Interrogating Culture: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Social Theory Book

"The emigres from Communist countries we didn't listen to, who found it easier to get published in Reader's Digest than in The Nation, or the New Statesman, were telling the truth… Why didn't we hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now? … We didn't love the truth enough… We tried to distinguish among Communisms - for example treating Stalinism, which we disavowed, as if it were an aberration and praising other regimes outside Europe, which had and have essentially the same character."

-Susan Sontag, quoted on page 32


In chapter 2, Hollander notes political defectors from Communist countries by and large were ignored as a source of information about these political systems and about political attitude formation and change. Sometimes their message was even trivialized and caricatured with scorn. The same kind of dynamic is observed in The Demon in Democracy.

How do you prevent the mass generation of ideological shock troopers capable of committing heinous acts and living atrociously day after day while convinced sanctimoniously of their purity? Once permission-giving beliefs are lodged in the minds, mere information may take years to filter through, or may never truly register. I am reminded as I read about Communist defectors and how they often explained away mendacious politics by an end justifies the means rationale when I see the reactions to the Mueller report in the liberal media.

"Once more it was neither the lack of information nor his acceptance of official versions of these events [coercion of peasants to join collective farms; mass starvation; the purges and show trials] that was decisive in allowing him to retain his faith but the ability to neutralize these outrages with other considerations. By persuading himself that the ends justified the means, he found ways to reduce the moral significance of unappealing means used in the accomplishment of long-range goals…'I never believed that Bukharin and Trotsky were Gestapo agents or that they wanted to kill Lenin…But I regarded the purge trials…as the expression of some farsighted policy; I believed that, on balance, Stalin was right in deciding on those terrible measures in order to discredit all forms of political opposition, once and for all. We were a besieged fortress. We had to be united… the opposition leaders had to be depicted as deviationists and villains, so that the people would come to hate them."

-The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality by Paul Hollander, Pg. 42

"With time. a segment of the population... deteriorated into a set type, with a smirk on their faces, rote words on their lips, a noncommittal stance on issues for which they have responsibility. They simply carried out their work according to routine, choosing their words carefully... and taking every precaution to ensure their own safety.'
Such behavioral changes were characteristic of all Communist systems where people learned to carefully separate public expressions of their beliefs or sentiments from their private thoughts in all matters that had the slightest political relevance. In the Soviet Union this behavior used to be called 'wearing the Party mask.'"
-Paul Hollander quoting Liu Binyan in The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality, pg. 115

The Communist dictator Mengitsu in Ethiopia dismissing reporting on the severity of the famine, urged Davit Wolde Giorgis, "Don't let these petty human problems that always exist in transition periods consume you." (pg. 166). In built in so much of Communism and socialism has been a permission giving belief for hardness of heart. It seems counterintuitive, but much of it was built on a closing of the ears against the cry of the poor. Permission for sin and transgression against the neighbor, for theft, betrayal and murder, was given in the name of Progress. Perhaps the most famous example is when Stalin told his forces entering Germany "All is forgiven" in advance, meaning no atrocities would be impugned or held to account.

"It was widely known that security people watched those who were not cheering loudly enough. Mengitsu even had to win the tennis games he played with members of his government who let him win; he expected and received 'rounds of applause' from the officials who gathered to watch these games." pg. 166
Such historical anecdotes are often dismissed without dwelling on their deeper significance. This wasn't an idiosyncratic dictatorship, an anomaly within Communism. Somehow such awfulness, cloaked in public mendacity, rose over and over again in Communist countries. Why? What about Socialism generates this mendacity? Probably we are closer to the mark when we note the falsehood of its anthropology. "Marxism will overcome nature."

Giorgis recalled that "none of us felt we were able to tell him the truth. It is a guilt that I and other public officials must live with." Solzhenitsyn recognized the "evil empire" was built on the little day to day concession to lies and urged a personal commitment never to lie. "The lazy man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion."

"A primitive belief in Marxism encouraged such attitudes as Mengitsu observed that 'the tide will turn… Marxism will overcome nature." pg. 167

"If radicalism was a displacement of personal grievance, it was not surprising that radicals could not confront their interior lives. New Left radicals favored the slogan 'the personal is the political,' but the intention behind it was not introspective. The phrase expressed, rather, their totalitarian agenda to CONTROL the personal in order to make utopian politics work."

-David Horowitz

"If the Left was primarily motivated by the desire to 'make the world better,' why was it so indifferent to the consequences of its efforts? What else could explain its lack of concern about the deeds of its liberators in Indochina, or its Panther vanguard at home? It's disinterest in whether socialism WORKED or not? The more I thought about the moral posturing of the Left, the more I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions."

-David Horowitz

"Marx was a man of strong hatreds and loves -mostly hatreds- which deeply conditioned his thought."

-Eugene Genovese

(His love for one of his maids ended in his refusing to acknowledge his offspring with her).

"The horrors did not arise from perversions of radical ideology but from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder and the desecration of our professed ideals....by a deep flaw in our understanding of human nature- its frailties and possibilities- and by our inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline long provided by the religion we have dismissed with indifference, not to say, contempt...Our whole project of 'human liberation' has rested on a series of gigantic illusions. The catastrophic consequences of our failure... cannot be dismissed as aberrations....They have followed in the wake of victories by radical egalitarian movements throughout history, from ancient times to the peasant wars of the Sixteenth century to the Reign of Terror and beyond, social movements that have espoused radical egalitarianism and participatory democracy have begun with mass murder and ended in despotism...The allegedly high ideals we placed at the center of our ideology and politics are precisely what need to be re-examined."

-Eugene Genovese, qtd. in The End of Commitment, pg. 193

"There are certain kinds of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason...It is fairly common among socialists: They are... God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth...trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future- always taking it for granted there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven, the you believe in socialism."

-Doris Lessing

The problem is not with religious acknowledgement of the transcendent but with the misplace meant of that into idols, what Rene Girard would call a subterranean metaphysics with an infernal mechanism leading to what Eugene Genovese noted: "That no socialist regime- no regime of the radical Left at any time in history- has ever avoided political tyranny and mass murder goes unremarked."

"...in the motherland of socialism (the Soviet Union), socialism did not work."

-Maurice Halperin