In the dark shadow of history

Democracy is incompatible with the evil empire of Communism. As a stalwart fighter against the monster Stalin, Horthy, despite his excesses and imperfections, is still on the side of modern democracy. (As is, for that matter, Viktor Orban.) Modern Ukrainians who similarly admire the Nazi collaborators in their past are the bravest fighters for democracy. Shinzo Abe visits the Yasukuni shrine and is the most admired Japanese politician. (Paul Krugman approves!)

Stalin was worse than Hitler and murdered far more people. You can read about this in Robert Conquest and Rummel and White and Applebaum and Snyder and Tony Judt and Stephen Pinker. There’s a long series of blog posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates contemplating the nature of evil as displayed in the Communist horror.

The sorry truth is that I agree with you. But the consensus of opinion does not. I do not see how it is possible to single out Horthy for special condemnation without radically challenging fundamental ideas about democracy that are pretty universal in serious opinion.

The histories of both Hungary and Romania in the 30s and 40s are pretty sorry. They vigorously competed with each other to curry favor with the Nazis. Not that that got them much in the end, of course.

Thanks for linking to this. It’s very sad. Budapest stands out in my memory as probably the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited. I’ve been trying to learn more about the current political situation and decide if it should influence my travel plans: I’m an American academic, possibly going to a conference in Budapest this summer. On the one hand, I doubt that even a sizable number of travelers canceling visits to Hungary would have any effect on its internal politics. On the other, the prospect of visiting a state that seems to be in the process of reverting to fascism is discomfiting.

stevenjohnson, I’m not sure what you’re on about. (One small example: Krugman has praised only Abe’s economic policy, explicitly avoiding comment on the rest of his politics. And he has published long and severely critical pieces on Orban and Hungarian politics by his colleague Kim Lane Scheppele.)

This is genuinely scary, and I do wish ambassadorships weren’t mere rewards for domestic party politics.

Henry @8: insert a “not”. I think stevenjohnson is accusing Eszter of belated antifascism, or something. There may have been moments in Central Europe when there was a choice between two world-historic evils — but this is not the moment, this is historical retrospect.

Oh, the irony!

Yeah, I thought stevenjohnson was being ironic and certainly didnt read it as pushing the Jeanne Kirkpatrick line. Pretty much the opposite, afaics.

Eszter, what is the impact of EU-level measures such as (at the very least) raising the noise level about the political climate in Hungary and the impact on minority rights? Sometimes it seems that the relevant domestic factions thrive on foreign disapproval. One would hope that 3 weeks after International Holocaust Memorial Day, you’d get more than just sonorous VIP speeches about history and some real contemporary commentary about current threats.

I know it’s off-topic but can I second rm (#10) comments about browser problems. Across different computers and browsers, CT often does not load. I have to use a search engine and click on its links to CT. rm is also correct about the commenter population composition during that time.

I don’t mean to thread derail, but crookedtimber no longer loads for me if my browser or the link from the access site includes the leading “www.” So “crookedtimber.org” works, “www.crookedtimber.org” does not.

Eszter: thanks for the link to your essay. I had no idea. It’d be fascinating to put this in the context of the rise of other right-wing political movements in other parts of Europe.

Gert Wilders isnt anti jew.

Geert Wilders isnt a member of the ‘traditional’ far right though. Afaict a lot of the current West European right are primarily anti immigrant, which is manifesting itself as anti Muslim, hence the alliance of convenience with the Israeli right.
Wilders is still a classic liberal though afaik, and sells his anti Muslim rhetoric in those terms. This is what my Dutch cousins tell me anyway. Also he’s completly daft, apparently.

Stevenjohnson seems to be taking the Jeane Kirkpatrick line, that any atrocity is forgivable if done by an anti-Communist. Beyond that, he’s suggesting that democracy and fascism are somehow inextricably linked

stevenjohnson @1 is (quite clearly I think) performing and criticizing this position. See the last para.

