From the other came more measured accounts of his professional triumphs and the vagaries of his private life, punctuated by a steady drip of regret that he had never felt able to recant his support for the Soviet regimes of the 1930s. Even the Observer review by Neil Ascherson, a one-time pupil who spoke at his memorial service, admitted that his former tutor’s political statements up until 1956 – the year of the Hungarian uprising – “make unhappy reading”.

There is a quite a bit of unhappy reading in Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, which turns out to be overlong (650 pages of text plus another 100 or so of end-notes), over-admiring, over-defensive, and heroically over-absorbed in such weighty matters as the editorial finesse brought to bear on its subject’s autobiography, Interesting Times.

On the other hand, there are two areas in which Evans –  Regius Professor of History emeritus at Cambridge and a world authority on the Third Reich – scores highly. The first is what might be called the question of Hobsbawm’s political upbringing in pre-Nazi Germany, from which his businessman father sprang him in 1933. The second takes in his conception of what the role of a Left-wing historian in a western parliamentary democracy ought to be.

Suggested reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

To return to the intimations of contempt, there is no getting away from Hobsbawm’s inflexibility over Stalin, for it runs through his career like quartz through a rock. All very well for Evans to protest that the question put to him by Michael Ignatieff in a notorious TV interview (“What it comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?”) was “hypothetical”, but the fact remains that Ignatieff asked it and Hobsbawm by no means reluctantly answered “yes”. To Evans, the explanation lies in “tribal” loyalties: the reaction of a teenager who had seen Nazism at work, clung limpet-like to the only force he believed to be capable of opposing it, and could never quite bring himself to forswear the affiliations of his formative years.

Communism, to Hobsbawm, was never a ‘God that failed’, to borrow the title of that famous symposium from 1949 by a collective of ex-Communists headed by Arthur Koestler; it was simply a God who had made the fatal mistake of manifesting himself in the wrong place and at the wrong time: come the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he veered much closer to the traditional territory of the Labour pragmatist, for whom even an electoral pact with the LibDems was not too insensate a step if it meant the end of the hated Tories.

But as well as being a tribalist, Hobsbawm was also, as Evans shows in extravagant detail, a classic example of a type of apparatchik that Left-wing political parties of the 20th century, whether British or continental, have always hastened to attract: the intellectual guru.

In fact, Hobsbawm’s guru status, if such it was, looks to have arrived comparatively late on. He was already in his mid-sixties when he began to interview titans of the Labour movement for Marxism Today, and Evans offers amusing accounts of his sit-downs with such politicians as Tony Benn (whose diary suggests that he barely knew who his interlocutor was) and a waffling Neil Kinnock. As for his achievements in this line, Evans claims that Tony Blair “clearly felt he owed a debt to Eric for the part he had played in laying the intellectual foundations for New Labour”. And as for what this role might have amounted to, Evans is convinced that Hobsbawm helped bring about “the reorientation of the party towards an appeal to intellectuals in the broadest sense, to professionals and the urban middle classes as well as to its traditional base among the manual working class”.

Suggested reading

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

If this makes the Sage of Nassington Road – no surprise to find that the Hobsbawms lived in Hampstead and gave glamorous parties there – sound like a reformed Bolshevik gaily welcoming the Mensheviks back on board, then it should immediately be said that the guru has a long and relatively distinguished history in 20th-century British political life. If, on the Left, the role was occupied at various times by such luminaries as Keynes, Harold Laski, G.D.H. Cole and Anthony Crosland (a bona-fide Labour intellectual whose The Future of Socialism (1956) was the first serious attempt to introduce his party to consumer materialism’s encroaching tide), then the Right, too, nearly always possessed a band of intellectual heavy infantry waiting for a chance to scuttle out into no-man’s land and lob a bomb into the nearest social democratic trench.

This was especially true of the Thatcherite revolution of the early Eighties. If Mrs Thatcher was, as Sir Alfred Sherman once put it, “a person of belief rather than ideas”, then her fascination with clever men and the intellectual ballast they could bring to the task of policy formulation was undimmed. Sir Keith Joseph; Sherman himself; the stalwarts of the Institute for Economic Affairs: all them played a part in Thatcherism’s unveiling 40 years ago and the different kinds of Conservatism let rip across the body politic in the decade that followed.

