Armenians were simply victims of wartime, not genocide, etc. In the main, nations are like selfish, immoral, and immature people — unless you bring them to their knees, humiliate them and force them to confess what they’ve done, they will never take responsibility, and they will do everything they can to convince themselves that they are innocent — perhaps even that they are in fact the victim.
And although I agree that Marxism is really very dreamy and exciting to those who inhabit the world of the academic humanities and social sciences, and many of them are loathe to criticize it without some sort of apologetic, let’s not pretend that any of the current socialist/communist governments are essentially being treated any differently than any other country when it comes to acknowledging their human rights violations. There are human rights violations going on all over the world, but only the few politically sexy ones get the attention at any given time.
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November 8, 2009, 3:48 amBrad says:
I haven’t read through the whole comment thread yet, so if this post is redundant I apologize.
An early commenter pointed out that Stalin was our ally against Hitler, and that is one reason for the current historical amnesia about the evils of communism. However, it should be emphasized that before Stalin was our ally against Hitler, Stalin was Hitler’s ally against us! Stalin only switched sides when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. Before that invasion, Russia and Germany worked together to carve up Europe between them.
In fact I think an excellent case could be made that Stalin was the indispensable ally of Hitler. That without Stalin’s aid, Hitler could not have succeeded during WWII to the extant he did and that WWII itself may never have started.
One huge reason Germany lost WWI is because a British naval blockade was starving Germany into submission. But with Stalin helping Hitler, Germany had all the raw materials, especially food and oil, that Germany needed to prosecute WWII in the early years. Without the Soviets aid, Germany was in an extremely precarious strategic position at the start of WWII. So precarious that Hitler may never have been so reckless as to provoke war with Britain and France, by invading Poland in 1939.
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November 8, 2009, 6:14 amBrad says:
Okay, I finally read through all the comments.
dicentra? Bravo! Keep up the good work.
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November 8, 2009, 6:40 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Ricardo:
Thanks, you proved my point.
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November 8, 2009, 8:23 amRicardo says:
Since you never pointed to which statement of Nixon’s you think showed he “knew what [he was] talking about,” you never made your point in the first place, let alone proved it. As I said, any particular claim of Nixon’s may well have been factually accurate — it’s pretty difficult to go through life being wrong about literally everything. But as for “knowing what [he was] talking about,” such a description summarily excludes anyone who indulges in paranoid anti-Semitic fantasies to the extent Nixon did. Or do you think he was dead accurate when expressing his beliefs about the Jewish-dominated media or the plot by Jewish economists in the Bureau of Labor Statistics to artificially inflate the unemployment rate?
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November 8, 2009, 9:51 amStone Cold says:
Cao said: “I have always said that I would put aside partisan wrangling to do the business of the people. My vote tonight was based on my priority of doing what is best for my constituents.”
Since he and his family have first hand knowledge of Communist tyranny and reeducation camps, his vote should put the lie to those here and in the GOP who call health reform “socialistic” or other such nonsense.
Cao represents one of the most liberal districts in the country, and he is attempting, with votes like this, to avoid becoming a one-term fluke. He won election only because he was running against the now-convicted crook, William Jefferson, who had been re-elected two years earlier even though he was already under indictment. Before Cao looks so hopefully to Obama for a working partnership, he ought to consider just how much good that did for Creigh Deeds and John Corzine.
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November 8, 2009, 11:19 amRichard Aubrey says:
Ricardo.
So the folks who politicized the unemployment rate weren’t Jews.
I suppose that’s one of the issues. The other is the politicization of any government figures.
On the other hand, what if, by accident, some of the folks involved in the DOL calculations were Jews?
Could happen. Anything can happen, eventually.
It would then remain to decide whether they politicized the figures, the figures weren’t politicized, or the Jews weren’t the ones who did it.
If the DOL failed to politicize the unemployment figures against a republican administration, they were not doing their job.
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November 8, 2009, 11:20 amRichard Aubrey says:
Cao might have been sincere.
