[A-List] UK ideological state apparatus: rewriting history

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

The battle for history

The now routine equation of Stalin and Hitler both distorts the past and
limits the future

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 12, 2002
The Guardian

It would be easy to dismiss the controversy over the latest Martin Amis
offering as little more than a salon tiff among self-referential
literati. His book, Koba the Dread, follows a well-trodden political
path. An excoriation of Lenin, Stalin and communism in general
(interlaced with long-simmering spats with his once communist father
Kingsley and radical friend Christopher Hitchens), it is intended to be
a savage indictment of the left for its supposed inability to
acknowledge the crimes committed in its name. Strong on phrasemaking,
the book is painfully short on sources or social and historical context.
The temptation might be to see it as simply a sign that the one-time
enfant terrible of the London literary scene was reliving his father's
descent into middle-aged blimpishness.

That would be a mistake. Amis's book is in reality only the latest
contribution to the rewriting of history that began in the dying days of
the Soviet Union and has intensified since its collapse. It has become
almost received wisdom to bracket Stalin and Hitler as twin monsters of
the past century - Mao and Pol Pot are sometimes thrown in as an
afterthought - and commonplace to equate communism and fascism as the
two greatest evils of an unprecedentedly sanguinary era. In some
versions, communism is even held to be the more vile and bloodier
wickedness. The impact of this cold war victors' version of the past has
been to relativise the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of
colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change
will always lead to suffering, killing and failure.

This profoundly ideological account has long since turned into a sort of
gruesome numbers game. The bizarre distortions it produces were on show
last week during a television interview with Amis, when the BBC
presenter Gavin Esler remarked in passing that Stalin was "responsible
for at least three times as many deaths" as Hitler - a truly
breathtaking throwaway line. Esler was presumably comparing Amis's own
figure of 20 million Stalin victims (borrowed from the cold war
historian Robert Conquest) with the 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler in
the Holocaust. But of course Hitler took a great many more lives than 6
million: over 11 million are estimated to have died in the Nazi camps
alone and he might reasonably be held responsible for the vast majority
of the 50 million killed in the second world war, including more than 20
million Soviet dead.

But in the distorted prism of the new history, they are somehow lost
from the equation. At the same time, the number of victims of Stalin's
terror has been progressively inflated over recent years to the point
where, in the wildest guesstimates, a third of the entire Soviet
population is assumed to have been killed in the years leading up to the
country's victory over Nazi Germany. The numbers remain a focus of huge
academic controversy, partly because most of them are famine deaths
which can only be extrapolated from unreliable demographic data. But the
fact is that the opening of formerly secret Soviet archives has led many
historians - such as the Americans J Arch Getty and Robert Thurston - to
scale down sharply earlier cold war estimates of executions and gulag
populations under Stalin. The figures are still horrific. For example,
799,455 people were recorded as having been executed between 1921 and
1953, and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million (most convicted
for non-political offences) at its peak after the war. But these are a
very long way from the kind of numbers relied on by Amis and his
mentors.

For all their insistence on moral equivalence, Amis and even Conquest
say they nevertheless "feel" the Holocaust was worse than Soviet
repression. But the differences aren't just a matter of feelings.
Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet
Treblinka, no extermination camps built to murder people in their
millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most bloody and
destructive war in human history - in fact, it played the decisive role
in the defeat of the German war machine (something that eluded its
tsarist predecessors). Part of the Soviet tragedy was that that victory
was probably only possible because the country had undergone a forced
industrial revolution in little more than a decade, in the very process
of which the greatest crimes were committed. The achievements and
failures of Soviet history cannot in any case be reduced to the Stalin
period, any more than the role of communists - from the anti-fascist
resistance to the campaigns for colonial freedom - can be defined simply
by their relationship to the USSR.

Perhaps most grotesque in this postmodern calculus of political
repression is the moral blindness displayed towards the record of
colonialism. For most of the last century, vast swathes of the planet
remained under direct imperial European rule, enforced with the most
brutal violence by states that liked to see themselves as democracies.
But somehow that is not included as the third leg of 20th-century
tyranny, along with Nazism and communism. There is a much-lauded Black
Book of Communism, but no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial
record.

Consider a few examples. Up to 10 million Congolese are estimated to
have died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the
early 1900s. Up to a million Algerians are estimated to have died in the
war for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the
20th-century British empire, the authorities gassed, bombed and
massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Sierra Leone to
Palestine, India to Malaya. And while Martin Amis worries that few
remember the names of Soviet labour camps, who now commemorates the name
of the Andaman islands penal colony, where 80,000 Indian political
prisoners were routinely tortured and experimented on by British army
doctors, or the huge Hola internment camp in Kenya where prisoners were
beaten to death in the 1950s?

If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of
hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then Churchill is
certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal
famine of 1943 - and earlier British governments are even more guilty of
the still larger famines in late 19th and early 20th-century India,
which claimed as many as 30 million victims under a punitive free market
regime. And of course, in the post-colonial era, millions have been
killed by US and other western forces or their surro gates in wars,
interventions and coups from Vietnam to central America, Indonesia to
southern Africa.

There is no major 20th-century political tradition without blood on its
hands. But the battle over history is never really about the past - it's
about the future. When Amis accuses the Bolsheviks of waging "war
against human nature", he is making the classic conservative objection
to radical social change. Those who write colonial barbarity out of
20th-century history want to legitimise the new liberal imperialism,
just as those who demonise past attempts to build an alternative to
capitalist society are determined to prove that there is none. The
problem for the left now is not so much that it has failed to face up to
its own history, but that it has become paralysed by the burden of it.