New York Review of
Books
Volume 57, Number 6 · April 8, 2010
Communists and Nazis: Just as
Evil?
By John Gray
The work of Avishai Margalit
provides a refreshing and instructive contrast to much
that has become conventionally accepted in recent
political thinking, particularly about the moral
conflicts that arise in pursuit of peace. A longtime
peace activist in Israel as well as one of the most
important philosophers working on questions of ethics
and politics today, Margalit was a founder of Moked, a
small party advocating what was then seen as a
revolutionary two-state solution to the Palestine–Israel
conflict; it gained one seat out of 120 in the Knesset
in the Israeli elections in 1973. As the years passed
the two-state solution gradually became accepted, while
officially encouraged settlement on the West Bank made
it all the more difficult to carry out.
On Compromise and Rotten
Compromises reflects over thirty years of practical
and intellectual engagement with the moral issues raised
by the search for peace. It begins with a simple
assertion: "The book is in pursuit of just a
peace, rather than of a just peace. Peace can be
justified without being just." Here Margalit is
developing a line of reasoning set out in The Decent
Society (1996), where he argued that avoiding evils
and not the attempt to realize an ideal condition of
justice should be the central focus of political thought
and action. A decent society is one that does not
inflict cruelty and humiliation on its members, and aims
to avoid other universal evils such as war.
An impassioned advocate of
"negative politics"—the politics of dealing with evils
rather than striving for an ideal good—Margalit is clear
that in a decent society many types of injustice would
be corrected; he is no less clear that remedying
injustice is not the same as moving toward a condition
of perfect justice. But his point is not that theories
of ideal justice (such as those of John Rawls, for
example) should be replaced by a philosophy that focuses
simply on making the world less unjust—a position set
out in Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice (2009).
Margalit's argument, implicit in The Decent Society
and argued methodically in On Compromise and Rotten
Compromises, is different and more radical: the
struggle for a decent society requires compromise,
including the willingness to accept a less just world
where this is necessary in order to stave off greater
evil.
For anyone concerned with the
moral quandaries of human conflict, On Compromise and
Rotten Compromises contains much that will be of
intense interest and lasting value. There is an
illuminating discussion of two pictures of morality and
politics. One is economic, in which practically
everything can be exchanged in the markets; the other is
a religious vision claiming that some things are holy
and may never be traded off. Margalit goes on to observe
how the politics of the holy can be used to support
irredentism, sectarianism, and sectorialism (the
division of society into separate parts). Whether in
Jerusalem or India, he suggests, "the politics of the
holy is the art of the impossible. It makes long-run
compromises untenable."
Margalit analyzes the logic of
arriving at compromises, showing how arguments from
political necessity are different from claims about
expediency and both differ from compromise itself. In
exploring varieties of compromise, Margalit
distinguishes what he calls "cockroach in the soup"
arguments, in which a rotten clause spoils the entire
agreement, from "fly in the ointment" cases where a
rotten clause makes an agreement that is flawed but not
worthless. The American Constitution, he argues, "was a
soup, with slavery being a huge cockroach." The
Versailles treaty had its clauses assigning guilt for
the war entirely to Germany and they were wrong but they
did not disqualify the entire agreement. (The US
presumably expelled the cockroach from its soup by means
of the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment.)
♦
The core of the
book is an examination of the moral dilemmas that
surround World War II. Rather than employing the often
far-fetched thought experiments that are the stuff of
much contemporary philosophy—"On the whole, I have
little trust in stylized examples," he writes—Margalit
has wisely chosen to examine actual examples: the Munich
agreement appeasing Hitler; the wartime alliance between
Britain, America, and Stalinist Russia; and the Yalta
treaty. The Munich agreement, he suggests, was meant as
a compromise by Chamberlain and his supporters; but it
was a rotten compromise—a compromise of the type that
should not be accepted under any circumstances—because
it was "a pact with radical evil, evil as an assault on
morality itself."
Radical evil, he writes, means
"not just committing evil but trying to eradicate the
very idea of morality—by actively rejecting the premise
on which morality is predicated, namely, our shared
humanity." In contrast the compromise that was made when
Churchill allied Britain with the Soviet Union in the
struggle against Nazism was morally right, even though
Stalin's moral record was worse than Hitler's at the
time. "Churchill was right, not because Stalin's worst
was not up to Hitler's worse-than-worst, but because
Hitler's evil was radical evil, undermining morality
itself." Up to the outbreak of war, and indeed up to
June 1941 when Churchill defended the alliance with
Russia in the House of Commons, Stalin's regime had
killed and tortured far more people than Hitler's:
The politically caused famine of
1932–1933 alone brought about the death of some six
million people.... Even if we compare the "purges"
that Stalin launched in the Communist party to
Hitler's in the National Socialist Party, Hitler by
then [1939] had very little to show in comparison to
Stalin's liquidation of 700,000 people in the Great
Purge of 1937–1938.