Vance Maverick: One of Shinzo Abe’s Three Arrows is military Keynesianism. Abe himself is bundling it with the rest of his economic policy. I think Samuelson’s silence is embarrassment, not disagreement on fundamental principle. Abe’s role in the pivot to Asia, and the whole pivot to Asia, is not extraneous to US economic policy either. I think Krugman’s silence is an explicit refusal to criticize.

Donald Johnson: Snyder explicitly makes the judgment that Stalin was worse prior to WWII (which he apparently believes began in 1939 instead of 1937…What’s the point of history if not take advantage of hindsight?) He even adds the (dubious I think) point that Stalin was killing in times of “peace” for the same reasons as Nazis. The article finishes making a case for assigning mutual responsibility for Hitler and Stalin to share. For example, the responsibility for appalling treatment of Soviet prisoners of war is shared by Stalin because he would not allow them to retreat! I think that’s nuts. The old idea that Nazism=Communism(=”totalitarianism, also, I presume?) has never managed to explain why such similar systems could not make a deal.

Snyder also writes, “Apart from the inaccessibility of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility.” He does not mean that reputable scholarship was nevertheless lying in the service of national policy (which is what makes it reputable, after all.) If that was what he meant, he surely would have said so. That’s good, because if reputable scholarship was lying then, we have to worry whether it’s lying now. We dodged a bullet there!

I don’t think this link shows what you think.

godoggo, Ronan (rf): I forgot that irony is a firearm that should only be used by the certified mentally healthy (aka conventional.)

Eszter Hargittai: Let me rephrase. The US government officially supports fascist sympathizers in a struggle against the government of Ukraine. How can you justify worrying about a mere statue when it contradicts national policy? (Personally I despise Horthy and his statue, Viktor Orban, the Ukrainian opposition, Shinzo Abe. But I’m insane.)

From the linked Snyder piece:

Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality [i.e., the nature of the killings, as opposed to the numbers killed] is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.

This passage is reasonably clear to anyone who can understand English, which steven johnson apparently has some trouble doing.

Democracy and freedom are incompatible with a totalitarian dictatorship?! Who coulda thunk it? What brave truths will stevenjohnson share with us next?

Stevenjohnson, I’m greatly relieved to learn that you meant us to read ironically. The relative poverty of context that surrounds blog comments sometimes makes it impossible to distinguish parody from sincerity. Also, often people have trouble with the very concept of tone, and they present their sincerely held beliefs with the volume turned slightly up as “irony” or “parody,” but not really. Glad that’s not you. But you really need to put more painstaking effort into crafting your blog comments in order to make yourself more clear if you want to earn the big blogcommenting dollars.

Some historical footnotes:

Hungarian anti-semitism had a few wrinkles. As Hungarian nationalism arose in the 19th century, a peculiar difficulty emerged: ethnic Hungarians, Magyars, were not an actual majority in their own kingdom, (which included Croatia and Slovakia among other territories). So a kind of implicit deal was struck: if Jews would assimilate to Hungarian language and culture, they would be accepted as “regular” Hungarians. (This didn’t involve religious conversion; some remained observant, some converted, and many simply assimilated as secular agnostics). Hence there arose a fairly large cohort of assimilated Hungarians of Jewish origin, who were the “good Jews”, subject to only mild “country club” anti-semitic snobbery, whereas the unassimilated Yiddish Jews, mostly in the east, were considered “bad Jews”. The population of Budapest before WW2 was 25% of Jewish origin and a good many famous Hungarian “names” in science and culture came from that group.

Admiral Horthy came to power in the white terror that crushed the 1919 Hungarian communist revolution, and ruled officially as regent, (despite the fact that he refused to let any members of the former Hungarian royal family return to the country), an admiral without a fleet ruling a kingdom without a king. It was an phalangist type regime, not fascist, though in the 1930’s pro-German and pro-Italian tendencies grew. Hitler cultivated the Horthy regime by awarding it territorial concessions, undoing the Treaty of Trianon and then, when the War broke out pressured it into signing a treaty allying Hungary with the Axis in Nov. 1940, after which Hungarian troops participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia, in exchange for some territorial awards, though Horthy was wary of being dragged into further military involvements, until the invasion of the U.S.S.R., when he succumb to Nazi demands and declared war, (resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of Hungarian troops at Stalingrad and elsewhere).

