Books

For ‘progressives’

By Kevin Steel ⋅ October 11, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

A review in the October New Criterion "Into the whirlwind" by Daniel Mahoney (reg. required) of From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States edited by Paul Hollander. Here’s a review excerpt:

Rooted in what Hollander suggestively calls the “violence of higher purpose,” the misdeeds of Communism do indeed get something of a free pass in “advanced” intellectual circles. It is certainly the case that the record is available for all those who wish to know it. Many had hoped, and even expected, that a broader public and scholarly recognition of the Soviet Union as a practitioner of state violence and repression on a truly unprecedented scale would follow the fall of Communism and would lead to its permanent discrediting. This has not come to pass. Instead, in academic circles, Communist regimes are often presented as having engaged in flawed but legitimate attempts at promoting rapid economic modernization and greater social equity…

If this book has a single lesson, it is that “progress” justifies nothing. From the abstract “love of humanity” flows limitless contempt for actual human beings. In the powerful words of Yakovlev: “What gives one group of people the right to sentence to death civil society, or popular custom centuries in the making?”