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Whether intentional or not, when dealing with this ignorance of the criminal dimensions of Communism, our contemporaries' indifference to their fellow humans can never be forgotten. It is not that these individuals are coldhearted. On the contrary, in certain situations they can draw on vast untapped reserves of brotherhood, friendship, affection, even love.

How could all these well-meaning people continue to harbor utopian delusions about their academic faith? To some extent, it's a matter of geographic accident. Unlike the crimes of the Nazis, communist atrocities mostly took place far from the Western heartland. Nor were they ever filmed or exposed by conquering armies. The Soviet Union ended World War II both as a victor and as a Western ally, and was able to profitably ride the wave of "anti-fascism." To those in the West, in the wake of a devastating world war in which the forces of humanism ultimately triumphed, it was simply beyond imagining that one mode of totalitarian genocide had largely been defeated by another. The likelihood of Steven Spielberg ever making a film about the Cheka killing Cossack girls with sledgehammers is remote indeed. Marxism will never have a Holocaust chained to its ankles because those 65 million corpses in China never made it to the screen. The iconic is indeed, alas, more powerful than the ironic.

In the end, though, the "Black Book's" body counts -- necessary as they are -- are less important than the soul-destroying connections between Marxist idealism and the violence committed in its name. Who are the "bourgeoisie," after all, whom humanitarians like Berman have for a century reviled as "bestial," "vile," "cancerous," "murderous" and "bloodsucking"? Are we not reminded of that other phantom scapegoat of anti-capitalist ravings, the Jew? But Berman, unlike the writers of the "Black Book," cannot tell us who his villains actually are, any more than Stalin could. For that is how revolutionary ideology works. The bourgeoisie, like all internal enemies, is undefined and nameless, sometimes little more than a nebulous synonym for civilization itself. It is described as a bacteria, a plague. But in the end it is merely everyone: Berman, Marx, you and I.

In the world of Baboeuf, we are all candidates for the guillotine.
salon.com | Aug. 30, 1999

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