Of the twin evils of the 20th century — Communism and Nazism — there are different memories. As French scholar Alain Besançon explains in A Century of Horrors, although Nazism was defeated and disappeared more than a half century ago, we remember it with appropriate abhorrence: “Our horrified reflection on Nazism seems to even gain in breadth and depth each year.” On the other hand, Communism, “although still fresh and just recently fallen, benefits from an amnesia and an amnesty that receive the almost unanimous consent, not only of its supporters — because they still exist — but of its most determined enemies, and even its victims.”
Both emerged from different histories and they were enemies, but they shared similarities. First, and often overlooked, both were variations of socialism: German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Each pretended to create a perfect society by eliminating threats — for Nazism, supremacy of the German Aryans by elimination of the Jews, and for Communism, supremacy of socialism by elimination of non-socialists. Most in common, Besançon states, “is that they arrogated themselves the right — and even the duty — to kill, and they both did so with similar methods, on a scale unknown in history.”
Under Nazism, it is estimated 25 million people were killed; under the Communists, 100 million. Either statistic is horrific, but regardless of the scale, Besançon concludes that the Holocaust, or Shoah, must be considered unique and distinct from the horrors of the Soviet gulag and other Communist killing fields. But despite their differences, he sees Nazism and Communism as twin ideological evils. Besançon, who has examined ideological evil in earlier works, extends his analysis in A Century of Horrors, first published in France and here now in translation by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, recording his reflections on the physical, moral and political destruction wrought by the twin evils.
Besançon’s reflective condemnations of Communism and Nazism, like those of some of his fellow French intellectuals who once flirted with Communism, are especially credible in light of his past. As he lamented earlier, “At some point, one realizes that we played a part in the worst the century produced, in a vast enterprise of evil.” Commenting now on The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997, American edition 1999) (See “MetroBooks” May 2000), Besançon commends that book for its account of the deaths caused by Communism and for its opening of their collective coffin. But he regrets that the resulting horror “was short-lived” and that, under a cloud of amnesia, “the coffin is already closing again.” Besançon reopens the coffin, not for recounting the dead, but to peer into it with penetrating philosophical and theological insights.
As he explains, the different memories of Nazism and Communism are forced often “into the endless struggle between the ‘right’ and ‘left.’” He explains, however, that Communism redefined the political spectrum; first falsely attaching Nazism to capitalism, and later to fascism, to fit its propaganda needs, Communism always placed socialist Nazism on the far right, opposite socialist Communism on the far left. This Communist classification has become fixed in Western thought, with Communism on the left, liberal democracies and their left and right parties in the middle, and Nazism and other forms of fascism on the right. Besançon concludes that the correct classification, one proposed by Hannah Arendt earlier, groups the two totalitarian regimes of Communism and Nazism at one end, places liberal regimes in the middle, and groups authoritarian regimes at the other extreme.
Duke, UNC Included In Account By Paul Hollander
However the abstract spectrum is defined, Paul Hollander lived as a young man under actual Nazism and Communism. Like other Jewish Hungarians spared the Holocaust by the Soviet liberation of his native country from the Nazis, Hollander was briefly pro-Soviet and pro-Communist. He soon had second thoughts. Later he escaped to America, where he became a scholarly critic of Communism. Especially interested in the search by intellectuals for utopia through Communism, Hollander has studied and documented their political pilgrimages to the Soviet Union and other Communist countries — such as Cuba — their anti-Americanism, and, after the collapse of Soviet Communism limited their destinations, their philosophical pilgrimage into postmodernism as a new vision of Marxism and anti-Americanism. (See “MetroBooks” May 2002). In The End of Commitment, Hollander expands his scholarship to examine and explain disillusionment by some intellectuals with Communism. Of course, many intellectuals had second thoughts years ago, as expressed by several in The God That Failed (1950). Continuing the theme of disillusionment, Hollander focuses now on recently disillusioned individuals who span the globe from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to the Third World and, of course, to the West — including America.
