The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (3)

OK, like I said, there's a lot of stuff going on in Colombia and I want to blog about that. So, for the time being, I'm going to wrap up this thread.

The more I think about it, the more I stand by what I wrote before: the verdict between Fascism and Communism is not something you can just base on facts. Thus, I will take here the luxury of being ideological. But I won't do the usual thing of equating Communism with the Left and Fascism with the Right. At least not without qualifications. Although that framework has some truth to it, for some purposes it is too simple.

There is a standard joke among history professors that, no matter which country you want to cover, you can safely start some unit in 1945. That's pretty much the year the world hit the reset button. The 30 years before that are probably the worst historical cataclysm ever (or at least one of the two or three worst ever). Fascism and Communism were both born out of that period of iron and fire and were responses to the crises of the time. 

During the late 19th Century, the socialist workers' movement came of age but also entered its stagnant era: by the early 1900s it is becoming clear in country after country that the workers will not take over the means of production. The employers have made abundantly clear that they are willing to make concessions in terms of redistribution (taxes) as long as they don't loose the control over the "commanding heights" of the economy. Such is the pact on which social democracy is based. To be sure, it will be several years before social democratic parties and governments come of age. But I surmise that by 1910 the capitalists of Western Europe and the US are sleeping soundly. 

World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution put an end to this. The first one destroyed the old order, the second one showed that another order could be brought about. Fascism and Communism are, to a large extent, the reaction to such historical earthquake.

Although we now classify Fascism as a "right wing" reaction, let's not forget that it was, in its own terms, quite revolutionary. This is one of the strong points of Zizek: he acknowledges that, to come to terms with Fascism, we must understand that it was, at least in theory, a potential overhaul of the liberal-capitalist order that had brought about the disaster of WWI. At the end of the day, and here, again, Zizek is right, Fascist regimes became, so to speak, bastardized into defenders of the establishment. But this is not the way it was supposed to happen. 

Am I saying that, just as Stalinism "betrayed" Communism, so did Hitler's cozying up of the German industrialists "betrayed" Fascism? Well, yes and no and it doesn't matter. Yes because, like it or not, Fascism was anti-establishment. The mass movements that signed on to it were sick of the liberal plutocracies they wanted to overthrow. No because, since Fascism was viscerally anti-Communist, it was clear to anybody that, whatever the outcome of its victory, at the end of the day the business interests would be better off than under the wholesale expropriations of the Communists. (Although, ironically, two years after Mussolini comes to power, the Soviet Union is looking for some accommodation of private property under the NEP.) And, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because my ultimate point is a different one.

For my purposes, what matters is that I cannot imagine a "Fascism with human face" while the search for a "socialism with human face" is a task worth pursuing. Sure, it is a thankless task and an elusive goal. But I, for one, cannot tolerate the idea of a world in which Fascism would have carried the day in WWII and where we would now be searching for a kinder, gentler version of it. 

Once you strip Fascism of its anti-Semitism (which, remember, infected mostly its German version),  you are left with a view of society ruled by order and loyalty. In short, at its best, a Fascist society is an oversized military barrack. There are worse things in life, for sure. You can live, grow old and die peacefully in such a place. But I hope (and am not alone in this hope) that it is possible a better view of society, one based on liberté, egalité, fraternité and that said society will be rightly called socialist.  

Back from Bogota

I spent a week in Bogota, enough to convince me that a lot of stuff is going on and that I shouldn't spend too much time blogging about historical hair-splitting. I'll try to finish that stuff and move on to blog about Colombia (in Spanish probably) ah, and my promised to dimes on Zizek.

The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (2)

Funny how I tried to argue that maybe the whole business of comparing Communism and Fascism is overrated and yet I get caught into it myself. It's hard to resist it. At the end of the day, it is one of those topics that seems historical and factually-based but is in fact quite ideological. In that sense, no amount of argument will settle the issue: if you are comfortable with the European right in its pre-liberal manifestations (see how polite that came out?), you will claim that Fascism was better than Communism and that, if anything, it was the understandable reaction to Communism. I get the impression that this same stance is sort of the "secret handshake" of the American hard-right. People in the far right of the American conservative movement excoriate Roosevelt not only for his "big government" domestic agenda but also for his foreign policy. As far as I now, whenever things get explicit, they veer of instead of saying what really is in their mind: that Roosevelt should have backed Hitler. (I remember that back when I still dignified Ann Coulter with my reading she once came the closest you can find, by saying that liberals loved Roosevelt because he "saved Mother Russia". But I kicked the Coulter habit long ago and won't bother commenting.) 