Margalit adds that "the GPU,
better known by its later acronym of NKVD, was an
instrument of oppression far more ubiquitous than the
Gestapo. Until the war, there were about 8,000 Gestapo
torturers, as compared to 350,000 in the GPU."
These facts may not have been
known to Churchill in detail; but he was fully aware of
the nature of Stalin's tyranny. Even so he had no
hesitation in allying Britain with Stalin. Here his
statement in a broadcast he made on June 22, 1941,
quoted by Margalit, is worth reproducing;
The Nazi regime is
indistinguishable from the worst features of
Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle
except appetite and racial domination. It excels all
forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its
cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a
more consistent opponent of Communism than I have
for the past twenty-five years. I will unsay no word
that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away
before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The
past, with its crimes, its follies, and its
tragedies, flashes away.
While the wartime alliance with
Stalin can be defended as a justified compromise,
Margalit condemns the Yalta agreement, which "accepted
the systematically cruel and humiliating rule of Stalin
over Eastern Europe.... It thereby rendered the Yalta
agreement rotten." Very little that was agreed on in
Yalta had not been agreed on previously; when the
agreement was signed the overall shape of postwar
Europe, including the incorporation of Poland and other
Central and Eastern European countries into the Soviet
bloc, had been decided. Soviet forces had already
occupied Poland and were approaching Berlin. Nothing
that could be done by the Allies could alter these
facts.
Despite this, Margalit condemns
the agreement as rotten, for it legitimated a rotten
state of affairs. Moreover, Yalta made possible
"Operation Keelhaul," the forced repatriation to the
Soviet Union that occurred in May and June 1945 and
continued until 1947 of over two million displaced
people, some of them Nazi collaborators but most simply
Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans and some who had
never been Soviet citizens, by American and British
forces.
Those who defended this
operation, which was publicly admitted only after nearly
thirty years,[1] did so
largely on grounds of necessity or expediency, with the
British foreign minister Anthony Eden arguing that the
operation was necessary in order to ensure the safe
return of Allied service people in Soviet hands and
maintain good relations with the Soviets. As Margalit
shows, the factual basis of such arguments is at best
shaky. "There is not a shred of evidence," he writes,
that refusing the Soviet demand for repatriation "would
have ended the alliance with the Soviet Union."
As to the possibility that the
Soviets would delay the return of around 25,000 British
and American prisoners of war, "there is not a shred of
evidence that the Russians threatened reprisal, though
no one doubted they were capable of it." In any case, no
argument can justify what was in effect a crime against
humanity: "Crimes against humanity...extend...to
prisoners of war and to ex-prisoners of war, as my
example of the forced repatriation of Soviet prisoners
of war into Stalinist Russia at the end of the Second
World War attests." In enabling forcible repatriation
Yalta was a rotten agreement, even if there was no
feasible alternative to the situation of Soviet
occupation in which it was made.
In returning to
the perennial reality of choice among evils, and
illuminating these choices through a richly detailed
analysis of a conflict that shaped the world we live in
today, Margalit shows us how moral and political
philosophy should be done. It is impossible to find
fault with his conclusions regarding the compromises he
examines. In allying Britain with Stalin's Russia,
Churchill was not denying the evil of communism; he was
looking ahead to the greater evil of Nazism.
But Churchill's account of the
threat to morality posed by Nazism and communism differs
from Margalit's in crucial respects, and here I side
with Churchill rather than Margalit. For Churchill the
choice between Nazism and communism—not Stalinism, but
the regime established by Lenin—was a choice between
radical evils, with communism being the lesser of the
two at the time of the Soviet entrance into the war. To
my mind, moral reflection and the evidence of history
support Churchill's view.
Margalit distinguishes between
regimes that rest on cruelty and humiliation, as many
have done throughout history, and those that reject
morality as such. He makes another distinction:
morality, he tells us, has to do with how human
relations should be simply in virtue of our being human,
whereas ethics concerns how we should behave toward
other people with whom we have special relationships,
such as family members, friends, and coreligionists.
Morality and ethics may be at odds, sometimes
irreconcilably, and in Margalit's view most of what are
normally considered to be tragic moral dilemmas are
examples of "the clash between morality and
ethics." He does not deny that "there are cases of
genuine moral dilemmas, in my narrow use of the term
'moral.'" But he believes these moral dilemmas do not
concern him here, and does not accept that the choice
Churchill faced in June 1941 was a dilemma of this kind.
