On the crimes of Lenin and Stalin

This from Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties:

But the most important consideration remains the mere extent of the Terror. In the First World War the killing was on a scale wholly disproportionate to any military or political objective attainable by either side — to the degree, indeed, that our whole civilization was badly shaken, and almost ruined. This has long been widely understood. The Great Purge in Russia (and the previous killings of the collectivization period) are a similar case, but one which has perhaps not yet been grasped so clearly. Even leaving aside the question of whether the ends involved were good ones, the casualties were too great for any attainable political or social objective.

Put another way, this time in Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter in this book.

The book, as Martin Amis points out in Koba the Dread, is 411 pages long.

The founding fathers, part I: Hamilton and Washington

Ron Chernow’s biographies of George Washington (2010) and Alexander Hamilton (2004) should be read together. They are a matched pair, like dueling pistols greater than the sum of their parts. Chernow purports to, in half a million words or less, tell the story of a birth, the emergence of a nation. In this he succeeds. Washington and Hamilton are more than any other men responsible for the manifest success of the United States. They transformed the idealizations of rich, idle tobacco planters into a durable foundation, a framework for prosperity.

The details are well known. The wealthy Virginian general and the precocious New Yorker traced the outline of a government that has persisted to the present and will undoubtedly last well into the future. The overarching theme of these separate but related works is the American willingness, then as now, to seek out ideas. If the twentieth century demonstrated how a more refined approach eclipsed the many virtues of brute strength, the agonies of starting a country cast the achievements of Hamilton and Washington into sharp relief.

Sustaining a tradition is easy; establishing one is not. American success is harnessed to a worldview that undermines appeals to tradition and precedent. Intellectual sclerosis is unknown in the United States because its citizens are not shackled by the notion that historical triumphs guarantee victories in the future. Many foreigners have criticized Americans for their bumptious rituals and jingoistic nationalism. What too many outsiders fail to perceive is that imperishable – and yes, often strange – mores are superseded by a deep love of good ideas. Washington and Hamilton had no choice in the matter; they were tasked with pouring the foundation, not improving the superstructure.

It is a common misconception that the American War of Independence was fought to end taxation without representation. Although extortionate tax policies fanned the flames of outrage, bureaucratic tyranny is rarely sufficient cause for war. Usury was, in the American case, just another symptom and not the disease. Make no mistake: Washington and Hamilton fought to jettison orthodoxy and discard prevailing standards, but they did so under the banner of paradigmatic change. The established system was obviously flawed, its strictures unconscionable to the entrepreneurial colonists. That this notion occurred simultaneously in so many powerful men is evidence of its validity; that repeated attempts at conciliation failed point only to British intractability. War was a last resort. Meeting the redcoats in battle with few resources, fewer men, and a bankrupt war chest was a losing proposition. That the American upstarts managed to win was miraculous, the stuff mythology is made of – and perhaps the topic of a later essay. It is sufficient to note that Washington and Hamilton carried with them into office the spirit of change.

Their partnership resembled that of a proud father and intractable son: often strained but always underscored by the ineffable. Washington and Hamilton emerged from the Revolution little harmed by bitter disagreements, obloquy, insubordination – inevitable detritus of years in the field. War annealed their friendship, hardened their commitments. Their friendship – for that is what it was – did not end at Yorktown; it persevered through the end of the war, the uncertain beginnings, and ultimately produced a nation. The first Americans were lucky to count among their number Washington and Hamilton, a fact undisputed by most. History, however, has demonstrated that their true worth lay not in individual action but in the accomplishments together.

Hamilton was the firebrand, relentless in his pursuit of ideas and unmatched in conviction. His only intellectual equal was Thomas Jefferson, a man whose monumental vision is eclipsed by stunning contradictions and a flair for disputation. If Washington, staid and caution, was the moral fibre that held together fledgling America, Hamilton was the font from which a fully-formed nation sprung. His poisonous pen and deep, often fortified convictions often landed him in trouble. Hamilton’s insistence on fighting the fatal duel with Aaron Burr can be linked to his absolute unwillingness to compromise his principles, his perception of the truth. Washington recognized this tendency and strove to moderate, if not eliminate it. He required a profusion of ideas, not some pugilistic sidekick.