Alternatively, it could be a plain vanilla cover for having been told by Pelosi & Co. that his political career would be over if he didn’t cave.
After all, what are earmarks for if not to award or withhold for proper behavior?
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November 8, 2009, 11:29 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Ricardo:
I don’t normally point out the obvious, out of respect for others’ intelligence. However: Nixon was famously (or notoriously) an anti-communist and it is obviously that part of his career I’m talking about. You may pick a specific statement from that mellieu at your pleasure.
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November 8, 2009, 11:36 amCornet of Horse says:
Liberals in academia, including this one, can keep our heads buried in the sand or heed dicentra’s warnings. The latter strikes me as more fruitful given the proportion of the population that has passed through said institutions over the past forty years and have noted the reality that dicentra highlights, though many were more sympathetic to it at the time than dicentra.
That sympathy doesn’t wear well, given subsequent experience, and serves to undermine support for legitimate progressive, and especially liberal, policies, given the illiberalism of Marx.
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November 8, 2009, 12:37 pmmarkm says:
So, why haven’t young people adopted the swastika as a fashion statement? It looks cool and it would really rile “the establishment”.
The answer is obvious. They know the swastika is the symbol of a truly evil group of men. So, the question is, why are they unaware that these symbols and iconic figures they adopt are from an even more evil group?
Because their teachers told them much about Nazis, but never mentioned that the Communists were evil. Or that Che Guevara tortured prisoners in a Communist concentration camp, and died trying to corrupt another nation.
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November 8, 2009, 12:45 pmDuffy Pratt says:
In a similar way, lots of attention is paid to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshoma and Nagisaki, and not so much to the firebombings of Tokyo and Kobe. The firebombings killed more people. But the Bomb was different.
I think the same can be said about the Nazi death camps. The industrialization of death, including the novel inventions and engineering efforts that were devoted solely to increasing killing efficiency, these innovations raised the Nazi efforts to a new level. By comparison, the mass murders of the Communists are just the extension of old forms of killing raised to a very large scale. The communist camps are more like firebombing, something we can readily imagine, just a new application of old methods. The Bomb and the Nazi death camps were both new, and for many people, beyond imagination or comprehension.
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November 8, 2009, 2:06 pmHarry Eagar says:
Randy sez: ‘All of these at least touch on the evils of communism and can’t really be said to be obscure.
They can’t be said to be comic, either.
There was ONE comic movie about Stalinists, but the redhot antireds might not want me to point to it: ‘Red Snow,’ made at the behest of Sen. Nixon, in which Guy Madison plays a heroic Air Force officer leading a band of capitalist Eskimos against a band of communist Eskimos as they struggle over control of the means of blubber production . . . or something.
It may be that the refusal (to the extent it existed) to see communism as being as evil as Nazism had something to do with the chief drumbeaters for the idea: with buffoons like McCarthy and Sheen, it took a certain lack of — shall we say — self-esteem to want to identify with the reds-under-the-bed crowd.
I note, based on several comments here, that buffoonish anti-communism is not as dead as some of us would wish.
markm asks, ‘So, why haven’t young people adopted the swastika as a fashion statement?’
Oh, but they have. Or, at least, certain capitalists would like them to. See
here.
I am not one for atrocity-mongering. I do not hold, with Richard Aubrey, that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Both were sufficiently bad. But I question whether people who present themselves as expert atrocity-mongers — among whom I place Professor Somin — are really as expert as they hold themselves out to be.
I have read the whole thread, and I note the conspicuous absence of any reference to some of the biggest atrocities of the era. And I’ll bet not too many people know who John Rabe was.
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November 8, 2009, 2:27 pmloki13 says:
Some have. I suggest you do some research on punk, my friend.
Anyway, I find it amazing that there are those who make it their cottage industry to get outraged at the T-Shirts that the young’uns are wearing. I recommend making your displeasure clear– it would help spur sales of the T-Shirts, which might be the most ironic (meta-ironic) statement yet.
