Domenico Losurdo

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Stalin #USSR #History #Losurdo¶

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1. How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report¶

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“for however shocked he was, on the day of the attack Stalin had an eleven-hour meeting with leaders of the party,, government and military, and did the same the following day.”37 But now we have at our disposal the registry of those that visited Stalin in the Kremlin, discovered at the beginning of the 1990s: it appears that, in the hours immediately following the military aggression, the Soviet leader was immersed in a series of uninterrupted meetings and initiatives to organize the resistance. They are days and nights characterized as “strenuous” but organized. In any case, “the entire episode [narrated by Khrushchev] is a complete invention”, this “story is false."38

6. Psychopathology, Morality, and History in the Reading of the Stalin Era¶

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with the defeat of the Evil Empire, it’s the former allies who represent the new incarnation of Evil: the freedom fighters (and their sympathizers in United States territory and everywhere else in the world) are sent off to Guantanamo.

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If you want to take into consideration the geographic and military situation, the concern of the Soviet dictator appears more justified than that of the American president.

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what becomes synonymous with treason is a political outlook, and just for that those that embrace it became targets of denunciation, trials and intimidation;

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During the Cold War, aside from espionage, the activity of Western intelligence services also included “sabotage operations” and even support to insurrectionary movements.801

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according to an eminent American historian, the “style of paranoia” profoundly marked the history of his country. The belief, shared by George Washington, in London’s intention to enslave the colonies on the other side of the Atlantic is a central element in the American Revolution;

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Freud, who passed away in 1939, considered it relevant to conduct a psychoanalytic study, but not of Stalin, nor even Hitler, but of Wilson, putting him on the list of those dangerous “fanatics” who are convinced they “have a special and personal relationship with the divine”, and who thereby considered themselves charged with a providential mission of guiding and transforming the world.806

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Hitler accuses the American president of having a “wild” and sick “imagination”, the imagination of a man who’s “truly mentally ill."808

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Wilson authorizes the publication of documents that contain sensational revelations: not only was the October Revolution nothing more than a German conspiracy; but, even after the seizure of power, Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolshevik leaders continued to be at the (paid) service of Imperial Germany;

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a second conspiracy theory arises to explain the October Revolution, but this time, aside from the usual Bolshevik suspects, it’s not the Germans who are blamed, but rather the Jews.

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the denunciation of Judeo-Bolshevik intrigues, which spread sedition throughout the world and threaten order and civilization itself, will then play a principal role in the “final solution.”

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the liberal and bourgeois society that they tried to overthrow was synonymous with genocide.

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one cannot help but speak of “moral decadence” when they see humanity fall back into a “blind and ruthless barbarity”:

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Molotov accuses France and Britain of having rejected the Soviet policy of collective security in the hope of pushing the Third Reich against the USSR, thus without a doubt provoking “a new large massacre, a new holocaust of the nations."816

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Lenin continues to stick to his moral-political condemnation of war; together with it he denounces the social-political system that, in his opinion, caused it.

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moral pathos that inspires the Leninist analysis of capitalism and colonialism in particular. This is how the Italian war in Libya is described: that “typical colonial war by a twentieth century ‘civilized’ state”: we see “a civilized and constitutional nation” perform its “civilizational” work ”by means of bayonets, bullets, the noose, fire, rape”, even by means of “butchery."

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No less charged with moral indignation is the reading that Stalin makes of colonialism. But Theodore Roosevelt appears to preemptively respond to this denunciation of the enslavement and genocidal practices that take place in the colonies: “Quite fortunately, the tough and energetic politicians who were the pioneers of the difficult job of civilizing barbarian territories didn’t allow themselves to become overtaken by false sentimentalism”;

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is communism synonymous with the total state and with totalitarianism? In the years of the First World War, it was the capitalist countries, including those of liberal orientation, who incarnated all that.

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the growing militarization and “the competition for greater conquest drives political power to the point that it threatens to consume the entire society, even the State."828

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Stalin, for whom war ends up mutilating or destroying “democracy”

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the common place reading that likes to oppose the moral sense of the liberal bourgeois world to the communist movement’s Machiavellian lack of scruples doesn’t stand up to historical analysis.

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for Benedetto Croce, however, the Bolsheviks and the “Russian revolutionaries” are the object of hatred and ridicule, who represent “moralistic politics."

