Epigones of Beria.

The late Alexander Cockburn noted that he was often "savaged as little better than an epigone of Beria" for settling on the figure of five or six million deaths in Stalin's Russia. It shouldn't have to be said that looking for an accurate picture of a monstrous series of crimes is not an act of exoneration. But in this society it would seem that the higher you go the better. Only the maximal estimates of Stalin's victims guarantee credibility. Expect nothing less from the enemies of the people!

Since the passing of Eric Hobsbawm in early October the BBC has made available the widely misquoted interview of Hobsbawm by Michael Ignatieff. It's around 11 minutes in that Ignatieff raises the matter of Stalin's liquidation of huge swathes of kulaks and dooming of millions of peasants in the 30s. The question asked is "If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time?" Hobsbawm responds first by stating that it is an unanswerable academic question. In a retrospective answer, not a historical answer, Hobsbawm said "Probably not". He went on to explain his reasoning, that in a period of universalised mass-murder and mass-suffering the chance of a future at all would be worth supporting. The sacrifices in Russia were unnecessarily great and excessive by any measure and, in his eyes, only marginally worthwhile. The Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution, but if it had been Hobsbawm says he isn't sure if the sacrifices would have been worthwhile.

In the next breathe Eric Hobsbawm asks "Do people now say we shouldn't have had WW2 because more people died in WW2 than in Stalin's terror?" At this point interviewer Ignatieff attempts a summary "So what that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified." It was not posed as a question and Hobsbawn responds in the affirmative, to indicate that this is the view that could be taken. Yet the old man had made it clear, moments before, that he isn't sure if the terror would have been worth it with the advent of communism. He goes on to qualify his emphatic 'Yes' by explaining that this is what people thought about the World Wars. Even though in the end many would say that the First World War was an unnecessary bloodbath, the Second World War was worth fighting. Yet this is not how the Right likes to portray this conversation, as I quote in my last article on this:

According to Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Ignatieff in 1994 "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Apparently Hobsbawm's only response was "Yes."

We have good reason to suspect the right-wing historian Conquest - a former British intelligence officer and virulent cold warrior - is out to push the worst line possible about the Marxist Left and not just the Soviet Union. It's a sure thing that Conquest wouldn't rebuke in phony moral outrage at someone who sees the slaughter of the Second World War as necessary to bring down the Third Reich. As Hobsbawm emphasises, it was not about the construction of a utopia - it was a case of "a world rather than no world" - at that time for the Communists who saw the world as crumbling at that time. Really it's because Conquest disagrees fundamentally with the ultimate aim, whereas the defeat of National Socialism merely means a return to liberal democratic capitalism. The notion of a "radiant tomorrow" was rhetoric in Hobsbawm's thinking, it was more about a better, more perfect and new world. It was a more upbeat view of the future tempered with the stark realism of the dire situation in the world.

At around 24 minutes in Eric Hobsbawm goes over his view of the estimates of deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He insists that the people involved in the Communist International, in the 1930s, had no substantial knowledge of what was going on under Stalin with regard to human suffering. Hobsbawm makes the same statement about what the anti-Communist intellectuals claim to know about the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm goes on to add that the estimates - ranging from 3 to 14 million in the gulags alone - are speculative and indefensible because of the range of the figures alone. The blunt tool Ignatieff quickly inquired if the old man of British Communism was saying Stalin's crimes have been "exaggerated" and, without hesitation, the old man responded "No... I'm merely saying that nobody knows!" Hobsbawm concludes that the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin was indefensible and inhuman. And yet the man is still lambasted by the Right as a lifelong apologist for Joseph Stalin's abattoir socialism.

In Saddam's Shoes.

