Excerpts from Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin:
History and
Criticism
of a Black Legend
Translator:
Matthew Klinestiver
Preface
The following excerpts are translated from the 2011
French edition of Italian philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin:
storia e critica di una leggenda near
(Carroci
Press, 2008).1Losurdo’s
book is one of the only contemporary, nonRussian, “revisionist” accounts
of Stalin’s leadership. The only recent book of a similar stripe is professor
Grover Furr’s Khruschev Lied:The Evidence That Every “Revelation”
of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) Crimes in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech”
to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on
February 25, 1956, is Provably False(Erythros Press, 2011).2
Aside from French, Stalin: storia e critica di una
leggenda near has been translated into Spanish (Stalin: historia y crítica una leyanda
negra, El Viejo Topo, 2010) and German (Stalin: Geschichte und Kritik
einer schwarzen Legende,Papyrossa, 2012) editions. Unsurprisingly, no English translation is
forthcoming.
Included among Losurdo’s more recent works are: Liberalism:
A CounterHistory (Verso, 2014), Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns (Duke University Press, 2004), and Heidegger
and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West
(Humanity Books, 2001).
The translator has added all footnotes, and, moreover, assumes all
responsibility for any errors or inconsistencies in the text.
Pages 31 to 35
1.2 The Great Patriotic War and the “inventions” of
Khrushchev
Translator’s
introduction to Sections 1.2 and 1.3:
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” sent shock waves
through the entire world, and dealt a severe blow to the international
communist movement. In the speech, was called “On the Cult of Personality and
its Consequences,” Khrushchev condemned the achievements of his predecessor,
Joseph Stalin, accusing him, among other things, of selfdeification and
military incompetence. In this section of his book, Losurdo focuses on the
latter of these allegations. And, using archival material, he attempts to
reveal that Khrushchev’s assertions were entirely without merit. In Section
1.2, he shows that Stalin had made serious preparations for war, something that
Khrushchev emphatically denied. Then, in section 1.3, he shows that Stalin was
a perceptive and strategic wartime commander further discrediting Khrushchev’s
attack.
After the battle of Stalingrad and the defeat
suffered by the Third Reich (a power which had, up to then, seemed invincible),
Stalin gained enormous prestige across the world. And, accordingly, Khrushchev
specifically touched on this matter in his “Secret Speech.” He described, in
catastrophic terms, the military unpreparedness of the Soviet Union, claiming
that its army was, in some cases, lacking the most elementary weapons.
However a study that seems to have been produced by the German military,
or which, in any case, makes much use of their military archives, directly
opposes this view. It speaks of “the superiority of the Red Army in assault
tanks, planes, and artillery pieces.” Moreover, it notes that “the industrial
capacity of the Soviet Union has attained
dimensions which have provided the Soviet armies with a practically
unimaginable level of armament.” This is a sentiment that only intensifies with
the approach of Operation Barbarossa.3
One piece of data is particularly telling: in 1940, the Soviet Union
produced 358 tanks of the most advanced type, of significantly higher quality
than was available to other armies, but in just the first half of the next
year, it produced 150,336 [1]. Furthermore, documents from the Russian archives
hold that, at least during the two years preceding the aggression of the Third
Reich, Stalin was literally obsessed with the problem of “quantitative
expansion” and “qualitative improvement of the entire military.”
Some information speaks for itself. While in the
first Soviet five year plan, the amount spent on defense was 5.4% of total
state expenditures, by 1941 it had reached 43.4%; “in September 1939, at the
order of Stalin, the Politburo made the decision to build nine new airplane
factories before 1941”; and, at the moment of Hitler's invasion, “Soviet
industry had produced 2,700 modern aircraft and 4,300 tanks” [2]. Judging from
this information, one could say anything but that the USSR had been unprepared
for their tragic entry into the war.
Moreover, a decade ago, an American historian
inflicted a severe blow to the myth that the Soviet leader had collapsed and
fled immediately after the Nazi invasion:
3 “Operation Barbarossa” was the German’s code name
for their June 22nd,1941 surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
“although shaken, on the day of the attack, Stalin convened a meeting
with party bosses, and government and military officials, a practice he
continued in the course of the next few days” [3]. We also now have a registry
of visitors to Stalin's office in the Kremlin, first discovered in the early
90s. It shows that in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Soviet leader
engaged himself intensely in planning the resistance. These were days and
nights characterized by an “exhausting,” but orderly, amount of activity. In
every case, “the whole episode [recounted by Khrushchev] is totally invented,”
and the “story is false” [4].
