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| 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.”
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