If you are part of the non-American left, you feel compelled to claim that Communism was better than Fascism. (For historical reasons, the current factions of the American left are, by and large, staunchly anti-Communist and do not have any "sin" to atone for.) Finally, if you want to belong to the large group of "right-thinking, serious people" be it as a neoliberal or a Third Way social democrat, then you will claim that both were "Twin Evils" and that you have nothing to do with them. (That's part of the reason I've spent time blogging about this "foundational myth.")

So what about this particular, non-American leftist? Like I said long ago, I feel that probably I shouldn't have a dog in this fight. "I am not and have never been" a Stalinist but seems like sooner or later somebody will call me one (that's standard operating procedure in Colombia these days) so I better have my answer ready.

Fascism was a type of regime that flourished in Europe between 1922 (Italy) and 1976 (Spain). Of those 54 years, the Nazi era covers only 12 (1933-1945). (I know very little of, and will say close to nothing about, Japan's militaristic regime of the 1930s.) The Nazi variant of Fascism, the most prominent one, for sure, never quite knew "normality" of any kind. It was always on a war footing, be it fighting its domestic enemies, or engaged in that foreign policy nuisance we call WWII. After 1945, European Fascism is reduced to the Iberian Peninsula and survives in one way or another until the mid-70s. But, of course, by that point it has been transformed in many ways. 

Communism, instead, lasted from 1917 to 1989 (although, of course, one percent of mankind belongs to the Chinese Communist Party). It ruled over many different countries in four continents. In some countries it reached the "normalization stage" and lasted for a while (Eastern Europe, for instance). 

So, comparing Fascism and Communism is a bit of apples and oranges. Are we supposed to compare Italy in 1936 with Angola in 1976? Or Yugoslavia in 1977 with Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942? That's why the conventional approach is to compare both regimes in their most horrific manifestations: Hitler and Stalin. At this point it should be clear that we are unlikely to learn anything clear from this exercise but let's get into it.

Probably we'll never know if Hitler killed more people than Stalin. For what it's worth, I have the feeling, without any claim to authority, that it's a bit of a toss up. The claim that Stalin killed 20 million people sounds to me a bit iffy. It depends on exactly how we define a "victim" (do famine casualties count?). At any rate, the numbers game can quickly become distasteful. Sooner or later somebody will try to find in it grounds for an exoneration. Just to get a feel, remember the times when it was uncertain the number of victims of the Holocaust. I don't see why it would be less criminal to gas 2 million people than 6 million.

So, if we want to keep going with this, we need to make our minds based on nebulous criteria. Here's one that I had been toying with for a while and envy Zizek for having the guts for putting it out: there is something especially monstrous about Hitler's annihilationist drive. Stalin's crimes were the result of some kind of cold iron logic (remember, the guy's nickname came from "steel") that is, in its own perverted way, similar to the logic of modern nation states. In any modern state, a person allied with foreign interests plotting for the government's overthrow, would be treated harshly. Likewise, to this day many governments implement economic plans that they know will impoverish dramatically many of their citizens. No government with a claim to be civilized will nowadays take these two lines of logic to the extreme that Stalin took them. No government will simply execute hundreds of thousands of dissidents accusing them of all sorts of fabricated charges. (I'm going by the "official" number of people directly killed in the Great Purge. Not that I entirely believe it, but a. it's backed by hard data and b. it is enough to make my point.) No modern government will engineer a famine and plunge all its working masses into barely-subsistence conditions just to meet some industrialization goal. (Remember, Stalin was murderous with the peasantry, but the urban proletariat was also reduced to abysmal levels of consumption.) 

But there is nothing in our modern sensibilities that connects with Hitler. We just cannot envision the line of reasoning that could lead to the decision to exterminate millions of people on purely ethnic and bogus "biological" grounds. If the Soviet kulaks could have "somehow" survive on their rations, Stalin would not have sent the troops just to shoot them. For Hitler, there was nothing his targeted victims could have done to be spared. 

If Stalin is the perverse extreme of some notions of the 20th and 21st Century State, Hitler is, at best, the perverse extreme of organicist notions of society from the 19th Century, notions that, although not entirely dead, should be dead. Hitler's view of racial minorities was one shaped by the idea of society as a body in need of therapy. This view immediately reduces large swathes of the population to the role of vermin or viruses. I cannot find anything worth rescuing in that type of thought. 

