-Caveat Lector- March 4, 1999 'Dispassion' About Stalinism Distorts Its Horrors By Robert Conquest, a fellow at the Hoover Institution. His "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" will be published by W.W. Norton later this year. He served as a consultant for "The Stolen Years." The documentary "Stolen Years," airing this week on PBS, is a welcome reminder of the frightful experience of the Russians and other Soviet peoples under communism. But who needs reminding? We can hardly blame those of the public who think of Stalin's horrors as far away and long ago. In "Stolen Years" we see and hear survivors of the Gulag, men and women still among us in the late 1990s, direct links to a system described in late Soviet times in the official government organ as marked by "unbearable toil, by cold and starvation, by unheard-of degradation and humiliation, by a life which could not have been endured by any other mammal." "Survivors" is the key word. One of them tells of how he was among the 22 out of 517 inmates in his camp who lasted through the winter of 1938-39. The way they tell of their often dreadful experiences is warmly personal, relaxed and outgoing. "The people who suffered have very quiet voices," says one woman; another explains that all she wants to do is leave some record. And these interviews are effectively set between visual evocations--the remarkable Gulag paintings of Nikolai Getman, and helicopter and other shots of the crumbling ruins of Arctic labor camps. I am on record as saying that I feel the Holocaust to be worse--though not all that much worse--than the crimes of Stalinism. But the key word is feel. One cannot truly know about such phenomena unless that knowledge is accompanied by feeling. The minimum requirement for a civilized understanding of Hitlerism and Stalinism is to see them, and condemn them, as horrors. We may see "Stolen Years" as a record, like the more numerous films on the Holocaust, of a lethal and loathsome political system that wrecked so many lives and threatened all of us--and that we need to understand to face today's world. Holocaust denial in the crude sense is a thoroughly discredited affair of crackpot racists. But the Holocaust is subject to various other distortions. One academic tendency of the deconstructionist type argues that nothing can really be known about the past. Some college students were quoted a few years ago on the Holocaust as perhaps not having occurred, but "having 'purchase' " as a "reasonable conceptual hallucination." Such insights do not emerge spontaneously in young minds. They have been infected by a stratum of academe. At the same time, even in Germany a school has arisen that takes the National Socialist atrocities as resulting from the operation of a bureaucratic machine, rather than the decisions of a world-class criminal and his accomplices. Needless to say, similar distortions have been applied to Stalinism. Again, these are mainly the product of academe, and seldom met with in journals, right, left or center, that present themselves to what one might call the real world. The Gulag itself was only part of the Stalinist scheme of things, which also included mass executions, mass torture and a huge apparatus of lies enforced on the Soviet citizen and peddled to the woozy Westerner. Knowledge of the truth has in fact been available for over half a century, in a series of books by victims of the Gulag who had reached the West, and in analyses by Western scholars. But Soviet authorities denied the Gulag's nature, even its existence, and many Western intellectuals accepted their disavowals. When asked if he would criticize the Soviet Union if the Gulag did exist, a Communist defendant in a Paris libel suit retorted that this was like asking if he would condemn his mother if she were a murderess. "But my mother is my mother and will not be a murderess!" The whole nature of the Gulag was known, too, to Western governments, even if seldom used in their polemics with Moscow (though in 1950 the British delegation to the United Nations did produce a copy of the secret Forced Labor Code, with great effect). In the 1970s I was researching the subject and found in the Westminister Library in London its most modern maps of Northeast Siberia showing the camp settlements and labeled "Secret: U.S. Air Force." At that time a Washington intragovernment proposal to publish a full layout of the camps was blocked by the State Department in the interests of détente. Yes, our citizenry did need, and does need, to be reminded of the true record of the insane ideologies our century has produced. But it is not only that such things are forgotten; they are often still actively distorted by those who stand between the facts and the public--certain academics, certain film producers, who usually claim they are "dispassionate" and "nonjudgmental." That great historian Edward Gibbon could praise a "bigoted" analyst as nevertheless full of "diligence, veracity and scrupulous minuteness." That fine historian G.M. Trevelyan saw that "dispassionateness" was overvalued as against "the really indispensable qualities of accuracy and good faith." Neutrality toward the Soviet regime--like neutrality toward the Nazis--is a committed position. Yet one of our best scholars in the field, Vladimir Brovkin, was damagingly attacked a few months ago in confidential assessments by his academic colleagues not for any intellectual deficiency, but merely for being too "anticommunist." It can be argued that the absurdities of academe have little direct effect on the mind of the ordinary intelligent citizen, any more than the sub-Marxist absurdities of the English departments affect his reading of literature. But now we are told, and not only by odd academics, that to describe the Soviet record is a sign of a Cold War mentality and, again on the basis of being terrifically objective, that there was not much to choose between the West and the Communists in that confrontation. Thus we get the proposition that the West was as bad as, or as much to blame as, the Communists, or nearly so. Nor, of course, are we allowed to be glad that we prevailed--that would be "triumphalism." Triumphalism was specifically forbidden in Ted Turner's instructions to the producers of the CNN series "Cold War." This production has been defended on the grounds that much of it is effective and true. But this is rather like a restaurant saying, "The first three courses were all right, so you can't object to our serving skunk for dessert." Many others have noted that series' absurd presentation of "moral equivalency" between East and West, with the two Joes, Stalin and McCarthy, balancing out. Its inane Castrophilia has also not gone unremarked. I will only say that a film like "Stolen Years" will take the nasty taste out of your mouth. from Wall St Journal ********************************************************************* DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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