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PARTISAN REVIEW
domestic spying through which the GDR transformed the role of citizen
into that of informer and made espionage the totalitarian principle gov–
erning every human exchange: all love, all loyalty, all rivalry, all hope, all
fear-a nation based in mass mutual betrayal.
All this, Wolf assures us, sophisticates like ourselves should brush aside.
Some of these
demarches
were mistakes; but what government doesn't make
mistakes? As for the others, it is essential to Wolf's defense that they served
the legitimate aspirations of a legitimate state. Were some illegal? Come,
come. Every secret service sponsors illegality. You think the CIA and
British intelligence are Sunday schools?
Note how important secret services are to this defense. Reduced to its
crude essence, it holds that since every secret service sponsors illegali ty, any
state with a secret service stands outside judgements oflegitimacy or crim–
inality. If everyone does it, everyone is the same. It is a curious revival of
the old doctrine of "equivalence"-that favorite nostrum of post-1968
radicals, the blunt instrument once used to batter down the liberal critique
of totalitarianism. The United States and the USSR, so equivalence pro–
claimed, are equally bad; twin powers, indistinguishable in evil. "The
Soviet Union," one heard, "is
almost
as bad as the United States."
Nonsense? Wolf's book is a smooth new version.
It
is reminiscent of when
Carlos the Jackal, paunchy and middle-aged, stood in a Parisian courtroom
being tried for three of many French murders attributed to him, and hec–
tored his judges as "Stalinist." There is "equivalence" at its most pure. For
Wolf, twin secret services mean twin legitimacy and twin illegitimacy. In
a world where nobody is right, let nobody dare judge Markus Wolf.
Such is the logic that the new history, with its new perspective on
state criminality, will demolish. Not that the perspective is unfamiliar. The
Nazis long since made a vision of the criminal state a haunted common–
place. But should the communist states be seen in that light? Clearly,
neither the law nor secret services make criminal states. Tyranny makes
criminal states. Crimes against humanity make them. Courtois's scholars
estimate Marxism-Leninism's murdered victims, worldwide, at something
around
one hundred million.
If this number is even close to correct, where
does talk of justice even begin? That is one, two...many Markus Wolfs. A
dark new discussion is taking shape. Mter such knowledge, what forgiveness?
STEPHEN KOCH