Suggested reading

Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

It would be overstating the case, here in 2019, to claim that the ‘party intellectual’ is more or less extinct, for there are still gurus busily at work on either side – Lord Willetts, say, for the Conservatives, or Paul Mason, the author of Postcapitalism, for Labour. But the Hobsbawm figure – the Hampstead intellectual with his Marxist quotation, falling over himself to remind you what Bevan said to Conference in 1953 – is as dead as the dodo.

Part of this, naturally, has to do with the widespread distrust of intellectualism that infects modern politics like a distemper, and set against which the Wilson cabinet, with its clutch of Oxford firsts, looks like a meeting of the British Academy. But another part has to do with the changing nature of political loyalties. Hobsbawm’s ‘tribe’ was the pre-war Communists, a political grouping whose ideology was founded on class and hostility to nationalism and in which women were barely allowed a ringside seat. In much the same way, most of the thinking of the current Corbyn Labour Party harks back to the kind of municipal-cum-Trade Union anti-European socialism in whose crucible its leaders were forged all of 40 years ago.

None of this, alas, cuts much ice with the 20- and 30-somethings who flocked to join the party after the 2015 election, for their tribal loyalties have moved on from social class to take in such items as identity, gender and eco-activism, while the communities that sustain them are more likely to be found in cyberspace than committee rooms in London N1.

The new Hobsbawm, if such a guru could now exist, would – you might hope – be a Crosland-style figure, capable of squaring the need for state intervention with the right to personal and economic freedom and reconnoitring the very considerable task of how to live decently in an increasingly pluralist age. The Hobsbawm of Richard J. Evans’ biography was, by the end of his long life, not so much an “evil sod” as an anachronism.

This how Tanya Gold explains the controversy in a piece for GQ:

“There is a new term of abuse in politics: a ‘gammon’. It refers to a middle-aged white man of a certain political persuasion. He is a Brexiteer. He is ugly. He is a conservative. He may wear hideous trousers. And, because he is a Brexiteer and so very ugly and a conservative who may wear hideous trousers, why not call him a gammon? Particularly if you are in politics to have fun, rather than to change minds.”

The insult has been in use for a few months now, but this week a full-scale backlash kicked in. Debate has been especially intense as to whether the term is racist or not.

It is certainly lookist – refering to the persistent redness of face that comes with age and/or medical conditions like rosacea. Moreover, the whiter someone’s skin, the more obvious any excess blood flow to the skin. If mocking people on the basis of perceived physical imperfections associated with a particular ethnic group isn’t racist, then what word should we use?

Similarly if seizing upon the cruelties of the aging process to humiliate your opponents isn’t ageist, then how else can it be described?

Gold is in no doubt as to the nature of the insult:

“But calling someone a gammon is not only a stupid waste of a two-syllable word, and meal. It is also, to steal leftist language, hate speech…

“…it is the discourse of the sewer. It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. So much of this sounds like American culture wars transported, horribly and no doubt eternally, to England.”

But what if there’s nothing wrong with a bit of hate – as long it’s directed to ‘progressive’ ends? What if, like the new left, you believe that the hierarchy of privilege needs to be brought tumbling down; with those at the top humbled so those at the bottom can have their voices heard? If that is your worldview then a term of abuse that targets older, well-fed, white males could be seen a serving a progressive purpose.

Obviously you’d need to be possessed by some pretty twisted ideas to think that way. But even within the confines of such a worldview there’s still a problem with ‘gammon’, which is that, as Gold says, it “reeks of class snobbery”. Those who use the insult – “the socialist bourgeoisie” – are clearly of a higher cultural status than those they use it against. It hardly fits with all that talk of privilege.

What it does fit with, however, is the long history of elite contempt for those who attempt to better themselves without the free pass of a university education, the correct opinions or the right cultural preferences. What better symbol for the skilled working class or the ‘lower’ middle class, than gammon – a dish that hasn’t been seen at smart dinner parties since the 1970s.

Further reading

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

But does any of this really matter? As Adam Bienkov tweeted this week its not as if the ‘gammons’ are facing any real discrimination:

“No ‘gammon’ is not a racial slur. Nobody has ever been abused in the street, denied service or threatened with deportation because they’re an angry old white man with cheeks like two slices of Wiltshire.”

I wonder, though, whether we have to wait for hate speech to be acted upon before considering it hateful.

And let’s not forget that in other times and places, ‘gammons’ or people like them have been the target of the most horrific persecution. Look at the history of the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, and you see how the verbal abuse of ‘class enemies’ went hand-in-hand with mass murder. For instance, the liquidation of the ‘kulaks‘ in the USSR or of the ‘funong‘ in China – and indeed of anyone resisting the march of socialism. Up against some stiff competition, left-wing class hatred was the most murderous force of the 20th century.