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After Hitler’s rise to power, the London government seeks by all means to redirect the Third Reich’s expansionist drive to the East, and primarily against the Soviet Union.

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“The responsibility for the tragedy of World War II, the Holocaust included, must fall in part on Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and their closest allies."843

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It’s the Soviet leadership that seeks to restrain it,

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But they try by all means to bombard there as well [...] It’s necessary for Germans to emerge who can act to save what can still be saved for the sake of the German people.

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the leading country of the liberal West at that time planned a new “genocide” as was coming to end the one that had been initiated in 1914.

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it’s precisely Britain who becomes the protagonist of the systematic destruction of German cities toward the very end of World War II

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The Guardian revealed that between 1946 and 1948, Great Britain prepared camps in Germany in which were to be confined communists or elements suspected of communist sympathies, and real or presumed Soviet spies:

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To add a further gruesome detail: it’s been noted that the annihilation of the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was aimed, not at a Japan on the brink of surrender, but at the Soviet Union, delivered as a serious warning.853

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Roosevelt didn’t alter the policy traditionally followed by Washington in Latin America, and in 1937 a bloody dictator, Anastasio Somoza, comes to power in Nicaragua, thanks to the National Guard trained by the United States.855

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despite pressure from the Republican Party, “the president never put forth legislative proposals against lynchings”,856

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while accepted when it comes to historical reconstruction, the long-term perspective disappears like magic when it comes to the formulation of a moral judgement:

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to the British protagonists of appeasement―in truth, the redirection of Nazi expansionism to the East―shared responsibility “for the tragedy of World War II, including Holocaust."

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to only apply a criteria to one’s own side is the very definition of dogmatism at the theoretical level and it’s hypocrisy at the moral level.

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to resort to the atomic bomb and “to kill and terrorize civilians”, without even attempting a real negotiation with the Japanese, were “two crimes in one."

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the Great Terror as a whole had played a positive and even an important role in the defeat of Operation Barbarossa.

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while the systematic killing of a civilian population by aerial bombardment is a crime in itself, the collectivization of agricultural and rushed industrialization end up leading to a series of crimes.

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criminal at a time when the defeat of the Third Reich was already becoming evident, are these actions justified while the supreme emergency is in effect? It’s once again evident the difficulty in moving from the general to the particular.

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“The United States army had a policy of killing civilians that approached South Korea”; the victims were “mostly women and children”, but they had feared that North Korean infiltrators had been among them, although in researching one of the more documented cases (the killings that occurred in No Gun Ri), “there didn’t appear to be any proof of enemy infiltrators”).872

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The American and South Korean “Katyn” doesn’t appear to be smaller in scale than the Soviet one, and in addition it shows a greater lack of scruples

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both are unjustifiable; it’s instead a question of noting the inadequacy of the moral-Manichaean approach to understanding Stalin and the country led by him.

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leadership group of Soviet Russia, it comes to power at a time when―to use the words of a Christian witness sympathetic to the changes brought by October 1917―”pity was killed by the omnipresence of death”,876

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The disappointment and outrage that none of that had come to pass encourages more conflict, and a conflict that can’t be managed by purely formal juridical norms, as they too are destined to disappear.

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a level of violence appears that can’t be justified by the “supreme emergency”, but instead relates to the colonial ideology shared by the liberal West and Germany.

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While the Third Reich compares the “indigenous people” of Eastern Europe to the decimated Native Americans and enslaved blacks, Britain and the United States end up treating the Germans and the Japanese the same way as colonial peoples are treated, needing a lesson in obedience.

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The condemnation in 1924 of the “outrageous disparity” between nations, theorized and imposed by imperialism, and the call to topple “the wall that separated whites and blacks”, nations considered “civilized” and peoples excluded from that recognition (supra, ch. 5, § 7); the approval of a “profoundly internationalist” constitution―as Stalin stresses while presenting his project―and based on the “principle that all nations and races have equal rights”, regardless of the “color of their skin”, their language, and their respective level of economic and

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military development: all this could not fail to arouse a deep echo not only in the colonies but also in the peoples of colonial origin located in the very heart of the West.886

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In the Southern United States, where the regime of white supremacy still rages on, a new atmosphere takes hold; they look to the Soviet Union with hope and to Stalin as the “new Lincoln”,

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growing “imprudence” of black youths. Thanks to the communists, they finally begin to receive that which was stubbornly denied to them: an education that goes further than the basic education traditionally given to all those destined to carry out semi-servile labor for the master race.