Some of you might've watched David Aaronovitch lock horns with George Galloway on Question Time back in April. It was a refreshing sight, George Galloway insisted that the unpopularity of New Labour comes down to the Party's responsibility for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq which caused the deaths of over 1 million people. He went further to denote the trilateral consensus on foreign policy as well as on domestic economic affairs. It was a welcome sight to see Yvette Cooper being put on the spot over Afghanistan and Iraq. That being said it was quite something to see Mr Galloway trying to outdo Aaronovitch in a bout of mudslinging over Abu Qatada. Gorgeous George even slagged off Aaronovitch for the years he spent as a Communist. This spectacle reminds one of Galloway's flaws. But I suppose it's too late to rise above the tide of sewerage flowing through the streets of Whitehall. Aaronovitch is one of a few journos to leap across the chasm between the anti-establishment Left and the Right over questions of humanitarian intervention.

We owe to Rousseau the republican notion of freedom as non-subjection, but freedom comes in three forms for Rousseau. Natural freedom is simply the absence of impediments that people experienced in the state of nature, the only possible restraint being the forces of individuals. Then there is civil freedom which comes out of the association that does away with natural freedom insofar as it introduces limits. Freedom guaranteed by unfreedom. The limits imposed safeguard the individual's freedom in a certain way, which is the reason that the civil state is formed. Out of this convenient arrangement comes moral freedom as a by-product of it. This is the freedom which ix experienced in the submission to laws prescribed to oneself. Rousseau seems to presuppose a democratic system in his conception of moral freedom. It isn't a teleology, the social contract is not forged in order to generate moral freedom but to secure civil freedom. The advent of moral freedom is really accidental, but it is only possible after the establishment of civil freedom. 

Imagine taking on the project of setting up moral freedom under conditions that had yet to see civil freedom. There is a similarity with the dilemma that the Russian revolutionaries were confronted with just before the October Revolution of 1917. The Mensheviks argued that the end of Tsarism in Russia would have to be followed by a period of bourgeois democratic capitalism in order for socialism to be attained later on. The Bolsheviks thought that an alliance of workers and peasants could hasten the development of capitalism in a democratic framework. It's easy to take a side here and even easier to forget that Karl Marx had been willing to support democratic nationalism. You can find this when Marx expressed support for Abraham Lincoln, the abolition of slavery and ultimately the bid to maintain the American union. Another instance of democratic nationalism was when Marx supported the reunification of Germany for the cause of opening the passage to socialism by strengthening the capitalist system. He later backed off of this position.

Perhaps in the hope that socialism was a historical inevitability Marx had held that there had to be a period of bourgeois rule before the working-class could triumph in Germany. The inevitability of capitalist decline would open up the space for political agency and revolution. This could be taken as though injustice now may be necessary for justice later. We should resist such a teleological reading, Marx was neither a cold determinist nor a teleological snake-charmer. He acknowledges that history could culminate in the "common ruination" of all classes and provides an excellent description of human freedom in the Brumaire. Nevertheless, we shouldn't forget Marx in the moments when he praises free-trade and the middle-class legacy of human rights and civil liberties. In his mind a democratic culture is a vital precondition for socialism. By contrast, in Aaronovitch's mind, to hold free-elections was the reason to bomb Afghanistan as well as the justification for and ultimately the function of the intervention - democracy by airstrike.

For Aaronovitch the interventionist promise of democratization opened up the possibility for social democratic achievements like universal health-care in Afghanistan. This is what Oliver Kamm calls 'liberal democratic internationalism'. It is a view that has more in common with the Chinese Communists who foster capitalism in China with the stated purpose of nurturing the proper conditions for socialism. As Marx saw it the end and the means are eschew, the process to attain communism requires misery and injustice for most members of the human race. This is because capitalism is the system which amasses the surplus to provide the material preconditions of communism. Freedom is the fruit of unfreedom. Socialism is inseparable from exploitation and violence insofar as it required the fruits of the accumulative processes of capitalism, which is in turn indebted to slavery and feudalism. There is no teleology here, not in the sense that class society can't provide the material precondition for emancipation but in that socialism is not inevitable.