One American example, Sidney Rittenberg, became a Communist in the 1940s while a student at UNC-Chapel Hill. (There were secret Communist cells in Chapel Hill then, as acknowledged elsewhere by another UNC student in the ’40s, Junius Scales, who became an underground Communist Party organizer recruiting others for a violent revolution; his criminal conviction based on those activities and their connection to his membership in the Communist Party was upheld by the Supreme Court.) Rittenberg learned Chinese and settled in China where, despite intermittent imprisonment as an alleged spy, he served the Communist regime for years. Although he was formerly a “true believer,” Rittenberg came to see that his “life’s vision was flawed” and left China and Communism. Later, he became a visiting professor at UNC-CH and then a consultant on trade between the United States and China.
Another American example is historian Eugene Genovese. Not only did this former supporter of Marxism and Communism abandon both, but he also questioned American Marxists about their responsibility for the horrors of Communism. The question itself angered the Left, further incensed by Genovese’s assessment that: “The horrors did not arise from perversion of radical ideology but from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder. … Our whole project of ‘human liberation’ has rested on a series of gigantic illusions. The catastrophic consequences … cannot be dismissed as aberrations.”
Among other disillusioned Americans are David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh, both “red diaper babies” of Communist parents. Both became Marxist leaders of the 1960s New Left. Horowitz broke with his cohorts after learning of its crimes. He is now a conservative critic of the Left’s influence on American politics, culture and education. Radosh’s research as a historian of Communist espionage in America gave him second thoughts, and subsequent events, including publication of Horowitz’s autobiography, Radical Son (1997), caused Radosh to break from Communism and become a conservative critic, as he explained in Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001). (See “MetroBooks” July/August 2001.)
Of the “leftover Left,” Radosh says that his former friends still “dream secretly of revolution” and that, quoting Arthur Koestler from The God That Failed, they are still “clinging to the last shred of the torn illusion.” Among those still clinging, Hollander chronicles prominent examples, such as British historian Eric Hobsbawm and American linguist Noam Chomsky. Younger devotees include Duke University literature professor Michael Hardt, co-author with Communist and convicted terrorist Antonio Negri of Empire (2000), an attack on capitalism praised by academic leftists — including Hardt’s Duke colleague Fredric Jameson — for its postmodernist theorizing. Hollander also profiles former 1960s Weather Underground terrorist-bomber and one-time fugitive Bill Ayers, now sheltered in academia with his wife and fellow Weather Underground terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, where both remain unrepentant. (See “MetroBooks” December 2001/January 2002, and “My Usual Charming Self,” February 2006, “You Don’t Need A Weatherman.”)
Despite the focus on individuals, Hollander includes some generalizations. He expands upon applications of the Left’s slogan that “the personal is political.” He explains that both religious and secular “true believers” sometimes subordinate their personal morality to larger causes. In the case of the Communist cause, he notes the religious-like attitudes and emotions that motivated many Communists.
In the “century of horrors” that followed Sigmund Freud’s proclamation that God is “an illusion” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s that “God is dead,” Communism became for many intellectuals a new god. Ironically, it became exposed as an “illusion” itself and as “the god that failed.” To expose the many ghosts it left behind, Besançon reopens the horrific coffin from which they escaped, and he and Hollander explore their haunting memories.
BRIEFLY NOTED —
MORE ABOUT THE GULAG, THE KILLING FIELDS AND A NEW HISTORY OF COMMUNISM
Paul Hollander continued his study of Communism as editor of From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (2006). Published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, this collection of over 40 personal memoirs of former political prisoners of Communist states shows that, in Hollander’s characterization, Communism was “violence with a higher purpose” — the transformation of human nature to create Communist utopia.
Comrades: A World History of Communism (2007), by Oxford University historian Robert Service and just released by Harvard University Press, promises to be an important contribution to our understanding of Communism. Service recently summarized his conclusions and refuted a critical review of Comrades that he said is “typical of … a nostalgia for communism.” Among Service’s points, he states that “it was no coincidence that durable communist states maintained a heavy load of repression. … The point is that repression was not some aberrant phenomenon under communist rule around the world. It was ideologically condoned in advance. … The ghosts of the victims of all those bloody purges cry out for us to reject the printed apologias for the communist past.” (See www.newstatesman.com.)