My favorite t-shirt? Che with a lattle caption– “Get off my lawn.”
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November 8, 2009, 2:35 pmRandy says:
“There was ONE comic movie about Stalinists.”
No, there have been several, but you refuse to acknowledge because you don’t know about them. And it’s a little strange to complain that that there is a dearth of films in the very tiny subgenre of ‘comedies about Stalinist Russia’
Furthermore, if that is your beef, you have a simple option. Make your own movie.
It isn’t that hard or costly, actually. I’ve worked an independent GLBT filmfest for years, and I know that that people of very limited means or skills can actually make a pretty good film (although the odds are that the film won’t actually be very good).
Nonetheless, if semi-talented film students can make decent films, so can you. If you really believe that there is a dearth of films that you want to see, then make them. That’s exactly how the GLBT film circuit started, out of frustration that Hollywood wouldn’t tell our stories. So we decided to tell our own.
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November 8, 2009, 3:21 pmDrew Kelley says:
In defense of dicentra...
Those that think in geographical terms, or in red/blue state terms, miss her approach.
For our self-described intellectual betters, her “Heartland” could best be described as “flyover country”.
For those with a more Populus bent (and I include myself here) it is a philosophical devide that could be appropriately marked as Jacksonian/Wilsonian — a divide that delineates not only foreign policy, but how we relate to each other domestically.
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November 8, 2009, 3:22 pmHarry Eagar says:
I have not seen the Manchurian Candidate, Randy, but it has not been my impression that it was a comedy.
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November 8, 2009, 4:13 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Both the Fascist and Communist systems tended to disdain the intelligentsia in favor the the allegedly authentic emotions of the working class. What is unique about the American conservative movement is the picture of people who know better having to embrace Creationism, Global Warming Denialism, Liberalism=Stalinism, intolerance of religions other than Christianity, and other anti-intellectual beliefs that are more prevalent in what they are choosing to call the Heartland. (In geographical reality, it’s the heartland of the Confederacy plus parts of the Mountain States.) Just in the blogosphere they’ve managed to turn two well-read stalwarts into apostates this way.
[Aside to Ms. Dicenza: “Besides, those grapes are sour.”]
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November 8, 2009, 5:25 pmegd says:
FYI, in my entire college and law school career, I never met anyone born after 1980 who has watched an episode of Hogan’s Heroes, unless they accidentally left the TV tuned to Nick at Night after watching Mr. Ed and smoking pot.
And for those who say academia isn’t full of Marxist apologists, I know anecdotal evidence isn’t always reliable, but I personally had one class that involved a professor defending Marx’s “Concept of Man.” I can’t imagine a class defending “Mein Kampf” making it into the curriculum, but I’d be happy to hear of any.
I do think that a lot of the ambivalence towards Marxism is due to the lack of time since the downfall of the Soviet regime. Furthermore, the fact that Gorbachev, the last public face of the USSR, has done a lot of good in his life, as opposed to the horrors and personal goals of Hitler and Stalin.
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November 8, 2009, 9:09 pmAnderson says:
No one ever said that the hard sciences are overrun by Marxists, just the Softies.
Let’s roll the tape:
Of course, Marx is dead in economics programs, but he is beloved in virtually every other university department.
Could those insisting that we not forget the past, possibly trouble themselves not to forget previous comments in the same thread?
I personally had one class that involved a professor defending Marx’s “Concept of Man.” I can’t imagine a class defending “Mein Kampf” making it into the curriculum, but I’d be happy to hear of any.
I’m not familiar with that particular work by Marx, but may I humbly submit that Marx’s works may well have the occasional interesting concept, without Marxism’s thereby becoming a valid theory?
Students of philosophy, for instance, study Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, without anyone’s being under the impression that any of these writers was actually The Truth.
Marx’s version of alienation, for instance, is an interesting idea, though I believe Marx’s mistake was in imagining some idyllic alternative, just as his “labor theory of value” erred in imagining that work’s value is set by the laborer, not by the market.
