Delineating Evil

A few months ago, when I was digging into some Eric Hobsbawm, I got into a debate with some members of the Horde over how to view Hobsawm's adherence to communism. I defended Hobsbawm's allegedly reflective outlook against many who saw him essentially indulging in a European version of Lost Cause-ism. I want to say that I was dead wrong and my interlocutors were right.  In that wrongness, I think is an important lesson. 

I understood, say, the Soviet bloc under a general rubric of "bad" or "evil" or "not good." This is insufficient for one who endeavors to be a thinking person. To be human is to be detailed and individual, and thus to see inhumanity  you must not submit to the temptation of seeing people's oppressions as an undifferentiated muck of pain.  Part of the job of writers, historian, artists and intellectuals is not allow evil to become inhuman, amorphous and globulous, to make sure that we don't get lazy, that the contours of particular evils are delineated and precise.

I should have known better than to do this because one of my pet peeves is the way the black struggle in American gets lumped into the broader "People of Color/Women/Poor/Gay etc" gumbo. Activism sometimes necessitates a melding of interests. But I am not an activist. I'm not sure what I am. But I am sure of what I want--to see clearly, that is to say  without self-serving apology or self-flattering caveat or self-justifying analogy.

The following paragraphs from Tony Judt reminded me of this. Here is evil perceived clearly and communicated directly:

The scale of the punishment meted out to the citizens of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the decade following World War Two was monumental—and, outside the Soviet Union itself, utterly unprecedented. Trials were but the visible tip of an archipelago of repression: prison, exile, forced labor battalions. In 1952, at the height of the second Stalinist terror, 1.7 million prisoners were held in Soviet labor camps, a further 800,000 in labor colonies, and 2,753,000 in ‘special settlements’. The ‘normal’ Gulag sentence was 25 years, typically followed (in the case of survivors) by exile to Siberia or Soviet Central Asia.   In Bulgaria, from an industrial workforce of just under half a million, two persons out of nine were slave laborers. In Czechoslovakia it is estimated that there were 100,000 political prisoners in a population of 13 million in the early 1950s, a figure that does not include the many tens of thousands working as forced laborers in everything but name in the country’s mines. ‘Administrative liquidations’, in which men and women who disappeared into prison were quietly shot without publicity or trial, were another form of punishment. A victim’s family might wait a year or more before learning that he or she had ‘disappeared’. Three months later the person was then legally presumed dead, though with no further official acknowledgement or confirmation. At the height of the terror in Czechoslovakia some thirty to forty such announcements would appear in the local press every day. Tens of thousands disappeared this way; many hundreds of thousands more were deprived of their privileges, apartments, jobs. 

   

1