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despite the linguistic and racial differences between those participating in that initiative promoted by the communists: “It was paradise on earth."

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here too communist propaganda has achieved considerable success in attempting to win blacks over to the “revolutionary cause”,

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on these events, the concern over the challenge objectively represented by the USSR, and by the influence exercised by it on the colonial peoples and the peoples of colonial origin, played an essential role.

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Stalin also declares that the new constitution is destined to guarantee “the right to work, the right to rest, the right to an education”

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Stalin repeatedly seeks to move on from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality, with the realization of a “Soviet democracy”, of a “socialist democratism”, and a society “without the dictatorship of the proletariat."

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the elimination of Beria is a type of mafia style settling of accounts, it’s a personal violence that doesn’t make reference to any state or juridical order, nor to party statutes.

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After having managed to overcome the “crisis of the entire Russian nation”, the Bolsheviks in the end were defeated by the arrival of that relative state of normality, that is itself an outcome of their efforts.

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One can ridicule the pompous language of a constitution that never came into force, but it’s necessary to have in mind that even purely abstract declarations of principles have an impact on history.

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“It's the bad side that produces the movement that makes history."893

7. The Depiction of Stalin between History and Mythology¶

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the paradox of a historiography that, while unceasingly denouncing the farcical nature of the trials carried out by Stalin in Moscow, has easily accepted the legitimacy of the trial conducted in different manners, first by Trotsky and later by Khrushchev!

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led by a “generalissimo” and by such a ridiculous political leader, how was the Soviet Union able to defeat the terrible Nazi war machine that had so quickly subjugated the rest of continental Europe?

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how did such a grotesque and absurd portrait like the one made by Khrushchev achieve the status of historiographical and political dogma?

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“The numbers are not up for discussion: tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, they even speak of millions."

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In Russia they had introduced the nationalization of women, as charged by documents published with the authorization of President Wilson and as was described in rich detail by an authoritative newspaper like the New York Times; yes, every girl upon turning eighteen years old is forced to register in an “office of free love”, and then sadly turned over to a man arbitrarily chosen, and she is forced to suffer on her body and soul the governmental entity’s impositions.939

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Conquest is satisfied in blaming Stalin for organizing the starvation of the Ukrainian people.

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a few months after the overthrow of the Soviet Union, an authoritative Italian newspaper reported: “A million and a half people run the risk of not surviving the winter, for lack of food and medicine throughout the Soviet Union; a report by the International Red Cross has stated."941

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If not a reversal, at least the charge of genocide is applied to all sides, with the condemnation of one of the West’s heroes (Yeltsin), and with him the West itself, considered responsible for the tragedy that in no way took place in a situation of acute political and economic crisis, but after the Cold War itself had ended, at a time when, at least in the most advanced countries, shortages were only a distant memory.

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“The Terror had been the first calamity; the second, that which ruined the Republic, was the trial conducted against the Terror."943

8. Demonization and Hagiography in the Reading of the Contemporary World¶

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Pol Pot, who was supported until the end by Washington against the Vietnamese and their Soviet protectors.

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in 1949, at the time of modern China’s foundation, the People’s Republic of China was the poorest, or among the poorest, countries in the world.945

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the Taiping Revolt (1851-1864), which made the struggle against opium the order of the day. It was “the bloodiest civil war in world history, with an estimate between twenty and thirty million deaths."946

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“between 1911 and 1928, 1,300 wars between warlords had taken place”, with each opposing “military faction” being supported at times by this or that foreign power.

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In 1948, in attempting to halt the Japanese invasion, Chiang Kai-shek’s air force bombed the Yellow River’s dykes: 900,000 peasants drowned with another 4 million forced to flee.953

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Just as in Russia, in China it’s ultimately the revolution led by the communist party that saves the nation and even the state.

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In October of 1949, China finds itself in a desperate situation. It’s necessary to note, however, that the Civil War hadn’t completely ended. The bulk of the Kuomintang army had taken shelter in Taiwan, and from there they continued to threaten the new state with air attacks and incursions, on top of the isolated spots of resistance that continued to operate on the continent.