Before his death Christopher Hitchens wrote that the fall of Saddam Hussein inspired elements within the pro-democracy movement that had swept the Middle East in 2011. He argued that the Arab Spring would not have come about if Saddam Hussein had remained in power. Apparently the crippled regime had the capability to hold down demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Not to mention the yet to be successful revolts all over North Africa and the Middle East. Saddam Hussein would have been a great threat to the people within Iraq's border and perhaps nearby neighbours. In the same way that the Assad regime is the principle threat to Syrian citizens. We shouldn't forget that Iraqi society had been almost destroyed by the economic sanctions that had been imposed and this had strengthened the isolated Hussein regime. Hitch is eager to mention that the fall of Saddam was an inspiration for the pro-democracy movement in the region, he neglects to mention that their enthusiasm for Saddam's departure was not an enthusiasm for occupation.

It could just as easily be claimed that Saddam would've been overthrown by the Iraqi people in the Arab Spring given the crippled state of the Iraqi military. That's not something Hitchens was ready to concede. It's interesting, Hitchens told his friend James Fenton that Iraq will become is an American protectorate - overtaking Saudi Arabia in this role in the Middle East - and the base for the export of democracy. This comes out of the Jeffersonian vision of an imperial America which promotes freedom and democracy at every turn. To export the American Revolution was reason enough to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the primary justification and function of the intervention (until the wars got under way at least). There is no third camp between Islamism and Americanism. Only a democratic strike against totalitarianism can be made to defeat the forces of nihilism and take the side of the victim against the oppressor. Notice, this is compatible with his view that Indian democracy was a necessary by-product from the period of British colonial rule.

It's not as easy to remember that the British had no intention of establishing a democratic India independent of the empire complete with a socialist constitution. The same goes for the instance of the demise of European Fascism and the emergence of democracy in Germany and Italy. The outcome slotted neatly into the imperial ambitions of the Allies, the British were looking to takeout the Continental rivals to secure India while the US was looking to wipe-out the European competition. The elections in Iraq were a by-product, not the creation of a benevolent strike to build democracy through "shock therapy". Rather the elections were a means to legitimize a series of illegal economic reforms imposed soon after the invasion. The best outcome, for the Americans, would have been a Sunni military junta but in the end Washington had to compromise. But that was not guaranteed from the outset. It was the horrors of the war that were easily foreseeable from that stance.

The Myth of the Beautiful Soul.

A persistent characteristic of liberalism is a kind of irresponsibility, liberal leftism may appeal to grand projects of social justice and freedom but shirk from the harsh price to be paid for an ideal such as solidarity. The anti-capitalism of liberals might be just a concern over the excesses of capitalism, but the liberals shrink and avoid the consequences of applying their principles. So we can watch Vince Cable "attack" capitalism as he jumps in bed with the Conservative Party along with all the other gutless liberals. It would seem we have reached the point that the liberals are incapable of defending even their own ideas. It is true today that the liberals will talk about justice and rely on the conservatives to do the necessary dirty work for them. So we find the Democrats essentially colluding with the Republican Party on fiscal policy to attack the base of voters who elected Obama. But still Obama hangs onto his 'Beautiful Soul' even though the disagreement over the debt-ceiling was only over a difference in proposals of 2%. This is the shame of the self-described 'moderate' Left, the dirty secret of liberals and progressives everywhere.

It was this that drew the disdain of Rudyard Kipling for the liberals of his day, who relied on conservatives to do the dirty work for them. The same attitude of utter contempt is befitting for the liberal Simon Hughes who abstains from voting on tuition fees whilst quietly relying on his Tory cohorts to do the work for him. The liberal Left might even want a true revolution to bring down capitalism, but the liberal shrivels in the face of chaos and avoids the costs that need to be paid for a revolution. The liberal favours, at best, a revolution without a revolution. Even at the level of activism and civil disobedience the liberal prefers to stand back where he can maintain his convictions. The consequences of the application of such convictions don't have to be acknowledged and the liberal can remain in safe illusions. This is what we saw with the student protests in the UK, the liberal Left effectively took the side of the Right in order to oppose "violence" and "extremism". In that case the liberals sought to maintain the purity of their principles - their 'Beautiful Soul' - but in the end effectively took the side of the common enemy. 

