| ashu |
Posted
on 26-Jul-01 08:02 AM
During the heyday of soc.culture.nepal (SCN), surely the most intellectually stimulating and difficult debates I
ever had had was with Ramesh Sharma, a thirty-something Nepali man from Cleveland, Ohio. Ramesh was attacking liberalism (as
it is understood from the works of John Rawls et al) from a libertarian perspective, and I was defending Rawlsian
liberalism.
Anyway, for some months now, Ramesh has been visiting Kathmandu, and he remains the ONE and ONLY Nepali libertarian that I know of.
Enjoy this book review (slightly dated, esp. in the first paragraph).
oohi
ashu
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Book: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression
Authors: Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrezej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, et al.
(Translated by: Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer)
Publisher: Harvard University Press, Hardcover
Price: US $37.50
Pages: 856
(Illustrated)
A review by Ramesh Sharma
“Fascist” is one of the numerous insults regularly hurled at the current Prime Minister by those who proudly call themselves Communists. But my concern here is not with whether the Communists are right—I’ll let the intelligent reader decide whether Mr. Koirala deserves that label. My only purpose in bringing up the issue is to show that Communists obviously continue to believe that they are infinitely morally superior to Fascists. If they thought otherwise, they surely wouldn’t use the label “Fascist” as the ultimate slur and “Communist” as the ultimate accolade, would they?
Fascism is no doubt horrible. Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis is justly regarded as a monstrous crime. And it’s estimated that all together 25 million people died because of what the Nazis did. As a consequence, Fascism is so thoroughly despised, and justifiably so, everywhere that only fringe elements in civilized societies find it appealing. But what of the Communists, the self-described paragons of virtue?
Well, if the figure presented in “The Black Book of Communism” is to be believed—and there is every reason to believe, based on how meticulously the numbers have been added up, that the figure represents a credible estimate--it turns out that they have managed to kill—directly or indirectly--around 100 million (yes, one hundred million) people. Even if the death toll is credible, Communist apologists quick to argue, the crimes committed by the Communist regimes were qualitatively different (read “for just cause”) from those committed by the Nazis, weren’t they? When reminded of Stalin, most Communists acknowledge that he was no saint, but put forward the stale argument that Lenin was a great guy. How good or bad was Lenin? And how about Mao, the role model of Nepal’s fanatical Maoists?
There is no better book, especially in one volume, that does a better job of wrestling with these and related questions than ‘The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” by a group of mainly French scholars.
When first published in France in 1997, the book created a great deal of controversy for suggesting that Nazi crimes and communist crimes were morally equivalent. It’s been available in English translation for the last couple of years, with Martin Malia’s excellent foreword. Edited by Stephane Courtois, an ex-communist and director of research at a Paris-based think tank, and other scholars, mostly ex-communists, it’s more a collection of academic essays than a book intended for the general reader.
But this surprisingly readable book is a comprehensive--all Communist regimes are discussed--catalog of decades of horrors—too numerous to name, from the Red Terror under Lenin, to the Great Terror under Stalin, to the government-caused famines in the Soviet Union and China, to the gulag and laogai, to the disastrous Great Leap Forward, to the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia--that a large section of humanity was subjected to in the name of building utopia. There is a judicious blend of previously available materials and materials from newly opened archives in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The quality of essays in the book is uniformly high, although Nicolas Werth’s outstanding opening essay on the Soviet Union that anchors the book is the best. Jean-Louis Margolin’s essays on China and Cambodia are also superb.
The central thesis of the book is that wherever they usurped power, Communist regimes relied on mass crime as statecraft to consolidate totalitarianism. Martin Malia notes in his foreword that the Communist regimes not just committed crimes but “were criminal enterprises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence, and without regard to human life.” This Khmer Rouge slogan exemplifies the nature of those regimes: “One can always make a mistake and arrest the wrong person, but one should never let the wrong person go.”
Another thesis of the book, highlighted by Courtois, is that the nature and magnitude of the Communist crimes make it no less evil than Nazism. Courtois reminds those who argue that most of the crimes committed by the Communists were carried out in accordance with their own laws that the same was also true of Nazism. “The crimes…are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes,” he argues, “but by the unwritten code of the natural laws of humanity.” Courtois is not alone in making the comparison.
Assessing Stalin, under whom Communism was institutionalized, historian Norman Davies writes elsewhere, “the only person whose evil can be compared to his [Stalin’s] was another man with a different moustache [Hitler], who he never met, and who was not so successful.”
And what to make of Lenin? The book successfully puts to rest the myth of “good” Lenin. In exposing the vicious nature of Lenin’s rule, Werth presents powerful evidence, including Lenin’s official directives and field reports prepared by party and secret police functionaries, to make his case beyond doubt that there was no “good” Lenin who was, as the myth has it, betrayed by “bad” Stalin. It was Lenin, he argues, whose systematic practice of terror made savageries of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest possible.
Many people have directly or indirectly rejected the notion that Communism and Nazism are on the same moral plane. They argue, as Alan Ryan has done in reviewing the book for the New York Times, that Nazism, unlike Communism, was intrinsically evil because it was exterminationist in principle. But they conceded, as Ryan does that “if wild utopian disregard for human life is the charge, there is no contest between the practices of Nazism and Communism.” In any case, maybe in years to come, when many more people than today become aware of the true nature of Communism—intrinsically evil or not, people calling themselves Communists will be as rare as people calling themselves Neo-Fascists or Neo-Nazis today.
The book should serve as a warning to Nepalis about the true nature of Communism, which is based on the utopian notion of perfectibility of man and the long-discredited notion of economic determinism. Giving up, out of disillusionment resulting from corruption in places high and low, on the present system, however imperfect, and cheering for the Maoists, as even many otherwise smart people do, will be ignoring history so well documented in the book.
(Ramesh Sharma is a libertarian and lives in Kathmandu.)
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