Am I making a direct comparison between Corbynite trash talk on Twitter and the horrors of a darker age? No, because I’m not – I would contend – a complete idiot. However, as with hateful, contemptuous language anywhere else on the political spectrum, all of us should be mindful of the precedents.

Koko (“I’ve got a little list”), The Mikado

Why did the story of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and the Czech spy gain so little traction? Is it because, as UnHerd’s editor Tim Montgomerie believes, a critical percentage of younger people are basically relativists who see no absolute virtue in Britain? Do they believe the former Soviet Union, and for that matter Corbyn’s other interlocutors, the IRA, legitimately saw (and Communist recidivists still see) Britain as being just as badly flawed as all other nations?

Or is it a significant case of amnesia, perhaps even nescience?

No history, only “news”?

The median voter’s age at the last general election was 40; the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, when the median voter was in his/her early teens. The Warsaw Pact – more correctly the Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance – of which Czechoslovakia was a key member, melted away even earlier. Declared disbanded at a meeting of Pact foreign ministers in February 1991, in reality, it had ceased to be in December 1989 when the violent anti-Communist revolution in Romania – President Ceausescu and his wife summarily shot – passed without military intervention by other member states.

That was 28 years ago. The Warsaw Pact is “history”.

Besides, haven’t the relativists got a point: wasn’t the Pact formed (in 1955) only because Nato had admitted the newly independent Federal Republic of Germany?

That is how a narrow chronologist might see it: post hoc ergo propter hoc[1.  The logical fallacy “after this, therefore because of this.”]. However, in 1955, the USSR was the occupying power in several Eastern Bloc countries still. Moscow wanted to maintain control over their military forces and of those of countries they had occupied in 1945 but subsequently withdrawn from under the Yalta agreement with the former Western Allies (having first made sure there was a Moscow-oriented Communist government in place) – notably Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was indeed a key Eastern Bloc country. It shared a long border with the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and Poland, and like the DDR it was on the frontline with the Federal Republic of Germany. If it ever came to war with Nato, the Soviet-equipped Czechoslovak army and air force would have a key role. Moscow’s influence in Prague was therefore of the essence.

Nothing illustrates this better than the events of 50 years ago: the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion by Soviet troops. Early in 1968, the Moscow-loyalist Antonin Novotny was ousted as head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and replaced by the more liberal Alexander Dubcek. The new government ended censorship and announced a plan for reform. Moscow and the Czechoslovak hardliners became alarmed, and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, decided to intervene to restore a pro-Soviet regime.

The invasion in August 1968 took the West by surprise. Moscow had moved troops from the Soviet Union, and Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary, Poland, the DDR and Bulgaria, into place under the cover of Pact military exercises. They quickly took control of Prague and other major cities, as well as communications and transport links. Dubcek, fearing a bloodbath like that during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, had ordered the army not to resist.

Remember dead Czechs

Brezhnev had calculated correctly: the United States condemned the invasion, but as with Hungary, did not intervene.[2.  US involvement in Vietnam was escalating, and the 1945 sentiment of non-intervention in the Soviet sphere of influence still prevailed (although Stalin broke his promise of free elections given at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and at Potsdam in July/August).]. The invasion of Czechoslovakia was bloody enough, however: 137 civilians were killed, and 500 seriously wounded.

That summer and autumn the USSR Symphony Orchestra was touring Britain, with the great cellist Rostropovich. I went to Sheffield to hear them. The steps of the City Hall were lined with students chanting “Remember dead Czechs when you clap at the end”.

To my eternal shame, I did go in, and I clapped at the end. My excuse is that I was in my teens. I shall never forget it.[3.  Rostropovich played at the Proms on 21 August, the evening after the invasion. It was the orchestra’s debut at the Royal Albert Hall, and by extraordinary chance the programme included Dvorak’s cello concerto. After the performance, before which there had been heckling and demonstrations, the Rostropovich and the orchestra were cheered by the audience. Rostropovich stood and held aloft the conductor’s score of the Dvorak as a gesture of solidarity with the composer’s homeland. He was later excluded from foreign tours, and left the Soviet Union in 1974.]