Washington, unlike his younger counterpart, was neither a prolific writer nor a fertile breeding ground for cutting-edge ideas. He preferred deliberation to rashness, determination to equivocation. Bent on concealing his turbulent emotions and towering rages, he endeavoured to remain detached. His journals and letters reveal little, his contemporaries even less. One gets the distinct impression that no one – perhaps not even his beloved Martha – really knew George Washington. Chernow agrees, stating that the first president “ranks as the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.” In sharp contrast with Hamilton, who is either hated or adored, Washington remained aloof.

Fortunately for everyone, Washington was adept at channeling Hamilton’s impulses. Early American history is shot through with over-simplifications. As Chernow points out, Hamilton “to this day...seems trapped in a crude historical cartoon that pits “Jeffersonian democracy” against “Hamiltonian aristocracy.” It is certainly true that Jefferson and Hamilton diverged sharply in their view of democracy; and that the former’s conception of political democracy was probably more fair – or at least more equitable – than that of the latter. Arbitrary reductionism can be effective, but is necessarily hampered by a lack of important detail. Just as Jefferson’s complex worldview cannot be summed up in the idea of agrarian democracy, Hamilton cannot be painted with the brush of elitism and monied privilege. It is certainly true that Hamilton “was the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America,” but his exertions were always intended to foster a stable economic climate, a financial landscape suitable for growth and harvest, growth and harvest. Washington recognized this and sought to harness Hamilton’s compulsive and often rash flood of words and thoughts. Without the presidential razor to strip away the fat, Hamilton would have languished, indecipherable to all but the most highly educated personages.

The United States survived its birth because of the combined efforts of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the firmament and the swirling sea. Neither man could have succeeded alone; only together were their talents sufficient to spawn a nation – an economically stable, forward-looking nation. Many people regard Washington, insofar as these things are quantifiable, as the greatest of presidents. They cite all manner of reasons, from his unwillingness to accept the mantle of a king to his adroit management of the bellicose politicians clamouring for his attention. These opinions are both natural and wrong. Washington is enshrined among the greatest leaders of our – or any – time because of his willingness to explore, to plumb new depths and scale new heights. He understood the fundamental importance of the idea to the emergent United States, and his recruitment of Hamilton allowed the nation to flourish. Then as now the good idea reigns supreme. Temporal difficulties are insignificant so long as the nation preserves its faith in the power of thought, of vision, and of idea.

* * *

Both books are magnificent works of history and biography. Chernow has the rare ability to discard the inevitable detritus of a life well lived. Both volumes are long – Washington is apparently the longest single-volume biography of the first president ever published – but neither contains a superfluous word. Aimless digressions are absent. Chernow’s books are a cheerful antithesis to Gore Vidal’s assessment of an emerging trend in biography:

When it comes to any one of the glorious founders of our imperial republic, the ten-volume hagiography is now the rule. Under the direction of a tenured Capo, squads of graduate students spend years assembling every known fact, legend, statistic. The Capo then factors everything into the text, like sand into a cement mixer. The result is, literally, monumental, and unreadable.

Chernow’s volumes are certainly monumental – Alexander Hamilton runs 818 pages; Washington a cool 904 – but neither qualifies as unreadable. In the realm of popular history Chernow is a titan. His books weld exuberant prose and unquenchable enthusiasm with academic detachment and profound insight. Alexander Hamilton and Washington are magnificent examples of fine scholarship and beautiful storytelling – required reading for anyone interested in the foundation, and indeed the evolution of, the American republic.

