What makes the intelligentsia in most countries more amenable to left-wing fascism than right-wing? In any university common room you can be sure of warm flushes of indignation and voluble condemnation if you mention Pinochet or Franco or Mussolini, writes What makes the intelligentsia in most countries more amenable to left-wing fascism than right-wing? In any university common room you can be sure of warm flushes of indignation and voluble condemnation if you mention Pinochet or Franco or Mussolini, writes Kevin Myers.
Mention Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Lenin, Trostky or even Stalin, and suddenly opinions became shaded, softened, equivocal and contextualised.
Yet only a complete and utter fool would think there was anything admirable about Guevara, whose ambition was to turn South America into a Vietnam. And Castro is still regarded with affection across much of the Western world, though within weeks of coming to power in 1959 he had more than 500 Battista officials executed.
There has been a veritable industry built around the Holocaust and the concentration camps of the Third Reich, yet far less about the bloodier and far longer-lasting Gulag system in the Soviet Union. Of course, the attempted genocide of the Jews deserves a special place in world history, but it wasn't the first attempt during the second World War to extinguish an entire race.
That honour went to the Soviet Union, with its massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers in April 1940, long before the Final Solution became Nazi policy. Yet Katyn was denied a place in the demonology of the 20th century, just as those men who denounced the industrialised murder of Soviet Communism - such as Robert Conquest and Arthur Koestler - have traditionally been marginalised as "right-wing", a term which instantly forfeits you a respectable academic audience.
We know now that George Bernard Shaw poisonously justified Stalin's terror in the 1930s, proving not merely that the murderous policies of the Soviet state were known in the West, but also were approved. The authorities in Ulan Bator recently discovered hundreds of skulls of monks and intellectuals, all with bullet-holes in the head, some of the 30,000 people Stalin's henchmen murdered in the 1930s in the anti-Buddhist campaign which also saw the destruction of 700 monasteries.
Such a genocidal campaign by the Nazis would have been the cause of treatises and indignation; but because it was conducted by a "left-wing" government, it is airbrushed out of history. Indeed, academically fashionable histories of the Soviet Union - by E.H Carr, David Shub, Isaac Deutscher, Bertram Wolfe - traditionally took a sympathetic view of Communist atrocities: there was always a reason, or extenuating circumstance, for every evil.
And evil the regime was - evil, through and through, as Anne Applebaum's recently published Gulag rivetingly shows. The scale of the wickedness of the Soviet system was truly astronomical - and the term is for once appropriate, because it is only by the understanding by which we come to terms with the stars that we can understand what was going on in the USSR under Stalin. For example, Anne Applebaum estimates that some 28 million people became forced labourers in the Soviet Union.
She is unable to say with ease how many people died within the Gulag (which would of course not include the vast numbers who were murdered by firing squad or man-made famine). She comes up with one figure out of reluctance, because it excludes so many other categories of murder: she thinks that 2,749,163 died in the camps. But that doesn't tell the vaster story, of how many people were caused to die by Communism; she quotes the figure from The Black Book of Communism at 20 million.
But even that appalling figure cannot begin to capture the reality of the iron law of consequence: the family of each executed prisoner would be denied work or ration cards, and soon began to starve. They would have to turn to crime or prostitution to stay alive, and would themselves then be drawn into the Gulag system - to a world of summary rape, torture and casual execution. The Soviet Union was an open-air lunatic asylum of industrial brutality and mass murder.
All this was known about in the West, to a greater or lesser degree. Yet approval of the Soviet Union's barbarities has never attracted the opprobrium attached to even fringe-fascist regimes, such as Franco's or Pinochet's. And though those men were indeed perfectly vile, even in their worst moments they never came near the bloodthirsty wickedness of Lenin, or Trotsky, or Stalin, or Dzerzhinsky, or Beria.
Extraordinarily, some people in the Labour Party today were once fervent admirers of the Soviet Union. Yet no one who supported the Soviet Union through evil thick and wicked thin would be socially ostracised, as anyone who supported the Nazis or the Chilean junta certainly would have been, and still would be. We have placed murder in different categories: if someone supported murder for "socialist" reasons, he is more acceptable than he who approved of murder for "right-wing" reasons.
So James Connolly, for example, is the historical beneficiary of such non-thinking. He was not opposed to a world war, merely the grounds on which it was being fought. He sought an international conflagration to destroy capitalism and to impose totalitarian communism. His ambitions were globally evil; and, accordingly, he is revered by the morally imbecilic left. He even has a hospital named after him; and you can say this for him: he certainly would have known how to fill it.
Communism predated, provoked and outlasted fascism. It was the fons et origo of totalitarian evil. Yet there is still a tang of liberal, bien-pensant approval attached to its name. Gulag is a shocking, terrifying journey into the heart of evil triumphant: and mandatory reading for those who wish to understand the nightmare of the 20th century.