The following year, I was in uniform, and my next 20 were dominated by the Warsaw Pact threat (with occasional distractions by the IRA). As the desk officer for Central Europe in the MoD’s directorate of military operations in the 1980s, when Jeremy Corbyn is alleged to have got cosy with Czech intelligence and holidayed in that famous tourist attraction, the old DDR, I was certainly mindful of the Sheffield students’ chant, for there were longer-term consequences of the Warsaw Pact invasion.

Dubcek having been forced from power, the new leadership had quickly re-established censorship and movement controls. Czechoslovakia became once more a cooperative and highly effective member of the Pact. If in doubt, read John Le Carré. Not for nothing does the Státní bezpečnost (StB), the Czechoslovak state security service, feature prominently in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. As an intelligence-gathering and counter-intelligence organization, the StB was second only to that of the USSR.

Suggested reading

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Allan Mallinson

With the success of the invasion, an emboldened Soviet leadership promulgated what would become known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. This held that Moscow had the right to intervene in any country where a communist government was threatened. It would be the primary justification for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and it was what neutralised Solidarity’s resistance in Poland in 1982 after the government of General Jaruzelski had crushed the opposition the previous year.[4.  “Solidarity” was the trade union founded in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk under the leadership of Lech Walesa, the first union in a Warsaw Pact country that was not controlled by a communist party. Membership reached nearly ten million, a third of the working-age population.] Fear of invasion spurred Jaruzelski’s repression, while at the same time tempering the resistance.

The Brezhnev Doctrine required the active cooperation of the Warsaw Pact as a whole, but especially, in the case of Poland, that of Czechoslovakia; for Lower Silesia, one of the strongholds of opposition, lay along the Czech border. Prague under President Gustav Husak – “Hero of the Soviet Union” – was certainly cooperative. In any case, the Soviet troops that had invaded in 1968 were still there (and would not leave until 1991).

For a trade unionist, such as Corbyn, Czechoslovakia in the 1980s ought not have been an attractive country to side with.

But history is never over

It’s all a long time ago of course. I was minded of this recently when I went to another concert, this time the Czech Philharmonic. Besides being an unusually masculine orchestra – more so even than the Vienna Philharmonic (I counted only four women) – they are a very youthful one. Indeed, the leader and the principal cello could not have been born when the Warsaw Pact disbanded, let alone seen the 1968 invasion. I trust they know, however, what their parents’ generation went through. They will have been reminded of it recently by news of their prime minister, Andrej Babis, a Slovak-born billionaire businessman. A court has just rejected his demand by to be cleared of cooperation with the former StB.

A long time ago, but old sins cast long shadows.

Perhaps the 50th anniversary of the invasion will remind the median voters in Britain that the former Warsaw Pact regimes underpinned what President Ronald Reagan called “The Evil Empire” (the USSR), and that they were not simply alternative, equally valid and virtuous, forms of government.

There are, however, persistent “useful idiots”, as Lenin is supposed to have called them – willing dupes of Communism – who are prepared to relativise everything. On BBC’s Question Time last week, the former Labour deputy prime minister, Lord (John) Prescott, excused Jeremy Corbyn’s contacts with the enemies of Britain by saying that William Whitelaw (Margaret Thatcher’s deputy) and John Major when prime minister also talked to the IRA.

Yes, he really said that.

To Lord Prescott, like Mr Corbyn, treason, to paraphrase Talleyrand, does indeed appear to be ultimately a matter of dates.

Three important questions are begged here which require much more detailed investigation given the long term impacts on political discourse.

1. First, is this a cohort or age effect?  The equality versus freedom numbers suggest the former: younger people since the War (at least) have placed huge value on freedom.  How much has that changed and why?
2. Second, what do different ages understand by ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’?  Communism seems to many Millennials a mere throwback to a former age while capitalists feature currently in discourse over how Western economies are run.
3. Finally, and most intractable of all, to what extent is the political angst of younger age groups caused by frustration at government inability to tackle the consequences of social breakdown and a fragmented society?  For example, Western governments ignore the avalanche of statistics showing the personal and societal costs of family breakdown, while legislating to make divorce easier and legalise civil partnerships for all.  By failing to tackle the underlying causes of societal breakdown all governments can do is play political ‘splat the rat’ by trying to fix the consequences of failed social policies.  Is Millennial flirting with far left policies a cry of ‘do something’ in the face of failing government interventions, despite ever more cash being thrown at the problems?

Without understanding fundamental drivers of generational behaviour, we fail to prepare for the political fallout from what currently looks to be the most significant shift in values in living memory.

***

> Introduction to this Under-reported series | All Under-reported articles.