In reality, from the very beginning of Operation
Barbarossa, not only did Stalin make extremely difficult decisions, arranging
for the movement of people and industrial sites that were close to the front,
but “he retained minute control of everything, from the size and shape of the
bayonets to the Pravda headlines and who wrote the articles” [5]. There was no
trace of panic or hysteria. Read, for example, the diary of [Georgi] Dimitrov,
a witness, which says: “At 7 am, I was urgently summoned to the Kremlin.
Germany had attacked the USSR. The war had started [...] Stalin and the others
had quiet strength, and incredible confidence.”
The immediate clarity of his ideas is even more
striking. It is necessary not only to move forward with the “general
mobilization of our forces,” but also to define a policy framework. Indeed, he
declares that “only the communists can defeat the fascists,” putting to an end
the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Third Reich. But, at the same time, it
won't do to lose sight of the real nature of the conflict: “The [communist]
parties are launching a movement for the defense of the USSR. Don't ask about
the socialist revolution. The Soviet people are conducting a patriotic war
against fascist Germany. The question is one of the defeat of fascism that can only mean the enslavement of a whole host of peoples” [6]. This is the
political strategy that would govern the Great Patriotic War. 4
Several months prior, Stalin had already emphasized
that the Third Reich's expansionism, “was a sign of the subjugation and the
submission of other peoples” who responded with just wars of national
aggression and national liberation (see below, 5.3). For another thing, the
Communist International had taken care to respond to those who scholastically
opposed socialist patriotism and internationalism, even before Hitler's
aggression, as is reported in a note in Dimitrov's diary, dated May 12, 1941:
We must develop the idea of a marriage between healthy and
wellunderstood nationalism and proletarian internationalism. Proletarian
internationalism is based on commingling of the nationalisms of many countries
[...] there can be no contradiction between healthy nationalism and proletarian
internationalism. Rootless cosmopolitans, refusing the national sentiment and
the idea of the homeland, have nothing to do with proletarian internationalism
[7].
Far from being a improvised and desperate reaction
to the situation created by the onset of Operation Barbarossa, the strategy of
the Great Patriotic War expressed a theoretical orientation of a more general
character one that had matured over a long
4 The Soviet name for World War II.
period: internationalism, and the international movement for the
emancipation of peoples, concretely advanced the wave of national liberation,
which was made necessary because of Hitler's attempt to resume and radicalize
the colonial tradition, with the goal of subjecting and enslaving the allegedly
servile races of Eastern Europe.
The same sentiments are taken up in the speeches and statements made by
Stalin over the course of the war. They constituted “significant milestones in
the clarification of Soviet military strategy and political objectives, and
they played an important role in reinforcing popular morale [8]; they also took
on an international significance, as an annoyed Goebbels observed about a
Soviet radio announcement issued on July 3rd, 1941, which “created a huge
amount of admiration in England and the USA” [9].
1.3 A series of disinformation campaigns and
Operation Barbarossa
Khrushchev’s report has lost all credibility even
at the level of military operations. According to him, Stalin, ignoring all “warnings”
about the immanence of invasion, confronted the impending danger irresponsibly.
But, does this accusation have any basis in truth?
Everyone knows that even information from a
friendly country may prove to be incorrect. For example, on June 17th, 1942,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned Stalin about an impending Japanese attack – an
attack that, of course, never materialized [10]. Especially on the eve of
Hitler's aggression, the USSR was forced to come to grips with diversionary
tactics and massive amounts of disinformation.
The Third Reich wanted to create the false belief that its mass of
troops in the East was only intended to conceal its maneuvers across the
English Channel, and this was made even more credible after its conquest of
Crete. “The entire State and military apparatus is mobilized,” Goebbels was
pleased to note in his diary (May 31st 1941), to set in place the “first wave
of the coverup [of Operation Barbarossa].” At that point “fourteen divisions
were transported to the West [11]; moreover, all the troops stationed at the
Western front were put on maximum alert [12].
