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.