Although millions were incarcerated in Soviet labour camps, often in the most terrible conditions, there were no newsreel cameras to record their liberation (photographers would have been shot and there was no liberation to record). Released prisoners were too frightened to speak out; former inmates were shunned, denied employment and education, and banned from living in any major cities. By contrast with Willy Brandt’s ‘kniefall’ before the Warsaw ghetto monument, there has been no act of national repentance for excesses of the Soviet Communist era. Today, gulag survivors and their families see Russia governed by a former member of the state body which, in an earlier incarnation, also comprised their guards and executioners.

Soviet Communism’s repression of its citizens represents one of the great crimes against humanity of the 20th Century but the lack of public awareness of it in the West is not only due to the repressors’ success in hiding their tracks. Western enthusiasts for Lenin’s ‘great experiment’ alternately looked the other away, denied the evidence, or actively supported the Moscow regime.

I first became aware of this while I was writing about the Siberian gulag. I came across impassioned speeches in the House of Lords in the early 1930s on behalf of over a million smallholding peasants, the ‘kulaks’, who had been deported in convoys of cattle cars to the far reaches of the Soviet Union. Given only few hours to quit homes they had been born and raised in, many hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were despatched to cut timber for the Soviet export trade. The largest customer for this slave-cut timber was Britain. At today’s prices, it was a trade was worth over £500m a year. Russian logs were the ‘blood diamonds’ of their day.

Intrigued and horrified, I dug deeper. What I found was disturbing. The Labour Party was in government then but had not only denied the eye witness accounts that filtered out from escaped prisoners; ministers had obstructed all attempts to halt the trade and the Cabinet had even blocked an enquiry into conditions in the camps.

A number of questions followed:  Did Labour really know of what was going on? And if they did how could a party which was founded to speak up on behalf of the poor and marginalised ignore such appeals? If they had been deceived about Soviet Communism, how far back did that deception go? How widespread was it? Why were they duped? My original work was laid aside and I began work on what eventually became my book, Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left, published earlier this year.

Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party, had written of Socialism that it was “the greatest revolutionary ideal that has ever fired the imagination”. Labour’s pre-war Socialism, the variant now coming back in vogue under Jeremy Corbyn, was very different from the social democracy favoured by many Nordic countries today. True Socialism, derived from Marx, involved bringing society and the economy under the control the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and was regarded as the essential precursor to a fully Communist state. Labour enthusiasts had spoken openly of their hopes for Socialist revolution in Britain: they welcomed the Revolution of October 1917 and looked upon Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their political cousins. In Russia, the world’s first Socialist state, they saw their hopes made flesh, a model to be admired, possibly copied, and, most importantly, to be supported and defended against attacks from the old European imperialist regimes.

In the cause of that defence, Labour’s Soviet enthusiasts put themselves through extraordinary logical contortions and moral compromises, most of which have been either ignored or excused by modern Labour historians. My problem, writing about the phenomenon, was not the lack of evidence but cataloguing its abundance.

You don’t have to look far to see it – from Labour Solicitor General Stafford Cripps’ defence of the Soviet death penalty as “just”, the year after 30,000 kulaks were shot without trial, to the Labour trade minister who defended the gulag system in Parliament as “a vast and very remarkable experiment” which the Soviets were “entitled to pursue without outside interference”.  “I say”, he added, “let the experiment continue. Let us give all the co-operation we can.” And few people today know that, in the early 1920s, the British trades unionists nearly pushed our own country over into Communist revolution, backing off at the moment as their nerve failed; or that the Soviets, with the help of British supporters and some Labour MPs, ran a such a substantial money-laundering racket that it halved the price of diamonds on the London gem market. The proceeds provided millions for British revolutionary groups and the bulk of IRA’s finance for two years.

Some reactions are still hard to fathom. How could George Strauss, the future Labour peer, stand up in Parliament and insist that conditions in gulag camps were “very much more favourable than in our English prisons”? Clement Attlee, not known in the post war years as a Soviet enthusiast, was in Moscow in 1937 and witnessed the fevered atmosphere of mass arrests and show trials. He returned to Britain and praised the Soviet Union for “building a new society based on social justice.” That was said at the height of the Great Terror, during which 680,000 people were shot.