(It is not dead, like I said. Some other day I will rant about the damage inflicted by hate-monger Orianna Fallaci. In the meantime, I should just say that her pamphlets were straight from that same kind of mind frame and that it was shameful that she was given a pass in spite of that. While I'm at it, this type of "organicist" thinking often finds its way into public discourse in Latin America. Many coups have been justified as a kind of "social chemotherapy.")

I thought this would be my last post on this but no. There's a third coming up soon. Stay tuned! (Well, it's an inside joke where "inside" means between me and me. I know that nobody is reading this.)

The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (1)

What the heck, if I want to keep talking about socialism in the transition between the 20th and the 21st Century, sooner or later I will have to write a post with some "comparison" between Fascism and Communism. So I might as well do it now. Plus, I just read some of the relevant chapters from Zizek's book so this can save me some comment time later on.

Why this shouldn't matter. The combination of anniversaries (the 70th of WWII, the 60th of the Chinese Revolution, the 50th of the Cuban Revolution, the 20th of the Eastern European Revolutions, just to name a few) have generated a lot of reflections about the comparative evils of Fascism and Communism. It now seems as if every thinking person should have an opinion about this. Stepping back, this is a bit overwrought. 

1. The "Body Count" Effect: Supposedly, the reason we should all care about this is because Fascism and Communism were the greatest man-made disasters of our time. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are regarded as the greatest mass murderers of the 20th Century. 

There are problems, though. The first one comes from, of all places, Brussels. People in the know claim that the reign of terror imposed by Leopold II of Belgium on the Congo costed the lives of probably more than 12 million people. If you add to this the lives it destroyed and adjust by population, Leopold II quickly rises to rival the other mass killers of the 20th Century. This is one of humankind's most unacknowledged genocides. Yet it didn't have anything to do with Fascism or Communism. It was an exercise of plain, old imperialistic ideology. 

The Rwandan Interahamwe killed 800 thousand people in little over 100 days, with a lethal efficiency that would put Reinhardt Heydrich to shame, and without his materiel. Again, it was a genocide that does not fit in the bilateral framework of Fascism or Communism. (It also has a Belgian connection, though, if you think of colonial history. But I have very good Belgian friends and don't want to beat this horse.) 

In accounting for human tragedies, it is hard to see why we shouldn't adjust for population. Hitler, Stalin, and to a much larger extent, Mao, had control over huge chunks of the human race. Once you take this into account, the picture gets more and more complicated. 

At around the time that Stalin's "dekulakization" plan was in full swing, wreaking havoc over the Soviet peasantry, in little, forgotten El Salvador Maximiliano Hernandez crushed a peasant revolt by killing around 20 thousand people (or even 30 thousand), most of them indigenous. It may seem small change compared to Stalin's debauchery until you keep in mind that El Salvador is much smaller than the Soviet Union. Once you adjust, the murderous record of the modest mestizo general begins to match that of Stalin. 

There are other ways of complicating matters. For instance, why should we just focus on violent deaths? In fact, when it comes to Stalin and Mao, we don't. In both cases, the indictment includes their role in the famines that ravaged their countries. Sure enough, they deserve much of the blame for this. Stalin's procurement quotas were nothing short of criminal. Mao's case might be a bit trickier. In retrospect it is clear that his Great Leap Forward was a monumental economic folly but, at least by some authoritative accounts, he was egged on by a massive failure of information resulting from the desire of lower-ranking officials to dress up their economic reports. Obviously, that they felt they had to do this was, to a large extent, result of the atmosphere that Mao had created. So, yes, guilty as charged. 

But, then, in this stage of human history, every famine is to some extent man-made. They are, invariably, the result, whether immediate or cumulative, of policies. So, shouldn't we count among the scourges of the 20th Century all the other famines? If we do so, wouldn't we have to bring the British Raj some notches up the list of recent disasters? 

We can even up the ante a bit more. Why stopping at famines? Why only deaths? When I run down the list of Stalin's victims, I don't think just of the lives he finished, but also of those he destroyed (e.g. through decades-long imprisonment in the Gulag). Throughout the 20th Century millions of lives in the Third World have been destroyed by the daily grind of poverty. Even to this day, in the era of greatest technological achievements ever, millions of children who have never heard of Communism or Fascism die or become stunted because of malnutrition or lack of access to elementary medical care and clean water. If we are making an inventory of man-made tragedies in our time, shouldn't this be at least as high as the Holocaust or the Great Purge? 

