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Never let the left forget It is good to see efforts being made to remind people just how monstrous things were in Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism. Films like Life of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) should be a good antidote to those who like to equate the oppressor and the oppressed.
Just as it only took a few years for revisionist liars like David Irving to try and re-write the history of Nazi Germany more in accordance with their likes, too many left wingers who praised the prevailing socialist system in Eastern Europe have not been forced to confront what it was they were supporting and what they wanted to force on the rest of us. What a pity there was nothing analogous to the process of ‘de-Nazification’ following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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“Europe have not been forced to confront what it was they were supporting and what they wanted to force on the rest of us. ”
Actually, it should be what they are still trying to force on the rest of us (and in some cases succeeding (Bolivia, Venezuela, EU)).
As for de-commification, we smugly felt that the competition of the fair market would prove to them the error of their ways, but they’ve hidden from the market in the school system, and are indoctrinating the kids in comintern agitprop.
Of course, all the communist regimes, were (and are in North Korea and Cuba) – just as bad if not worse than the Stasi regime in East Germany.
For the Western mind it’s very difficult to grasp the full extent of the horror that communism was and is. And few are interested.
My late aunt used to say: “one who hasn’t lived there will never understand”.
As to de-cummunistization [?] – well, you can’t try a sixth of East-German population… but a few show trials would have been in order. If I remember correctly – the head of the Stasi was tried and given maybe 6 years in prison or so…
FWIW: Freedom’s Fury and The Lost City are two more.
How about a “Commies Are My Nazis!” day for survivors of communist regimes to tell their stories? Could also make for a nice t-shirt.
Would you say de-Nazification worked, Perry?
(I ask curiously, not facetiously!)
Very much so. The object of de-nazification was not so much to punish Nazis (although it did often have that effect) but rather to make it clear that ‘Nazi’ was a synonym for ‘evil’… it was to make being a Nazi beyond the pale and in that it was very successful indeed.
And that is exactly why a similar process was needed after the fall of communism. For former communists to be regarded as rehabilitated, they should have been required to repudiate communism. Forgiveness for being a communist should not be automatic… before forgiveness must come repentance. In my view an unrepentant communist in a former communist ruled land should just be regarded as a criminal.
PdeH : Denazification only went so far. Today one hears of the foolishness of disbanding the Iraqi army because it would have provided stability following the war. After WW2, there was an enormous allied occupational presence & the former enemy was busy finding shelter & putting a meal on the table. But many, many Nazis with organizational skills (the judiciary in particular) retained their former positions & played a vital role in the rebuilding of Germany, in both West (mostly) & East. The alternative might well have been what we see in Iraq today.
Sure. And a few years after the war, could these guys band together and start up a new Nazi Party? No, they could not. As I said, the object of de-Nazification was to make it clear that you could not STILL be a Nazi if you wanted to be part of the New Germany… unlike in Eastern Europe where former communists can run for office as communists if they wish, as if it was just another political party.
…you could not STILL be a Nazi if you wanted to be part of the new Germany…
If someone had asked old Richter Knodelkopf if he was still a Nazi what might you think he would have replied? He was in the Resistance, you must surely know.
It certainly went far enough though. The fact that German schools have had such a rigid, and extensive, curriculum for the teaching of Germany’s history between 1933 and 1945, and why it must not occur again, implies that the lesson handed down during post-war reconstruction worked very well. To be fair to the Germans I hear of far more ‘Nazis’ outside of Germany than I do within their borders.
I don’t think that de-nazification and de-communisation could ever be comparable, simply because the process by which the two systems fell was so different. In many former Soviet states what slipped in with the fall of Communism was not democracy, but – stealing a comment from another post – Tony Soprano. In Russia and in many of the ‘stans he in turn managed to steal the country from the rightful heirs – those who had been given the short end of the stick under Stalin and his successors. The only interest in the west seems to have been to try and milk those same poor sods for our benefit or sell them bibles.
Given what they have ended up with, is it any wonder that some of them look back to the ‘good old days’? Can you imagine though, how bad it has got for some of them to want to return to that?
