The Manchurian Candidates

The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.

Writes Claire Berlinski in this quarter’s City Journal.

the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century.

And yet it continues to be idolized as a better way of life for the slef-perceived powerless individual, the very people chopped up in its’ machine. Setting aside the aging handful of hardcore proponents of Communist Socialism who actually lived under it, the common bond of its’ present-day proponents are an ignorance of it’s crimes, ignorance of the homogeneity and narrowness it requires to sustain it, and a literature based entirely outside of the experience of real, living Socialism.

Take as an example some of the bright lights of Europe, held up as potential “states-persons”, and their pasts, which are nearly as ugly as the passivated third world leaders that the KGB and Stasi were turning to their purposes. In the last of the cold-war missile treaty efforts, some of them are transparently going to bat for the Soviets, out of either ideology or programmed hatred of their own society.

Kinnock was vice president of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004, and his wife, Glenys, is now Britain’s minister for Europe. Gerard Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, has noted the significance of the episode. “If the report given to Mr. Gorbachev is true, it means that Lord Kinnock approached one of Britain’s enemies in order to seek approval regarding his party’s defense policy and, had he been elected, Britain’s defense policy,” Batten said to the European Parliament in 2009. “If this report is true, then Lord Kinnock would be guilty of treason.”

Similarly, Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.

Even the Vice President of the United States isn’t immune to it.

Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”

I’ll bet that the inheritors of the monomaniacal statist Fascist and Marxism can, when the see this dance again: the early, heady days of economic and social tumult that put well localized and scrappy ideologues in power for decades, soberly rationalizing the social needs to use the state’s power to contain the will of the individual.