There is something deeply ugly about comparative statistics when the statistics in question relate to human lives. The deaths of people should not be accounted for like steel or coal production. In his diaries the English born expatriate novelist Christopher Isherwood once relayed a conversation at a dinner party in Hollywood where a fellow guest busily compared deaths caused by the Viet Cong with those caused by the US. “What are you, a f-ing statistician?”, Isherwood finally exploded.
As we consider the various catastrophes of the twentieth century, it is not only statisticians who can cause such eruptions, but partisan statisticians in particular. Thanks to the recent film Denial, the case of fascist historians like David Irving have been made familiar to a wide public. Although it does not come out especially clearly in the film, in the book which provoked the libel trial depicted in the film (Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory by Deborah Lipstadt) the motivation is clear. ‘Historians’ like Irving engaged in two games at once.
The first was to diminish the number of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, to chip away at the six million figure and come up with as a low a number of victims as they thought they could get away with (a figure that often culminated in the figure zero). At the same time they focused their energies on events such as the Allied bombing of Dresden and worked away to inflate the numbers killed in those raids. By this manoeuvre they hoped to be able to show that the Allies were at least as bad or even worse than the Nazis. Such are the exposed sins of fascist historians. The whole world is now familiar with them.
Yet since the dawn of the communist experiment, exactly one hundred years ago, precisely the same tricks have been used by communist historians and admirers, but with infinitely more success. From the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty1 in the 1920s and ’30s right up to Seamus Milne (previously a Guardian columnist and now senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn) in the present, the crimes of communism have been covered up (as in the case of Duranty) or downplayed (as in the case of Milne). Noticeable among the traits of those who perform this task is that they are the self-same people as those most eager to presume – and parrot – the highest deaths-tolls attributed to the side of any capitalist, democratic society engaged in any conflict anywhere.
Yet while the Irvings get the obloquy that they deserve, the careers of the Milnes of this world are not damaged in the same way. Why is this? The main cause – as even anti-communist historians like Robert Conquest have been willing to admit – is that fascism somehow ‘seems’ worse than communism. There remain many people who think that communism was not as bad as fascism, not because it didn’t claim more victims but because those victims were claimed in a somehow ‘noble’ endeavour. Perhaps now that we are a century on from the dawn of both experiments all can be seen in a clearer, and less competitive, light.
In recent months I have been speaking to people who study communism and its effects as well as some of those who suffered those effects. The resulting documentary for UnHerd was introduced by Tim Montgomerie yesterday, and can be downloaded and listened to via his introduction or, for example, on iTunes.
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