However, Horthy refused Nazi demands to deport any Jews, *who were Hungarian citizens*, (as opposed to from some outlying territories). In 1944, foreseeing the impending outcome of the War, Horthy initiated secret contacts with the British and the Soviets, seeking a deal to surrender or switch sides to best advantage. When the Germans got wind of this, they invaded and occupied Hungary, though leaving Horthy as regent and having him appoint pro-German ministers. Only then did the deportation of Hungarian Jews begin. However, Horthy was rather resistant to the deportation of Hungarian Jews and refused any deportation of Budapest Jews, eventually firing the pro-German ministers. The Germans then overthrew Horthy in Oct. 1944 and put the local fascist party, The Arrow Cross, in charge, and deportations from Budapest commenced until the Battle of Budapest in Jan.-Feb. 1944.

400,000 Jewish deaths is a bit of a low estimate. There were probably 800,000 Hungarians of Jewish origins, (though it’s a bit hard to say, because of mixed marriages), and likely something more than 300,000 survived the War. Many of the survivors, of course, emigrated. And it would surprise me if Budapest has the largest Jewish population of any European city. There are 30,000 observant Jews according to surveys. (Hungarians nowadays are not very religious and only about half report a religious confession). Hungarians of Jewish origin might number 60,000.

Orban’s Fidesz won a super-majority in the 2010 (post GFC) elections, with even supporters of the Social Democrats voting against them, because of disgust with the corruption and incompetence of the prior government. And then Orban began consolidating power in a way not announced during the campaign. But the really disturbing result was that the neo-fascist Jobbik party, the direct descendants of the Arrow Cross, won 16% of the vote. Everything is the fault of the Jews and the Gypsies! And while there aren’t many Jews left in Hungary, Gypsy/Roma people are a sizable minority, perhaps 7-8% of the population, especially concentrated in the rust belt regions in the east and south of the country.

Eszter’s article omits what a basket case the Hungarian economy is. Before the crisis, many were encouraged to take out low interest mortgages in Swiss francs. Then the franc skyrocketed and the forint crashed…

Of course Snyder says a lot more than that, and I understated his first point–he doesn’t say the archival evidence “suggests” that Hitler killed more. He says unequivocally that the old estimates for Stalin’s numbers were inflated and that Hitler killed more civilians. But the whole piece is worth reading and I’d encourage people who are interested to read it and not rely on my inadequate summary.

Snyder explicitly makes the judgment that Stalin was worse prior to WWII (which he apparently believes began in 1939 instead of 1937…What’s the point of history if not take advantage of hindsight?) He even adds the (dubious I think) point that Stalin was killing in times of “peace” for the same reasons as Nazis. The article finishes making a case for assigning mutual responsibility for Hitler and Stalin to share.

Yes, Snyder is actually factually correct on all those points, and Horthy was also a nasty fascist whose memory needs to be excoriated – there is no contradiction. Stalin and Hitler were both evil monsters motivated mostly by a lust for power and megalomania. The only reason to try to prove that one of these bastards was “worse” than the other (which seems to me like a choice between execution by hanging or execution by firing squad) is to use the deaths of millions in the 1930s/40s to score cheap political points today, which is reprehensible no matter which political side you’re taking.

I request the people arguing Hitler vs. Stalin do a few things:

A) Explain to me why “starting WW2” does not count against Hitler in your summations.

B) Explain why civilian deaths are the only deaths that count.

C) Explain how you jumped from “worse” to “killed more people while he happened to be in power”. (I’m pretty sure the common cold has killed more people than ebola, and Barack Obama has killed more people than Newt Gingrich.)

or just, D) Talk about Hungary.

There was a series of guest-posts on Paul Krugman’s blog last year that was deeply revealing and very scary, about the destruction of constitutional liberal democracy in Hungary. I always thought it was a travesty those stories were buried as a curiosity in the idle-musings blog of a columnist, limited to those who sought it out on the internet, and not on the damned front page of the paper. Even if you neither know anything about Hungary nor care about the country or its people, it’s a terrifying cautionary tale.