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The embargo quickly decreed by the United States makes this extremely serious economic and humanitarian crisis more catastrophic than ever. The objectives of the United States clearly emerge in the studies and plans by the Truman administration and the admissions or declarations by its leaders: make it so that China “suffers a plague” and “a standard of living at or below the level of subsistence”; provoke “economic backwardness”, “cultural backwardness”, a “primitive and uncontrolled birth rate”, “mass disorder”; inflict “a heavy and very prolonged cost on its internal social structure” and ultimately create “a situation of chaos."956

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with US assistance, the Kuomintang bombing campaigns continued against industrial cities on continental China, including Shanghai.958

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One president after another takes office in the White House, but the embargo remains and expands to medicine, tractors and fertilizers.959 At the start of the 1960s, an advisor in the Kennedy administration, namely Walt W. Rostow, observes that, thanks to this policy, the economic development of China was delayed by at least

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“decades”,

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Is it a question, then, of reducing the pressure on a people reduced to a state of hunger? On the contrary, it’s important not to loosen the embargo, “not even for humanitarian relief."

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Does it make sense, then, to exclusively assign Mao blame for the economic catastrophe that for a long time struck China and was intentionally and ruthlessly planned by Washington beginning in October of 1949?

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their threatened cancellation of normal commercial relations would have constituted, “in dollar terms, the biggest commercial sanctions in the history of the US, excluding the two world wars”; it would have been “the commercial equivalent to a nuclear attack."963

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the blocking of Chinese imports is the nuclear weapon that America has pointed at China."964 Brandished as a threat in the 1990s, the economic “nuclear weapon” was systematically deployed during the Cold War against the great Asian country, while Washington openly and repeatedly reserved the right to use actual nuclear weapons.

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the fact is that never has a country democratized while it was savagely attacked economically, isolated diplomatically, and subjected to a terrible and constant military threat.

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the political leadership that put an end to the Century of Humiliation becomes a gang of criminals, while those responsible for the immense century long tragedy, and those that with their embargo did everything to prolong it, become the champions of freedom and civilization.

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The omission of history, and especially the history of colonialism and war, is a constant in the mythology determined to transform all communist and anti-colonialist leaders into Hitler’s twin monsters, more or less.

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At least with regard to the very first phase of holding power, there’s a moderation in Pol Pot that could hardly be found in Washington’s leaders!

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why should the moral judgement on Pol Pot be more severe than the one on Nixon and Kissinger

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if political leaders must be criminalized, it’s those responsible for the revolution, never those responsible for the war.

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communism as such would be closely linked, by elective affinities and by sympathetic ties, to Nazism.

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the Führer explains to the leadership of the armed forces that he first intends to liquidate the “poison” represented by “pacifism, Marxism and Bolshevism."982

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in the very first months of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis had killed more than two million Soviets, with the communists as their first target.

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and Russian workers; the conditions of the latter are particularly tough: “They so desperately suffer from hunger that Jewish comrades come to their aid. That was prohibited; but they drop a slice of bread. Soon after the Russian bends down and then runs off to the bathroom with the slice of bread."986

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the conditions of Russian (or Soviet) slaves was, at times, even worse than those of the Jewish slaves.

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in completing his crusade that, aside from communism, also targets political currents in some way influenced by socialism, Conquest affirms: “eugenics, with all its racist implications, was also popular among the Fabians."997

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Consider the thesis formulated in one of Conquest’s last published works: true civilization finds its most complete expression in the “English speaking community”, and the primacy of that community has a precise ethnic basis, constituted by “Anglo-Celtics."1000

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It’s known that during the Nuremberg trials the Nazi defendants were denied the principle of tu quoque, in other words, that based on the charges being contended they could call attention to similar crimes committed by their accusers. The Tokyo trials play out in a similar way. It’s the justice of the victor, of course.

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It’s evident that a historical judgement is unthinkable without the reconstruction of the time’s atmosphere: comparisons and the recourse to the principle of tu quoque are absolutely inevitable.

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Is the terror by the liberal West only practiced outside their national borders? No, it is not; one just needs to think of the violence that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, is still carried out against blacks, and that is often organized as a mass pedagogical spectacle:

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Communists are called “nigger lovers” for taking part in a campaign against the practice of lynching, and are therefore targeted by the terror wielded by the regime of white supremacy and forced to “face the possibility of prison, beatings, kidnapping and even murder."1010

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it’s a massacre carried out without the industrial efficiency of the Nazis, and therefore with an added level of sadism.

