NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!
Reading this excellent post at Samizdata, I chanced to follow the link for the Black Book of Communism. Inevitably, I ended up looking for a paperback edition, given that the choice is between paying £42 for the hardback from Amazon.co.uk, or $30 for the hardback from Amazon.com and making up the difference in iniquitous import taxes. Having googled "black book communism paperback" I chanced upon this rather hysterical page belonging to the Maoist Internationalist Movement, whose members I can only assume are greatly enjoying their trip back to 1976.
In their cosy parallel universe in which Karl Popper never published The Open Society and its Enemies and Friedrich von Hayek never published The Road to Serfdom (or perhaps the members of the MIM are actually enjoying a trip back to 1942), there is nothing laughable about referring unironically to "the bourgeois press"; there is no savage irony to their putting freedom in inverted commas. Whatever - self-delusion is like a warm shroud for the tenacious adherents to a dishonoured and discredited political dogma that has turned so many lives to ashes. They can keep their outdated, meaningless rhetoric - and they can continue to pay some big capitalist telecommunications company for the privilege of disseminating it on the web.
But in among it all is possibly the funniest thing I've seen yet this year - in a bleak, black, Black Book of Communism way, of course. The author is protesting that during translation a symbol meaing "per thousand" was interpreted as "per cent" and that consequently the book has "[overestimated] deaths by a factor of 10". Still unironically (I can only assume), he goes on to say that this is why the book is so famous - the "claim that communism killed 100 million".
The Maoist Internationalist Movement wishes to make it perfectly clear that their political ideology did not, in fact, kill 100 million people, but a mere 10 million. Much better. I think there comes a point when the number of deaths involved becomes meaningless, and it's probably at less that 10 million, but for the sake of argument: 10 million people is still 100,000 people per year for the whole of the 20th century - and since communism lasted essentially from 1917 to 1989, what is sometimes called the Short Century, that figure rises to just shy of 140,000 people per year. That's 380 people per day. More than 15 people per hour. More than a person every four minutes for 72 years - that is what the MIM wants the Harvard University Press to acknowledge while they ramble on about "self-censored bourgeois 'freedom'". Can you say cognitive dissonance?
Still, it has put me in mind of a classic moment of comedy. In the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil is getting chewed out by an obnoxious (though ultimately correct) American fellow, who states that, "What I'm suggesting is that this place is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!" To which the dotty old Major, staunch in his defence of Basil, interjects, "NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!"
In their cosy parallel universe in which Karl Popper never published The Open Society and its Enemies and Friedrich von Hayek never published The Road to Serfdom (or perhaps the members of the MIM are actually enjoying a trip back to 1942), there is nothing laughable about referring unironically to "the bourgeois press"; there is no savage irony to their putting freedom in inverted commas. Whatever - self-delusion is like a warm shroud for the tenacious adherents to a dishonoured and discredited political dogma that has turned so many lives to ashes. They can keep their outdated, meaningless rhetoric - and they can continue to pay some big capitalist telecommunications company for the privilege of disseminating it on the web.
But in among it all is possibly the funniest thing I've seen yet this year - in a bleak, black, Black Book of Communism way, of course. The author is protesting that during translation a symbol meaing "per thousand" was interpreted as "per cent" and that consequently the book has "[overestimated] deaths by a factor of 10". Still unironically (I can only assume), he goes on to say that this is why the book is so famous - the "claim that communism killed 100 million".
The Maoist Internationalist Movement wishes to make it perfectly clear that their political ideology did not, in fact, kill 100 million people, but a mere 10 million. Much better. I think there comes a point when the number of deaths involved becomes meaningless, and it's probably at less that 10 million, but for the sake of argument: 10 million people is still 100,000 people per year for the whole of the 20th century - and since communism lasted essentially from 1917 to 1989, what is sometimes called the Short Century, that figure rises to just shy of 140,000 people per year. That's 380 people per day. More than 15 people per hour. More than a person every four minutes for 72 years - that is what the MIM wants the Harvard University Press to acknowledge while they ramble on about "self-censored bourgeois 'freedom'". Can you say cognitive dissonance?
Still, it has put me in mind of a classic moment of comedy. In the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil is getting chewed out by an obnoxious (though ultimately correct) American fellow, who states that, "What I'm suggesting is that this place is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!" To which the dotty old Major, staunch in his defence of Basil, interjects, "NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!"
posted by Novus at 19:18
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