2. Guilt by association. These days hardly a week go by when I do not open a Colombian newspaper to find a denunciation of some elements of the left as Stalinists. (These days, usually the major source of the accusation comes from the left itself.) This is baffling. Stalin died in 1953 and was denounced in 1956. It's been more than 50 years since it is even "officially sanctioned" in the left to speak of his crimes. Except for Russia (for clear, historical reasons) I cannot think of any single place where politicians on the left are trying to rehabilitate Stalin's memory. I cannot imagine any scenario under which, in any country, Stalin's policies will be repeated. Couldn't we just bury the guy? 

Apparently not. Seems that, as I already said in a previous post, these days if you are a socialist, you ordered the collectivization of land, you set up the tribunals in Moscow and you signed the orders for Katyn. 

3. The "Black Book." Part of the explanation for this exercise in guilt by association can be found in the belief of many that there is something inherently murderous about Communism and, by extension, any type of Socialism. This type of thinking probably reached its apex with the publication of "The Black Book of Communism" an attempted inventory of all the crimes of Communist regimes. I will have more to say about this but let's start with a few observations. 

First, as I already mentioned, Communist regimes differed across time and space. The genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia is something with virtually no parallel in the history of Communism. (Can we mention that it was stopped by the invasion of the pro-Soviet Vietnamese and that the Khmer Rouge managed to get their chestnuts out of the fire thanks to the diplomatic aid of the United States and China? Can we mention that the Khmer Rouge was, to a large extent, a virulently racist regime and that much of its genocide was driven by anti-Vietnamese hatred?) Some Communist leaders in some Communist countries enjoyed certain degree of popularity and legitimacy, allowing the regime to relax and give some breathing space to civil society: Gomulka in Poland, Tito in Yugoslavia are examples that come to mind and, judging by the relative tolerance of dissident opinions, Kadar in Hungary in the 70s. 

Second, it is often said that, in every country Communism was the most murderous period in its history. This is dubious (more on that some other time). But even if true, it is also true that in many countries that were never Communist, their most murderous periods were those of anti-Communist dictatorships. True, Pinochet's body count (around 10 thousand) is small change compared to Stalin. But it is the most violent period in Chile's history, much, much more than anything Allende's regime might have thought about committing. Same for Argentina's military (20 thousand killed or disappeared). Suharto cemented his regime on the massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party, killing around 600 thousand people. (Proportionally, it makes Stalin's Yezhovshina pale by comparison.) If I had been a grown up in 1974, I would have much rather carry a book of Milton Friedman in Budapest than one of Marx in Santiago.  

One of the advantages of a blog is that I can stop whenever I damn please. It's late, I'll continue tomorrow.

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (3)

Chronos: Yes, our modern mythology presses Greek gods into service. Chronos is part of our current understanding of the 20th Century. As you may already know, what makes Chronos useful is that he devoured his own children and, we now constantly repeat, that's exactly what revolutions do. (Heck, I myself have used the metaphor. You can find it here if you look hard enough.)

Arguably, the Bolshevik Revolution, as we all know,  acted like Chronos and devoured many of its children. It is a useful figure of speech. But it is misleading. It gets both Chronos and the Revolution wrong.

For the Ancient Greeks, Chronos was the "god of time" (as in chronometer). It was time the one that devoured its creations, that is, everything was subject to it. The myth of Chronos was the Ancient Greek version of the later Latin dictum of "sic transit gloriae mundi." Of course, when we see visual representations of it (as Goya's famous painting) we think of the devouring act as happening all at once.

But, Greek mythology aside, this also gets important aspects of the Revolution wrong. Or, to be more precise, it gets them right but organizes them in a peculiar way. One fact that we now tend to forget very easily is how determined the Western powers were in the late 10s and early 20s in rolling back the Russian Revolution. By 1920 there are already British, French and even American expeditionary forces there. From the start, they allied with the White Russians in the Civil War that ensued. This set off a well-known pattern: a revolutionary regime, facing external aggression, becomes radicalized, suspicious of internal dissent, repressive and, in due course, murderous. 