Whereas a distinguishing feature of Nazism, shared by Mein Kampf in particular, is its utter lack of redeeming value. Even a tyrant like Napoleon comes off well compared to Hitler. Mein Kampf has pathological value at best, and I can’t think of any reason to argue the same about Marx’s work.
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November 8, 2009, 9:31 pmAnderson says:
(And for those upset about the lack of press for Communist tyranny, consider how long it’s taken for a properly negative view of Napoleon to become anything like the mainstream.)
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November 8, 2009, 9:36 pmCornet of Horse says:
Anderson,
“Mein Kampf has pathological value at best, and I can’t think of any reason to argue the same about Marx’s work.”
Because his widespread embrace (or at least the toleration of him and his thought) by those who should know better has done great damage to the liberal project over the last couple generations?
Look, the popularity of Marx (you can deny all you like, but the syllabi do not lie) and fellow travelers in illiberal continental philosophy, and those whose statecraft claims inspiration therefrom, among our erstwhile intelligentsia doesn’t rankle because I’m afraid that it might endanger the dittoheading of America. If I were coming from the right-wing, there is no shortage of inanity coming from that direction to critique, which would be the most logical course of action for me to take if my sympathies ran that way and I sought to improve their arguments. Said inanity is likely a non-trivial source of the appeal of the Marxian, in an enemy-of-one’s-enemy sort of way. Why Uncle Miltie should be anyone’s enemy is another question entirely, and one more liberals would be well-served to ask.
But the liberal project has historically seen such petty small-mindedness for the dead end that it is. Marx and his followers are no friends of liberty, whoever the supposed enemies are, and never have been. As long as we liberals continue to pretend that the illiberal Left is some marginalized fringe not to be seriously contended with, that supposed fringe will continue to discredit the causes we hold most dear and undermine the liberal institutions to which we have committed our lives.
Those institutions depend a great deal on widespread popular support. We ignore Populous at our peril.
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November 8, 2009, 9:57 pmRicardo says:
JFK and LBJ were anti-communists also. It was, after all, JFK’s brother who gave permission to J. Edgar Hoover to spy on Martin Luther King, Jr. over the latter’s alliances with communists and socialists. For that matter, Reagan was a more convincing anti-communist. You obviously had a specific reason for choosing Nixon.
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November 8, 2009, 10:09 pmHarryEagar says:
Who’s not contending with the illiberal left? The Americans for Democratic Action was formed to separate the sheep from the goats.
It wouldn’t take me 10 seconds to find a dozen claims that Barack Obama is Stalin in blackface. I could find at least one on this thread.
If the rightwingers want me to take them seriously, they need to set up a right ADA to distance themselves from the nuts.
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November 8, 2009, 10:11 pmAnderson says:
Dude, Plato is not a friend of liberty. Aristotle’s not a friend of liberty. Are we to burn all the books not by “friends of liberty”? Is it not worthwhile to study books by the *enemies* of liberty?
I would like to see *one* serious study demonstrating the supposed clutches of Marx on the American university. I studied philosophy and literature in undergrad and grad school, and I can think of maybe two classes where Marx was assigned — a Russian history class (duh) and a class on 19th century philosophy (duh). Of what must be 15 or 20 English profs, I’ve had maybe one “Marxist” (more of an Earth First type).
But it’s deeply confused to equate Marx — a philosopher with economist pretensions — with Lenin or Stalin. Blaming him for what they did is rather like blaming the authors of the Gospels for the Inquisition. Thank god no terroristic regime tried to implement Kantian philosophy at the state level!
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November 8, 2009, 10:18 pmMartha says:
I just did two advanced google searches. A search for “syllabus” and Marx OR communist OR communism yielded 330,000 results. A search for “syllabus” and Hitler OR Nazi OR fascism yielded 200,000 results. Definitely more syllabi for communism, though I’m not sure how to interpret those results. Is “Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Italian Cinema” a pro-fascist course? Is “History of Economic Thought” a pro-communist course because it assigns lots of Marx? (Many of the Marx-related syllabi come from economic departments, btw, comments upthread notwithstanding.) And what to make of a history course on the 1950s that assigns no Marx but comes up in the search because it covers the HUAC (largely through primary documents)?
