HVK Archives: Stalin and Hitler: Equals among firsts
Stalin and Hitler: Equals among firsts - The Asian Age
Paul Johnson
()
January 19, 1998
Title: Stalin and Hitler: Equals among firsts
Author: Paul Johnson
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: January 19, 1998
It is already horribly clear that, in important moral respects,
the new Labour government is no improvement on its lamentable
predecessor. As the Formula One and Robinson cases show, it can
neither avoid sleaze nor, when it is exposed, deal with it
promptly. There are, I predict, much bigger scandals ahead. It is
obviously preferable for the Labour party to finance itself from
individual contributions rather than be dependent on the union
barons, but greed for money and lack of scruple in getting it are
taking it deep into oily waters. The new government has not been
in office nine months but it has already awarded five peerages in
return for contributions. Even by the standards of the outgoing
Tory regime, which was notoriously ready to sell honours, that is
going it.
A Labour government, exposed to all kinds of hidden pressures
>from the Left including the Far Left - is also capable of moral
errors of a different kind, and this lot has already committed a
major one. I refer, of course, to the award in the New Year's
list of the Companionate of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist
historian. Hobsbawm, like his equivalent at the other end of the
totalitarian spectrum, David Irving, is not without a certain
brutal honesty. Just as Irving defends, excuses, exonerates or,
when it comes to the pinch, minimises the guilt of Hitler, so
Hobsbawm legitimises Stalin. He was at it again last year on
Start the Week. I wish the BBC would publish a transcript of his
remarks. So far as I can remember, he said, among other things,
that without Stalin the British would not have the welfare state.
Ah, so that was how we got it. Like most people, I had always
assumed that state welfare was invented by Bismarck to appease
the German socialists, was introduced here before the First World
War by Lloyd George and Churchill, and amplified after 1945 by
Attlee. Nye Bevan et al. But Hobsbawm tells us we owe it to
"Uncle Joe," as the Left taught us to call him in the Second
World War. Yet while Irving is excluded from academia and, quite
rightly, from ' the civilised community generally, Hobsbawm gets
the gong which, next to the OM, now safely in the hands of the
Queen and so immune from political lobbying, is regarded as our
highest award for distinction. How come?
In an important article in the current issue of the American
monthly Commentary, the French historian Alain Besancon advances
six reasons for she double standards educated people in the West
apply to Nazism and Communism. I won't rehearse his arguments,
originally put forward in his inaugural address to the Academie
Francaise, to which he was inducted in December 1996, and now
updated. His essay should certainly be published in London. But
in brief he points out that the distinction we still make is the
result of historical accident rather than of any real doubt about
the moral equivalence of these two appalling systems of state
crime. It is not as though there is any lack of knowledge about
the depravity of communist regimes, particularly Stalin's Russia.
Over here. the basic facts, in all their enormity, were reversed
in a series of brilliant investigations by our greatest living
modern historian. Robert Conquest. So far as I know. Conquest has
never been offered an honour of any kind, though the only
vindication he sought has been provided in full the
substantiation of all his conclusions, and most of his detailed
work, by the opening of the Russian archives. Revelations about
the horrors of those years - and after - continue to emerge.
Only five years ago, the bones of some of the personal victims of
Stalin's favourite henchman and police chief, Beria - young women
whom he had raped and murdered --- were unearthed near Moscow.
One of Beria's executioners in 1953, after Stalin's death, Major
Gurevich, now 83, provided details of his final months recently,
which were published in the Sunday Times. The documentation of
Stalin's wickedness, though far from complete the most secret KGB
files are not yet open and perhaps never will be - is already
enormous. Indeed, it is an indication of the continuing power of
the academic Left in this country that the securing of the CH for
Hobsbawm was obtained in year which saw the publication in Paris
of a remarkable book by a croup of French historians, Le livre
noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, repression published by
Robert Laffont at 189 francs. This 846-page work, the first book
of reference about what it calls "a planetary tragedy," has been
a bestseller in France, and has not been unnoticed over here: I
wrote two whole pages about it in the Daily Mail, for instance.
But its message has not yet got across. What the book shows, in
great detail, is not merely that the crimes of Communism far
surpassed those of Nazism in sheer magnitude, but that the two
systems, in all moral essentials, were indistinguishable. Whereas
the Nazis were responsible for 25 million victims, those of the
various Communist states fall not far short of 100 million,
including 20 million in Russia and 65 million in China. More
important, perhaps, Le livre noir subjects these state crimes to
the same juridical procedures inaugurated by the Nuremberg
Tribunal in 1945, and now being applied in Bosnia. Under Article
Six of the Nuremberg statutes, state crimes were divided into
three major categories: Crimes against Peace, Crimes of War, and
Crimes against Humanity. The authors show, in detail, that
Communist states and their individual leaders were guilty of all
three on a colossal scale, over and over again. The list of
Stalin's Crimes against Humanity is particularly long and
horrifying, involving over ten million people. He committed
crimes of genocide, as defined by the international courts, on at
least seven occasions: against the Russian kulaks, in which a
genocide of class replaced the genocide of race, in 1930-32;
against the Ukrainians in 1932-33; against the Poles. Balts
Moldavians and Bessarabians in 1939-41, and again in 1944-45;
against the Volga Germans in 1941, the Crimean Tatars in 1943,
the Chechens in 1944 and the Inguches in 1944.
Perhaps Mr Tony Blair, who must take final responsibility for the
honours lists he puts out in the Queen's name, will explain to us
why he chase to confer such a distinction on a writer who still
defends Stalin's Russia. After all, these are national awards:
by selecting Hobsbawm for such an accolade, Mr Blair appears to
suggest that the British people associate themselves with the
crimes of a human monster. In the mean-time, it is those
innumerable Russians who resisted Stalin and died for it, and now
lie unremembered in unmarked graves, who arc the true Companions
of Honour.
By arrangement with The Spectator
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