With the honourable exception of RH Tawney, Labour intellectuals were captivated en masse. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the LSE, became Stalin’s most vocal apologists; In 1946, Harold Laski lauded the “high and benevolent purposes of the Russian Communist Party” before commending the “controls” it put in place “to exclude the democratic idea of freedom from the life of the Russian citizen.” GDH Cole, the Labour theorist and mentor of future British Labour leaders, was recently claimed by John McDonnell, alongside Marx and Lenin, as an inspiration. Cole wrote in 1942 that, even allowing Soviet Communism’s “barbaric features”, post-war Britain would be better governed by Stalin than by social democrats. George Bernard Shaw, considered in his day to be Labour’s greatest propagandist, went so far as to commend Soviet secret police executions as a necessary “weeding of the garden”.

Journalists, too, bear their own responsibility. In 1931, as protests by British members of the public over the deportations mounted, the Manchester Guardian (forerunner of today’s Guardian) told its readers that “so long as the people submit to be disciplined and regimented in the name of Socialism, or any other name, it is not for us to interfere, only to watch this amazing triumph of human endurance.” Twenty thousand deportees, most of them children, had died in the previous year yet leading Socialist commentator HN Brailsford defended the “rashness and severity” of the round-ups as “the excess of a great quality”, adding “we can afford to be tolerant if men working at this pace … express themselves roughly”.

From time to time, particularly when evidence emerged that non-Bolshevik Socialists were being persecuted, Labour’s support briefly faltered, only to be re-established as soon as doubts could be suppressed. The colossal task set themselves by the Russian Socialists, insisted George Lansbury, speaking as Labour leader in 1933, “should be supported by all lovers of the race. We are not called upon to judge or accept all the means they adopt to attain their ends.”

As Anthony Eden observed of Labour’s refusal to acknowledge Soviet human rights abuses, “there are none so blind as those who are determined not to see.” Sadly, the modern Left’s refusal to accept the failure of Socialism in Venezuela and its retrospective apologia for Soviet and East German Communism show that that blindness is as strong as ever.

But for all the horrors of the twentieth century – and those more recently – the Holocaust stands as the most thoroughgoing and explicit demonstration of humanity’s capacity for evil. As Churchill wrote: “The Final Solution is probably the greatest, most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

This is not about some sick contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner. It is, rather, that we can only truly understand the lessons of the Holocaust if we acknowledge what made it unique.

A useful starting point is with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a survivor who escaped to Britain after a year at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (His elder brother, who would not leave Germany, was murdered by the Nazis.) For Fackenheim, four characteristics of the Holocaust separated it from other examples of mass murder.

First, the mere fact of being born Jewish was itself enough to merit extermination. (And the definition was – in modern parlance – as inclusive as possible, to ensure that no trace of Judaism would be left on earth.) Many Poles and Russians were also murdered by the Nazis, but their death was not pre-determined by Nazi ideology as a fundamental requirement – although Gypsies were also murdered for the crime of existing.

So secondly, the sole purpose of the Final Solution was to wipe out every Jew from the face of the earth. An entire people would be extinguished. Other genocides have targeted groups or races for mass murder; but they were not designed to remove them in their entirety. The Turkish genocide of Armenians or the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, for example, were both unspeakable crimes. But they did not have all of Fackenheim’s four characteristics of the Holocaust.

Thus Fackenheim’s third unique characteristic was that there was no economic, political or territorial goal which the Final Solution was designed to leverage. The Final Solution was its own purpose. It was not part of the larger territorial war but it was nonetheless considered to a fundamental part of the Third Reich’s war effort. The two were equal in importance and so there was no significant internal dissent from the idea that resources that could have been used in war were instead used to exterminate the Jews.

It is this third characteristic that is perhaps the most rationally inexplicable of all elements of the Holocaust – that it had no purpose other than the murder of an entire people for the sake of their murder.

Fourthly, as Daniel Goldhagen further elaborated in his seminal 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Holocaust was carried out not by a cadre of committed ideologues or committed soldiers but by ordinary Germans – what Fackenheim described as “ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job.”

Goldhagen argued that the overwhelming majority of Germans were “willing executioners” because of the “eliminationist antisemitism” which had taken hold in German political culture over many centuries. Crucially, he destroyed the comfortable myths that most Germans knew nothing of the Holocaust – and that it was only the SS and not the Wehmarcht who murdered Jews. As the Holocaust scholar Franklin Littell wrote: “The death camps were designed by professors and built by Ph.D.s.” Civilised Germans – doctors, architects and writers – tortured and murdered Jews while Bach and Wagner played in the background, testing to see what levels of pain could be survived or, as Auschwitz’s chief physician, Dr Joseph Mengele, enjoyed himself, sewing twin children together to create a “Siamese pair” to test their behaviour.

