Re: [Marxism] re Deaths under Stalin

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bob M:
> In the mid-80s Cockburn undertook what some on this list may view as an
> exercise in Stalinist apologetics to counter the emergence among West
> German historians of a nationalist self-serving identification of Nazism
> and Communism (the so called Historikerstreit) used to justify the German
> war mobilization, Operation Barbarrossa, and the underlying
> anti-Bolshevist hysteria of the Nazis. Prominent West German historian
> Ernst Nolte actually asserted that Nazi atrocities were no  worse than
> those of Stalin, and further that Stalin's atrocities actually provoked an
> understandable response. The Historikerstreit followed on the heels of
> Reagan's rehabilitation of the Wassen SS at Bitburg cemetery. This
> revision of the traditional historical view of the Nazi genocide in the
> FDR of the mid-1980s must be seen in the light of the emerging demands on
> the part of the German bourgeoisie to the imperialist legitimacy it was to
> display in the Balkans carve-up of the 1990s.

I am looking at these questions right now in the context of preparing a
review of the German movie "Downfall", which takes place in Hitler's bunker
in 1945. It is based on Joachim Fest's book of the same title. Fest is a
prominent German historian who wrote a much acclaimed biography of Hitler
in the 1970s. He was also the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
which gave a platform to Nolte in the 1980s when this controversy was
brewing. Fest is a conservative historian who eschews social and economic
explanations for the rise of Hitler. He is something of a psychohistorian
who sees Hitler's relationship to the adoring German population in sexual
terms. At any rate, I'll have plenty more to say on these topics in a
couple of days.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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