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Camus and Navalny, The Scaffold Does Not Become Any More Liberal

Navalny

The headline – “Russian Prosecutors Urge [Alexei] Navalny Jail Term as Protests Swell-- inspires terror, but then communist Russia is no stranger to terror.

Both Lenin and Stalin relied on the terror, first introduced by Lenin and perfected during the Stalin regime, to destroy potential opponents. In exile in Mexico, Trotsky was visited by one of Stalin’s assassins who buried a hatchet in his skull.

Shortly after rising to the top of the blood-encrusted presidium, Stalin arranged “show trials” during which his victims, mostly old-line communists, were compelled to give false testimony against themselves concerning their drift from Stalinist orthodoxy, after which they were dispatched and later airbrushed from old photographs indicating their solidarity with Stalin and Lenin.

Once communism – Albert Camus in France later would call it “the socialism of the gallows” – had been firmly established in a purged Russia, Stalin brought other nations, newly free, into an inescapable Soviet orbit. Ukraine was among the first to be bloodied and then absorbed by means of Stalin’s man-made famine that Ukrainians today call the Holodomor, roughly translated as "famine-genocide."

Writing in 1987, Robert Conquest provided in his much thumbed book, “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine," a useful but seldom used data harvest, showing that upwards of 6 to 10 million people in Ukraine and the Caucasus region died of famine after Stalin, in an attempt to nationalize agriculture, confiscated and sold abroad the seed grain necessary for the 1932-33 harvest. In the midst of the terror-famine, communist cadres, eager to please Stalin, prevented resisting Ukrainian farmers from searching their already harvested fields for handfuls of grain to feed their starving families.

There were during this period a few courageous journalists who managed to smuggle the story out of Moscow. Among them were Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, a Welch journalist, both of whom left their propaganda cages in Moscow and visited the countryside to report on the famine. Muggeridge smuggled out his dispatches in diplomatic pouches and lived to tell the tale.  Jones was later murdered by communist bandits in China. The American correspondent for the New York Times, the infamous Walter Duranty, who later received a Pulitzer Prize for his tendentious reporting on Stalin’s Five Year Plan, would later remark about the victims of Stalin’s Holodomor that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.

Months after Jones' and Muggeridge's reports were printed, Duranty belatedly took a tour of the countryside and reported that he saw no signs of a famine -- no signs that 6 to 10 million people had died of starvation. Afterwards, Duranty himself, in a private conversation with British Embassy employees, placed the number of dead at 10 million. But even then he temporized in his news dispatches. Duranty was, Muggeridge said, the most accomplished liar he had met in all his years of journalism.

Like Muggeridge, like Jones, Albert Camus, writing about the Hungarian resistance to Soviet hegemony in 1957, had much to lose following his publication of his brief essay titled “Kadar Had His Day Of Fear.” Camus’ essay begins on what musicians call a dominant note: “I am not one of those who long for the Hungarian people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the stadium, and we can be generous only with our own blood. Hungarian blood has proved to be so valuable to Europe and to freedom that we must try to spare every drop of it.”

His was an essay condemning the totalitarian terror of his day. “Terror,” Camus wrote, “does not evolve except towards a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely. The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the right or the left, is the single party, and the single party has no reason to destroy itself.”

There is sound reason to be doubtful that those who refuse to remember the past clearly will be able presently to forge a future in which the struggle for liberty everywhere in the post-modern world of terror and state propaganda may gain a foothold. Camus’ essay on the suppression of the Hungarian revolt in 1957 might easily be imported to op-ed pages in every newspaper in the United States as a warning against and a remedy for a resurgent totalitarian onslaught.

China is swallowing Hong Kong as these words are being written. Iran, set back by stringent trade restrictions, may once again, during the coming Biden/Obama administration, advance as a powerful terror-wielding hegemon in the Middle East under the superintendence of smarmy Western diplomats who have forgotten yesterday, not to speak of ancient days in which Camus, almost alone in France, mourned the passing of Hungarian liberty. And Putin, having swallowed Ukrainian Crimea, is now crushing any attempt in Russia to put a period to his totalitarian pretensions through the mass arrests of courageous protestors such as Alexei Navalny and all of his supporters.

These wholesale assaults on liberty and democracy are occurring, in Camus’ words, “under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their [diplomacy] slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game,” blissfully unaware that “Terror, does not evolve except towards a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely.”

Comments

Anonymous said…
If Hitler had any redeeming value, it would be that he was not a Communist.

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