“Hitler vs. Stalin” is like “Alien vs. Predator.” Or should be.

Here you go.

“Yeah, why did these stop? ”

Yeah. To my mind Krugman continually exaggerated how dire the political situation ‘in Europe’ was during this time to help push a general position against austerity. How good Scheppele’s analysis was I dont know, but I still remember it being less alarmist and more sophisticated than Krugmans interpretation.

By alarmist I mean that she described the situation as being dire, not that she was exaggerating it. I may have chosen the wrong word.

“I request the people arguing Hitler vs. Stalin do a few things:”

What argument? Steven Johnson pretended to believe that Stalin killed far more than Hitler–Snyder disagreed, Steven Johnson then said–well, I’m not sure what. Others responded to that. A good thing I’m not arguing too, because I have no idea what point you’re making with your questions either. Snyder’s article was clear and interesting and that’s why I linked to it.

As for Hungary, I had a late friend who visited there and told me about the rising anti-semitism he saw there. It has been reported in the NYT as well.

* The criticism stopped because post-Snowden it turned out the US is a liberal democracy engaging in very very heavy surveillance. This showed up as completely ridiculous and totally insincere the idea that Hungary engaging in much much milder activity marked then out as an autocracy.
* Again, Orban is not an anti-semite. People seem keen to throw dark accusations around, but don’t seem willing to back it up with anything. He was a guest at the WJC. One of the things which has offended the human rights lobby is his attempts to ban the swastika. The worst thing that can be said about him is he seems keener to blame the Hungarian holocaust on the Nazis than is fair. But realistically, when his opposition are actual fascists, thinking the Nazis were a bit worse than they really were is hardly a damning indictment.
* Lastly, Orban has pissed a lot of people off through very sensible policies. He’s anti-austerian, he’s taxed big business, he tried to make students funded by Hungary work there, he introduced a finance tax. He’s fiercely critical of German domination of the EU and the Troika – which is an *actual* proven threat to democracy in the periphery. That why he’s a target for these sort of hatchet jobs.

Doesn’t the EU have some leverage here? The Hungarians must be in breach of a lot of EU laws.

Trying to score points by claiming one homicidal dictator is worse than another is un attractive and unhelpful.

The limitations of the EU are shown by the ineffectiveness of the organisation when confronted by states that disrespect civil Liberties. Orban may not be a Natzi but he certainly has clear dictatorial tendencies and the obsession of the EU with being big business friendly means it is unable to advance “European values”. The tight money euro system means that the EU is less able to argue for any moral values. The euro project seems to have made every issue subordinate to keeping the euro.

The situation in Hungary is reflected to some degree else where in eastern Europe.

The soviet oppression has been used by Politicians to avoid any responsibility for the crimes of the Nationalist rulers during and before the second world war. As if Stalin being a big cunt made all the errors of the pre war regimes ok. In fact the rulers who took over when the first world war ended made many errors and embraced oppressive policies and economic policies that failed to work. The whitewashing of past failures is the real problem and no good can come from such a lack of insight. It is not so far from Putin trying to whitewash the soviet regime and also use Russian orthodoxy in a contrived synergy to act as the basis for his Government. It is not a constructive approach and it just encourages prejudice and stifles creativity and thus is bad for economy and society in the long run.

@john c. halasz (34): What about German-speaking Jews in Hungary?

Obviously, I’m thinking about Theodor Herzl – or was he one of a kind?