Unfortunately too, there were probably many more apologists for Stalin and his cohorts on ‘our side’ than there were for Hitler. While many stopped giving overt support in 1956 or 1968, they didn’t give up their belief in the fairy stories, rationalising what had happened into terms like “deformed workers’ state”.
Unlike many here of course I don’t subscribe to the alternative fairy stories either – what Kevin Carson calls ‘vulgar libertarianism’ is just as likely to lead to Tony Soprano. The state may not be your friend, but neither are Enron, Deloitte or Shell.
ian,
Bang-on. Absolutely spot-on. I was reading this thread and about to post something along similar lines, then I saw your post. Additional comment is not needed.
Perry – thanks for posting something “on-topic”.
I was about to ask whether Samizdata had been renamed Spaceizdata.
While deploring the wholesale spying that went on in East Germany (and, less efficiently, in the USSR), let us not forgat that the forthcoming British surveillance state – whose foundations have now passed into law – will provide the state with MORE information about the daily lives of all us, than the Stasi could ever have dreamed of.
And thanks to the power of modern information technology, they won’t need any spies at all.
No notebooks, no disguised vans, no one-way mirrors, no trench-coats; it will all happen silently and automatically, and the sheep will not notice or care.
After all, they have nothing to hide, have they?
Of course, all the communist regimes, were (and are in North Korea and Cuba) – just as bad if not worse than the Stasi regime in East Germany.
For the Western mind it’s very difficult to grasp the full extent of the horror that communism was and is. And few are interested.
It seems that many who lived under East German communism have forgotten ‘the horror’ too, judging by their nostalgia for it.
They lived shabby but peaceful lives, with their basic wants attended to in exchange for not a lot of work. Amazing though it may sound to libertarians, an awful lot of human beings– perhaps most of them– would rather have that than the chance of being ‘free’ to be swindled like today’s Russians, to have to change their jobs every few years and up sticks in the process, to be constantly presented with bewildering ‘choices’ of TV channel or fast food that turn out, when sampled, not to be all that different from one another either in price or quality.
Sociologists have built up a body of evidence that above a certain modest standard of comfort, psychic wellbeing has nothing to do with affluence or opportunities. These studies are beginning to be invoked by planners to justify freezing the standards of living of today’s debt-ridden, globally warmed westerners. ‘Progress’ will be redirected from ever-expanding consumption into saving the planet and making it feel cuddlier.
There is little evidence of widespread frustration even among Communist subjects who could see how western Europe lived, and there was absolutely no popular pressure for revolution in the late 1980s. The Comecon countries were ‘liberated’ as an accidental byproduct of the Cold War sputtering out.
Indeed the apathy and quietism of most eastern Europeans, young and old, prophesied similar tendencies in the West itself once the Reagan/Thatcher backlash against statism– limited and compromised as it was– blew itself out. As we contemplate a future of CCTV, ID cards, permanent ‘Terror’ alerts, fuel scarcity and purges of smokers, we may feel that the Warsaw Pact spirit, far from being snuffed out when the Wall came down, quietly scrambled over the rubble and began to make itself at home among the helots of globalised, irresponsible capitalism.
They call it ‘downshifting’ nowadays. Ossi Germans were downshifted by their system whether they liked it or not. Trouble is, most did like it.
Ian, there are no shortage of people who mistake being pro-business with being pro-market but that has nothing to do with ‘libertarianism’.
The Enron and Deloitte debacles were all made possible by and actually encourage by the imposition of bizarre state imposing accounting standards which actively reward book keeping which hold no relation to reality and in effect pushes companies to act in ways which are fraudulent and in the end vastly counter-productive.
Although competing rating agencies are the way of the future, at the moment they are so dependent on state mandated reporting requirements that actually tell you nothing meaningful about the operations of a company that we are no doubt doomed to more of the same corporate malfeasance for the foreseeable future.
As with most things, when you reduce the problem down far enough, the impositions of the state are usually a major contributory cause. There will always be fraud as long as there is commerce, but state regulation of corporate governance usually just changes the form it takes.
