Flutterby™! : Koba the Dread

My parents have always had friends from Eastern Europe, so as I was growing up I had a reasonable diet of tales from the other side of the Iron Curtain. But in the intervening years, especially since the wall came down, it's been easy to forget what government gone horribly wrong can be. I finished Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million last night. It's a look by Martin Amis at the reign of Iosef Vissarionavich Stalin. But Amis was the son of another famous novelist, Kingsley Amis, and came of age knowing Christopher Hitchens and other famous lefties, so it's also a memoir an reaction to the apologists for the Soviet Union that came out of the 1960s. The last two chapters are a letter to Hitchens and Amis the elder, and in the letter to Hitchens he recounts an episode where Hitchens was giving a speech an referred to someone as "an old comrade". Amis picks up the story:

Afterward I asked Conquest, "Did you laugh?"

"Yes," he said.

And I said, "And so did I."

Why is it? Why is it? If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many "an old blackshirt," the audience would have... Well, with such an affiliation in his past, Christopher would not be Christopher—or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. Is that the difference between the little mustache and the big mustache, between Satan and Beelzebub? One elicits spontaneous fury, the other elicits spontaneous laughter? And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old iea about the perfect society. It is also the laughter of forgetting. It forgets the demonic energy unconsciously embedded in that hope. It forgets the Twenty Million.

I was originally going to take this critique off into pointing out that while graphically illustrates, drawing on all sorts of sources, the horrors of the Soviet Union, he doesn't do anything to illuminate why a nation would allow that sort of evil to occur. One man didn't put 5% of the population in slave labor camps, didn't kill and punish by quota. It took the coordinated efforts of many people to deliberately screw up harvests, to starve many countries under that huge nation, and then when the United States stepped in to help, to make sure that those supplies didn't get distributed either.

But as I was retyping that quote above, I realized that maybe he did.

I was going to tie this whole thing together in one long distrusting bit, pointing out that not all of the alleged brutalities of, say, Uday Hussein occurred as they were originally reported but that we have pretty strong record of such things happening elsewhere. I was going to balance that by mentioning that buyying into false realities created by politicians who deliberately pervert and change language is also a recipe for disaster.

But I don't have a conclusion. I can, however, recommend the book as a great shit-stirrer.