Two weeks later, the Berlin edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter published an account that described the occupation of
Crete as a model for the squaring of accounts
with England. The paper was then immediately withdrawn from publication
to give the impression that it had clumsily revealed a secret of the utmost
importance.
Three days afterwards (the 14th of June), Goebbels
notes in his journal: “English radio reports state that our deployment against
Russia is only a bluff, behind which we are hoping to hide our preparations for
the invasion [of England]” [13]. The German disinformation campaign also had
another goal: Germany's military deployment in the East put pressure on the
USSR, possibly serving as an ultimatum that would force Stalin to accept a
redefinition of the clauses of the NaziSoviet pact, and to export larger
quantities of grain and coal to the Third Reich, which was engaged in a
seemingly endless war. Germany wanted to give the impression that the crisis
could be resolved through further negotiations and with additional concessions
from Moscow [14].
This was the conclusion reached by British intelligence and military
leaders, who again, on the 22nd of May, warned the war Cabinet: “Hitler has not
yet decided whether to pursue his objectives [with regard to the USSR] with
persuasion or force of arms” [15]. On the 14th of June, a satisfied Goebbels
noted in his journal that: “In general, they still believe it's a bluff or a
blackmail attempt” [16].
The disinformation campaign undertaken against the
Soviets, which had begun two years prior, should not be underestimated either.
In November 1939, the French press published a fake speech (said to have been
delivered to the Politburo in August of that year) in which Stalin was supposed
to have revealed a plan to weaken Europe, by first stoking a fratricidal war,
then moving to Sovietize the continent. There is no doubt about it: the report was false, and it was designed to break the NaziSoviet
nonaggression pact, and to direct eastward the expansionist fury of the Third
Reich [17].
According to a prevalent historiographical misconception, the British
government, warned Stalin repeatedly and selflessly about the impending Nazi
attack, but he, in dictatorial fashion, trusted his German counterpart. In
reality, if on the one hand Great Britain gave Moscow information about
Operation Barbarossa, on the other, they spread false information about an
immanent Soviet attack against Germany or its occupied territories [18]. The
point, which is completely self-evident, was to either speed up or render a
Nazi-Soviet conflict inevitable.
Then, of course, there is the mysterious flight of
Rudolf Hess to England, which was clearly designed with the hope of reuniting
the West in the war against Bolshevism, thus giving concrete expression to the
program found in Mein Kampf,which calls for the alliance and solidarity of the Germanic peoples in
their ‘civilizing’ mission. Soviet agents abroad informed the Kremlin that the
Nazi number two had commenced his mission with the full support of the Fuhrer
[19]. Moreover, highranking Nazi figures continued until the very end to
support the contention that Hess had acted on Hitler's behalf.
In any case, the need was felt to immediately
deploy minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop to Rome, in order to
assure Mussolini that Germany was not plotting a separate peace with Great
Britain [20]. Evidently, the concern generated by this turn of events was even
stronger in Moscow, where it was noted that Britain did not exploit the “capture
of the Vice Fuhrer” to take advantage of “the greatest propaganda
advantage, what Hitler and Goebbels awaited with fear”; on the contrary,
the interrogation of Hess as reported to Stalin by the Soviet ambassador in
London, Ivan Majski was entrusted to a British leader who favored a policy of
appeasement with the Nazis.
Even as they left the door open to AngloSoviet rapprochement, her
Majesty's secret services spread rumors of an immanent peace between London and
Berlin; all this was in order to put pressure on the Soviet Union (which might
have tried to prevent an alliance between Great Britain and the Third Reich with
a preemptive attack on the Wehrmacht) and thereby strengthen Britain’s
diminished capabilities [21]. The caution and distrust of the Kremlin are
understandable; the danger of a repeat of the Munich Betrayal5appeared, on a much larger and deadlier scale. It
may well be hypothesized that the second disinformation campaign undertaken by
the Third Reich had been extremely effective.
