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.
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