hix,

there’s nothing austerian about Orban’s policies. In aggregate, they represent a massive and non-transparent transfer of state and private wealth into the hands of favored associates and partisans while seeking alliances with non-democratic countries. Many new security units — complete with tacky regalia and swat-team hardware — have been created, some for “anti-terror” usage, including a unit built out of Orbans’s own private security team, some assigned directly to the control of the prime minister or the speaker of parliament, thus without democratic oversight. Without open bidding, his government has assigned long-term agricultural land leases with EU subsidized perks throughout the country to a handful of Fidesz cronies, most now absentee landlords, in most cases leaving the people who actually work the land worse off than during the soviet block era collectivization and very close to landless and indentured peasantry status, for which, of course, Fidesz appears to have great sympathy in their program of restoring an older class system. Tobacco monopolies were taken away from the small shop keepers who held them and reassigned, again in a non-competitive and non-transparent way, to Fideszniks, putting hundreds of small business people out of work. The private retirement funds of the Hungarian people were confiscated and, though Orban promised they would be untouched, they have in fact been drained. A airport is given a 30 year least to a Chinese interest, contract terms unknown, labeled a “state secret.” A Russian-held interest in MOL, the state oil company, was repurchased, over the market price and terms unknown (and held as a state secret), a massive transaction that has been costly to Hungary and certainly an opportunity for market manipulation by the — unknown actors — who made the deal. Victor Orban’s tiny hometown has had the bulk of its land assets placed into Orban family control while a world class soccer facility has been built there. And finally, let’s not forget, that an Azeri, who went out and bought an axe with which he killed a Georgian, while both were attending a NATO program in Hungary, was summarily removed from prison by the Orban government and sent by to a hero’s welcome in Azerbaijan, a nation with which Hungarian suddenly enjoyed very friendly economic relations.

john c. halasz wrote:

“However, Horthy refused Nazi demands to deport any Jews, *who were Hungarian citizens”

This is not true. Just consider the thousands of Jewish Hungarian citizens who perished in the Ukraine in Kamenets-Podolskii in 1941, shipped there by a cabinet decision of the sovereign Hungarian state under the regency of Horthy. Further, there is considerable evidence that immediately after the German entry into Hungary, it was Hungarians who pushed for removal of Jews from Budapest against a German military which was reluctant, if only because of immediate resource and timing issues.

Ze Kraggash,

The bulk of the licenses were taken from small tobacco shop owners, whose livelihoods have largely been ruined; this was a large part of the Fidesz design as these concessionaires were viewed as legacies of the old era, even if many of these businesses had changed hands in-between. The new licenses were fewer in total and many if not most new licensees were awarded multiple concessions (for example, András Kulcsár, a top manager at the Continental Cigarette company — a firm hearvily involved in writing the new law — who was awarded 84) so there was a net loss of jobs and small business owners and a Fidesz-typical transfer of wealth to cronies. Yes, there have been robberies (many of the new shops were built quickly, without proper security and with no management experience in the field), but the greater damage has been caused by the fact that cigarettes in Hungary have become a black market good, with cheaper Ukrainian products outselling the inflated prices and heavy taxes of the licensed Hungarian cigarettes. Cigarette consumption appears not have gone down, tax income from cigarettes has collapsed, old business were destroyed and many of the new businesses have already failed.

Alex:

“Perhaps Horthy’s role in preserving Hungarian independence from Germany may be the reason for Orban’s refusal to condemn the Horthy statute, rather than a desire to murder Jews and insitute a dictatorship?”

How does not condemning a wartime dictator complicit in genocide do anything to preserve the contemporary independence of Hungary? If anything, by diminishing foreign sympathy for Hungary while not doing anything concrete to help the country, it makes things worse.

Thank you to you all for the interesting information concerning Hungary past and present. As a Bulgarian I have to say with regret that the Hungarian history is not much dissimilar from the Bulgarian. A staunch German ally in the two WWs; and ruled by an autocratic king since the beginning of the 1930s who changed governments at will, and personally approved the election lists during the farcical parliamentary elections. According to a rare – in terms of frankness – contemporary interview with a Jewish historian the Kingdom of Bulgaria was given as an example to emulate at the Wandersee conference attendees due to it’s harsh anti-Jewish legislation. In addition, since the 1930 Bulgaria traded almost exclusively – over 70% – with Germany thus contributing to the Axis war effort both with man-power and in terms of supplies and logistics. And, surprise surprise, since the political reversal in 1989 the past has been officially rehabilitated , and all the involved white-washed. Today – of course – the Roma and the Turks are to blame for everything; and in the media regularly get regurgitated plenty of fascistic “scientific studies” about how great were the proto Bulgarians and their pure descendants; how fabulous were their genes; and how everything good in this world is due to them. Such nonsense inevitably carry informal political approval because media, big monies and politicians are operated by the same circles. Therefore those above, including the OP, who think that the US and/or EU aim at upholding moral standards and values are either somewhat naive or a wee delusional.

very ethically mixed

Indeed. Very.

