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Living with the hammer and sickle
How the West doesn't mind the SovIet era symbol, but abhors the swastika

...It is truly one of the strangest distortions of our times, this selective myopia concerning the legacy of Soviet-style communism. Perhaps the most incisive analysis of this phenomenon comes to us in Applebaum's aforementioned study of the Soviet system of exile and labour camps, Gulag.

Applebaum examines the strange mix of idealism and selective memory that gives rise to what amounts to a collective apologia for among the worst crimes of the 20th century. She recounts, for instance, a conversation with the current lord mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, known affectionately among his constituents as "Red Ken" for his dalliances with pure laine socialism. Livingstone patiently explains that, while it is appropriate to describe the Nazis as "evil," one must understand that the Soviet Union was, by contrast, "deformed."

"That view," writes Applebaum, "echoes the feeling that many people have, even those who are not old-fashioned left wingers: the Soviet Union simply went wrong somehow, but it was not fundamentally wrong in the way that Hitler's Germany was wrong."

In other words, the teleology of a classless society based on the principle "to each according to their need from each according to their ability" mitigates the most heinous crimes, whereas Nazi Germany's race-based ideology does not.

And while it seems a gossamer thread on which to hang an analysis of the perceived differences between these two Satans, Applebaum bravely pushes past righteous indignation into a sustained discourse on the subject. She points out that both the Soviet and Nazi systems of concentration camps were born of a common fin de siècle European "colonial" experience.

"The notion that some types of people are superior to other types of people was common enough in Europe," writes Applebaum. "Both regimes legitimated themselves, in part, by establishing categories of `enemies' or `sub humans' whom they persecuted or destroyed on a mass scale."

For the Nazis, this began with the crippled and the retarded and moved on to gypsies, homosexuals and, above all, the Jews. And the Soviets? At different times, Stalin systematically persecuted Poles, Chechens, Tartars, and, on the eve of his death, Jews.

In the end, Applebaum draws a fine and chilling distinction between the two systems, both on the basis of intent and result. Whereas the Nazi concentration camps were designed specifically to eradicate the Jews and other "undesirables" from Europe, the gulag prisoners were exploited for economic ends.

"They were, to use Marxist language, exploited, reified, and commodified. Unless they were productive, their lives were worthless to their masters." From each according to his ability to each according to their need, indeed.

And still for all that, the hammer and sickle, the symbol of this "deformed" ideology, raises nothing like the hackles and discomfort one feels at the sight of the much loathed swastika. At least in the West, the Soviet symbol is a signifier for a kind of folie de grandeur.

"While the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror," writes Applebaum, "the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh."...