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.