@71:

Oops! Typo.

@69:

And yet Axis Bulgaria refused to deport its own Jewish citizens, (while willingly collaborating with the deportation of Jews in the military zones of occupation that were granted to it by the Nazis beyond their pre-established borders.)

Anti-semitism doesn’t automatically equate with exterminationism. At the risk of raising some hackles or encouraging disputes between petty nationalisms which I abhor, I would cite the case of occupied Poland.

At the risk of raising some hackles or encouraging disputes between petty nationalisms which I abhor

Let’s just agree that Canadians are the worst of all, and call it a day.

Not to trash the Bulgarians, who have almost zero non Russian or Bulgarian defenders. But few Jews had worse survival statistics than those in the chunk of Greece that Bulgaria occuppied.

Of course given the situation it really wasn’t up to them, but it realky wasn’t up to Horthy either. The amount of self congratulation on this issue where literally no one except the Danes distinguished themselves in the basic humanity departmnt, and even the Danes would have probably behaved very differently if they had been treated the same as the Poles, is incredibly false and self serving. Italy has as much to brag about as anyone, yet they gave the world fascism.

“Romania was the second most anti-Semitic European country between the wars and during the war”

I have always been chilled, tho I read it many years ago, by Arendt’s account (following Hilberg, I suppose) of the Rumanian approach to deporting Jews.

The silly Germans wanted to ship the Jews off in boxcars a great distance and gas them. The pragmatic Rumanians were all, “why? just drive them around the countryside in locked boxcars for a week – problem solved!”

This, I recall, struck the Germans as deeply uncivilized and inhumane, and indicative of the boorish un-Aryanism of their Slavic allies.

@79:

Romanians aren’t Slavs.

And they have beat up on the Roma, the Hungarians, afaict. Consistently. Just to note.

The Poemas del rio Wang blog has a couple of recent entries that touch on this story:

http://riowang.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-little-guide.html
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2014/01/lost-their-lives-in-an-immigration-procedure.html

“I would tend to point to the unenlightened bureaucratic despotism of the neo-liberal EU, as much as to power-hungry politicians instrumentalizing “Greater” chauvinisms, in analyzing the current resurgence of such atavistic tendencies ”

What does ‘neo liberal’ mean here ? Is there some description of the mechanisms by which ‘EU neo liberalism’ leads to rising ‘authoritarianism’ in Hungary (accounting for alternative paths to economic stability/non EU growth plans) ? Or should we stop using the moniker ‘neo liberal’ as a catchall for everything we don’t like ?
Yes economic dislocation leads to growing opposition to minorities, but it seems EU institutions have put a brake on that opposition so far.

81: doh, of course not. Sorry, Slavs.

86: are you suggesting no one would rob the victims if they didn’t really get a trip to Auschwitz?

Ronan(rf): Is there some description of the mechanisms by which ‘EU neo liberalism’ leads to rising ‘authoritarianism’?

It is all in Polanyi, isn’t it? The Euro a new gold standard, a free market globalization and financialization driving civilization’s sheepherd over the cliff.

I would tend to point to the unenlightened bureaucratic despotism of the neo-liberal EU, as much as to power-hungry politicians instrumentalizing “Greater” chauvinisms, in analyzing the current resurgence of such atavistic tendencies

More generally, some of the EU effects (mass immigration in the central states, perceived loss of sovereignty in the periphery) give rise to nationalist sentiment. Where sentiment exists, politicians will show up and amplify it. Inevitably, nationalism will turn against ethnic minorities: some of them are presumed to have dual loyalties, others are lacking nationalist awareness or have a parasitic culture or whatever. And voila, there you have it, the Jobbik movement.

Besides, Hungary is a special case: having lost more than half of its territory in the last hundred years, and with almost a half of them living outside the borders, nationalist victim complex is not a big surprise. Soviet-controlled authoritarian governments suppressed it, but in a democratic system it becomes a force to reckon with. And to exploit, of course.