The name Vladimir Lenin is not often mentioned in the same tones as Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, for obvious reasons, but the common ground between the three of them is significant. It is the difference between the politics of responsibility and the politics of conviction. We find Lenin can be located alongside Churchill and Lincoln as each of these men assumed the full responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. Neither of them had any illusions about power, when it was necessary to exert it and what it really took to handle it. This was true as Lenin led the fight against the encroaching forces of imperialism and fascism in Russia as it is when he pulled back from War Communism and implemented the New Economic Policy in 1921. It was a pragmatic move necessary for the times. The New Economic Policy opened up a space for market relations, as well as private industry and services at a small level whilst the peasants received a fair price for their products. War Communism had done its job and was abandoned after the Civil War, as the transition to a minimal functioning of society was achieved, then it was time for the NEP to be imposed.

Perhaps we should think of Abraham Lincoln, certainly the greatest of American Presidents as well as the most tragic. Abraham Lincoln loved the work of Shakespeare, particularly those work focused on powerful men. Above all he adored Macbeth which is significant given that the Scottish play is about the guilt of the King who has murdered his predecessor. This is symptomatic of the awareness Lincoln had for what it meant to lead the US in such times and what the enormity of his decisions amounted to. The tragedy of Lincoln was that he had brought on the American Civil War, it could have been avoided, 3 million would not have had to fight and the lives of over 630,000 people would have been spared. The savagery unleashed to fight and win the war should not be forgotten, we should not forget that Abraham Lincoln was a syphilitic racist who suspended habeas corpus. But to do so is not to dampen the greatness we attribute to Lincoln with urine. Part of the greatness is down to the kind of man he was and we shouldn't revert to a crude hagiography.

Before the official abolition of slavery there was a conflict between the gradualism of liberals and the radical abolitionism of John Brown, which almost functioned to introduce the Jacobin logic to the US. These are the radicals possessed by what Badiou calls the passion of the Real: if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B - the violence required to really defend and assert A. The attempts to incite an armed insurrection to abolish slavery certainly acted as one of the sparks that set the nation ablaze and the Civil War began. Notably the last written words of Brown were "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done." John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian, it was vital for him to practice egalitarianism on every level and he made it clear that he saw no difference between white and black - not by saying it, but by what he did. Brown embraced the cause in an unparalleled manner.

We ought not forget it was Winston Churchill who flirted with eugenics, harboured racist views, disliked the poor and held the British Empire in the highest of esteem. It was not an angel who bombed Dresden and defended Stalin in cabinet meetings. This is the same Churchill who assumed the responsibilities of Prime Minister at a time when Britain faced war and the possibility of German invasion. The man stood out as a maverick in his opposition to the appeasement of Fascism in the Parliament of the 1930s. He did so in full awareness of what the situation demanded of him. As the war raged in 1940, and it looked like the Third Reich might actually invade, Churchill suspended habeas corpus in order to detain fascists and sympathisers without charge. It was a necessary evil which he described as the "foundation to all totalitarian government". Once it became clear that the Germans would not invade the power was repealed. Recall the words of Winston Churchill in September 1943 "To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go."

Bare in mind, it was Lenin who fought a vicious civil war against the White Armies that had been mobilised to crush the Russian Revolution and the Entente Powers who came to the rescue of the old ruling class. If the White Army had been victorious the word 'fascist' would be Russian and not Italian, thus the labels with which we pin to the chests of both Hitler and Mussolini would be entirely different had the Red Army lost the Civil War. Besides that, if the White Army had been able to forge Fascism in Russia there would have been an unprecedented slaughter of Jews in the country. This would also mean that Moscow would have stood behind National Socialism all the way for ideological reasons and not just out of pragmatism as seen under Stalin. The pact between Russia and Germany may not have come to an end, or at least not to the benefit of the Allies in WW2. We should take this very seriously given that the Third Reich could have won WW2 had Germany waited to invade Poland until 1942.