There are plenty of examples of this. In the build-up to the Terror during the French Revolution the Jacobines played on the all too real fears of foreign intervention. Louis XVI was decapitated not for being king, the revolution had already accepted his role, but for trying to escape and form an alliance with the Austrians and the Prussians. The Iranian revolution began with a large coalition but the islamicist among them became bolder and ended up eliminating all other elements (including, you guessed it, the Communists) as Saddam Hussein (with American backing) began to bomb Iran viciously (mmmm, was Saddam a neocon?). Even the American Revolution could have turned into a dictatorship during the crisis of the Alien and Sedition Act, itself the reaction of the Federalists to what they perceived (with reason) as the attempts of the French and the British to kill the Revolution in its cradle. The (justified) fear of American intervention played a crucial role in radicalizing the Cuban Revolution. You get the picture. In fact, one revolution that did not have to contend with attempts at suppressing it from outside and that "normalized" over time was the Mexican Revolution.

So, yes, it is easy to conclude that revolutions always turn on themselves in a self-destructive rampage and, of course, the bloodletting of Stalin's Great Purge fits this to a t. But we should not forget that the strain of siege mentality that Stalin represented, his vision of events, always finding "imperialist conspirators" under any bed, were reactions that received an air of reasonableness because of the real attempts from the West at strangling the Bolshevik snake in its nest.

In every polity you will always find sectors with the most radical and deranged views only that, normally, they remain marginalized. But the circumstances in the then-nascent Soviet Union were not normal, quite the opposite, those circumstances led to a situation where Stalin was, so to speak, vindicated by the facts. 

What made Stalin a world-historical criminal, as opposed to just another cadre in the Bolshevik party, is precisely that, on key issues, his threat assessment was correct. He was obsessed with a German attack and considered the forced industrialization of the Great Leap Forward as a necessity to stop it, and, sure enough, the German attack came.

Between this and my previous post I want to bring out one fact: liberal democracy did not simply emerge pure and clean from the cesspool of the 20th Century. It was part of that cesspool. Western politicians were involved in the making of the "twin evils." Many of them egged on Hitler because they saw him as the world's greatest anti-Communist. Many of them had their fingers in the Russian pie from the very beginning.

In fact, one politician that managed to avoid one of these, was Winston Churchill. A dyed-in-the-wool anti-Bolshevik if there ever was one, instrumental in the early attempts at suppressing the Russian Revolution, later decided that, in his words, if Hitler invaded hell he would ally with the devil. That's precisely what makes him a 20th Century great, the fact that, unlike many others of the time, he escaped the traditional mold and did not allow his Toryism to blind him to Hitler's danger.

(For what it's worth, I believe that the real giant is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but that's for some other post. I think that Americans don't commemorate him enough.) 

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (2)

The Apologist: This is another character important for the myth of modern liberal democracy. He is the one that, although not himself a participant in the crimes of Communism, spent the Cold War making excuses for them, denouncing only the penultimate atrocity when it was already safe to do so, finding "moral equivalents" and so on. Coward, weak-kneed, you name it, a despicable character. Compare him to the morally pure liberals of our time that never hesitate to defend human life and that have no association whatsoever with any of the great criminal regimes of the 20th Century. 

To repeat, like any mythological character, this one is based on true experiences. But the key of the myth is not the fiction but the reorganization of facts. This myths reconstructs as a "moral space" what was in fact the outcome of brutal events that left little choice to all those involved. 

To appreciate this, imagine that the Soviet Army had lost in Stalingrad in 1943. Imagine that Hitler prevails on the Eastern Front and, as a result, forces peace terms upon the Western democracies. France remains a satellite under Petain, the UK and the US barely save their skin, protected by their respective bodies of water. Communism is eradicated from the face of the Earth and the vast expanses of Russian land are "Germanized." All this exercise has been pretty well imagined by many. But keep going. Of course, at some point the "years of iron and fire" would be over. At some point, Hitler's murderous rampage would have stopped, probably Hitler himself would have died of natural causes somewhere in the late 50s or early 60s. The time would have come for "normalization" under, say, Chancellor Albert Speer who would be regarded in the English-speaking media as a "moderate" and a "pragmatic." He would tone down the anti-Semitic rhetoric, saying that it belonged to a past that did not need to return. He would probably introduce more market mechanisms in the German economy, abandoning many of the interventionist policies that dated back to the war years. The time would have come to bury the hatchet and look for reconciliation with the US and the UK. 

This way, a new creature would have been born: the "liberal apologist," the intellectual that would say that, for all its criminal past, the civilized peoples of the world should acknowledge that Germany had stopped the totalitarian danger of Communism. He would explain how the Holocaust was an aberration of Nazism, that was finally overcome by the new generation. He would explain how the plight of the Eastern provinces of the German empire, groaning under enslavement, would over time come to an end with the introduction of market mechanisms and lower procurement quotas. 

