The title of this post is Leon Trotsky’s description of Stalinism. More at the end of the essay.
Like many on the right, I’ve been taking stock of the ideas that undergird American conservatism. I take it as a given that ideas have consequences and that bad ideas have lethal consequences. So, in trying to determine the nature of a just government and social order, we always have to retreat back to our first principles.
Only after we determine the fundamental nature of the moral order in which we live can we then determine what’s fair and just in a world that’s demonstrably imperfect. In the words of Henry Jaffa, it’s “a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people.”
In the former view, we have no duty higher than that which we owe ourselves; in the latter, we view our world and limited existence as transcendent, as something we live beyond the passions of a particular age. The latter view accepts, of course, a conception of the “good” that can exist from age to age and a “truth” that is timeless. The Bible recognizes transcendent truth; so did Aristotle when he observed in Nicomachean Ethics (I,vi.1) that:
Still perhaps it would appear desirable, and indeed it would seem to be obligatory, especially for the philosopher, to sacrifice even one’s closest personal ties in defense of the truth. Both are dear to us, yet ’tis our duty to prefer the truth.
“Preferring the truth” requires great vigilance and personal effort. Yet, the prevailing opinion-makers in every age seem to cling mightily to views antithetical to truth, even avoiding unpleasant realities apparent to everyone but themselves.
Nowhere is this aversion to truth – to reality itself – more apparent than in the late 1930s. Intellectuals embraced leftism at a time when Stalin – having liquidated millions – was now liquidating tens of thousands more in the Great Purge, trying friends, colleagues, rivals and the truly innocent in courts that functioned only to reach a predetermined result.
The western intellectual class – mostly of the left – averted its eyes and worked to justify and excuse. They did so because the end – so they judged – was worthy. In response to Walter Duranty’s comprehensive apologies for Stalin’s crimes, Malcolm Muggeridge observed, “There is something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous about his unscrupulousness, which made his persistent lying somehow absorbing.” For men like Duranty, lying became an end in itself.
Totalitarianism is fundamentally corrupt and those who defend it assist in their own self-corruption, particularly in perpetrating the lie that there is no individual responsibility for good or ill. In denial, justification and obfuscation, leftist intellectuals during those years worked mightily to surrender themselves and the rest of society to the totalitarian future, in which the difficult questions of truth and individual will would be absorbed in a glorious, monolithic, collective will.
Lionel Trilling thought that the leftists of that time repudiated politics, or at least the politics of “vigilance and effort”:
In an imposed monolithic government they saw the promise of rest from the particular acts of will which are needed to meet the many, often clashing requirements of democratic society . . . they cherished the idea of revolution as the final, all-embracing act of will which would forever end the exertions of our individual wills.
The totalitarians of our present age also urge us to surrender our will – which we cannot do. To do so is to cooperate in our own corruption.
As a final word, here is Trotsky commenting on the Stalinist show trials – including his own. While he can readily denounce the excesses of “Stalinism”, he still maintains that they are not indicative of “communism” and “socialism” but derive from the “irresponsible despotism of the bureaucracy over the people”. Clearly, Trotsky’s own self-corruption was complete. All that remained was his own assassination.
Related posts:
Twitter
Facebook
RSS
LinkedIn