For all the talk of the backward conditions in Russia it was the fifth industrial state in the world before the orgiastic slaughter of the First World War. The country had an enormous peasantry and as the country was devastated by war it was left on the brink of social collapse. It is feasible that the process of industrialisation could have been achieved without a revolutionary event at all. But that is not a sufficient case for Tsardom and it seems absurd to hold that this process would have been accomplished in a "humanitarian manner" under the Tsar. The tragic loss for Russia is that the revolution of 1905 failed, which is what Lenin and Trotsky had worked for so hard, had it succeeded it is possible that it could have forestalled the First World War and consequently political change in Russia might have been achieved without carnage.

It is symptomatic of the liberal Left, and infantile leftisms in general, that there is a desperate need to cling to the vestiges of a powerless status in order to maintain a "pure" adversarial position to power itself. The push for change is restricted in this way as the liberals revert to a passivity as demonstrations turn violent. When the need for unity is most dire the liberals are the first to call on the Left to point the guns inwards and open fire. It is better to be a noble loser with a Beautiful Soul than a radical who went too far. Note the person who gets his hands dirty has always gone too far. This stance is unsustainable and impractical, it is one of comfortable resistance when the very nature of resistance is uncomfortable by definition. It was true of the British liberals whom Kipling despised as it is of the student representatives who distanced themselves from 'violence' only to lose their authority in doing so. It is just as we drink decaff coffee, we want coffee without caffeine which is just coffee without coffee essentially. We can't always avoid the harshness of our choices. In the words of Bayard Rustin "The proof that one truly believes is in action."

Crashing and Burning in Montreux.

The controversial book Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov and published in 1955, known for the innovative and lyrical style in which the narrative unfolds page-by-page, the infamy that has enveloped the novel is down to its content which focuses on the most sordid sexual deviancy - paedophilia. It is a dark tale of a middle-aged man and his obsession with a 12 year-old girl, the nature of this "love affair" is disposed towards rape and physical abuse. Nabokov insisted that his book did not convey any message, and it was not a work of "big ideas", stressing that he didn't want to "touch hearts" or "effect minds". I can't help but suspect that this element of Nabokov's work is partly due to his outlook and political views. Nabokov was a strident individualist and considered himself an old-fashioned liberal, which is likely given that his father was a prominent liberal politician, although Nabokov was also a close friend of William F Buckley and a fan of Richard Nixon.


It's important that we consider Nabokov's life. Vladimir Nabokov was born into one of the most powerful families in St Petersberg and inherited great wealth at a young age, he lived in a large house of 50 servants. Though this life of luxury as a Russian aristocrat was cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution, foring Nabokov to go into exile just as he was reaching maturity. This separated him from his first love Tamara, Lolita could have been Nabokov's way of mocking the way he still reminisced on his relationship with Tamara even in old age. Particularly as he aged she would have no doubt remained the same age in his mind as he had known her. Nabokov's father was shot dead by a fascist in Berlin, his gay brother was murdered in a concentration camp. These events not only displaced Nabokov and changed his life forever, but it may be the reason for his individualism. From the trampled ground of Bolshevism and fascism Nabokov emerged, like Ayn Rand although less extreme, in opposition to "big ideas" and "utopian goals" like communism.

Nabokov's claim to not propagate any message or "big idea" in his work is typical of an "old-fashioned liberal", who would argue that the state should be minimal to protect individual freedom. In the past, and even today, the libertarian right-wing has argued that the Civil Rights act should be repealed on the grounds that it infringes on the freedom of business owners - the freedom to discriminate. Defenders of such a position often claim to be "neutral" and adhere to a minimalist view of the state as "non-interventionist" for the sake of freedom of choice. But in not taking sides and not interfevening in such a way you are taking sides and are interferring. As such "neutrality" is permissive of the racist practices prevalent at the time. In not taking sides in Lolita, neither explicitly condemning nor embracing paedophilia, Nabokov may have taken the side of Humbert Humbert.