I personally don’t know of a single Marxist at my university (a top 10 univ–in size). That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, of course; I don’t know everyone who teaches here. So I searched my univ website and got no hits on any of those terms, then searched the course catalog (grad and ugrad) and found one course: a junior-level philosophy course called Marx and Nietzsche.
None of this proves anything, but I wanted to take at least a brief look at what those non-lying syllabi might actually show.
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November 8, 2009, 10:32 pmCornet of Horse says:
“Dude, Plato is not a friend of liberty. Aristotle’s not a friend of liberty. Are we to burn all the books not by “friends of liberty”? Is it not worthwhile to study books by the *enemies* of liberty?”
It is. As such. Which is not how he is presently taught, rather more as a liberal in a hurry, with his heart in the right place. Not unlike how White Supremacist groups see Hitler. Just misunderstood, dontcha know. Those who follow his lead also enjoying a special dispensation for being on the side of the angels, even if there have been a few missteps along the way. Entirely understandable, given the oppression, etc...
And of course in
practicepraxis Platonism and Aristotelianism have a much wider array of results than those enjoyed by Marxism. Perhaps it just hasn’t been tried correctly yet.I’m not calling for a witch-hunt of the Left. I’m asking that you consider what it is that truly constitutes Progress. If it’s illiberal, that ain’t it, however Left it claims to be.
On a less smarty-pants note, I guess Marx and friends serve as the lazy alternative to whatever it is that one calls our status-quo. The two problems with that are the extent to which our present libertarian-leery establishment, having completed their march through the institutions, perceive themselves as sharing the same enemies as the Marxians, if not common cause*, and more seriously, how much Marx’s discredited (outside the intelligentsia) dogma crowds out more viable real alternatives to that none-too-happy status quo.
* — by and large, actually being a Marxist has gone out of fashion, but I’d attribute that more to the post-modern suspicion of –isms as such, than to any distaste for the Old Fart himself, let alone his thought, the tropes of which very much live on.
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November 9, 2009, 1:10 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
There was a Marxist in my department. As it was the Math Department, I doubt if many students were contaminated.
The idea that Marx—who seems indeed to have made contributions with his analysis of current events, if not his economics—has to be removed from the curriculum because of his disdain for democracy and the rights of individual citizens seems backwards. As Anderson points out, with this criterion, the Gospels have to go out the window. (If the Gospels seems too far removed, is anyone crusading to rid our universities of the works of Martin Heidegger?)
I agree that universities ignore populism at their peril, but the anti-intellectual strain in American fundamentalism is over a century old. Mark Twain had to fight against it. Perhaps there are better ways of winning this battle than purges: for example, doing a better job of educating the students already there. Or working harder against the crusaders for ignorance who keep running for School Boards in Ms. Dicenza’s heartland.
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November 9, 2009, 1:28 amPascal says:
Why restrict umbrage to Germans and Russians? Didn’t Havel’s country forcibly eject some 2,000,000 Germans and steal their possessions of land, farms, equipment? Curious, since WWII began over Havel’s country when Hitler, imbued with Wilson’s thoughts about nations and nationalities, decided to “rescue” the Germans in that land. Britain declared war then with no army, no air force, no nothing.
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November 9, 2009, 8:02 amSara says:
Cornet:
Can you give me an example of who teaches Marx this way? Admittedly, my one brush with Marx was in a class with other political theorists back in the days of the USSR, when it seemed to make sense to study him as a problematic political theorist. But he was certainly not studied in the way you claim.
