Unrepentant Communists Just as Unwelcome

I must begin by acknowledging something that fills me with deep shame.

In my youth I was favourably disposed towards communism, and believed that anti-communists in the West were greatly exaggerating the brutality of marxist regimes in Europe and Asia.  Even if communism wasn't appropriate for a country like Australia, it seemed the only system that could offer hope for the Third World.

I did not deny that dreadful excesses had occurred under communism -- although I was certainly blind to many of them.  But I thought that the excesses were aberrations, which were at least partly explainable by the exceptional military and other threats that communist states had to face.

In my terrible naiveté, I believed that if only the Soviet Union and like-minded regimes were treated reasonably by the West, they would do everything possible to bring about a more just and peaceful world.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 forced me to reconsider my views.  But it was not until the 1990s that I finally accepted that the passionate anti-communists I had once ridiculed, men such as B.A. Santamaria and Melbourne academic Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, had been right all along.

Now, only a few holdouts in the loonier reaches of our universities and unions would refuse to concede just how nasty and murderous communist regimes really were.  In The Reds, his recent, rather sympathetic history of the Australian Communist Party, even Professor Stuart Macintyre, who responded to what he calls "the aura of communist tradition" by joining the party in the 1970s, readily admits that the "tradition" was responsible for millions of innocent deaths.

In fact, Stephane Courtois, the editor of The Black Book of Communism, which caused a sensation when it was published in France last year, calculates that communists have killed between 85 and 100 million people.  This makes communism the most lethal political movement in history, far more destructive than nazism, which was responsible for around 25 million deaths.

Many apologists for communism -- including, I am very sorry to say, my younger self -- attempted to differentiate between the honourable aims of founders such as Lenin, and the malignant regimes created by the likes of Stalin or North Korea's Kim Il-Sung.  But as The Black Book of Communism and other historical studies make painfully clear, communism was criminal in its nature from the start, rejecting the rule of law and committed to achieving its aims through mass terror and violence.

Whereas nazism practised a genocide based on race, communism practised a genocide based on class.  The bourgeoisie and other so-called "enemies of the people" were to be "crushed";  destroyed "like noxious insects", in Lenin's chilling phrase.

In the first five months of their rule in Russia, the communists executed nearly three times as many political opponents as the Tsarist authorities had killed during the whole of the previous century.  And the number of communism's victims during its seventy-five year long reign in Russia is only a fraction of the number during China's half century of communism.

There is a fundamental question about this bloody legacy.  It relates to what the English writer Ferdinand Mount calls the "asymmetry of indulgence" with which western intellectuals treat communists compared to the way they treat nazis -- or even people who supported the far less murderous fascism of Benito Mussolini's Italy.

For the past half century, nazism has rightly been seen as an abomination in the West.  People who profess any support for nazism place themselves completely outside the bounds of acceptability.

It is virtually unthinkable, for instance, that anyone claiming that Hitler was "a man who seems to have been Christ-like, at least in his compassion", or "one of the greatest teachers of humanity" -- as Professor Manning Clark said about Lenin -- would be allowed to participate seriously in Australia's intellectual or political life ever again.

And unless he wished to commit professional suicide, no academic would write a history of the Australian Nazi Party -- or even a less reprehensible party of the extreme right -- which was as charitable in tone as Professor Macintyre's treatment of Australian communists.  Statements that involvement with nazis had given an author "warm friendships that still endure, loyalties and interests that persist", or expressions of hope that anti-nazis would "exhaust their exultations" at the defeat of nazism, would scare off any reputable publisher, whatever criticisms of the party such a history contained.

Nor would a work with such disagreeable sentiments be given the non-fiction Book of the Year award by the Melbourne Age, as has just happened with Professor Macintyre's history.

Even if they repent, former supporters of nazism or fascism are never really forgiven.  But for supporters of communism repentance is completely optional, no matter how compromising the activities in which they took part.

Prominent communists and fellow travellers are allowed to erase their former enthusiasms without any embarrassing questions being asked.  Indeed, howls of outrage would greet any suggestion that without proper repentance such people should be just as unwelcome in our universities, cultural institutions and public life as are nazis and fascists.

The "asymmetry of indulgence" also works against anti-communists.  Last year, when it was revealed that in the 1940s George Orwell had given a friend in the British Foreign Office a list of fellow intellectuals sympathetic to Stalin, he was accused of monstrous betrayal.  But the actions of communists -- such as the Australian writer Katherine Susannah Prichard -- who provided comparable advice to marxist regimes about "unreliable colleagues" are shrugged off.

Australia has become home to hundreds of thousands of European and Asian refugees from communism.  Called fascists and worse by pro-communists when they first arrived, it must really stick in their craw to see the local apologists for those who drove them from their home countries treated so indulgently.  In the climate of apology and reconciliation which is now so popular, perhaps it is time for a National Sorry Day in which the former supporters of communism in the universities and elsewhere are asked to atone for their guilt.

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