In any case, if we stick to the transcript found in the Soviet Communist
Party archives, in which, while implying that the USSR would only enter the
conflict briefly, Stalin, in a speech to the graduates of the military academy
on May 5th, 1941, highlighted how Germany had historically won wars win it had
fought on only one front; but had lost when it was obliged to fight in the East
and West at the same time [22]. Stalin may have underestimated Hitler's
impatience to attack the USSR. Moreover, Stalin
5 An
agreement signed by the Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, which allowed the Germans to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. No Czechoslovakian
representatives were present.
knew that total mobilization would give a casus belli to the Third Reich
on a silver platter, as had happened at the outbreak of World War I.
One point is, however, certain: while acting cautiously in a rather
confusing situation, the Soviet leader called for a “speedingup of war
preparations.” In fact, “between May and June, 800,000 reservists were called
up, and in midMay, 28 divisions were deployed to the Western districts of the
Soviet Union.” Stalin proceeded at an accelerated rhythm, fortifying the
frontiers and concealing the most sensitive military objectives. “On the night
of the 21st of June, this large force was put on alert and asked to prepare for
a surprise attack by the Germans” [23].
In order to discredit Stalin, Khrushchev insisted
upon the spectacular initial victories of the invading army, but he sloppily
overlooked the forecasts that had been made in the West at the time. After the
partition of Czechoslovakia and the Wehrmacht's entrance into Prague, Lord
Halifax continued to reject the idea of a rapprochement between England and the
Soviet Union, arguing that it didn’t make sense for Britain to ally itself with
a country whose armed forces were “insignificant.” Either on the eve of
Operation Barbarossa, or at the moment it was undertaken, the British secret
service calculated that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated in 8 or 10 weeks”;
in turn, U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson's advisors predicted on June
23rd,that the Soviets would be finished within 3 months
[24]. Moreover, the Wehrmacht's deep penetration into Soviet territory,
observes a contemporary military historian is easily explained by geography:
The length of the front (1800 miles) and the rarity of natural obstacles
offered the aggressor immense advantages for infiltration and maneuvering.
Despite the enormous size of the Red Army, it was still dwarfed by the
landscape, and German mechanized units could easily identify opportunities for
indirect maneuvers that would flank their opponents.
Moreover, that cities were far apart, and placed at the convergence of
roads and rail lines, allowed the aggressor to quickly shift objectives,
placing its Soviet enemy in a series of successive dilemmas.
4.8 The Gulag, Concentration Camps, and the “Absent
Third”
Translator’s
introduction to Section 4.8:
In this section of his book, Losurdo tries to make clear that the most
obvious point of comparison with regards to Nazi concentration camp system is
not the Soviet Gulag, but rather the prison and extermination centers of the
Western colonial powers (in fact, he points out that these were first called “concentration
camps”). That the relationship between Nazi and colonial European concentration
camps is practically never explored is no accident. Instead, it is the result
of a willful practice of forgetting and a continuous process of historical
revisionism that seeks to downplay European and American culpability for the
atrocities characteristic of their racialist and imperialist projects. This
history of colonialist internment genocide is thus, Losurdo argues, an “absent
third” point of comparison. By his account, it is American and European
colonialism, not Soviet communism, which is ideologically implicated in the
Third Reich’s mass genocide.
Following the invasions of Poland and the USSR, the
system of Nazi concentration camps resumed, and intensified, some of the
darkest chapters in the history of colonialist slavery.
When, during the slave trade, the availability of
slaves was virtually unlimited, owners had no economic interested in sparing
their slaves’ lives. These slaves were condemned to death from overwork, and
promptly replaced with others, with the goal of maximizing the economic benefit
of their owners. Thus, an 18th century economist who caught Marx's attention
observes that the flourishing agriculture of the West Indies
“engulfed millions of African men” because “the lives of blacks are
sacrificed with no scruples” [26].
The war Hitler unleashed in Eastern Europe
represented a new and more brutal form of the slave trade. Captured en masse, the Untermenschen6 slaves (who had survived the Germanization of the territory) died of
overwork to make possible the master race’s “civilization,” and to fuel the
Nazi war machine. Their conditions were similar to those of enslaved blacks,
with whom they are explicitly compared by Hitler.