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November 9, 2009, 8:44 amegd says:
That would be a well taken point, if it weren’t for the fact that the class was basically a defense of Marxism and Communism, including the oft repeated mantra that “the Soviets were bad because they were doing it wrong.” The professor’s position was that if only there had been some real Marxists (like Trotsky) in power in Russia, the revolution would have spread globally and we would all be in a Utopian communist paradise by now.
Fortunately, this was an elective course, and therefore I was able to ignore most of this apology of Communism. But the fact remains that the class was essentially a defense of Communism-lite, or more particularly, “Communism was great, except for the killings, and it can still work.”
Keep in mind, that this sort of idiocy was well after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the democratization of Russia.
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November 9, 2009, 9:09 amAnderson says:
Curious, since WWII began over Havel’s country when Hitler, imbued with Wilson’s thoughts about nations and nationalities, decided to “rescue” the Germans in that land. Britain declared war then with no army, no air force, no nothing.
Havel, as in Vaclav? Czech Republic? Your history is very confused; Britain did not declare war over Czechoslovakia in March 1939, but over Poland in September 1939.
... I join Sara in wanting actual, named examples of some of these Friends of Marx in the academy. An awful lot of people’s notions on this subject seem to be informed by, at most, having read something by David Horowitz on the web once, or similarly in-depth sources.
Since so many commenters are so knowledgeable, providing some names shouldn’t be too difficult.
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November 9, 2009, 9:17 amAnderson says:
That would be a well taken point, if it weren’t for the fact that the class was basically a defense of Marxism and Communism, including the oft repeated mantra that “the Soviets were bad because they were doing it wrong.”
Okay, for example: What is this professor’s name? Where did he teach at the time?
I don’t doubt that there are a few idiots everywhere, but we’re addressing claims that “many” or “most” college professors are sympathetic to Marxism, so getting some names would be a useful project — perhaps even worthy of an independent VC post soliciting same.
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November 9, 2009, 9:21 amHyman Rosen says:
Isn’t it clear from the responses here why there’s a difference between the accounts of Nazi atrocities and the Communist atrocities? Nazi atrocities are taught as historical events. Communist atrocities are used to bash modern progressives. It’s the difference between “Hitler killed millions” and “Stalin killed millions thus Obama is evil”. The linked op-ed piece is of that sort.
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November 9, 2009, 12:21 pmGringo says:
Anderson: as you want an example of pro-Marxist university people, here is one from some years back. Some time after Daniel Ortega lost the 1990 elections in Nicaragua,I heard Miguel Descoto speak in the US. Descoto had served as Foreign Minister for the Sandinista regime from 1979–1990. The professor who introduced him fawned over him. Also point out that the LASA, a.k.a. the Latin American Studies Association, was collectively a very determined cheerleader for the Sandinistas in the 1980s.Regarding the Marxist credentials of Descoto and the Sandinistas, I refer you to two examples.
In March 1980, less than three months after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, various Sandinista comandantes made a trip to Moscow. One result of that trip to Moscow was a joint Nicaragua/USSR proclamation. Here is a partial translation:
The proclamation went on to talk about the “progressive transformations” of Afghanistan that would occur as a result of the Soviet invasion. That is, Reagan didn’t drive the Sandinistas into the arms of the Soviets: they were already there before Reagan was elected. Source: Central American Crisis Reader ( Leiken & Rubin, editors) 1987, or Barricada March 23 ‚980.
Here is what Miguel Descoto said upon receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in 1987, while the USSR was warring in Afghanistan.
That professor fawned over Descoto. There was during this time wide spread support in universities in the US for the openly Marxist Sandinistas.Perhaps you may subsequently discount it as just one example, but it is an example.
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November 9, 2009, 1:16 pmCornet of Horse says:
They discount it because they are on the defensive, though perceive themselves, rightly, not to be in much serious danger yet from the direction they’re looking. The problem is that the threat isn’t coming that way, it’s from within — the erosion of the liberal arts themselves as they are increasingly associated with discredited ideology in the public mind.