Apart from his life as a novelist Nabokov loved football and was an avid chess-player, he was also an entomologist. As an entomologist Nabokov collected over 4,000 butterflies and even discovered a species, which was named in his honour "Nabokovia". The life of a butterfly is particularly interesting in regards to Nabokov's writing. A butterfly begins life as a caterpillar, before entering an immobile stage known as the "nymph stage" before emerging as a butterfly weeks later. During the "nymph stage" the insect is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, in that sense it is in a liminal state. The parallel stage among humans would be the teenage years - which are neither child nor adult - liminal like the "nymph" stage. In the story Lolita is a prepubescent girl of 12, which would place her just prior to entering this liminal stage as a caterpillar. But it is as she is reaching maturity that Lolita dies while giving birth to a stillborn child, she was just 17 at the time - not yet an adult, not yet a butterfly.

However, we must not be rash and conclude from this that Vladimir Nabokov was simply no defender of paedophilia. Humbert Humbert is not the last "nympholept", nor was Lolita the last "nymphet", spawned by the dark-side of Nabokov's imagination. Similar tales of sexual deviancy appear as early as 1939 in Nabokov's work, beginning with The Enchanter and ending with Laura which he never finished and was published posthumously against his wishes. In total there are about six novels in which young girls are lusted after by mature men. As Martin Amis noted, about two or three of these novels are masterpieces but the content is nevertheless unsettling. It would appear that "nympholepsy" is part of the decor of themes and motifs - along with butterflies, chess, Freud-bashing, mirrors; doubles and dopplegangers - that are recurrent in Nabokov's works.

The Enchanter is similar to the first half of Lolita in that the protagonist infiltrates the household of his prey by marrying the girl's mother, after the mother is out of the picture (e.g. killed off), the "enchanter" despoils the prepubescent daughter. Though the differences are more important, and perhaps more revealing, than the similarities between the two books. The "enchanter" has a single voyeuristic "moment" with his nymphet, whereas Humbert Humbert has sex regularly with Lolita for about 2 years. The Enchanter is less subtle and crude than Lolita in terms of writing, in the former Nabokov writes at one point "he began passing his magic wand above her body". And yet it is Lolita in which Nabokov judges Humbert Humbert, tacitly holding him responsible for the trajectory of Lolita's life - from her defiled childhood to her premature death, a life stolen by Humbert.

Interestingly, The Enchanter was published by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, whereas Lolita was published in 1955 when Nabokov was still alive, even though it was The Enchanter which was written first in 1939. This might lead us to conclude that Vladimir Nabokov was worried about the release of The Enchanter, nothing particularly new there as Nabokov contemplated burning Lolita on several occasions and wanted The Original of Laura to be destroyed upon his death. But it was not until Nabokov's later years that he underwent a literary meltdown, beginning with Ada in 1970. As Amis puts it "When a writer comes off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident." It is in Ada that Nabokov creates a world which Humbert would have adored - where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

On it goes in Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), in the latter a Vadim Vadimovich marries a girl 43 years his junior. In Transparent Things an impotent misfit named Hugh Person visiting Switzerland, courting Armande and tending to Mr R an aging eccentric author and a paedophile. Person looks at a picture of Armande when she was 10, arousing and haunting him in dreams from then on, he later strangles Armande in his sleep and dies in a fire at the hotel. The sexual depravity recurrent in some of Nabokov's many novels may place such works further to the transgressive fiction of William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade. Though we might conclude Nabokov's writing on such a rancid transgression is really down to an obsession with the internal chaos of man. But I think that might still be too generous, even for an author of Nabokov's magnitude.