Prison systems reproduce the relations of the societies that control
them. In the USSR, in the interior and exterior of the Gulag, we see basically
the work of a dictatorship of development that tries to mobilize and “reeducate”
all the force of society, attempting to overcome an ageold backwardness,
something that is made all the more urgent by the approach of a war that, by
the explicit statement of Mein Kampf, has as its goal slavery and annihilation. One can then see that ‘terror’
in the Soviet Union meant the emancipation of oppressed nationalities, robust
social mobility and access to education, culture, and even the placement in
positions of responsibility and management portions of society that had been
totally marginalized up to that point.
The obsession with productivity and pedagogy, and
the social mobility that accompanied it, is felt, in all cases, even in the
interior of the Gulag. Nazi concentration camps reflected, in complete
distinction, the base racial hierarchy that characterized the racialist Nazi
state and the racialist empire it was attempting to construct.
6
For the Nazis, the German slur Untermenschen meant ‘under,’ ‘below,’ or ‘sub’
“humans.”
the concrete behavior of detained individuals played an uninteresting,
or rather marginal, role; therefore a pedagogical preoccupation was rather
meaningless.
In conclusion, the prisoner in the Gulag is a
potential “comrade,” obligated to participate in particularly difficult
conditions towards the productive effort of the whole country, and after 1937,
he is, without contest, a potential “citizen.” Of course, there is a tenuous
line of demarcation between the enemy of the people and member of the fifth
column that the total war on the horizon already acts to neutralize. In
contrast, the concentration camp prisoner is in the first place an Untermensch, marked forever by his place or racial degeneracy.
Thus, if you really want to drawn an analogy with concentration camps,
it's necessary to compare the Nazi concentration camps with the colonial
tradition (especially given that this is just the lineage in which Hitler places
them). This tradition targets, particularly, people of colonial origin. And
this is precisely what is repressed in typical [scholarly] comparisons. And, it
is in this sense that we can speak of an “absent Third,” something that
contemporary scholars usually overlook.
Two distinguished historians have, respectively,
labeled the “military work camps” of colonial India circa 1877, and the
concentration camps in which Libyans had been imprisoned by liberal Italy, as “extermination
camps” [27]. Thus if we want to understand the genesis of this model, the fact
remains that Nazi concentration camps
disclosed a racial logic and hierarchy that governed the Italian and
Western colonial empires, and which is incorporated in the concentration camps
that they built.
It is equally likely that we will think of the Nazis when we read about
the ways in which the “Canadian holocaust” or “the final solution to our Indian
question” was perpetrated. The “Commission for Truth About the Canadian
Genocide” speaks of “death camps” with “men, women and children” that were “exterminated
in a deliberate fashion” in a “system that had the objective of destroying the
largest possible share of indigenous people through disease, deportation, or
murder.” To arrive at this result, champions of white supremacy didn't hesitate
to strike “innocent children” who died “because of beatings or tortures or
after having been deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other sicknesses”;
still others were subjected to forced sterilization. A “small minority of
collaborators” managed to survive, but only after renouncing their language and
identity and putting themselves at the services of the executioners [28]. Even
if we can presume that a sense of righteous indignation contributed to the
exaggeration of these events, the fact remains that we come across the same
practices that were put into effect by the Third Reich and enactments that stem
from an ideology very similar to the one that presided over the construction of
Hitler's racial state.
Let us move
now to the southern United States.
In the decades that followed the Civil War, black
prisoners (who made up the vast majority of the incarcerated population), were
leased to private enterprises, and kept in “large cages on wheels that followed
the encampments of real estate and railway
developers.” Official reports show thatthe prisoners were excessively and sometimes cruelly punished; “they
were underdressed and illnourished, the sick among them were neglected, no
medical care was provided for, and the sick weren’t separated from the healthy.”
An investigation conducted by a Mississippi grand jury found of the sick that:
their entire bodies show the signs maltreatment of the most brutal and
inhuman kind. A large number of their shoulders are covered in lesions,
blisters, and scars, some have raw skin because they have been whipped... They
lay dying and some of them lay on bare tables, so weak and emaciated that their
bones are almost glimpsed through the skin, and many complained of the lack of food
[...].We saw live parasites slither across their faces, and their poor sleeping
areas and meager scraps of clothing are often ragged and filthy.