My experiences come from a top U.S. unversity where I studied engineering (but was active enough on campus/sufficiently intellectually curious to be familiar with a wide variety of programs/professors) in the late 80’s/early 90’s, a year at the University of Manchester (UK) studying Economic History during the Eastern European revolutions in 89/90, to which I traveled and about which I read deeply, especially in the daily pages of the Guardian, Independent, and The Economist as the events unfolded, and three years of graduate Liberal Arts study in the early part of this century at one of our Ivies, leavened by work experiences inside and outside our liberal insitutions and communities.
Of course the majority of academics/intellectuals are not Marxists per se (nor are many anything –ists, and studiously so, some for good reason), but the main observation of the original post certainly holds. One can be considered, and indeed not a few are, a mischievious or misguided or overzealous or even in some sense brave and visionary Marxist or Communist or Maoist, et. al. in a way that one could not be such a Fascist or Nazi, even among so-called right-wing company that is supposed (by the intellegentsia) to be sympathetic to such things, let alone in academia itself, where to even be libertarian is to draw bizarre suspicion, if one is too critical in one’s thinking.
And, no, I’m pretty sure that the preceeding observed phenomena were not merely cases of mistaken Asperger’s and/or poorly developed social skills, but thanks for thinking of me. Given the relative ease of obtaining the old Phddie Duddie these days, and its precipitously declining value, I’m pretty sure the grapes really were more sour than I had hoped during long years of pining after them.
Perhaps such hopes were impossibly high...
I do not note this to bash academia, whatever that means, but in the hope of forming a better one next generation by avoiding the mistakes of the last.
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November 9, 2009, 1:57 pmGringo says:
I suggest that you Google bush hitler, if you are of the opinion that “modern progressives” are not inclined to use the leading spokesman for National Socialism to bash the right.
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November 9, 2009, 2:15 pmgeokstr says:
Let’s not forget Professors Ayers (and his wife (shudder), who is even far scarier than he is), both of whom admit to being “communists” to this very day, and who praise Hugo to high heaven for his wonderfulness. Obama and he gave $100 million dollars away to leftists in the 1990’s for the specific purpose of politicizing education in order to turn out more leftists.
Ayers is beloved by a big chunk of the professoriat, as shown by this letter of support by 3,000 of them (and that was all the way back in October 2008, they could probably have had a lot more signatures by now. In fact, my google search shows that there was a site called supportbillayers.org that had 4,291 signatories but the site seems to be gone now)
Ayers Letter of Support
As I said above, one does not have to be an actual card-carrier anymore, they are happy to have useful idiots and fellow travellers as well. And of course, there are probably plenty of soft science professors who would deny under oath that they were Marxists and then teach and preach the gospel of it anyway.
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November 9, 2009, 3:40 pmMartha says:
To sum up: We know for a fact that *most* university departments (except for economics depts) are riddled with Marxists. Well, not Marxists, because *being* a Marxist is out of fashion (except for t-shirt fashion), but fellow travellers. Or if not fellow travellers, people who would probably deny under oath that they were Marxists but then teach and preach Marxism anyway. The syllabi do not lie. Well, except for the many economics dept syllabi that teach Marx–no one believes they are communist. It’s all the other syllabi that do not lie. In fact, those syllabi are so clearly pro-communist that no one needs to produce any examples because we already know for a fact that most U.S. academics (especially the social scientists) promote communism.
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November 9, 2009, 3:59 pmCornet of Horse says:
Martha,
I could name some names, but they are among my favorite professors, and I’m not sure that they would take my point the way I intend it. And again what is deplored is not overt support for Marxism and its progeny, although that is indeed worrisome enough for those with eyes to see, but at least, as in the topic of the post, the gentleman’s agreement among liberals that prevents it being properly condemned as illiberal.
If anyone is least well-served by the present arrangement, it well could be those professors themselves, who often deserve energetic engagement rather than the glib dismissal in evidence here from erstwhile defenders of the academy.