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The Entente’s blockade, that sought to annihilate Bolshevism, instead killed Russian men, women and children; could the poor going hungry compete in democratic elegance with those from the Entente causing the hunger? As was natural, they rallied around their own government and identified its enemies as their own.1018

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“Witnessed cases of anthropophagy” also occur in certain parts of China in 1928,1019 cases that could hardly be blamed on the communists, who will seize power more than twenty years later;

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in F.D. Roosevelt’s United States a case, not of cannibalism provoked by general scarcity, disorder and hunger, but rather self-inflicted cannibalism, forced and organized as a mass spectacle in a society otherwise enjoying a high standard of living.

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one world exclusively analyzed by its sacred spaces and its periods of normality is triumphantly counterposed to a world that, having challenged the barrier that separates the sacred space from the profane space, the civilized and the barbarians, is forced to confront a prolonged state of emergency and the irreducible hostility from the guardians of that exclusive sacred space.

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remarks―”the British residents [...] are forced to cancel their usual evening walks due to the awful smell of bodies, too numerous to be buried."

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in New Zealand―The Times observes in 1864―the settlers, strengthened by the support from the London government, carried out the “extermination of the natives."

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slavery is in full bloom in the United States, which had just earlier reintroduced it in Texas, taken from Mexico by force of arms, and that had previously declared, under Jefferson, its goal of reducing the people of Haiti to starvation, guilty for having broken the bonds of slavery.

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the brutality of Western “civil and democratic order” is not only put into practice, but also explicitly theorized by authors embraced as part of the liberal pantheon without any issues.

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three great revolutionary movements that, in different ways, had radically challenged the slavery or semi-slavery of the colonial regime, and the racist regime of white supremacy that existed at both the national and international level.

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the October Revolution that calls upon the colonial slaves to break their chains, and that powerfully encourages those that until then were considered the “inferior races” in the struggle for decolonization and emancipation.

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“Despite its military defeat, the South won the ideological civil war a long time ago."1027

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Reconstruction is forced to make way to a regime of anti-black terror, so ferocious that it can be identified as the most tragic moment in African-American history.

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In the wake of emancipation Reconstruction sets in, during which majorities are formed in the South that rely on blacks: it’s “an incredible carnival of public crime”, to which “the natural and inevitable rise of the whites” fortunately puts an end.1028

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“public crime” is the brief period of time that followed the American Civil War and during which there’s the effort, despite everything, to take the human rights of African Americans seriously.

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Imposed at the conclusion of a war that was very similar to the “total war by the Nazis”, it had intended to forcefully realize the principle of equality and racial intermixing, trampling on the will of (white) majority and appealing to the savage population, with the consequent “victory achieved through physical force by civilization over barbarism."

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the ruthless nature of the dictatorship maintained first by Lenin, and especially by Stalin later, is not up for debate.

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it is no longer politically correct to regret the end of slavery or the regime of white supremacy. In contrast, commonplace is the understanding of “Stalinism” (and the history of the October Revolution) as merely criminal, as well as the comparison of Stalin to Hitler, who―inheriting and radicalizing the colonial tradition―explicitly demanded the right of the “master race” to decimate and enslave the “inferior races”:

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the champions of colonialism still haven't lost the battle at either the political level or in the field of history.

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The movement in history condemned to damnatio memoriae is the one that more than any other radically challenged the arrogance of the “master race” that had ruled for centuries, from the classic colonial tradition, to the attempt by the Third Reich to radicalize it and apply it in the very heart of Europe.

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even liberalism can be read in a more or less criminal perspective.

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The role of Islam in the creation of the grand multiethnic and multicultural civilization that characterizes Spain before the Christian reconquest is hidden and forgotten, as is its radical questioning of caste society in India, and more generally of its promotion, beginning in the nineteenth century, of the emancipation struggle by colonial peoples.

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rallying around the idea of equality and against wealth, power and the status of masters in general, the Jewish prophets would be first among those responsible for the massacres that took place during the peasant wars, the Puritan Revolution,

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the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. A line of continuity which nineteenth century antisemitism and Hitler extend to the communist movement and the “Judeo-Bolshevik” revolution of October 1917.

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Locke should also then be classified as a traitor to liberalism, as he is generally considered the father of that line of thinking, and not only did he legitimize the expropriation (and the deportation) of the Native Americans, but he was also, as observed by an eminent scholar (David B. Davis), “the last great philosopher who sought to justify absolute and perpetual slavery."