In other words, the events of World War II, specifically the destruction of Nazism as the most formidable anti-Communist force, created the "moral space" where modern liberalism can now afford its luxurious and unblemished deontological commitments to human rights. Just like in my previous post, this is something to celebrate. But we must understand how we came to where we are.

The "Twin Evils" as Modern Foundational Myth (1)

No historically grounded discussion of modern liberalism is complete without coming to terms with Fascism and Communism. They are the "twin evils" defeated by liberalism, in its battle and ultimate victory against them, liberalism acquired its identity and, more importantly, its inevitability. Let's think critically about this; there is a lot of myth-making involved here. A good way to illustrate it is by looking at the characters involved in this myth. Like any other myth, this one is based on reality. "Unmasking" the myth and its characters is not a job of showing that they are false, it's a matter of showing how that reality came to be seen the way it is. I won't go in any particular order.

The Innocent Victim. Hitler and Stalin were mass murderers. There is no question about that. They killed millions and destroyed the lives of many, many more. On purely statistical grounds, an inordinate amount of victims were ordinary human beings guilty of nothing else but standing on the way of their project, be it the racially pure lebensraum or the "de-kulakized" Soviet fatherland. But our collective reconstruction of these crimes tends to gloss over the guilty victims, those that were sent to prison, torture and death on entirely accurate charges. (Count von Stauffenberg, reenacted by Tom Cruise, seems to be the exception.)

When the Moscow trials come up, people immediately resort to the irrational, to Stalin's putative paranoia. It's a bit like the Greek myth of the "battle against the giants." The foundation of a new, civilized order must be the defeat of a purely irrational one that existed before. Surely, we are told, Stalin must have been crazy (and with him, all of Communism).

I don't understand this rush to exculpate the victims. I prefer to believe that some of them were actually guilty. Probably not of the exact charges brought against them, but that they were either on their way to plot against Stalin or that the dynamic of events was leading them in the direction of plotting against him. In my book, that would make them true heroes. So, why is it that the usual perception of Stalin's purges is that it was a pure act of paranoia? Don't we all like a good hero story? Isn't that one of the key points of any legend?

I venture that there is a reason for this: the most visible victims of Stalin's purges were true-blooded, convinced Communists. By the 1930s, when Stalin rains terror and destruction on the Soviet Union, any true "liberal democrat" of the type that our current consensus would want to celebrate is already either dead or in exile. The ones that were left, the ones killed by Stalin were hard line Bolsheviks that, if given the chance, would have gone on to install their version of socialism in the Soviet Union. Moreover, had they lived in a Western democracy, they would have been persecuted and probably killed. In fact, Stalin killed many dissenting members of Communist parties from other countries and yet, to my knowledge, not one of those governments ever raised a squeak of protest. As far as they were concerned, they were all to happy of being rid of those undesirables, international conventions be damned. Overall, probably the greatest killer of Communists in the 20th century was none other than Joseph Dzugashvilli Stalin. 

So, the innocence of the victims is fundamental. Otherwise we would have to acknowledge that Stalin was not foreordained by the Bolshevik revolution. That some truly horrible stuff had to happen before he became the only viable leader and that, along the way, he crushed all other alternatives. 

Something similar happens with Hitler. Not all his victims were innocent. Some were guilty as charged and were a true menace to the Nazi state. Let's salute them! Yes, there are few worst cases of suicidal idiocy as that of the German Communist Party up to 1934. (Also courtesy of Uncle Joe and his marching orders against the "social fascism" of Weimar.) But when they were sent to the concentration camps, the German Communists were, belatedly, becoming an opposition to Hitler. Same goes for the vast legions of Socialists of German politics at the time. (Actually many of them had read Hitler correctly before the Communists did.) But somehow we now prefer to remember Count von Stauffenberg, a conservative aristocrat, as the "true" opposition to Hitler. Else than that, all the other victims were, we prefer to believe, "innocent." 

(A side note: these days popular imagination sees Hitler as a killer of Jews, reducing his crimes to the Holocaust. A few months ago, I still remember my shock, I had to explain a German student, that Hitler killed much more than Jews. As it happens, this myth of the "innocent victim" is wrong and hurtful for many Jews. It reduces the Jews to passive victims, forgetting that many of them were fighting Hitler from the very beginning, sometimes politically, sometimes even with militias during the war.)