Why Friedrich Nietzsche was not a Nazi

I don't much care for the writings and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: his thinking is too atomized and, ultimately, too vague for my tastes. So too does his style offend me. Whereas many Continental philosophers espouse ideas in highly-literate, silken prose, Nietzsche seems bent on polemic. Reading him amounts to an assault on the senses. This was, I'm sure, his intention, yet I can't help but think that constant emphasis and incessant ardour become tired and absorb meaning, leaving only the vitriol. In spite of all this I am prepared to defend him from those who exploit and manipulate the inherent ambiguity of his work to justify all manner of crimes and depredations. The most salient example, of course, is that of Nazism. Nietzsche was held up by the Third Reich as a champion of the cause; it was assumed that he was a proto-Nazi and that his writings, particularly his discussion of master- and slave-morality, could be invoked as a philosophical justification for the villainy perpetrated by Hitler's thugs. To be fair, a less than thorough reading of On the Genealogy of Morals is sure to leave a sour taste; his discussion of masters and slaves, barbarians and the mob, is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric expounded by Goebbels and other propagandists of the Third Reich. This is not the case. The Nazis had it wrong.

Nietzsche's contempt for metaphysical slaves – a condition inherent to the Third Reich as we shall see – vindicates him from allegations of Nazism. Although his ultimate end seems to be the Übermensch (Overman), introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there can be no question that he valued autonomous self-expression over exogenous definition. Any use of his work to defend the crimes of the regime is both unfounded and spurious. Consider this passage from On the Genealogy of Morals (1887, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1967):

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside," what is "different," what is "not itself"; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye–this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself – is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all–its action is fundamentally reaction.

Underpinning the "philosophy" of Nazism is the simple fact that the whole of the Third Reich was predicated on a notion similar to Nietzsche's ressentiment. Nazism is "quite the contrary of what the noble man does, who conceives the basic concept 'good' in advance and spontaneously out of himself and only then creates for himself an idea of 'bad'!" The Nazis stand in diametrical opposition to Nietzsche's ideal view of the noble barbarian:

...the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks its opposite so only as to affirm itself more gratefully and triumphantly – its negative concept "low," "common," "bad" is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept – filled with life and passion through and through.

The Nazi edifice was constructed not on the self-assertion of the noble barbarian, but on the foundation of ressentiment. In speciously holding up the innocent as avowed enemies, the Third Reich revealed its allegiances. Rather than expressing good from within, the regime defined itself as good in reaction to artificially-created evil. The Nazis proclaimed their status as slaves – "the 'tame man,' the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man" – by defining themselves and their movement from without: "[w]hen the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: 'let us be different from the evil, namely good!"

Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and any attempt to justify such a movement as the apotheosis of master-morality is risible; it is a perversion of an otherwise sound idea. They were (and, sadly, still are) no more the archetype of the "blond Germanic beast" than the lamb is the ideal bird of prey.

William L. Shirer and the importance of history

This article was first published in the Sheaf, the University of Saskatchewan student newspaper.


There are probably some books that you’d like to read, but there are some you really should read. William L. Shirer’s magnum opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich falls unequivocally into the latter category.

Broadly speaking, Shirer’s book is merely another exhaustively researched history of Nazi Germany. You already know the story: an Austrian vagabond uses deviant rhetoric to attract legions of stupid and easily manipulated hooligans into his private coterie before embarking on a crusade to exploit a vulnerable people, become a dictator, conquer Europe, deploy the long-nascent Final Solution, and propagate a new brand of ruthless autocracy. Nothing is new; in Shirer’s account Hitler is still a vile man and his henchmen still do vile things.

Why then, you might justifiably wonder, is this colossal book so important? The answer is simple. Shirer’s masterpiece is uncommonly well-written, a condition that promotes accessibility. More importantly, the author’s perspective—he lived and worked in Germany from 1934 until the crepuscular autumn of 1940—is fascinating. Unlike many historians who write late at night in cramped basements and backroom offices, he was there, a witness to the ascent and subsequent decline of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. Finally, the book’s thesis buttresses George Santayana’s veracious aphorism, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Put another way, Shirer’s book is a paragon of inimitable journalism and unparalleled observational skill; nowhere can a more insightful examination of a great nation’s precipitous descent into fatuous nationalism and ugly servitude be found.