Why does it matter if the Holocaust was unique? For Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, also a survivor, the memory and the potency of the Holocaust have to be permanently renewed because “to forget would mean to kill the victims a second time. We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to be killed again.”

But there is something more obvious, too. As George Santanya put it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Repeat the Holocaust? That is unthinkable. But repeat elements of it? It happened once. That alone ought to be enough to worry us.

As we consider the various catastrophes of the twentieth century, it is not only statisticians who can cause such eruptions, but partisan statisticians in particular.  Thanks to the recent film Denial, the case of fascist historians like David Irving have been made familiar to a wide public.  Although it does not come out especially clearly in the film, in the book which provoked the libel trial depicted in the film (Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory by Deborah Lipstadt) the motivation is clear.  ‘Historians’ like Irving engaged in two games at once.

The first was to diminish the number of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, to chip away at the six million figure and come up with as a low a number of victims as they thought they could get away with (a figure that often culminated in the figure zero).  At the same time they focused their energies on events such as the Allied bombing of Dresden and worked away to inflate the numbers killed in those raids. By this manoeuvre they hoped to be able to show that the Allies were at least as bad or even worse than the Nazis.  Such are the exposed sins of fascist historians.  The whole world is now familiar with them.

Yet since the dawn of the communist experiment, exactly one hundred years ago, precisely the same tricks have been used by communist historians and admirers, but with infinitely more success.  From the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty[1.  The US-based Victims of Communism have launched annual Duranty awards in ‘honour’ of people who whitewash communism in our own times.] in the 1920s and ’30s right up to Seamus Milne (previously a Guardian columnist and now senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn) in the present, the crimes of communism have been covered up (as in the case of Duranty) or downplayed (as in the case of Milne).  Noticeable among the traits of those who perform this task is that they are the self-same people as those most eager to presume – and parrot – the highest deaths-tolls attributed to the side of any capitalist, democratic society engaged in any conflict anywhere.

Suggested reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

Yet while the Irvings get the obloquy that they deserve, the careers of the Milnes of this world are not damaged in the same way.  Why is this?  The main cause – as even anti-communist historians like Robert Conquest have been willing to admit – is that fascism somehow ‘seems’ worse than communism.  There remain many people who think that communism was not as bad as fascism, not because it didn’t claim more victims but because those victims were claimed in a somehow ‘noble’ endeavour.  Perhaps now that we are a century on from the dawn of both experiments all can be seen in a clearer, and less competitive, light.

In recent months I have been speaking to people who study communism and its effects as well as some of those who suffered those effects.  The resulting documentary for UnHerd was introduced by Tim Montgomerie yesterday, and can be downloaded and listened to via his introduction or, for example, on iTunes.

One thing that has struck me throughout the making of the documentary is the extent to which the victims of communism are still being fought over as if they were some kind of political football.  Perhaps it is understandable that many people on the political Left remain unwilling to dwell on these crimes because they would like to disassociate themselves as much as possible from them.

But it is striking that when people on the political right dwell on these crimes they themselves are often accused of doing so for partisan political reasons.  Of course there are some people who may have a tendency to try to seize the communist dead to make a short-term political point.  But for many people of any political tendency and none the worries about the lack of consideration of the crimes of communism is not about politics but about fear.

When the death-toll from communism comes up it is more often in the hope that people will remember the wretchedness of the experiment not in order for some other system to triumph but in order to prevent the communist experiment from being repeated.  As I point out in the documentary there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the memory of communism outside the countries which it ravaged is disturbingly weak.

Startlingly few young people even know of the central figures – Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot – let alone know any of the specifics of their crimes.  Every day there are anecdotal examples of the attitudes that this inculcates.  Just yesterday somebody told me of the reaction of bookshop worker in New York when they arrived at the till to purchase a copy of the latest biography of Lenin.  The employee at the till apparently said, “Ah Lenin. I love Lenin.”

It remains inconceivable, even now, to imagine arriving at the till of a bookshop in America or Britain with a biography of General Franco or Adolf Hitler and for the worker to say, “Franco. I love Franco”.  Let alone Hitler.  If such a thing were said it would cause a sacking within minutes, be news within the hour and within the day would become the subject of endless opinion pieces talking about the incipient return of fascism.