There is another sense in which the "innocent victim" is instrumental to our current understanding of liberalism. It underlines the fact that every regime rests upon the raison d'etat according to which it is entitled to dispose of the "guilty victims." In other words, even liberal democracies may, on some occasions, resort to killing subversives and that is fine. 

Don't get me wrong. There is something inherently monstrous in a regime that targets innocent civilians and, without a doubt, this is one dimension in which liberal democracies are better than the alternatives. Winston Churchill said that in a democracy, a knock in the door at dawn is the milkman. But this emphasis on "innocent victims" helps to mask the fact that in no regime this can be taken for granted; this is a hard won battle in many countries. 

More on November 9 (somehow I can't stop)

Well, this blog is NOT going to be "all Communism all the time," promise. There are lots of other things I want to write about. But not only we've been in the famous 20th anniversary, I just picked up Zizek's latest book "In Defense of Lost Causes." So I'm in the mood. Plus, after procrastinating so much with this blog, I have some accumulated backlog of stuff to say. I'm not done with Zizek yet so I won't comment on the book right now. That'll come.

One good thing about Nov. 9 is that it relates in many ways to the spirit of this blog. After the collapse of communism, it seemed that all of a sudden the only plausible view of society was a combination of free market capitalism and democracy. One of my goals is to ask questions about both. Criticisms of capitalism are a dime a dozen. But we are all democrats, including me. Sure, no right thinking person has now any stomach to propose a return of totalitarian dictatorship. But as social scientists we have the duty to be inquisitive about everything, even about ideas we like. So, one of the things I want to get started here is a reflection about democracy and its connections to markets. 

Before I put my ideas in order, I want to discuss facts as much as I know them, and some of their implications. That'll take a while so check the upcoming posts. 

Cafe Blogging

Before the internet, there was a decision to be made: either you spent your time in cafes, impressing your friends with your wit like a typical French film student, or you decided to find a tribune from which to address the masses. Now you can do both! I'm writing this in a cafe. Makes me wonder why I waited so long to start my blog. Just saying.

November 9 and "The End of History" (not what you think it is).

Yes, OK, we all know that Fukuyama pronounced 1989 as the end of history. I remember feeling angry at the essay (without directly reading it) but before I could muster much resentment, history decided to restart on its own without asking for Fukuyama's permission. So I won't say more about it (at least not until I actually read the essay).

Instead, now that I think back, November 9, 1989 meant the end of history in a different sense. It brought about, at least for many people, in many places, the end of historical consciousness. Up to 1989, socialism had a history. A checkered one, with triumphs, defeats, tragedies and, yes, monstrous crimes, but a history anyway. It had a tradition and a future, no matter how embattled. It was the work of historical agents. This meant, of course, that capitalism also had a history, a past, a present and a future, all of them resulting from concrete actions. For some people, especially those on the "winning side" of 1989 (and those who jumped ship), all this came to an end on November 9. From that point on, socialism in all its variants stopped being a historical entity and became, well, a ghost (to paraphrase the Manifesto). Let me count the ways.

First, let's look toward the past. The "Communist era" is now a shorthand reference that lumps together 40 years (or 70, depending of where you look) in the life of millions of people. In some sense, that generalization is accurate. Every communist country experimented with central planning, eliminated much of private property, was ruled by a single-party regime that limited severely the basic freedoms of its citizens and so on. But there were significant differences across time and space. Hungary went from the ultra-Stalinism of Rakosi to the "goulasch communism" of Janos Kadar in no small part thanks to the heroic 1956 Revolution. Czechoslovakia went in the other direction, from having some degree of openness (where "some" is the instrumental word) that culminated in the Prague Spring to become a political wasteland after its crushing. Poland had in Gomulka a rather popular leader and ended in Jaruselski's martial law. (OK, Albania was always...Albania). These 40 years were full of attempts in different directions, of roads not taken. Some times, in some places, Communist regimes enjoyed a degree of legitimacy and acceptable standards of living. Apparently these days you cannot say that, but it is a fact. It is not a glorious fact, many right-wing dictatorships pull that same trick off. But it is a fact. Instead, these days Communism is seen as an alien entity (alien as in "from a different planet") that was crushing everything in sight. The notion that the citizens of Eastern Europe could form worthy endeavors in their lives, could at times forget about repression, could think of ways in which to improve the regime and (horror of horrors!) like it, is something that cannot be said now in polite company. 