A part of Margalit's argument
rests on his account of Stalinism. While fully
acknowledging that Stalin's regime was based on cruelty
and humiliation, Margalit still finds in Stalinism a
"form of Leninism and not a separate new ideology," as
he rightly describes it—and he argues that Leninism
contained moral elements that were lacking in Nazism:
Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet
Union under Stalin retained the moral vision of a
nonexploitative classless society for humanity at
large; this is a very different doctrine from
Nazism, which rejected any form of recognized
morality by essentially dividing humanity into
immutable races.
In the Marxist-Leninist vision,
morality will wither away when scarcity has been
overcome. Margalit accepts that this vision of an
abstract new humanity in a post-moral world encouraged a
"dangerous fantasy of callousness towards the concrete
people of today." Bourgeois and Jews, he reminds us,
"were perceived in equally inhuman terms—as
'parasites.'" Even so, he rejects the view of some
supporters of the Popular Front and of Churchill, who
considered allying with Stalin against Hitler as a
choice of the lesser evil:
They were all wrong at the time
in their lesser-evil argument, since, judging by
conventional standards of decency and justice,
Stalin's regime in the thirties was by no means the
lesser evil of the two. And yet these people sensed
something right and important, namely, that Hitler
introduced an altogether new and different kind of
evil.
Stalin's attitude toward
morality, Margalit suggests, resembled that of the
fifteenth-century Spanish inquisitor Torquemada. "Both
retained, albeit perversely, the idea of shared
humanity." By rejecting this idea, Hitler repudiated
morality itself.
That Nazism
involved a new and different kind of evil is beyond
question. The Holocaust was, and remains, a unique
crime. Nothing like the Nazi extermination camps that
operated at Sobibor and Treblinka existed in the Soviet
gulag. The millions who died in Soviet concentrations
camps died from overwork, undernourishment, and inhuman
conditions—in other words, as a result of the system of
slave labor. As Robert Gellately has put it:
The crime that sets the Third
Reich apart was the mass murder of the Jews. The
Holocaust stands alone. The Soviet Union never had
factories designed to produce nothing but mass
death, even if they managed to kill millions just
the same.[2]
By the end of 1941 the Nazis had
killed one million Jews in the Soviet Union and the
Baltic States; by the end of 1942 they had shot another
700,000. As Timothy Snyder has shown, much of the
Holocaust was carried out using bullets.[3]
Mass murder on this scale involved the complicity of
some parts of local populations, but the driving force
was Nazi racist ideology. European and Soviet Jews were
killed simply for being Jews.
How much of this Churchill knew,
and the extent to which he could have acted on what he
knew, continues to be disputed. What cannot be in
dispute is Churchill's recognition that the Holocaust
belongs in a category of its own. In a note to Eden in
July 1944, he wrote of the Nazi assault on Jews:
There is no doubt that this is
probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever
committed in the history of the world.... It is
clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall
into our hands, including the people who only obeyed
orders in carrying out the butcheries, should be put
to death.[4]
In recognizing that Nazism was
radically evil, Churchill and Margalit are at one. Where
they part company is that Churchill believed that
communism was also radically evil, even though it did
not commit anything like the Nazis' supreme crime.
Churchill actively supported
military intervention in the Russian civil war, with the
explicit aim of overthrowing the Bolshevik government,
and he continued to support resistance to the Soviet
regime well into the Twenties. Again, only days after
Germany's unconditional surrender in May 1945, Churchill
was asking his chiefs of staff whether Anglo-American
forces, reinforced by elements from the defeated German
army, could launch an offensive to drive Soviet forces
from Eastern and Central Europe, with the strategic goal
of securing "a fair deal for Poland." Churchill's
proposal, which came to be code-named Operation
Unthinkable and was revealed only fifty years later,[5]
was soon rejected by British and American military
planners as unfeasible. The plan was reexamined in 1946
in the context of defensive preparations for the cold
war, but a rollback of Soviet power by force was never
seen as a serious option by any Western military
authorities. The chief significance of the plan is what
it shows of the consistent intensity of Churchill's
opposition to communism.
No doubt a part of his opposition
stemmed from the threat he believed the Soviet regime
posed to the British Empire, not least in India.
