From: nonesuch@here.com   
      
   "Pete Bayle"  wrote in message   
   news:8d9486cd.0410112046.171c792@posting.google.com...   
   > "Buffalo"  wrote in message   
   > news:...   
   >> "Pete Bayle"  wrote in message   
   >> news:8d9486cd.0410110913.40f5482d@posting.google.com...   
   >> > "Buffalo"  wrote in message   
   >> > news:...   
   >> >   
   >> >> This is rather a long way from a lament for the lack of a Nuremberg   
   >> >> for   
   >> >> the   
   >> >> Left. He's asking for acknowledgement, not retribution. But since   
   >> >> you're   
   >> >> keen on the subject, you could read Martin Amis's "Koba the Dread", a   
   >> >> recent   
   >> >> book about Stalin and his crimes, and about the refusal of Western   
   >> >> liberals   
   >> >> to take the Stalinist holocaust as seriously as they took the German   
   >> >> one.   
   >> >> It   
   >> >> was a book that Christopher Hitchens, for one, took exception to, even   
   >> >> though he and Amis are close friends. But even Amis, angry as he is,   
   >> >> is   
   >> >> not   
   >> >> asking for retribution. He's just saying that it's about time the Left   
   >> >> admitted that these horrors happened and that those who committed them   
   >> >> were   
   >> >> just as evil as the Nazis. And so they were.   
   >> >>   
   >> >> Buffalo   
   >> >   
   >> > Hitchens took exception to it, IIRC, not because of anything about   
   >> > Nurmenburg, but because of the way Amis characterized Hitchens own   
   >> > actions and repsonses. I found Amis persuasive, or at least highly   
   >> > plausible, on the old Hitchens.   
   >>   
   >> As I might have inadvertantly revealed elsewhere, Hitchens is not my   
   >> favourite ageing radical, but I think you're traducing him a bit here.   
   >> His   
   >> reaction to Amis's book was rather more than tetchiness that Amis had   
   >> picked   
   >> on him as a representative of the selectively blind left-radical of the   
   >> '60s. He did answer Amis quite fully on historical grounds, pointing out   
   >> the   
   >> large gaps in Amis's knowledge of the subject.   
   >>   
   >> >   
   >> > It would be interesting to know whether the new Hitchens, still feels   
   >> > the same way, or at least sees the same things in others regarding   
   >> > Iraq, as Amis saw on him.   
   >>   
   >> Well, in all fairness, Hitchens was ranting about Islamic fundamentalists   
   >> before 9/ll. Whether he would read Koba the Dread in a more generous   
   >> frame   
   >> of mind now, I couldn't say. But probably not. A lot of his criticisms of   
   >> the book were quite valid ones. Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (1961,   
   >> I   
   >> think) is a more serious and more scholarly (and more terrifying) account   
   >> of   
   >> the Stalinist bloodbath.   
   >>   
   >> Buffalo   
   >   
   > I'll answer both here.   
   >   
   > First, that's not the way I remember it as far as Hitchens problem   
   > being the historical critique of Stalinism in general rather than   
   > Hitchens own lack of acknowledging it. IIRC the book was dedicated to   
   > Conquest and I would be suprised if he hadn't seen parts of it, as   
   > he's an old family friend.   
      
   >   
   > Either way, I don't rememeber any large historical problems with the   
   > book. It seemed based on fairly standard soruces, other than the   
   > revisionists like Getty and others. And Amis never claimed to be an   
   > historian, or know more than Conquest. Who does? As much as I like   
   > him, I doubt the answer is Hitchens.   
      
   Where Amis was most at fault was not in his Soviet history, which, even   
   while littered with factual errors, is accurate enough overall. It was in   
   his knowledge of Western history, particularly in his failure to know the   
   extent of the backlash against Soviet communism amongst the Left from the   
   late 'thirties onwards. His idea that the non-communist Left were silent or   
   apologetic about Soviet repression was well off-centre.   
      
   One example springs to mind, because it's the subject of another thread here   
   at the moment. Looking  into the Orwell "red list" business (which I only   
   vaguely knew about), I was struck by the irony of the anti-communist   
   propaganda unit of the Foreign Office being set up by the then   
   Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. It was the young Ernest Bevin who had been   
   the leader of  the dockworkers in 1922 when they refused to load supply   
   ships bound for Murmansk, and thus played his part in foiling the attempt by   
   the British, French and Americans to intervene in Russia and overthrow   
   Bolshevism. Now, twenty-five years later, he's running a propaganda war   
   against the Bolsheviks.   
      
   But you can multiply Bevin's case by several  thousand.  The Left consisted   
   of many different groups, but one of them was made up of people who had been   
   prepared to give Bolshevism the benefit of the doubt in the early days, but   
   who withdrew their provisional support once they saw the whole Soviet   
   experiment turning poisonous. The fact is that vocal attacks on communism   
   were being made by socialists from the earliest days, and Stalin's crimes   
   did not go unnoticed or unrecorded by them.   
      
   But Amis seems not to know any of this.  I have my own copy  of his book but   
   can't quote from it without reading it through again. So I'll just   
   cherry-pick from the online reviews. Timothy Garton Ash writes, "As late as   
   1975, Amis notes, 'it was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too   
   hard on the Soviet Union. No one wanted to be seen as a 'red-baiter' -- or   
   no one except my father [novelist Kingsley Amis].'" I find this   
   incomprehensible, coming from someone who is only two years younger than I   
   am. By that time the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago had already been   
   published in the West to huge acclaim, from the Left as much as the Right.   
   Stalin's crimes were the talk of the town. How can he not know that?   
      
   If, on the other hand, he had substituted "China" for "the Soviet Union", he   
   might have had a point. I myself was deluded about China at that time. I   
   knew it was a repressive totalitarian state where a lot of collective   
   bullying went on, but I never thought mass-murder was involved. The casualty   
   figures for the Cultural Revolution are still coming in, but it's quite   
   possible that Mao's crimes exceed those of Stalin. Maybe in the case of   
   China, one could plead ignorance, because it was a country that information   
   came out of only in tiny trickle.  But, while there were no Stalinists among   
   the '68 generation - or none that I ever heard of - there were plenty of   
   Maoists, and we have to suspect that a lot of self-deception was going on.   
   If we have to have Nuremberg for the Left, prosecuting the still-living   
   apparatchiks of Mao's regime might be practical proposition.   
      
   > I don't have access to my copy of Koba, but if you have any links   
   > about the controversy in general I would be interested.   
      
   Try this one:   
   http://martinamis.albion.edu/koba.htm   
      
   Buffalo   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)