LIONEL ABEL
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dubbed Soviet communism - which the Russians tell us has been a failure
- "successful fascism." And there was the equally absurd counter-judg–
ment of Soviet communism by Michael Walser, a respected professor of
political science. He dubbed the Soviet state an instance of "failed
totalitarianism," as if the goal of the Bolsheviks had been totalitarianism,
rather than the international revolution, or alternatively, socialism in one
country.
And on October 31st of 1988, Marjorie Brady, Director of the
Russian Research Foundation in London, told us in a column in
The
Wall Street Journal,
that there may be a fascist element in
perestroika,
so
that what we take to be a democratic development in the Soviet Union
may be in fact a turn towards the corporate state Mussolini brought into
being. And the London sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, in his recently
published (and much overpraised) book,
Modernity and the Holocaust,
has
stressed what he finds similar in the criminal procedures of Hitler and
Stalin. Their victims, Bauman claims, were executed " ... because they
did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society.
They were eliminated, so that an objectively better human world - more
efficient, more moral, more beautiful (sic!) - could be established. A
Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world."
Were the Communists and the Nazis similar in their grandiose aims
as in their criminal deeds? If Bauman is right in the judgment I cited, it
would be impossible to distinguish morally between the Bolsheviks and
the Nazis. To do so one would have to show - and I think this can be
shown - that the Bolsheviks regretted the terrible methods employed by
the G. P. U., and
one cannot say this of the Nazis,
who for the most part
thought the world more beautiful and more human
because
cif
the methods
tmployed
by
the Gestapo.
And there are these indirect results of the Octo–
ber Revolution : independent nations in Asia and Africa. One cannot
imagine the slightest increment of freedom or independent sovereignty
for any nation in any part of the world had Hitler been the victor in the
late war. So Bauman's equalization of the Nazis and Bolsheviks simply
does not hold. And I must add one other point, which I take from a
great story of Borges. A Nazi officer, who has overseen the gassing of a
Jewish dramatist, applauds the execution, noting that by such deeds he
and his colleagues have introduced into the world a moral coldness
which no one will be able to expunge. What Borges the poet has seen
and Bauman the sociologist has missed, is that the Nazis did not
differentiate their methods from their goals, which in fact the Bolsheviks
did. The Nazis thought themselves great because they were capable of
deeds the rest of humanity regarded as unforgivable. The Bolsheviks be
Iieved they were creating a world such that their efforts in constructing it
