Eva’s Apology for Communism
Eva Balogh has deigned to respond a comment of mine on her blog. My response below:
An excerpt from my comment:
Varangy/Toad: “Eva, I would like to ask you as to your view of the Communists and ex-Communists? I believe massive injury has been done to Hungary, Hungarian society, and Moral Principle as there was no high-level purging undertaken in 1989/90 for the sins against humanity committed by the Communists.”
She then responds:
I must confess that I didn’t get much further than that, but I’m quite glad to answer this question. First and foremost, I’m not looking at this question from the narrow point of view of my family’s history. My grandparents and my parents had lost everything they ever worked for as a result of the communist takeover.
First off, I very much apologize if I dare view Communism through the lens of my family’s, relatives’, friends’ and compatriots’ experiences. I suppose some might call that ‘narrow’. I don’t agree, for many a reason, but I will intellectually indulge you.
Let’s look at Communism from a ‘broad’, historian’s POV — I can think of a couple things to start with. Namely, the massive number of deaths due to:
*extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps
*deaths due to man-made famine, usually closely connected to forced collectivization of agriculture
*straightforward executions.
Not to mention torture and the intentional strangulation of innumerable individual social and economic freedoms. These all varied in intensity and application by geography, regime and time.
It is estimated that worldwide approximately 100 million + people died as a direct result of Communism democide. Do I really need to waste more pixels in persuading you (or anyone else) that it is perfectly reasonable to persecute, indict and condemn Communism?
If so, please be explicit as to why.
But I’m not foaming at the mouth as some others do who most likely lost less or nothing.
Forgive me for being afflicted with Communist rabies. It seems to be that your view is that if one lost less than your family, one’s view regarding Communism is less valid than yours? Is this so? If so, this makes no sense whatsovever and is clearly wrong.
I have also held that although my family suffered, there were many who suffered much more than we did — so therefore do you think a pissing contest between the two of us regarding who lost more and who lost what makes any sort of intellectual sense?
As a historian I take a larger view: all this was unavoidable because Hungary ended up among the countries which were occupied by the Soviet troops. It was a historical inevitability what followed. The Rákosi period was awful: the Hungarian people suffered incredibly.
Ah, such condescension… With all due respect, I don’t think you take a larger view. You make no mention as to the 100 million or so who lost their lives to Communist democide. Whether or not Communism was ‘historically inevitable’, in your opinion, is completely irrelevant and nothing more than an oddly shaped strawman.
I could make many an argument as to why German and Italian fascism was ‘historically inevitable’ and all of them would shed no insight into the morality of Communism.
After Stalin’s death there was a political thaw and as a result came 1956. The Kádár regime’s first few years were almost as awful as the Rákosi regime’s darkest days, but after 1963 the dictatorship became more and more bearable.
Sure things got somewhat better. But ‘bearable’? I suppose that depends on whom you ask, don’t you think? Might be insightful asking a political prisoner of the time.
Eventually, most people didn’t even realize that they lived under a dictatorship.
This could be one the most outrageous and most condescending and most false thing you have ever managed to write. First of all, I completely dispute it. Everyone I have ever known knew it. Secondly, let’s try this thought experiment: if I keep someone prisoner, but she does not know, have I commited a crime? In your mind, people do not have natural rights.
After all, I have not held her against her will as she did not know she was even being held. This, again, makes no sense and is utterly false.
I’m almost certain that if the Kádár regime managed to keep up the standard of living people would have lived under the regime happily ever after.
You are correct. There are, more than a few, who would happily go back to the Kadar days. A man who plays on the same recreational sports team as I do, confessed to me that he would gladly give up some of his freedoms to go back to the days of what he deemed ‘secure Communism’.
So what? I am fairly confident that the involuntarily lost freedoms by far outweigh those who would willingly and stupidly give up theirs.
But it couldn’t. Plus the Soviet Union lost its grip on the satellite countries. Thus came the change of regime.
That change of regime was based on a negotiated settlement. The politicians of the new democratic regime couldn’t say that “you negotiated with us about a peaceful transtion, but now we turn around and will put everybody in jail whoever collaborated with the former regime.”
The politicans of the new democratic regime were the same politicans of the old dictatorial regime. Why would you expect them to punish themselves?
That is exactly why some blood should have been spilt and purging undertaken. Today’s Hungarians would have more ‘skin in the game’.
And a lot of collaborated to some extent, including József Antall who became a director of a museum. And there were millions like him: doctors, engineers, members of the academy, who knows who else. There were 800,000 members of the party. No one suspected until the very end that this regime will come to the end. They had to live, they had to make a career. They didn’t have to do anything awful.
I have never advocated punishing the scummy minor Party members, like for example, those who are morally tainted with their association with the Communnists but had not actually spilled blood. Some were even forced into the Party, just as some were forced to inform on their family and friends.
But you are wrong as to claiming the necessity of Party membership. I know many who never joined out of principle. Perhaps in your social sphere, you really don’t?
Out of my, rather large family, no one on both sides of my family, save on joined the Communists. She was not pressured to, she simply and selfishly wanted to further her career. She nakedly and unabashedly admitted to it. Ironically, both her children became dissidents. One is raising her children in the States, the other in Germany.
My father also recounts how many did join out of principle (!), one of their neighbors in the village he grew up in was the local Nazi chief, after the war, he became the local Party chief.
Can you still not condemn a movement that openly accepted and courted former Nazis?
They didn’t have to kill anyone, they didn’t have to put other people to jail. Therefore, I simply cannot see how how earth you could punish the so-called communists. Everybody was part of the system.
Would you excuse, say, KKK members who don’t kill anyone? I have just shown you that not everyone was part of the system. Many fled and became dissidents exactly because they did not want to be assimilated by the system.
As József Antall said to the people who wanted to “punish” everybody: “tetszettek volna forradalmat csinálni.” Meaning in English difficult to render with its subtlety, but basically he meant: “You didn’t make a revolution. So what are you talking about.”
You don’t have to translate this into English for me. Second, there was a revolution in 1956 that was cruelly suppressed and resulted in the fleeing of 200,000 odd people. Third, is he claiming that because the Hungarians did not successfully revolt, that they have no moral high ground?
Do you really believe that?
I would like to say the same to you and your relatives: you didn’t make a revolution! So, what are you talking about?
How dare you insult my family like that? What do you know of my family? Unbelievable. I will hold my tongue for now. Do you accuse Jews who suffered in the Holocaust of the same? After all, Jewish uprisings in Germany before, during and after the war are, well, non-existent, to say the least.
First things first, I do have close relatives who were intimately involved in 1956. Ők tetszettek forradalmat csinálni as you would dare to say. I do have relatives that fled to the West and have relatives that stayed. Of the relatives that stayed, only one became a Communist Party member.
And even if I had no connection to any revolutionaries, I would still be well on top of the moral high ground to condemn Communism from every which way I choose.
Why do you, who should know better, continue to justify the evils of Communism?
