Communism every bit as evil as fascism in casting aside humanity

A ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Russian Revolution and the civil war at the Russian Cathedral St Alexander Nevsky in Paris. Picture: AFP

Had he still been alive, the Marxist professor Eric Hobsbawm would almost certainly have been asked for his thoughts on the centenary of the Russian Revolution. His views would have been treated with respect, if not admiration. He might even have been asked to write a few words for some high-minded publication.

Now let’s have a small thought experiment. Imagine that Hobsbawm was a committed fascist and to the end of his life refused to resile from his support and admiration for Hitler. Would such a Hobsbawm have been sought out for his reflections on the anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power? Wouldn’t he have been considered to be utterly beyond the pale as an apologist for mass murder and treated as a social pariah?

Yet the real Hobsbawm, who didn’t just remain a member of the Communist Party but to the end of his life refused to condemn the tyranny of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s crimes against humanity, was appointed a Companion of Honour, even though MI5 had listed him as a potentially dangerous subversive.

When he died five years ago, obituaries described him as a “great historian”, gushed over his “unflinching sense of engagement” and “expansive intellect” and hailed him as “Britain’s most respected historian of any kind”.

His intellectual abilities were indeed formidable. But although he was criticised for his unwavering Soviet apologetics, he was indulged in a way that would not have been the case had he supported fascism.

Many other cultural figures who supported Stalin and the Soviet Union, such as the writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Arthur Ransome, Bertolt Brecht, Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and more, have been treated with similar forbearance.

One reason is that it is an article of faith that communism is opposed to fascism. In fact, they are historically joined at the hip. In the 19th and early 20th centuries both appealed to the progressive intelligentsia. This was because both had the utopian ideal of perfecting society rooted in the same 19th-century European cultural trends.

There were, of course, differences. While Marxism rejected liberalism, fascism rejected both liberalism and Marxism to promote a communal, anti-individualistic and anti-rationalist culture. But fascism grew out of a revision of Marxism. The progression was bridged by the philosopher Nietzsche and by Mussolini, who believed communism was the force that would bring about the destruction of society necessary to usher in a new civilisation. Mussolini thought, however, that the proletariat would not create Marx’s socialist utopia. Instead, the revolt by a Nietzschean “superman” would destroy bourgeois institutions. Thus fascism was born.

Both communism and fascism wanted to rectify what they saw as the disastrous consequences of modernity: the atomisation of society and the alienation of the individual under capitalism. Both spawned cultures of totalitarianism and murderous, psychopathic violence. Both were linked by theories of eugenics and racial superiority.

After reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx called it “the book that contains the foundation in natural history for our view”. The resulting doctrine of “social Darwinism” represented progress as a kind of ladder on which humanity could climb towards perfection. This meant the “unfit”, or lesser breeds of humanity, had to be discarded on the way up.

Early socialists were imbued with such eugenic thinking. The Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Harold Laski, CP Snow and Maynard Keynes were all eugenicists, as were various editors of the New Statesman and Manchester Guardian.

It was only when the full horror emerged of the Nazi extermination programs against “mental defectives” and the Jews that eugenics and racial theorising were discredited.

Given all this, why are supporters of communism and fascism treated so differently? This is not to suggest that the gulags were the equivalent of the Holocaust. It is merely to wonder why communist ideology, which caused the deaths of so many millions, does not provoke the horror and revulsion that bar fascist supporters from a place in public discourse.

Fascism only became seen as unconscionable after the Holocaust linked it to genocide. Concealing its common antecedents, communism then posed as fascism’s antithesis. In fact, much fascist thinking has emerged today in carefully sanitised form — on the left. Atomisation and alienation are contemporary obsessions, while Nietzschean destructiveness has become a fashionable shibboleth fuelling the emergence of the “ooooh Jeremy Corbyn” constituency.

The Nazis’ espousal of ecology and organic foods and repudiation of technology mutated into the modern green movement. Both the abortion of defective foetuses and withdrawal of food and fluid from the elderly and infirm are a form of eugenics.

Communism, however, was never sent underground in the same way as fascism. For years, the Labour Party tolerated the far left as no more than an irritant. It regarded such people as a threat only if, as with Militant Tendency in the 1980s and Corbynism now, it looked as if they might gain power. It did not exclude such views as beyond the pale of humanity itself.

The centenary of the revolution may occasion thoughtful pieces about the horrors of Soviet communism. Like the Potemkin villages built in pre-revolutionary Russia, however, such pieties will conceal a political and philosophical reality that is rotten to the core.

The Times