National Post (National Edition)
Want a statue of Stalin? Check ebay
YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE MUCH USE FOR A STATUE OF STALIN. — JOHN ROBSON
For just $119,000 you can get a genuine 10-foot-tall statue of mass-murdering totalitarian dictator Josef Stalin on ebay. How nice. You could put it with your statues of Hitler and Mao. No, wait. ebay has rules about Nazi memorabilia.
The whole thing might seem moot if you lack $119,000 for a statue. And it’s U.S. dollars, I’m afraid, though on the plus side shipping is included. Also you might not have much use for a statue of Stalin. Mind you, the same seller is offering a bargain US$49,000 Lenin, smaller and in poorer condition but equally historically malign.
People sometimes call Lenin an idealist whose doctrines Stalin perverted. But at the end of his long life Old Bolshevik and longtime Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who knew both men well, told an interviewer “Compared to Lenin, Stalin was a mere lamb.” So it’s not inconceivable that you’d want statues of Lenin, Stalin and indeed Hitler as an act of historical remembrance, that such evil men have walked the Earth and still do and, far more sinister, found plenty of admirers and apologists. (To his dying day, in 1986, Molotov was an unrepentant Stalinist.)
You might also want one to promote a Slovakian restaurant. It sounds silly, but in 1995 someone brought a five-metre-tall Lenin statue to Seattle for precisely that purpose. It didn’t work, the family is now trying to sell it for a quarter of a million dollars, and it is frequently defaced including with red paint representing blood on the hands. So not everyone has forgotten.
They certainly haven’t forgotten Hitler. He comes up in every third online debate, though not always in a context that suggests proper appreciation of his depravity and menace. As I’ve argued before, they are not the same thing. Plenty of depraved people do little harm because they lack technical ability; Hitler alas had plenty.
So did Stalin. He is often ridiculed as a mediocrity, in Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov’s famous phrase “a grey blur, looming up now and then dimly and not leaving any trace”, as if it somehow rendered him less sinister. It didn’t. (Including to Sukhanov, shot on Stalin’s orders as a German spy in 1940.) As I’ve also previously noted, Stalin had perfect pitch, a superficially strange thing to go with mass murder but like Hitler’s theatrical genius part of a hideous package of great talent and great malevolence.
For all that, historical memories of the two are very different. ebay is just one online commerce site. But its position, of having rules against Hitler but not Stalin memorabilia, is indicative. Yet what is the difference between them?
Some may say duh, Hitler was “right-wing” and Stalin “left-wing.” For a long time the common retort would have been no, they were both “totalitarian.” And I’ll argue with anyone, any time, that Hitler was a collectivist with deep contempt for tradition including especially traditional morality. But to this day Marxism is popular, even trendy, from Che Guevara T-shirts to universities boasting Marxist faculty. Whereas the mere wearing of a Nazi costume on Halloween can do serious career and social damage, never mind any hint of genuine sympathy with National Socialist doctrines.
Partly I think this attitude is simple grovelling. Nobody important has genuine Nazi beliefs today whereas Marxism is still bizarrely influential. For another, it seems to me to depend on the weird conviction that whatever its failings or sins, the “left” has its heart in the right place while whatever its virtues the “right” does not.
This doctrine I repudiate with indignation. The road to hell is so famously paved with good intentions that to ignore the likely results of your actions because you meant well is not innocent behaviour in an adult. Especially one aware of history, given how much people minimized the crimes of Stalin and his successors while it still mattered, from Walter Duranty’s 1930s Pulitzer Prize to the early 1980s peace movement calling Reagan a warmonger and Brezhnev a statesman, sometimes while pocketing KGB subsidies.
Moreover, I endorse Jordan Peterson’s claim in a online talk “How Hitler was Even More Evil Than You Think” that if actions produce sufficiently dependable results those results are a reliable guide to true motives. The democratic left’s love affair with tyrants from Castro to Mugabe is not good intentions somehow perverted any more than Stalinism turned the angelic doctrines of Karl Marx into something diabolical. There is a stench of cheaply perfumed malice about the whole affair.
One might thus want an authentic Stalin statue somewhere to make the point that he was once idealized by the bien-pensant who later hailed Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Yasser Arafat or Hugo Chavez. I’m short $119,000 for the statue, let alone the budget for a museum of totalitarianism to house it. But I’d contribute.