The opposite of love is famously not hate, but ignorance/indifference, and the willful blindness on display here to the Marxians in our midst, in lieu of the enthusiasm for Creationist hunts (as if any Creationist curriculum could get a single vote on any court in this country — whose consciousness is false? Shy of taking on someone one’s own intellectual size?), says odd things about where the true passions lie.
If these folks are on the fringe, how is it that they’re consistently elected to represent their fellow intellectuals? My biggest concern about that article is that Ayers is categorized as “ultra-liberal”. There is nothing liberal about the man, the tradition to which he tenaciously clings, or the reactionary nepotism that got him where he is.
Marxism has consistently produced one thing: utter social immobility. Do not think that the elites have not noticed...
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November 9, 2009, 4:19 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
On the other hand, how many school boards could have majority Communists. I would suggest that the dumbification of our science textbooks to appease Creationists hurts the next generation more than any number of professors who forget to spit and throw salt over their shoulders at any mention of Marx.
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November 9, 2009, 7:30 pmGringo says:
Document, please.
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November 9, 2009, 9:36 pmMartha says:
Example. Perhaps not as compelling as your memory of a professor fawning over a speaker twenty years ago, but you can always google more.
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November 10, 2009, 10:29 amgeokstr says:
Nice try. I, and many other conservatives, are just as opposed to creationism in educational curricula as Marxism. So let’s dispense with the phony moral equivalence of “you have the creationist whackos so it’s OK for us to have the genocidal maniacs”.
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November 10, 2009, 3:37 pmCornet of Horse says:
Some powerless creationist school board members (I’m a teacher — the dumbing down isn’t driven by your creationist boogeymen, I can assure you!) vs this (from the link above):
“Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.”
He’s far from alone. You make the call.
And I’m no conservative. I voted for Obama and am very supportive of the work Arne Duncan is doing. Ayers and his ilk are a burden to the Progressive cause that needs challenging.
So what if conservatives don’t like him either, and tried to use him for propaganda purposes. The Comintern used our hypocrisy on race for propaganda purposes and to great effect. That didn’t mean we should have swept it under the rug. Good that we didn’t.
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November 10, 2009, 4:17 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I certainly wouldn’t have voted for Ayers for anything and his rehabilitation is unfortunate. I don’t see him slipping Commie indoctrination into anything, though. Indeed, his educational ideas have gone over well in the Chicago business ccommunity, haven’t they?
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November 10, 2009, 7:47 pmCornet of Horse says:
Lazarus,
“his educational ideas have gone over well in the Chicago business ccommunity, haven’t they?”
That’s Progress? Busyness and Liberalism have no inherent affinity, especially when the busynessmen are busy corrupting their governments. Whether the nomenklatura are called businessmen or apparatchiks, the same corporatism reigns, undermining liberty, and thus eventually justice.
While you’ve been busy chasing creationists, the institutions have marched through your erstwhile Left. Not much truly Left left, far as I can tell.
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November 10, 2009, 11:47 pmGringo says:
His educational ideas go over pretty well with Hugo Chavez and his crew. Here is Bill Ayers speaking in 2006 in Venezuela.
In Venezuela, Bill Ayers will be less likely to dissemble than in Chicago. Here in Venezuela he uses a bunch of Commie buzzwords: “motor-force of revolution,” “international struggle,” “overcome the failings of capitalist education,” “barrage of lies spread by the US State Department.” Etc. He is still a Commie,or perhaps better said a commmie, and it permeates his educational ideas, as shown by the above buzzwords. Bill Ayers of the 21st century is of a piece of the Billy Ayers of 1974 who advocated dictatorship of the proletariat in Prairie Fire. (Zombietime has it online)
I’m sure you are aware that Bill and Bernadine raised Chesa from infancy while his Weatherpeople parents were in prison. Three days after Chesa got to Venezuela, on a college student tour of the continent, he was working inside Miraflores, the Presidential Palace. That’s how highly the Chavistas consider Chesa’s revolutionary heritage. (From Chesa’s book Gringo.)
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November 11, 2009, 12:53 am