Idealismo Asesino

by Paul Hollander

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of the study Reflections on communism 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall published by the Cato Institute.

The Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month was the very symbol of communism. It represented an unprecedented historic effort aimed at preventing people "vote with their feet" and leave a society that rejected them. The wall was only the most visible segment of an extensive system of obstacles and fortifications: the Iron Curtain, which stretched for thousands of kilometers along the border of the "Socialist Commonwealth." I was one of those who managed to cross these obstacles in November 1956 when they were temporarily dismantled along the Austrian-Hungarian border. My experiences in communist Hungary, where I lived until age 24, had a lasting impact on my life and my work.

Although they were very interested in communism in the late forties and early fifties, the American-hostile or sympathetic, actually knew very little about the system, and little is said today about the collapse of the Soviet empire. The fleeting media attention to the important events of the late eighties and early nineties matched his previous indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of large-scale atrocities, assassinations and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially when compared with public knowledge of the Holocaust and Nazism (which resulted in many fewer deaths ). The number of documentaries, films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared to those of Nazi Germany and / or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses about those remaining communist states or missing. For much of the West, communism and its various incarnations, remains an abstraction.

Different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as the result of communist atrocities are seen as side effects of noble intentions, which had difficulties to materialize without resorting to drastic measures. In contrast, the atrocities of the Nazis are seen as pure evil and no justification, and are not backed by an attractive ideology. There is much more physical evidence and information about the Nazi genocide and the extermination of these methods were highly premeditated and nasty, while many victims of communist systems were killed by lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of Communism were killed with modern manufacturing techniques.

Communist systems ranging from small Albania to the giant China, from the highly industrialized eastern European countries to underdeveloped countries in Africa. Although they were different in many ways, they all had in common the confidence in Marxism-Leninism as its source of legitimacy, the party system, control over the economy and the press, and the presence of a huge police force policy. They also shared an alleged commitment to the creation of a morally superior human being-man socialist or communist.

Political violence under communism had an origin and an objective idealist purifier. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle gave ideological support for genocide. People were persecuted not for what they were doing but because they belong to social groups that made them suspicious.

After the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals continue to believe that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long history of rancor among Western intellectuals that they gave him the benefit of the doubt or openly sympathized with political systems that denounced the pursuit of money and proclaimed their commitment to creating a more humane and egalitarian society, and humans they were not selfish. The collapse of communist systems to improve human nature means that any attempt to do so is doomed, but rather that such improvements will be modest and unlikely to be achieved through coercion.

Soviet communism collapsed for many reasons, including economic inefficiencies that resulted in chronic shortages of food and consumer products, and dominant and false propaganda, which was equivalent to the routine distortion of reality by highlighting the gap between theory and practice, between promise and fulfillment of this. The political will of the leaders behind the Iron Curtain fell over time, due in part to the 1956 revelations of Nikita Kruhchev about Joseph Stalin's crimes but also the product of their own experiences with the system failures . They no longer had the will to destroy those who dissented. In the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the new revelations were made public about the errors and evils of communism, further undermining the legitimacy of Communist rule.

The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans are motivated by noble ideals capable of inflicting terrible suffering with a clean conscience. But the collapse of communism also suggests that under certain conditions people can differentiate between good and evil. The grip and the rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deceptive and destructive idealism to the understanding of human nature that excludes the utopian social arrangements and that the careful balance of ends and means is the essential precondition for create and preserve a decent society.