This then is the oddity of the crimes of communism.  Not only that the crimes remain badly remembered, or misremembered, but that the potential lessons (such as ‘don’t try this again’) are dwindling.  You don’t need to be seeking to diminish the crimes of fascism to get involved in the debate about the crimes of communism.  You just need to have a desire to be honest about history and to learn its lessons.  One way to do so is – as in this documentary – is to listen to the voices of those who are dying out but who saw the horrors of which the communist systems were capable.

We recognise that we owe such a duty to the victims of fascism.  That is one reasons why the British government has committed itself to the erection of another Holocaust memorial in the centre of London alongside the Houses of Parliament.  That monument is not only intended to pay tribute to the dead but also to inoculate the living.  Though (as we argue in the documentary) there are people who would like to similarly memorialise the victims of communism in London[2.  These and related organisations will be profiled on UnHerd next week as we run a series of features on “Communism’s Forgotten Victims“].  there is at present no similar political support for such a project.  This is a great and growing shame.  Of course Britain never suffered from the direct local effects of communism – but then the same can be said of fascism.

What we do recognise is that there is a virtue and purpose in remembering fascism.  We need not become statisticians to recall the crimes of communism.  Nor people trying to wage some ongoing political or cultural war.  We need simply to be human beings, who wish to pay honest tribute to the sufferings of the past and express an appropriate caution over some of those solutions being suggested for our collective future.

Presented by Douglas Murray and produced by Sean Glynn – and which you can listen to, via Soundcloud, below –  examines our failure to remember the victims of communism, in the way that we, rightly, remember the victims of Nazi-ism.

Within this 35 minute production, Douglas travels to Budapest and to that city’s House of Terror museum. It is actually the location in the heart of the Hungarian capital where, first, the country’s fascists tortured and imprisoned their opponents and, later, using similar techniques and often against  the very same people, communists sought to neutralise their opponents. Very unusually the museum, open since 2002, records the horrors of the two periods in Hungarian history, by the two sets of totalitarian ideologies, with equal prominence. Having travelled to Budapest myself, a couple of years ago, I can testify to what Douglas recounts in the documentary – it’s a harrowing experience  to witness the parallel barbarities under the roof where they were carried out.

Talking to a wide range of people including David Aaronovitch, Anne Applebaum, Janos Horvath, David Pryce Jones and Giles Udy, Douglas explores why the communist ideology that killed many more people than Nazi Germany – and in many more parts of the world, from Russia to China and to Cambodia – is so poorly remembered in art, education or in public monuments and museums. He begins by noting that young people in Britain might overwhelmingly and correctly identify Adolf Hitler as a source of evil. Most, tragically, don’t even know who Lenin or Mao or Pol Pot are.

In modern day Russia, “comrade Stalin” is almost hero worshipped with 38% believing that the former leader of the Soviet Union was and is the most outstanding person of history. Douglas and his guests attempt to understand why communist leaders, at least as soaked in human blood as Adolf Hitler, have got away with their crimes. The common explanation is that, unlike Nazism, the communist goal of equality excuses those who allegedly sought it and helps explain why communism remains attractive to so many young people who wear ‘CCCP’ on their t-shirts or to British Labour Party leaders who attend communist-sympathising May Day gatherings. In reality, the pursuit of that goal makes communism more dangerous. It gives the thugs that inevitably lead red-starred regimes to have the ends-justifying-means excuses to kill, starve, torture and imprison anyone who gets in their way.

I also believe that there is a reluctance among some western governments to build museums to communism’s victims when, for example, they are trying to kow tow to what is still a communist regime in Beijing.

Tomorrow, Douglas will use his regular Friday slot to write about his documentary. Then, throughout next week, we’ll publish other features on this topic. We will, for example, note the unique nature of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews and will also explore the appropriateness of attempts by the likes of James Bartholomew to establish a Museum of Communist Terror in London.

Other UnHerd documentaries

This is the fourth of UnHerd’s audio documentaries – all produced for us by Sean Glynn.

• The first examined whether a rolling, 24/7 news culture is damaging western democracies.
• The second – presented by Juliet Samuel – assessed the health of our capitalist economic system ten years after the crash.
• The third – presented by our technology editor, Nigel Cameron – looked at the case for (and against) Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg becoming the next US President.

You might also be interested in the short film we made about the pioneering anti-monopolies journalist – Ida Tarbell.

Please go to our podcasts and videos page for more – or follow us on Twitter to ensure you learn quickly about all of UnHerd’s podcasts, articles and events.