Can the victims of communist crimes be mourned

...from the position of unreserved anti-fascism?

Will liberal democracy survive the internet? More and more I’m finding myself concluding that it won’t. Last night I fell down the rabbit hole of the Croatian right wing diaspora and revisionist historians of the Nazi death camps—a break I guess from the Serbian revisionist internet about the Serb role in the wars of 1990s -- and found an extensive online community feeding itself. Every crackpot cause, conspiracy and revision will have its club on the internet, and each will propagate, for such is the nature of the medium and the human. What chance stands the knowledge of history picked up in the public schooling system in your teens? Public broadcasters too are largely abandoning public education. And the internet is always here. (BTW whatever you do, don’t get your Balkan history from Wikipedia. It’s a madhouse down there.)

Take the Twitter character that posts under the name of the Croatian Heritage Association. It’s an ethno-nationalist, anti-vaccination, anti-EU, anti-NGOs, anti-Serbian profile that occasionally promotes revisionist history and parahistory about the death camp Jasenovac in the Nazi-run Croatia during the Second World War. (Revisionist in terms of: it wasn’t really a death camp, it did not target Serbs and Jews specifically, it was a labour camp and besides, the communists, who are much more evil anyway, made the camp their own after the end of war and kept putting people in it – type revisionism. Croatia has been unjustly smeared! Yugo-Serbo-communists that came after were much worse. Etc.) There’s an historian with some ties to the UK’s Warwick University who co-wrote a book of that kind on Jasenovac and who was the CHA’s guest speaker in several Catholic churches of Ontario some years back.

The pre-1990s diaspora from Yugoslavia, whether Croatian or Serbian or other, tended to come from the losing side of the WW2, but some liberals have emigrated too and then ended up I expect being radicalized by osmosis or nostalgia – that was the general tenor of the community – much further to the right. Canada’s earlier, pre-1990s Croat and Serbian diasporas (and many other people’s with similar historical trajectories) have always been fairly right wing and ethno-nationalist. In their minds and minds of their children who grew up in Canada, the Yugoslav communists are much more evil than the side that they fought against. This inherited emotional info has not been updated or contextualized in any way while they were growing up. And now they are largely the people who are lobbying for the creation of a monument memorializing the victims of communism. 

So we come to the main reason for this post: the troubles that come with erecting monuments for the victims of communist crimes. Troubles like those happening to the Ottawa project right now, where a buy-a-brick appears in honour of Ante Pavelić, and other contributions in honour of other far right figures from Eastern Europe. The most vocal lobbyists for such monuments in Canada probably come from this kind of demographic, the offspring of the right wing diasporas who have absorbed their families’ political loyalties, myths and memories. Mainstream Ontario politics has at least one player hailing from this background: Tanya Granic Allen, whose supporters, by accident of ranked ballot, brought us the current leader of Ontario Conservatives aka premier of Ontario. I’m always curious about social conservatives and ethno-nationalists, what makes them tick, how they reason, especially if they know how to hitch their concerns to populist reforms. TGA is a Catholic trad wife who homeschooled her five kids because she doesn’t trust public education (among other topics, on sex ed): here’s her explanation of why she said that the talk of gay marriage in Croatia makes her ‘vomit’, which is less interesting than how she uses her potted and not quite accurate synopsis of Yugoslavia for her argument, a perfect case of an inherited-emotion-as-history that so many diaspora children absorb. And some of those kids join mainstream political parties to continue their families’ battles by other means. Granic Allen occasionally approvingly RTs our friends above, the Croatian Heritage Association. Especially on real or fictional communist crimes, or people that the communist liberation from the Nazi occupation ‘martyred’.

She is very young and charismatic and I’d pay attention to her if I were an Ontario futurologist. She is very clear on what she believes – a disappearing quality among politicians. Disheartening but true, she is also one of the few people who are vocal on the issue of sex-denialism that seems to have gripped Canada’s elites, the mainstream politics, academia, media and arts sectors. (‘Gender identity’ is in, the material reality of sex out. To be able to say that sex matters, for science, politics and the laws, and that to say so is not hate speech, is being edged out of the mainstream.) She follows caWsbar on Twitter. Canadian left and the liberals have completely abandoned this flank to social conservatives. Canadian journalism to a great degree too: behold this profile of a ‘late-blooming’ 40-something archer that completely leaves out the fact that the person is a late transitioning male. How many female people become Olympians at the age of 40? Sorry, sorry, I’m hate-speeching, aren’t I.

But let’s leave this incoming bundle of troubles that is TGA aside. The Ottawa memorial raises a larger question: why we are relatively softer on communist crimes vs. those committed by the Nazis and fascists. Numbers-wise only, Stalinism murdered incomparably more people than Nazism, but there’s still this belief in the conversation of the humankind that morally, Nazi crimes were more wrong. Does the intent make the crime less of a crime? Attempts to question the historical, ethical uniqueness of the Nazi crimes – as do the attempts to build memorials to the victims of communism – usually come from the conservative right. Some of you will remember reading about the Historikerstreit debates in West Germany in the 1980s, when the historians like Ernst Nolte argued that there is no moral difference between the crimes committed by the Nazis and the Soviets, and that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that actually radicalized the German Nazis. ^^ Other people proposed that the Nazi crimes are not fundamentally different from the crimes committed by the Allies over German and East European civilians. Jugen Habermas was one of the better known public intellectuals in Germany who opposed this kind of revisionism.

I expect you’ve all seen Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin? Although the film is strictly speaking historically inaccurate, I thought it captured brilliantly the essence of Stalinist oppression: its utter arbitrariness, the making-it-up-as-you-go-along nature of its exercise of power. And… it’s a comedy. Would dark comedies of this kind about Nazism be possible? I can’t imagine it. Especially because the hapless leaders of the post-Stalinist nomenklatura that get taken down one by one in the film end up looking all too human.

I mean, yes, there are some actual historical reasons why ‘communism’ gets cut some slack by the western liberal democrats. There are capitalist countries where the communist parties did not hold the monopoly of power where they actually did some good – cf the municipal governments of northern Italian cities in the latter half of the twentieth. Or think the Communist Party of South Africa during apartheid. Or the communists in the Spanish Civil War. As for Yugoslavia, its communist regime created the first stable middle class among the South Slavs. It transformed a largely illiterate, rural society into an industrialized multinational state with free kindergarten-to-graduate education system and health care. But it was a trade off: it took away the multi-party elections, limited the freedom of speech and assembly, nationalized all the levers of the economy, gradually formed a ruling class that behaved the way any ruling class does. It was a safety vs. freedom tradeoff, and it could not last. And yes, some people went to jail, but there was more ketmanism than the open repression of the Soviet kind.

There are also philosophical reasons why we go easier on communism. Historian Tom Holland says it’s because its ultimate origin is Christianity – the universalism of we-are-all-of-equal-value, and the Last will be the First, and there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all who call upon Him – and we are still Christian that way, even while being secular societies, we live in the value afterglow of Christianity. I don’t know; a lot of us liberals are perhaps not so horrified by communism because we see it as located somewhere on the Enlightenment continuum, the Glorious, the American and the French Revolution continuum, but should we, or is the October Rev qualitatively a different thing?

What are your thoughts on this, readers? We (ie wealthy liberal democracies somewhat removed from the vagaries of history since about end of WW2) clearly haven’t found the right words and the right ways to commemorate the victims of communist crimes. I know we are facing more pressing global issues, but perhaps we should persist in this task. Or leave it to literature and the arts, which are likelier to accomplish what the crowd-funding of monuments can’t?