What does an Argentine-born Cuban Communist revolutionary
executed in the Bolivian jungle 45 years ago have in common with a
small town on Ireland’s west coast? Apart from tenuous ancestral
connections, the answer is nothing. Recent attempts, however, to
manufacture such an association have provided yet another
illustration of the left’s on-going determination to whitewash
history.
In February this year, Galway City Council announced plans
to build a statute of Che Guevara to “honor one of its own” (one of
Che ‘s grandmothers was born in Galway). It wasn’t long, however,
before several Irish
business leaders,
journalists, and eventually the
Chairman
of the House Foreign Relations Committee vented
their outrage about the council’s decision. Why, they asked, would
Galway erect a monument to someone who had personally killed
several people without even the pretense of trials? Why would they
honor a man who oversaw one of the Castro regime’s most brutal
periods of oppression — including arbitrary imprisonments and
summary executions?
The Irish left’s initial reaction was to
deny these facts and launch ad
hominem attacks. When that failed, they produced extraordinary
rationalizations which bordered on the absurd. One columnist, for
example, wrote: “Yes, Che was ruthless and fanatical and sometimes
murderous. But was he a murderer? No, not in the sense of a serial
killer or gangland assassin. He was one of those rare people who
are prepared to push past ethical constraints, even their own
conscience, and bring about a greater good by doing terrible
things.”
Apparently murder isn’t really murder if it’s justified by
“a greater good.”
We shouldn’t, however, be surprised by such responses.
They reflect a pattern. Getting contemporary French left-wing
intellectuals, for example, to acknowledge the ideological
genocide
unleashed in the Vendée by the French
Revolution in the 1790s is almost impossible. In present-day
America, any mention of Planned Parenthood’s early association with
the eugenics movement invariably results in stone-walling and,
eventually, lame explanations that its founder Margaret Sanger was
a “child of her time.” The same approach shows up in most American
liberals’ studied refusal to discuss slurs employed by the likes of
Bill Maher to describe conservative women.
But it’s when the left is confronted with the history of
Communism that the denials, ad hominem vitriol, sullen
silences, and feeble excuses really get going. Back in 1997,
several French intellectuals, many with left-wing backgrounds,
published
The Black Book of Communism. This
text exhaustively detailed how Communist movements and regimes had
imprisoned, tortured, starved, experimented upon, enslaved, and
exterminated millions across the globe throughout the 20th
century.
Though a few brave lefty souls conceded the book’s damning
evidence, the left’s general response followed the usual playbook:
attacks on the authors’ credibility; arcane disputation of precise
numbers killed (as if a million-less here-or-there made any
meaningful difference to the overall thesis); claims that Stalin
represented a “distortion” of Marxism; and even bizarre suggestions
that such crimes shouldn’t distract us from Communism’s “genuine
achievements.”
Overall, the left has been remarkably successful in
distorting people’s knowledge of Communism’s track-record. Everyone
today knows about the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. Yet does anyone
doubt that far fewer know much about the atrocities ordered by the
likes of Lenin, Castro, Mao, and Pol Pot? Do those Occupy Wall
Street protesters waving red hammer-and-sickle flags actually
understand what such symbols mean for those who endured
Communism?
But while the left’s response to such awkward queries
won’t likely change, the unanswered question is why so
many left-inclined politicians and intellectuals play these
games.
Part of the answer is the very human reluctance of anyone
to acknowledge the dark side of movements with which they have some
empathy. Even today, for example, there are Latin Americans
inclined to make excuses for the right-wing death-squads — the
infamous Escuadrón de la Muerte — that wrought havoc in
Central America throughout the 1970s and '80s.
The sheer scale of denial among progressivists, however,
suggests something else is going on. I think it owes much to the
left’s claim to a monopoly of moral high-mindedness.
Anyone who reads progressivists’ writings soon discovers
they usually assert to be working to liberate the rest of us from
all sorts of oppression. Normally, the end-goal is to usher some
secular utopia. Karl Marx, for instance, described his particular
end of history as a world in which it would be possible for
everyone “to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in
the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and
criticize after dinner, just as I please.”
Claiming the moral high-ground, of course, allows the left
to dismiss its critics as unethical, disingenuous, or dangerous. In
many instances, the same self-righteousness has been invoked to
justify the left’s use of ferocious measures against its opponents,
real and imaginary.
Seeking, for example, to legitimize the Reign of Terror
during the French Revolution, its architect Maximilian Robespierre
claimed: “The spring of… government during a revolution is virtue
combined with terror.… Terror is only justice prompt, severe and
inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.”
Unfortunately for progressivists, the lengths to which
some leftists have gone to realize their objectives cast into
extreme doubt their claims to moral authority. After all, who in
their right mind would associate virtue with the guillotine in the
Place de la Révolution? Isn’t it supposed to be
reactionaries who do such appalling things? Could it really be that
Saint Che himself once actually said: “To send men to the firing
squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an
archaic bourgeois detail.… a revolutionary must become a cold
killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
As a rule, conservatives generally aren’t into utopias.
Since Edmund Burke’s time, they’ve underscored human fallibility
and the folly — not to mention hubris — of trying to
create heaven-on-earth.
For the left, however, any recognition of such hum-drum
truths about the human condition severely compromises their
raison d’être. That same self-understanding also means
they must wage a war of rejection and rationalization against
whatever contradicts their mythologies, such as some very
unromantic facts about not-so-angelic figures like Che .
Ultimately, historical truth usually triumphs over mere
ideology. Lies have a way of disintegrating from within. But as
Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “When the past no longer
illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”
Conservatives forget that advice at their peril.