That would explain the squares full of people and mass demonstrations and Solidarity movement and…
Riiiight. And the Cold War spluttering out had nothing to do with the internal contradictions of the absurdist economic system, Regan pushing the Soviets into ever higher military spending and widespread contempt for the communist line? It just ‘happened’, sort of like the tide going out?
I think Dale Amon’s posts are very much in line with the Samizdata ‘ethos’. After all if private enterprise doesn’t tackle space no one will. I wish I could trace a wonderful short story from Analog on this theme in which New Zealand went into space on ready-made components sourced from around the world.
I was going to mention the revolution in Romania, the Berlin wall coming down, the KGB attempting to stall democratic change by coup and so and so forth, but Mr De Havilland beat me to it in a much finer way.
Surely if there had been no popular pressure and that people lived in this ‘utopia’ of minimal work for basic pay then why did so many East Germans start flooding into the West well before the Cold War ‘spluttered’ out, let alone Russians, Poles, Czechs and the rest? I’m sure you must know people who were satisfied with the endless queuing, dreadful housing, blackouts, shortages and being unable to complain about it but I have yet to meet anyone (apart from some Russians and Ukrainians living in secluded luxury for the work they carried out) who felt contented with that way of life.
Also I personally prefer ‘rid themselves of the yoke of tyrannical communist oppression’ to ‘liberated’, for what it’s worth.
There are still communist parties in western europe, never mind eastern europe! More to the point, such communist parties are not treated by the msm with anything like the same horror as that with which europe’s neo-nazi parties are treated.
Timing is critical. De-nazification in Germany was done at the right time (well of course pre-WW2 would have been the right time, but….) but the right time for de-commification passed by seventeen years ago.
De-Islamification? Surely a long way off yet… unfortunately.
Perry
… there are no shortage of people who mistake being pro-business with being pro-market but that has nothing to do with ‘libertarianism’.
I’m sure you are correct, but even setting aside for the moment which flavour of ‘libertarianism’ you are talking about, I don’t think that is a view universally held amongst commenters here…
I have a uncle who was a communist… then he got arrested, spent several years in jail, was released, finished getting his accountancy degree, and started his own business. He is now a wealthy man, and was even invited back to his university as a lecturer!
That’s rehabilitation!
Oh, here we go again. Libertarians this and libertarians that and oh, you libertarians are so silly and out of touch and people don’t really think like you, don’t ya know….
Of course not. Is that supposed to be a revelation?
I doubt there are very many people who post here or read items here who actually think that the type of minimalist philosophy generally espoused on this site is in any danger of becoming a majority opinion any time soon.
So what?
I am a radical individualist, based on the classical liberal intellectual case that the individual has, by virtue of his nature as a human being, rights to intellectual and physical liberties which may not be violated just because a group of people get together and decide to, i.e., form a state as their surrogate actor to justify their repressions.
When all is said and done, there are two basic reasons for this position, at least for me— others may have their own set of bases, that’s part of the point of it all.
All through history, men have tried to justify, explain, and find fulfillment in devotion to something other than their own humanity. (I’m not leaving women out, I just don’t feel like doing the he/she thing constantly) The early gods, the later tribal or national identities, the ideologies, the common good, the race, the class, the blood, the folk, the revolution, and, most recently, nature, Gaeia, and any animal that looks cute.
But devotion to the other leads inevitably to that other becoming the end, the goal, and humans becoming merely the means to that end.
If there is any glaring and ultimate point to the suffering and grotesque slaughter of the 20th centuries’ wars and repressive ideological excesses, it is that fanaticism in devotion to the other is a recipe for death for human beings.
Secondly, there is the utterly simple fact that no one can ever know or predict just where the spark of genius will next appear in any person. Who could have predicted Aristotle? Leonardo? Homer? Shakespeare? Edison? Einstein? The Wright brothers?
There have been a million unknown and well known people down through the millenia who have had an idea, a new way of doing it, a new design, a plan for the crops, a method for hunting successfully, an elegant solution to the problem, and who were willing to do the hard work, mentally and physically, to accomplish something meaningful.
Where do they come from? There is no formula, no secret combination of genes or bloodlines, no class boundaries, no way to ever know who will be the next man or woman that will carry the torch a little further.
