EDITORIAL: No moral difference (01/25/98)

EDITORIAL

No moral difference

In the jargon of newspaper and magazine publishing, it's called a "jump quote" - a catchy phrase, set in enlarged type, selected from an article's text to "jump out" and catch the reader's eye. Unlike a headline, the primary purpose of which is to summarize an article's contents in a phrase, the jump quote should somehow be incomplete, in order to tease, to provoke, to entice the reader to read the article completely.

A jump quote from an op-ed piece in the December 22, 1997, issue of The New York Times reads: "The child of a Ukrainian kulak deliberately starved to death by the Stalinist regime is worth no less than a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto starved to death by the Nazi regime." In terms of catching the reader's eye, this jump quote rated a 10. At the top of the page, above this quote was a pen-and-ink sketch of Lenin wearing Hitler's signature narrow black mustache, and the opinion piece, which was written by Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, was titled "The Longest Road to Hell."

Mr. Judt's commentary concerned a new publication, "Le Livre Noir du Communisme" (The Black Book of Communism), released in Paris in November. The book, edited by Stephane Courtois, a respected historian of French Communism, is an 800-page compendium, in French, of the atrocities committed worldwide in the name of Communism.

Mr. Judt writes, "The myth of the well-intentioned founders - the good czar Lenin betrayed by his evil heirs - has been laid to rest for good. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew. ... In the course of a few decades, Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people. ... Whole categories of people, real or imagined, were exterminated not for anything they had done, but just for being who they were. Concentration camps, forced labor and terror were elevated to a system of government. ... A permanent civil war of party-state versus society was inaugurated; its goal was a Gleischaltung - an atomized oneness - different from Nazism only in its invocation of 'class' instead of 'race' ... mass murder was not an unintended consequence."

The release of this book apparently has caused consternation in Europe among some of Mr. Courtois' fellow scholars and especially among Europe's left. Mr. Judt speculates that the West is reluctant to condemn Communism since the West united with Communism to defeat Nazism. (Nobody wants to think of this victorious alliance as a pact with one mass murderer to defeat another.) He also speculates that among us are still "many well-intentioned men and women beyond the reach of Communism [who] deeply needed to believe in it. ... It is thus difficult for the left-liberal intelligentsia of the West to let go of its memories and illusions, to reconcile itself to having been no wiser or better than Fascism's many foreign admirers in the 1930s."

Mr. Judt concludes that "Communism and Nazism are, and always were, morally indistinguishable." However, he offers a "crucial analytical contrast: there is a difference between regimes that exterminate people in the inhuman pursuit of an arbitrary objective and those whose objective is extermination itself." This crucial analytical contrast, it appears, is too frail to stand up to any kind of scrutiny, since among readers and writers of the numerous letters of response to this commentary there was confusion as to which regime was which. Some thought that Mr. Judt meant that the Communists were pursing arbitrary objectives, others thought he meant Nazism, and one letter writer included the United States, citing Vietnam as one example where the U.S. used extermination in the pursuit of an arbitrary objective.

The publication of this commentary, as well as several book reviews (some of which may be obtained from the World Wide Web) has apparently sparked some lively exchanges on the Internet. We'd enjoy hearing from our readers about the buzz on the wires. Also, since the book is written in French, we anglophones would be interested to hear from some of our readers, most notably those in Canada, if they can obtain and read the book and then give us some of their views and comments.

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