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undergirded by such an apparatus, that the military does not have a
central role in the structure of commun ist power, is part of that left–
wing nostalgia that Sontag stood against. Tanks are never far away
from any regime that has a problem of legitimacy . To be sure, the
occupation of Poland by its own army was a rather extreme
demonstration of communism's reliance upon this kind of muscle,
though the regular army was swiftly replaced by the ZOMOs, the
security police more accustomed to such an atrocity. And had the
Polish army been unwilling to betray the Polish people, the Russian
army would have done the dirty work, as it did in the past. More–
over, the phenomenon of a military takeover in a self-styled
revolutionary society is hardly unknown in the annals of Marxism.
It
is not fascism; it is Bonapartism. Lenin called Kerensky a
Bonapartist, and Trotsky called Stalin a Bonapartist. The analogy
was, in neither case, exactly correct, nor is it in Poland, but there is
certainly a bit of Bonapartism in Jaruzelski. A general stepped in
when the classes were in chaos, to prevent the final triumph of the
proletariat over the privileged.
Fascism is something more than a junta. And there are juntas
that are something more than fascism - communist juntas, for
example. The equation of communism with fascism is kind to
communism. There has not yet been a fascist government that
murdered as many people as the communist government of Stalin.
The numbers are numbing. The economic and political plans of that
one man cost well over eighty million lives . In the matter of corpses,
communism is the only thing as unthinkable as the bomb.
A
comparison with fascism, then, adds nothing. It only takes away.
Both must be fought, even to the death; but they are not the same
thing.
Sontag's analysis was also a confession . "People on the left have
wittingly or unwittingly told a lot of lies." "We did not love the truth
enough." She offered a reason:
I have asked myself many times in the past six years or so how it
was possible that I could have been so suspicious of what Milosz
and other exiles from Communist countries . .. were telling us.
Why did we not have a place for, ears for, their truth. The
answers are well known. We had identified the enemy as fascism.
We heard the demonic language of fascism. We believed in, or at
least applied a double standard to, the angelic language of
Communism.