The point is not to defend Communism. I never lived it and am happy I didn't. As far as I'm concerned, it is a page of history that we should not repeat. The point is that, precisely, it is a page of history. It resulted from many decisions, it related to aspirations and fears of millions of people and...isn't there a saying somewhere about what happens to those who don't know history?

The second sense in which November 9, 1989 meant the end of historical conscience is one I know a bit more closely and pertains to the future. History is about human action. Up to Nov. 9, Communism was a historical instance of socialism. Those of us who didn't like many of its aspects could keep thinking of a day when, thanks to historical agency, it would be transformed. But from that day on we are not supposed to think that way: socialism has no evolution, there is no possibility of learning from mistakes, no point in trying anything, no agency. 

In some parts of the world this predates 1989. In my corner of the woods, Colombia (as in much of the Third World), the Cold War was rained upon leftists as a huge exercise in guilt by association which is a way of denying agency. If you were a leftist, born thousands of miles away from Moscow, several years after Stalin's death, you had the blood of the Ukrainian kulaks in your hands as much as if you had signed the order yourself. As far as I remember, of all the Colombian leftists I knew back in the 80s, I can't remember anyone that was entirely uncritical of the Soviet Union. Most of them would admire this or that aspect, often many that turned out to be quite shabby once we knew better, but each one would have a pet peeve about it. (Most often the degree of repression and the appalling quality of consumer goods.) The "Communist paradise" was just a straw man of the right. As far as I could tell, Colombian leftists didn't want to turn Colombia into "Communist Russia" but into "Communist Colombia," into something different. (Not to mention the fact that Colombians had the stereotype, false as it happened, of Russians as not fond of partying...) But none of this mattered. In the witch hunts of the time, these people were not seen as agents, but as simple tools of the Soviet empire. Their views, their criticisms, their love for Colombia and its traditions was entirely irrelevant. Again, Communism did not exist in history and, therefore, its future was not part of human affairs. 

The events of 20 years ago didn't create this state of affairs, but certainly solidified it even further. To this day those of us on the left still get the same treatment. Nobody wants a return of the Gulag, but the right often sounds as if we did. (Note to self: right that superbrilliant entry you've been thinking about "slippery slope arguments.") One of the goals of this blog is, precisely, to study the possibility of regaining a sense of history for socialism, both looking to the past (with all honesty) and to the future.

November 9 as I saw it back then.

OK, I began making a big fuss about starting this blog on November 9, 2009. Why? In case you haven't noticed, today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin's Wall. As it happens, this event shattered my intellectual life in many ways that will become apparent as I post more. There's no way I will cover all the round in one post. Today I'll just ruminate on the anniversary and take it from there.

I'm 40 (almost 41). This means I was in my early 20s back then. In my late teens I had become a convinced Marxist (though I never belonged to any organization) of a relatively hard line but was taking some intellectual distances and was already convinced that the regimes of "really existing socialism" were unjustifiably authoritarian. When Gorbachev was elevated to the leadership of the Soviet Union I was among the many convinced that he would be able to steer the leaky boat of the Communist bloc to the safe haven of democratic socialism. Eastern Europe would democratize, Western Europe would maintain, and over time deepen, its commitment to the welfare state, the "House of Europe" would become the beacon of socialism for mankind. What was not to like? 

The events of 1989 laid waste on this scenario. I spent 1989 (and 1990, and 1991) making incremental forecasts of how quickly things would  unravel just to realize that the events were moving faster than anything I could imagine. The Communist bloc was much more decrepit than I had imagined in my more skeptical moments. The economies were poorer than I thought, the population was much more desperate than I thought, the leadership was much more cynical than I thought, and so it went. 

This had several consequences for me. The most obvious one is that I learned never, ever again to make political forecasts. OK, I exaggerate, sometimes I do make them. But ever since I feel very leery and don't put much stock on them. 

First Entry

Welcome to my blog. I've been meaning to start one for years and finally decided that today was the day, in no small part because today's date (November 9) has much to do with what I hope this blog will be about. (See below.)

You will find mostly two types of things on this blog:

1. My own speculations on social theory, philosophy, political economy, sociology, etc. (pretty nerdy stuff)

2. My thoughts on political events of the moment, especially in Colombia (my country of birth) and the US.

Please keep both separate. Of course there is a connection between them; my opinions on one are related to those of the other and most likely yours will also be. But I want Type 1 threads and discussions to be COMPLETELY civil, scholarly, good-natured. If you want to be opinionated and abrasive, Type 2 threads is what you're looking for.