This profoundly ideological account has long since turned into a sort of gruesome numbers game. The bizarre distortions it produces were on show last week during a television interview with Amis, when the BBC presenter Gavin Esler remarked in passing that Stalin was ‘responsible for at least three times as many deaths’ as Hitler – a truly breathtaking throwaway line. Esler was presumably comparing Amis’s own figure of 20 million Stalin victims (borrowed from the cold-war historian Robert Conquest) with the 6 million Jews murdered by Hitler in the Holocaust. But of course Hitler took a great many more lives than 6 million: over 11 million are estimated to have died in the Nazi camps alone and he might reasonably be held responsible for the vast majority of the 50 million killed in the second world war, including more than 20 million Soviet dead.
But in the distorted prism of the new history, they are somehow lost from the equation. At the same time, the number of victims of Stalin’s terror has been progressively inflated over recent years to the point where, in the wildest guesstimates, a third of the entire Soviet population is assumed to have been killed in the years leading up to the country’s victory over Nazi Germany. The numbers remain a focus of huge academic controversy, partly because most are famine deaths which can only be extrapolated from unreliable demographic data. But the fact is that the opening of formerly secret Soviet archives has led many historians – such as the Americans J. Arch Getty and Robert Thurston – to sharply scale down earlier cold-war estimates of executions and gulag populations under Stalin. The figures are still horrific. For example, 799,455 people were recorded as having been executed between 1921 and 1953, and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million (most convicted for non-political offences) at its peak after the war. But these are a very long way from the kind of numbers relied on by Amis and his mentors.8
For all their insistence on moral equivalence, Amis and even Conquest say they nevertheless ‘feel’ the Holocaust was worse than Soviet repression. But the differences aren’t just a matter of feelings. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka, no extermination camps built to murder people in their millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most bloody and destructive war in human history – in fact, it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine (something that eluded its tsarist predecessors). Part of the Soviet tragedy was that that victory was probably only possible because the country had undergone a forced industrial revolution in little more than a decade, in the very process of which the greatest crimes were committed. The achievements and failures of Soviet history cannot in any case be reduced to the Stalin period, any more than the role of communists – from the anti-fascist resistance to the campaigns for colonial freedom – can be defined simply by their relationship to the USSR.
Perhaps most grotesque in this postmodern calculus of political repression is the moral blindness displayed towards the record of colonialism. For most of the last century, vast swathes of the planet remained under direct imperial European rule, enforced with the most brutal violence by states that liked to see themselves as democracies. But somehow that is not included as the third leg of twentieth-century tyranny, along with Nazism and communism. There is a much-lauded Black Book of Communism, but no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record.
Consider a few examples. Up to 10 million Congolese are estimated to have died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early 1900s. Up to a million Algerians are estimated to have died in the war for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout the twentieth-century British empire, the authorities gassed, bombed and massacred indigenous populations from Sudan to Iraq, Sierra Leone to Palestine, India to Malaya. And while Martin Amis worries that few remember the names of Soviet labour camps, who now commemorates the name of the Andaman islands penal colony, where 80,000 Indian political prisoners were routinely tortured and experimented on by British army doctors, or the huge Hola internment camp in Kenya where prisoners were beaten to death in the 1950s?
If Lenin and Stalin are regarded as having killed those who died of hunger in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, then Churchill is certainly responsible for the 4 million deaths in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943 – and earlier British governments are even more guilty of the still larger famines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, which claimed as many as 30 million victims under a punitive free-market regime. And of course, in the post-colonial era, millions have been killed by US and other Western forces or their surrogates in wars, interventions and coups from Vietnam to Central America, Indonesia to southern Africa.
There is no major twentieth-century political tradition without blood on its hands. But the battle over history is never really about the past – it’s about the future. When Amis accuses the Bolsheviks of waging ‘war against human nature’, he is making the classic conservative objection to radical social change. Those who write colonial barbarity out of twentieth-century history want to legitimise the new liberal imperialism, just as those who demonise past attempts to build an alternative to capitalist society are determined to prove that there is none. The problem for the left now is not so much that it has failed to face up to its own history, but that it has become paralysed by the burden of it.9
(12/9/02)
We are sleepwalking into a reckless war of aggression
The world is now undergoing a crash course of political education in the new realities of global power. In case anyone was still in any doubt about what they might mean, the Bush doctrine (set out last Friday in the US National Security Strategy) laid bare the ground rules of the new imperium. The US will in future brook no rival in power or military prowess, will spread still further its network of garrison bases in every continent, and will use its armed might to promote a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ (its own), through unilateral pre-emptive attacks if necessary.
In the following week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the German chancellor of ‘poisoning’ relations by daring to win an election with a declaration of foreign policy independence. Even the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy felt moved to accuse the US of ‘imperialism’. But it was Al Gore, winner of the largest number of votes in the last US presidential election, who blurted out the unvarnished truth: that the overweening recklessness of the US government has fostered fear across the world, not at what ‘terrorists are going to do, but at what we are going to do’.
Some, however, are having trouble keeping up. In parliament, many MPs seem determined to sleepwalk into a war of aggression, hiding behind the fiction that all will be resolved if United Nations weapons inspectors are allowed to go in and finish the disarmament of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Tony Blair was at pains to soothe their anxieties on Tuesday, as he will be next week at the Labour conference in Blackpool. The aim, he assured them, was simply to get rid of weapons of mass destruction under the auspices of the UN. If the regime changed as a by-product, so much the better. But yes, Saddam Hussein could save himself by compliance.
It’s only necessary to listen briefly to the chorus of administration voices in Washington insisting on the exact opposite, however, to realise this is a fraud – and that Blair knows it. From the president downwards, they have made utterly clear that regime change remains their policy, and force their favoured method – with or without a UN resolution and whether or not Saddam complies with inspections. And they are the ones making the decisions.
What is actually happening is that Blair, as Bush’s senior international salesman, is providing political cover for a policy which is opposed throughout the world, using the time-honoured New Labour methods of spin and ‘sequencing’: drawing his government and MPs into a succession of positions intended to lock them