Churchill's anticommunism was never wholly or even
mainly rooted in geopolitical strategy, however. He
rejected communism as a political ideal, believing it to
be not only essentially incompatible with liberty and
democracy but also inherently destructive of civilized
life. In Churchill's view communism and Nazism were both
instances of totalitarianism, a category that has been
much criticized in recent years but that still seems
essential if the moral extremity of twentieth-century
politics is to be adequately described.
Aside from noting
that Stalinism was a development from Leninism and not a
separate ideology, Margalit says very little about
communism before Stalin. He cites the historian E.P.
Thompson's claim that "the years in Stalingrad between
1942 and 1946, much like those between 1917 and the
early twenties," were a period that revealed "the most
human face of communism." He quotes Leszek Ko akowski
challenging Thompson in a celebrated exchange:
Do you mean the deportation of
eight entire nationalities of the Soviet Union with
hundreds of thousands of victims...? Do you mean
sending to concentration camps hundreds of thousands
of Soviet prisoners of war handed over by the
Allies? Do you mean the so-called "collectivization"
of the Baltic countries, if you have any idea about
the reality of this word?
Margalit writes that Ko akowski
"forcefully questions the aptness of Thompson's
'human-face' account" of the war years in the Soviet
Union, but still concludes that those years "were
morally better" than the years before the war. "Better,"
he writes, "but not good enough to preclude their being
described as years of a cruel and humiliating regime."
If he is referring chiefly to the heroic fight against
the Nazis, in which over twenty million Soviet citizens
lost their lives, Margalit is surely right.
In line with Thompson and with
many liberals and social democrats, however, Margalit
does not ask whether the "human-face" account can
accurately be appied to Russia between 1917 and the
early Twenties. Does this human face include the
reinstatement of capital punishment (which had been
abolished by the Provisional government) in June 1918,
or the outlawing of opposition newspapers and political
parties in the spring and early summer of that year?
Does it include Lenin's orders of August 9, 1918, to
"shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes" and intern
"kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful
elements" in concentration camps? Does it mean Lenin's
order of August 11 in response to a peasant revolt
against grain confiscation, ordering the public
hanging—"hang without fail, so the people see"—of "no
fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men,
bloodsuckers"—a task that Lenin noted required finding
"some truly hard men"? Or Lenin's refusal to authorize
any action when informed by Jewish groups in October
1920 of pogroms committed by the Red Army during its
retreat from Poland?[6]
According to Margalit, "Stalin's
reign of terror was random." "A quota of victims had to
be filled, regardless of any wrongdoing." Whether or not
this was so in the case of Stalin, it is not true of
Lenin, who from the beginning of the Bolshevik regime
targeted specific social groups for execution,
imprisonment, and exclusion from society. As Lenin
himself put it, his overriding goal was "to clean Russia
of all vermin, fleas, bugs—the rich, and so on." It
might be thought that Lenin was the original Communist
exponent of Torquemada's attitude toward morality, in
which a concern for shared humanity is joined with a
readiness to apply terror to large numbers of human
beings. It would be more accurate to say that in Lenin's
view morality did not apply to large parts of humanity.
It is true that there is nothing
in Lenin's thinking that corresponds to the Nazi
dismemberment of humanity into immutable racial groups.
Lenin's retrograde elements—priests, kulaks, sex
workers, bourgeois intellectuals, and many
others—belonged for him to a stage of history that was
being left behind. Once these human remnants had been
dispatched they would never return, and a utopian
condition would be realized that would extend to all of
humankind. But for that very reason members of these
groups could be treated inhumanly, both in practice and
in theory. A part of humanity that had had its day, they
were not entitled to the protection of morality.
By denying moral standing to
members of groups he judged retrogressive, Lenin
repudiated morality itself. In this regard communism
must be judged radically evil, despite the fact that its
crimes did not include racial extermination of the kind
committed by the Nazis. When he considered whether to
ally Britain with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany,
Churchill faced a genuine moral dilemma; but not all
such dilemmas are insoluble. It is a measure of
Churchill's insight into this world-shaping moral
conflict that when faced with a choice between two
radical evils he had no hesitation in making the right
decision.
Notes
[1]For
an account of Operation Keelhaul see Nicholas Bethell,
The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia,
1944–7 (London: Futura, 1976).
[2]Robert
Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of
Social Catastrophe (Knopf, 2007), p. 587.
[3]See
Timothy Snyder, "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality," The
New York Review, July 16, 2009.
[4]Quoted
by Max Hastings, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord
1940–45 (London: Harper, 2009), p. 501.
[5]For
Operation Unthinkable, see Hastings, Finest Years,
pp. 571–577.
[6]See
The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive,
edited by Richard Pipes (Yale University Press, 1996),
pp. 50, 116–117.