Bloodlands

Timothy Snyder published a new - and instantly controversial - history of the Holocaust, titled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin .
http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465002390

What is controversial about it is the fact that it is not ONLY about the Holocaust, as is clear from the title. Snyder's main point is that the Nazi murder of the Jews should be seen in the context of the death of at least 14 million people in the hands of the two utopian regimes, Communism and Nazism, or if you prefer, their leaders Stalin and Hitler (who could not single-handedly kill even a single human being without the majority of their subjects aiding and abetting them). Snyder puts the Holocaust in the context of Stalin's deliberate starvation of perhaps as many as 3 million Ukrainian peasants (known today in Ukraine as Holodomor), the Great Terror, execution of the Polish intelligentsia by both regimes and so on.

I have read outraged responses to that, including Efraim Zuroof's indignant article in last week's Haaretz called, tellingly, "The Equivalency Canard"
http://holocaustinthebaltics.com/tag/neo-nazis-lithuania

Many such responses conflate morality and ideology. By what measure is death in Auschwitz more morally repugnant than the death of a Ukrainian child locked up in a barrack and left to starve (there were 20,000 of them in Kharkiv only)? Mass murder is mass murder.

But ideologically, the Holocaust IS different because all Jews, no matter their self-identification, were slated for extermination. Stalin did not plan to kill ALL Ukrainians. There was no place for ethnic genocide in Communist ideology, while class genocide by definition does not apply to national entities. It does not make Stalin and Mao better than Hitler. It just makes them different.

We have to move beyond the ethnocentric idea than only genocide directed against peoples count. Unless we develop ways of talking about auto-genocides of nation-states, we will never learn the true lesson of the Bloodlands or the blood century that produced them.

genocide sweepstakes

In Hong Kong airport, I bought a great new book by Frank Dikkoter, "Mao's Great Famine". 45 million people died in China between 1958 and 1962. This leaves Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler in the dust in the genocide sweepstakes.

When I lectured in Chongqing, mainland China, I got an honorarium in yuan (HK has its own currency, HK dollar). Each 100-yuan bill is decorated with a picture of Mao.

China today is neither the killing fields of the Great leap Forward nor the feckless disintegrating USSR of the perestroika. It is an amazingly dynamic, prosperous and interesting society. Chongqing, almost unknown in the West, has the population of 30 millions and better public architecture than NYC. Its people are kind, optimistic and vibrant.

I do not believe that China has to accept the Western model of "democracy" (meaning the tyranny of the majority) in order to prosper. I have no sympathy for the religious insurrectionism of Tibet, the Muslim Uigurs, or the sectarian Falun Gong. China has to stay unified; its disintegration would be a disaster for humanity.

But I believe that China has to come to terms with its past. Otherwise the unacknowledged trauma of auto-genocide will fester until it eats the culture from within. It has happened to Russia whose past greatness is gone - if not forever, for a long time.

But the airport in Hong Kong is a cause for optimism. Hong Kong is officially part of China - and yet it has free press, free civic culture, and as its airport book selection demonstrates, could not care less for the mainland's censorship. When I am able to buy Dikkoter's book in Chongqing airport, I will know that Mao has lost. And then I don't even care if they keep his chubby face on their currency. The genocide sweepstakes of the twentieth century will truly be over.