Good Intentions? Really?
Wed, 2007-06-13 23:22 — Jonathan Wilde
There's been an interesting discussion on other blogs about the acceptance of communist chic. Says Jim Henley:
America kicked the Nazis’ ass too, though, so what about that, huh?? you might say. Count me among those who believe that the Soviets were awful - I’m glad they’re dead - but that the Holocaust was sui generis. Uniquely awful, not in terms of body count but in terms of intention. Nazi Germany earnestly intended to pursue every last Jew on Earth and murder them. Even the Turks were content to allow any Armenians who actually made it out of Turkey to get on with their lives somewhere else.
(bold mine, italics his)
Julian Sanchez says, among other things:
I think Jim's right that the unique reaction to the Nazi case has to do with a special horror at the intentions of that regime: Soviet communism, one might say, turned out to be massively murderous, while the extermination of an entire group of people was a core goal of Nazi ideology.
I have to be honest. I'm surprised at these statements. I agree with Glen Whitman who says,
This rationalization doesn’t quite work for me. Maybe it would have worked as an excuse in 1945. But in 2007, anyone who doesn’t understand that communism is murderous and brutal is either willfully blind or woefully ignorant.
Quite a few people believe that particular communist myth: a bunch of people got together and tried to "implement a system" to better their lives, but as it turns out, the results weren't quite what they expected.
That's plain wrong. Communism was certainly supported by some based on ideals of "brotherhood" and "sharing". But a large part of it was also based on hatred. It gave people an excuse to hate people different than them. Lenin said in response to peasant farmers refusing to sell food to the state at subsistence prices,
These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers, growing richer the more the workers starved in the cities and factories. The vampires have gathered and continue to gather in their hands the lands of landlords, enslaving, time and time again, the poor peasants. Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!
The Nazis hated based on race; the communists hated based on class. The Nazis believed that the wealthy Jews were to blame for their ills; the communists believed that the wealthy were to blame for their ills.The Nazis tried to exterminate Jews; the communists tried to exterminate kulaks, Ukranians, and all sorts of ethnic minorities. Most historians believe Stalin was on the verge of a Jewish cleansing before his death.
The myth of "good intentions" was eloquently answered by Bryan Caplan a couple of years ago on this blog. I quote at length:
In any case, this argument is too subtle to explain why the world judges Communism less harshly than Nazism. In my judgment, the main reason for the double standard is that, even today, people believe that the Communists had better intentions than the Nazis. Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this position comes from Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R.:
Both Germany and Soviet Russia are totalitarian states. Both are realistic. Both are strong and ruthless in their methods. There is one distinction, however, and that is as clear as black and white. It can be simply illustrated. If Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had been firmly grounded in the Christian faith, either Catholic or Protestant, and if by reason of that fact this communistic experiment in Russia had been projected upon this basis, it would probably be declared to be one of the greatest efforts of Christian altruism in history to translate the ideals of brotherhood and charity as preached in the gospel of Christ into a government of men… That is the difference - the communistic Soviet state could function with the Christian religion in its basic purpose to serve the brotherhood of man. It would be impossible for the Nazi state to do so.(Journal entry, July 7, 1941)
But while the argument from good intentions is probably the main reason why people think that Communism was better than Nazism, the argument is at best half-baked. The Nazis dreamed of “perfect brotherhood” too - an Aryan utopia. Even in his Final Political Testament, Hitler placed “every single person under an obligation to serve the common interest and to subordinate his own advantage to this end.” And both Nazis and Communists had the same basic road map to perfect brotherhood: killing everyone unfit to be their brothers.
In short, both ideologies began with the creepy demand that human beings stop being the diverse, self-interested animals that we are, and eagerly jumped to the conclusion that a bloodbath was in order. How could their intentions be any more comparable - or any worse?
Perhaps the parallel is hard to see precisely because, even in the West, anti-capitalist propaganda has successfully dehumanized the bourgeoisie, landlords, money-lenders, and “the rich.” So when we hear Communists chant “Death to the bourgeoisie,” we don’t feel the same way we do when we hear Nazis chant “Death to the Jews.”
What is worth remembering every May Day, then, is that the people murdered by the Communists were, by and large, as blameless as the farmer who grows your food, the banker who lends you money, or the landlord who rents your apartment. Like the Jews of Europe, they were scapegoats - and anyone who genuinely had good intentions could have seen it at the time.
Human nature, being what it is, makes it difficult for most people to willfully kill another human being. When mass murder on the scale of what happened in the Soviet Union occurs, the basic traits of empathy and compassion have to be overcome. The dehumanization of certain groups of people that communist philosophy inspired was vital for this to happen. It's naive to believe that communism was merely a failed attempt to implement a different way of doing things or that its intentions were good.
distributedrepublic.net |