In miners’ camps in Arkansas and Alabama, convicts
were forced to work all winter without shoes, standing in water for hours. In
these two states, a system of “piecework” was in effect, where a team of three
men was obligated to remove an extraordinary amount of coal within a day on
pain of whipping. Convicts in the work camps of Florida, with “chains on their feet”
and “chains around their waists” were, nonetheless, forced to work at a quick
pace [29]. We thus have a system that uses “chains, dogs, whips and guns” and
that “creates a living hell for its prisoners”.
The mortality rate is highly significant. Between
1877 and 1880, in the course of the construction of a railway line between
Greenwood and Augusta “almost 45% [of the convicts employed] died,” and these
were “young and in the prime of their lives” [30].
Another statistic from the same period can be cited:
“During the first two years in which Alabama began to lease out its prisoners,
almost 20% of them died. The following year, deaths climbed to 35%; in the
fourth year 45% of them died.”
Regarding mortality rates, a systematic study comparing the concentration
camps in the USSR and in Nazi Germany would be very interesting. As far as the
Gulag is concerned, it was calculated that in the first years of the thirties,
before the intensification of the dangers of war, that the annual death rate “more
or less corresponded to 4.8% of the population of the camps.” Of course, this
statistic does not include the gold mining camps around the Kolyma river; we
must also take into account “the underestimates characteristic of camp health
officials.”
Yet, even if official figures have been substantially altered, it would
be difficult for Soviet mortality levels to reach the same levels as those of
the African American inmates mentioned above. Moreover, the reasons for “underestimates”
are significant. The fact is that “high rates of mortality and escape could
lead to severe penalties”; “health officials in camps feared being accused of
negligence and flippancy in the care of the sick”; and, “the threat of
inspection constantly hung over camp leaders” [32]. Judging from the mortality
rate of the rented out semislaves mentioned above, there was no comparable
threat for the American entrepreneurs who enriched themselves constructing
railway lines using inmate labor.
One point should be made very clear. In the
American south, black inmates experienced horrible conditions of life and died en massein a period of peace: a “state of
emergency” played no role and theneed to develop productive forces is also marginal or nonexistent. The
concentration camps in the southern United States reproduced the racial
hierarchy and the racial state that characterized American society in its
aggregate: the black inmate is not a potential “comrade,” nor a potential “citizen”;
he is an
Untermensch.His treatment by whites is considered the normal relationship in which other
races are supposed to exist alongside, or rather subordinated to, ‘authentic
civilization.’ Here again, we find the ideology of the Third Reich.
Moreover, there are eminent U.S. historians who
compare the penitentiary system that we have just seen to “the prison camps of
Nazi Germany” [33]. And it's no coincidence that the medical experiments
carried out by Nazis upon Untermenschen were also conducted in the USA, using blacks as human guinea pigs [34].
Moreover, before engaging in this type of experimentation on its own territory,
Germany, during the imperialist years of Wilhelm II, conducted medical
experiments in Africa, at the expense of Africans: two doctors would
distinguish themselves in these pursuits, and later become the teachers of
Joseph Mengele [35], who in Nazi Germany, carried out the perversion of
medicine and science already established within the (European and American)
colonial tradition.
Not only can the Third Reich not be understood
outside the history of the West's subjugation of its colonies, but it is also
necessary to add that this tradition continues to show signs of vitality well
beyond the defeat of Hitler. In 1997, President Clinton felt compelled to
apologize to the AfricanAmerican community: “During the 60s, more than 400 men of color were used as human guinea pigs by the government. In
spite of having syphilis, they were not treated because authorities wanted to
study the effects of the disease on a ‘sample of the population.’” [36].
6.7. The inevitability and complexity of moral
judgment
Even if it is inevitable, moral judgment appears
superficial and hypocritical if it is formulated outside of a historical
context hence its complexity and its problematic character. It requires that
we kind in mind both objective circumstances and subjective responsibilities,
and, regarding the latter, that we distinguish between those that belong to the
leadership class as a whole, and those that belong to particular individuals.
The leadership of Soviet Russia comes to power at a
period when as a Christian witness, who sympathized with the October 1917
revolution put it “Pity was killed by the omnipresence of death” [37].
Moreover this group is forced to confront an extended state of emergency, in a
situation characterized to quote an author of the Black
Book of Communismby an “incredible brutality”, widespread and “incommensurate with that experienced
by Western societies”.