Historiography has largely been conceived of as the sole property of academia. Civilians were for many years considered unqualified to write works of legitimate history. Shirer himself acknowledged this pernicious attitude in the postscript for his book The Collapse of the Third Republic. The American author offered profuse thanks to “A number of eminent French historians, none of whom share the disdain their American academic colleagues have for former journalists breaking into their sacred field—that stupidity is unknown in Europe…”

Implicit in Shirer’s diatribe is the suggestion that scholarly writing is masturbatory, written not for the general public but for other academicians. Corollary to this position is the claim that historiography is largely inaccessible. Given the importance of the topic matter, Shirer endeavoured to write a book anyone could read. To this end he relied extensively on his newspaper experience—Shirer instantiates the experienced correspondent’s sense of concision—and an innate ability to manipulate language. His writing is clear, his words well chosen. In spite of its size Rise and Fall reads like a novel.

The structure of the book relies heavily on Shirer’s unique and pointed insights. As the Berlin correspondent for CBS News, he was permitted by the Nazis to observe the inner workings of the Third Reich. Because Hitler wanted to present Germany as a peaceful, even convivial nation, Shirer was a guest at many of the major Nazi rallies and events. During his tenure he became acquainted with many of the regime’s leading figures. Most failed to impress him. His excoriations of the reptilian Nazi high command alone make Rise and Fall worth reading: Ribbentrop, the champagne salesmen cum foreign minister, he described as “incompetent and lazy, vain as a peacock, arrogant and without humour,” Streicher, Hitler’s insane newspaperman, “a depraved sadist...a blindly fanatical anti-Semite...a noted pornographist.” Tautology runs thick here.

More saliently, Shirer’s testimony is credible. He witnessed much political manoeuvring and was privy to the Fuehrer’s prolific bloviation. His ability to penetrate the latter was impressive. Shirer’s observations were prescient; he was able to strip away the veneer and portray Hitler for what he was: an irredeemable monster. Because he was a personal—and indeed, invited—witness to the devolution of Germany into a pattern of sycophantism and acts of unspeakable evil, Rise and Fall carries with it the irrepressible weight of truth.

Finally, Rise and Fall is important because its thesis has vast and relevant implications. Shirer argued that the ascendance of organized thugs and gangsters in Germany was facilitated—permitted, even—by a national character predisposed to accepting servility. Democratic vacillation led to ineffective governance. This contributed in turn to a growing sense of dissatisfaction; slavish devotion to an autocrat became more appealing than endless political wavering and inaction.

Widespread indifference gave Hitler the opportunity to legitimize falsification as a political instrument. A deep sense of suspicion regarding politicians allowed the Fuehrer to conceal his true motives with vile fabrications until he was firmly entrenched in power. The vitiation and eventual destruction of the moribund Weimar Republic occurred not because of Hitler’s persuasiveness, but because of a desire for instantaneous change. The Germans, Shirer argued, wanted a leader who would unburden the country from the chains of Versailles, democratic fluctuations, and return Germany to her old greatness. In short, a dictator.

Put another way, the zeitgeist encouraged and supported Hitler’s outrageous behaviour. A great people were subjugated because of their credulity. The paradigm shift was so rapid that Hitler’s own garbled musings, enshrined forever in the loathsome Mein Kampf, were roundly ignored.

Crucially, Shirer’s main thrust is free from the constraints of time and place. Another Hitler could rise wherever political ambivalence, reactionary thought, and blind certainty are present. His theory has been largely vindicated by the inexplicable and calamitous rise of a new crop of dictators in the early 21stCentury. The inevitable unspoken coda of a book like Rise and Fall is plain: vigilance and dissent do not deny justice and order, but sustain them.