So, never let any of the fanatics forget that we know. We know what they’ve done, and what they’re capable of doing again and again if we fall asleep and allow it to happen.
Liberty is a requirement of human life because nothing else can ever substitute for the fact that men and women are ends in and of themselves, and not means to some other end.
“What a pity there was nothing analogous to the process of ‘de-Nazification’ following the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Well. Ceacescu was shot. That was a good start. It’s just too bad they didn’t get to Gorbachev and Honecker in the same way.
I’m sure there are a lot of communists who would love a chance to shoot Gorbachev. He essentially let the soviet block fall apart, while the west has been lovy-dovy with him since pereztroika.
Honnecker, though probably could have stood doing a Mussolini, but, like the Serb war generals still in hiding, he has had an extensive support network.
The reason de-commification never was allowed to take is that the commies generally sold this bill of goods that the soviet bloc governments were “state capitalism” and that they wanted the more Italian flavor.
That would explain the squares full of people and mass demonstrations and Solidarity movement and…
And what? Even Solidarity often collaborated with Jaruzelski, and there was no comparable movement in any other Comecon country. There was no barricade work, no sieges, no forlorn defiance of tanks, nothing like Hungary in ’56. or even Czechoslovakia in ’68. When the Wall was dismantled, it was with the polizei looking on or even helping. East Germans even ‘rebelled’ obediently.
The ‘squares full of people’ were photo-ops, usually staged by communist party chancers positioning themselves to be at the head of the queue when privatisation started,. There were no genuine, large-scale popular uprisings, not even in Romania (except at Timisoara), and Ceacescu’s fall was an internal putsch. Most people, even more than usual, simply sat on the sidelines and waited to see which way the cat would jump.
You lot are starry-eyed about the way societies change, and the extent to which they change. All this romantic gush about throwing off yokes– do me a favour! It’s 99pc conjuring tricks. If you knew the score better you might have some impact on practical politics, but how many libertarians were victorious in the latest council elections?
Oh, I see, just another deluded revisionist.
Communism collapsed because enough people pushed the rotten edifice over, it really is that simple. As for council elections, those are for the poor fools who actually think they matter, who buy into the absurd joke that voting ’empowers’ you. Sorry but you are the one who seems mesmerized by conjuring tricks.
Quite a few that I personally know of and many of them in Camden – a London borough that has finally worked out how to throw off the yoke of Labour oppression.
So libertarians are going to win over the 99pc of humanity which has never heard of them by refusing to take part in politics?
Julian Taylor: I don’t see any Libertarian councillors listed here:
http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/content/council-and-democracy/twocolumn/local-election-results-4th-may-2006.en;jsessionid=bt2X5tF9Fl0-
The impression that you fellows live in a parallel universe is strengthened by yards and yards of stuff about space travel which nobody besides the author seems interested in commenting upon. Intergalactic escapism, I fear.
I’m afraid you’re going to have to creep out into the big bad world if you’re ever going to be noticed. It won’t come to you.
I think most of us are too busy having real lives and working at real jobs to get into politics ourselves directly. I am sure you think getting elected to a town council makes you important but in truth it really doesn’t.
There are many ways to make things happen and playing with the current political system is by no means the only way to work your will.
Blogs are not written for the commenters (in fact I always insist Samizdata contributors specifically not write with commenters in mind but rather write about what interests them personally). Moreover, there is very little correlation between an article’s comments and the number of people who read the blog.
Feel free to stay in your limited world (and I am not referring to this planet).
“I am sure you think getting elected to a town council makes you important but in truth it really doesn’t.”
Is that why you spend most of your time moaning about the eeeevil things politicians are allowed to do? Because they’re not important?
“There are many ways to make things happen and playing with the current political system is by no means the only way to work your will.”
Which must also be why you spend most of your time moaning about the eeeevil things politicians are allowed to do, even though there are other ways of working your will…
The man’s right – you’re howling at the moon.
So to not be ‘howling at the moon’, I should vote presumably?
And that would do what? And would being a member of the local town council somehow empower me in some way (well I suppose it would mean I get to profit from the state’s theft directly)?