Donald Johnson doubles down on Snyder, and Vanya basically bets the farm. I still think Snyder is nuts on the most charitable interpretation. If he’s a highly reputable historian, so much the worse for reputable history.

His phrase “historical and moral flexibility” is not irony, but euphemism. As I said, he only needs to be polite about “historical” flexibility because he wants to avoid admitting that reputable history was propaganda, to imply we’re getting the real goods now. Frankly I think he only admits the truth about the inflated numbers because he can’t get away with it.

The phrase “moral flexibility” unpacks as a discreet claim that the democracies should never have allied with the monster Stalin. Make of that what you will. I myself make very bad things of it. I don’t believe that the famine was any more genocidal than the Irish potato famine or the Indian famine during WWII. (And you can make of this what you will.) This claim is a major ideological justification for Ukrainian opposition, including real live fascists.

And this brings us back to the point I was trying to make, which is that the modern democratic struggle is connected to the rehabilitation of old versions of fascism. My crazy, vicious original post predicted claims that were actually made in this thread: Horthy is objectively better than socialist Hungary; Viktor Orban is a democrat; Shinzo Abe is a great economic leader, and we can slyly ignore his militarism. It wasn’t explicitly stated but the fascists in the Ukrainian opposition aren’t a matter of interest in this thread.

Let me suggest again that confused notions about the classlessness of democracy or that there really is something like “totalitarianism” have rendered most so-called discussion an exercise in muddying water.

I don’t know if that helps. The Bengal famine was no different from the Ukrainian famine, well actually it was, but only because thr British didn’t have the manpower or stomach for what Stalin did, the intention was the same after all they were dangerous fascists there, inspired by the arch Nazi MK Ghandi…

As to the Irish famine, I would say that was a lesser crime, and I say that as an Irish Catholic descendent of immigrant washerwomen, there was already a famine and Lord John Russell decided to make the most of it, like the good Whig he was. Of course this same logic can be used to defend all sortsof evils, but Ireland in the 1840s was just the apotheosis of the clearances. Mere oportunism. Unlike Churchill or Stalin, or Ulysses S Grant and the plains indians he didn’t actually intentionallycreate the famine in the firstplace. He just took advantage of it.

Of course if there is a hell he should probably burn in it, but probably only in the fourth circle or so.

Sorry, bad tho the 1943 Bengal famine was, I call b.s. on comparing it to the Ukraine famine, which I last read about in Snyder’s “Bloodlands.” Even the Wikipedia article on Bengal’s famine shows that it was a complicated event with debatable causes, much closer on the spectrum to the Irish famine than to the government’s going out and confiscating food from people.

Having just finished Mukerjee’s ‘Churchill’s Secret War’, I’m inclinded to agree that the Bengal Famine was closer to the Holdomar than is normally thought. One striking thing is just how clear it was made to the senior British war leadership that there was an emerging famine situation, how easy it would have been to solve, and how frequently and emphatically Churchill and his senior advisors refused to solve the problem.

There is also a hint that some in the apparat felt that famine was not such a bad thing, since it helped to (temporarily) defuse Indian nationalism, but it’s hard to say how far this opinion went — partly because some crucial official records have disappeared or been redacted. Churchill himself stated at one point that he felt India should be able to carry on so long as the army and munitions workers were fed, and damn the rest.

But, Luke, the Irish famine was “easy to solve” too. (Step one: quit exporting food from Ireland.)

It’s like the difference between refusing to help a city devastated by a hurricane, and bombing a city so that it looks like a hurricane hit.

@Anderson

Not exactly, because the violence inflicted against the people and the countryside (including the firing of grain stores, as well as the destruction civilian water transport essential for fishing and moving commodities locally), first as part of the ‘scorched earth’ policy to thwart possible Japanese invasion, and then as retaliation for rebellion, were contributing factors.