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in the eyes of a great liberal theorist of slavery like John C. Calhoun, It’s precisely the abolitionists with their Jacobinism and anti-slavery fanaticism who betray liberal ideas of tolerance and respect for property rights in all their forms.

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A truly miserable outcome is reached by relying on the category of betrayal.

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The history of the communist movement as a crime in itself, triumphantly written by the ruling ideology, is simply rebranded―by those who are unable to identify with the ruling ideology―as the history of betrayal of its original ideals.

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the approach criticized here commits the mistake of erasing the real and profane history, which is substituted by a history of the unfortunate and mysterious corruption and distortion of doctrines elevated a priori to the status of purity and holiness.

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it is nevertheless permitted and even obligatory to question the role (however indirect and limited) played by Marx and Engels, rejecting the myth of their innocence and investigating the real history of their impact and the reasons for that impact. But then it’s necessary to take a similar approach toward all the great intellectuals, including those who are placed within a different and opposing intellectual tradition.

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must a theorist, like John Stuart Mill, of the West’s “despotism” over the “lesser” races (who must show “absolute obedience”) and the beneficial nature of slavery imposed on “savage tribes” alien to work and discipline, be considered in part responsible for the terror and massacres that accompany colonial expansion?

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We saw Nietzsche refer to the fiery tirades against power and wealth by the Jewish prophets and founders of the Church to explain the destructive and bloody nature of the revolutionary cycle.

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Marx and Engels can be accused of having legitimized in advance violence that, at any rate, will be put into practice after their deaths, and with decades separating them. Mill, however, legitimizes practices that are contemporary to him; similarly, in Tocqueville we can read the explicit recommendation of colonial practices that are more or less genocidal (the systematic destruction of urban centers found in areas controlled by the rebels) that don’t refer to the future, but the immediate present.1035

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regarding the atrocities of colonialism that take place under their watch and, at times, with their direct approval, the representatives of the liberal tradition cited here have much more direct responsibility than that attributed to Marx and Engels regarding the shameful aspects of the Soviet regime and “Stalinism."

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While the path that leads from Marx to Stalin and the Gulag is problematic, bumpy and at any rate mediated by totally unpredictable events like World War II and the permanent state of emergency, it’s immediately evident the link that connects Locke to the slave trade or Mill and Tocqueville to the forced labor imposed on the indigenous people and the colonial massacres.

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how many catastrophes were provoked and continue to be

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provoked by the utopia (supported by Wilson even before Bush Jr., as well as by prominent modern philosophers like Popper) of a permanent peace to be achieved by spreading democracy around the world through the force of arms?

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There are, of course, those that read the history of the country born out of the October Revolution by lamenting the gradual “betrayal” of the ideals elaborated by Marx and Engels; in reality, and in certain aspects, it’s precisely those “original” ideals (the millenarian hopes for a society without a state and juridical norms, without national borders and without the market and money, where there’s ultimately no real conflicts at all) that played a harmful role, obstructing the transition to a state of normality and prolonging and intensifying the state of emergency (caused by the crisis of the old regime, by the war and by the subsequent invasions).

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It’s way too easy to exclusively blame Hitler for the atrocities of Nazism, suppressing the fact that he extracted from the world that preceded him―and then radicalized―the two essential parts of his ideology: the celebration of the white race’s colonial mission and the West itself, now called upon to further extend its dominion into Eastern Europe;

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to comprehend the genesis of the Third Reich’s horrors, it’s not a question of reconstructing Hitler’s childhood or adolescence; nor does it make sense to start with Stalin’s very beginnings to analyze an institution (the Gulag) that has its roots in the history of Tsarist Russia and which, in ways that are always different, of which the countries of liberal West also made use, both during periods of colonial expansion as well as during the state of emergency caused by the Second Thirty Years’ War.

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It would be equally unreasonable to seek to explain the horrors of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib by starting with Bush Jr.’s adolescence or childhood.

"Concentrate All Our Strength" Against "The Principal Enemy"¶

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far from being synonymous with peace, bourgeois democracies had started and continued to be responsible for wars that often had a genocidal character.

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“When the First World War broke out in Europe, most countries (including Great Britain, France and Germany) were governed by what were essentially democratic institutions.

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Even in that field, fascism has demonstrated itself to be the most barbaric form of bourgeois rule.

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