This means that if the protagonists of the 20th century were obliged to
confront the devastating conflicts and moral dilemmas that characterized the ‘second’
Thirty Years' War, Stalin also had to pit himself against the conflicts and
particular moral dilemmas of Russian history and of the second period of
disorders. One could say that the shadow of “supreme emergency” dominated the
thirty years in which he exercised power. One should not, however, lose sight
of the fact that objective conditions were not the only thing to impede or make impossible the passage from the state of
exception to a condition of normality.
Messianism was also a contributing factor.
Although, it had been powerfully stimulated by World War I, it was intrinsic to
a worldview which expected the disappearance of the market, of money, of the
state, and of juridical law. Disillusionment or, perhaps, indignation,
subsequently exacerbated the conflict a conflict which was not possible to
control through purely “formal” juridical norms, which themselves disappear.
The result is recourse to violence that it is not possible to justify with
reference to the state of exception or “supreme emergency.” In this sense,
moral judgment coincides with political judgment. This point is also valid when
it comes to the liberal West.
It was observed about the man who executed the
strategic bombardments against Germany [Sir Arthur Harris]:
As a young pilot, Harris had bombed rebel Indian civilians. Even his ‘shock
psychology’ was originally derived from observing cultural shock. Primitive
tribes who lived in villages of thatched huts threw themselves fascinated at
the feet of the colonial empire and its industrial arsenal. [38]
Moreover, it was especially Churchill who promoted these wars: we see
him suggest attacking “recalcitrant natives” in Iraq with bombing based on “gas
and especially mustard projectiles,” and then compare Germans with “evil Huns.”
We can also see the importance of racial ideology in the war of the
United States against Japan (supra, 6.4), the atomic bombing of which is no matter
of coincidence. Here again emerges a supplementary violence that it is
impossible to justify through a “supreme emergency,” but which is a return to
the colonial ideology shared by the liberal West and Germany. If the Third
Reich equates the decimation of Native Americans and Blacks to the enslavement
of “indigenous” eastern Europeans, England and the United States likewise end
up treating Germans and Japanese as colonial peoples who must be made obedient.
[1] Hoffmann
(1995), p. 59 et 21
[2] Wolkogonov
(1989), p. 500504
[3] Knight
(1997), p. 132
[4] Medvedev,
Medvedev (2003), p. 231232
[5] Montefiore
(2007), p. 416
[6] Dimitrov
(2005), p. 478479
[7] Idem, p.
472
[8] Roberts
(2006), p. 7
[9] Goebbels
(1992), p. 1620 (note de journal du 5 juillet 1941)
[10] Dans
Butler (2005), p. 7172
[11] Goebbels
(1992), p. 1590
[12] Wolkow
(2003), p. 111
[13] Goebbels
(1992), p. 15941595 et 1597
[14] Besymenski
(2003), p. 422425
[15] Costello
(1991), p. 438439
[16] Goebbels
(1992), p. 1599
[17] Roberts
(2006), p. 35
[18] Wolkow
(2003), p. 110
[19] Costello
(1991), p. 436437
[20] Kershaw
(2000), p. 376 et 372
[21] Idem, p.
380381 ; Ferro (2008), p. 115 (pour ce qui concerne Majski)
[23] Roberts
(2006), p. 6669
[24] Ferro
(2008), p. 64 ; Beneš (1954), p. 151 ; Gardner (1993), p. 9293
[25] Liddell
Hart (2007), p. 414415
[26] Marx,
Engels (195589), vol. 23, p. 281282
[27] Davis
(2001), p. 5051 ; Del Boca (2006), p. 121
[28] Annett
(2001), p. 56, 12 et 1617.
[29] Woodward
(1963), p. 206207
[30] Friedman
(1993), p. 95
[31] Blackmon
(2008), p. 57
[32] Chlevnjuk
(2006), p. 349 et 346347
[33] Ainsi
Fletcher M. Green, dans Woodward (1963), p. 207
[34] Washington
(2007)
[35] Kotek,
Rigoulot (2000), p. 92
[36] E. R.
(2007) ; cf. Washington (2007), p. 184
[37] Ainsi
Pierre Pascal, rapporté par Furet (1995), p. 131
[38] Friedrich
(2004), p. 287
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