It wasn’t just that Bengal was hit by a storm and needed food aid: it’s that it was occupied by a hostile army that was eating all the food, confiscating and destroying local food stores, destroying local transport networks, and, incidentally, shooting protesters and raping whole villages at a time. It’s the difference between failing to feed the hungry, and taking their food by force and beating them into a bloody pulp, then failing to feed them.

As that ancient hippy said, let the dead bury their dead. Why would anyone think to gain unmerited competitive advantage, in argument or anything else, from unimaginable sufferings they’ve never experienced?

B. W. @91:

That was a strange comment. Are you suggesting something like Arnold Gehlen’s “disburdenment”?

I saw after typing the above comment that Ze Kraggash addressed this @92.

Roy belmont

Not that you should care, but it is my field

The blight, like the Potato itself was native to S. America, when the potato was introduced it came without the blight but was introduced intermittently by improving commercial farmers who began importing guano from Chile.

The thing no one remembers is that the blight was not unique to Ireland, it struck all of N. Europe killing thousands and was a spur to immigration to the US. However only in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland was it socially devastating. But relief was actually properly provided in Scotland, where many cleared crofters were provided with passage to N.America, while in Ireland it killed a million.

Re redistribution under fascism, Milward’s War, Economy and Society 1939-1945 is also good. His conclusion is the same as lurker’s: The standard of living for working-class Germans rise under Hitler and was maintained at a high level almost to the end of the war.

I think a lot of the famine comments are lacking the links, citations, and references that would strengthen their respective cases!

On 115, financial repression was a big part of the Nazi economy; the financial sector was basically given no choice but to suck up all the bonds (actually, usually short t-bills) the government could issue and either sit on them or post them for rediscount at the central bank, which would be delighted to print you some cash. Corporate profits were pretty high, but dividends would be taxed heavily. Capital controls kept you from moving your money out of the country, so your choices were to buy government bills or leave it and submit to the inflation tax.

The government finances worked, pretty much, up to 1944 when the funding roll broke down and the printing press took over. Before that, starting in mid ’43, there’s a run-up in retained profits and internally financed investment within companies, said to represent repressed inflation/flight from the currency.

The analogous pattern in the household sector was strong wage growth vs rationing; you got paid but there wasn’t much to spend money on, so you put it in the sparkasse which put it in the landesbank that had to buy bonds.

114-115: thanks

Roy at 6:13 am:
I was using the bat (seabird?) guano to color in the blanks in the first sentence there. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. I’ve got no quibble with the causative diagram you’re presenting.
The biological specifics of the Great Famine aren’t super interesting to me, though I’d be glad to read up on them.
What interests me far more is the destructive hammer brought down on Irish culture, Gaelic/Celtic cultures generally, and indigenous cultures globally.
Something I view pretty much the way medieval peasants viewed the workings of Satan, in their world.

Forgot to mention Hitler–that’s how the Stalinist regime gets to be number four or possibly five on the list of history’s greatest killers, behind Mao, Hitler, the Brits, and maybe Leopold.

stevenjohnson

Your comment makes no sense. There is no difference between killing one person than killing another.

There is no greater licence to kill others, than to kill your own.

If you want to differentiate Stalin’s regime from eg. American Colonial frontier indigenous deaths and slave shipping deaths of Africans, you may like to look at causal factors.

Stalin and his predecessor suffered extraordinary foreign subversion and multipoint military interventions. Many deaths arose from resulting paranoia. America and colonial Britain massacred for economic benefit. Many deaths resulted from racism.

America massacred hundreds of thousands in Vietnam purely as an act of paranoia.

@125
“America massacred hundreds of thousands in Vietnam purely [sic] as an act of paranoia.”

@120
“As an historical figure, Stalin is analogous to Cromwell or Napoleon, neither of whom get good press but neither of whom are commonly held to refute “democracy.””

Is there a competition going on to see who can make the most bizarre, ludicrous remark?

‘Stalin killed far more of his own party and his own country’s elite than Hitler or all the British Prime Ministers.’ (stevenjohnson)
There is that to be said in his favour. Wiped out most of my country’s communist party, too. Buggers had created a quasi-state in exile, with an army and everything. Potentially quite dangerous to us but good old JV took care of them.