End notes to April 13 blog entry on film The Front

[These notes relate to the April 13 blog entry. Look within the text there for references to these notes. The information below also isn't meant to be definitive; you'll see one of my references is a 1972 encyclopedia--R.I.P., print Britannica--but it's good enough for my purposes here. This entry edited 4/18/12.]

End note 1.

In the relevant paragraph in the blog entry, I wrote out a sketchy history, feeling it might have been a bit redundant, because one would have thought such a history wasn’t necessary here. But not to be definitive, the facts piece out this way, according to some old references of mine (and of course some more recent scholarship, like that of Anne Applebaum, has fleshed out the facts even further): deaths for which Stalin was responsible, within his own regime: 20 million in total, which reflects not only research outside the former Soviet Union but a number given inside it (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 486); this includes approximately 1(+) million executed in the show trials period of 1937-38 (Great Terror, pp. 485-86), approximately 2 million who died in the labor camps in 1937-38 (Great Terror, p. 486); and approximately 14.5 million dead as a result of the collectivization of agriculture and the resulting famine in 1929-33 (Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 301).

Hitler was responsible for the deaths of 35.8 million; given the Nazis’ insistence on trying to beat the Soviet Union in World War II (along with other factors), the country that suffered the largest number of deaths was the Soviet Union, at 18 million (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1972 edition, vol. 23, p. 802J). According to the same source, the countries that suffered the next largest amounts of dead were Poland at 5.8 million and Germany at 4.2 million; we can assume that some percentage of both sets of numbers, as well as those of other countries, contribute to the total deaths of Jews of the long-accepted number of 6 million (on this last number, see, for example, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2009 edition, p. 728).

Even if you said, for the sake of argument, that some other factor was more responsible for the deaths of these 35.8 million than Hitler’s initiative, and thus reduced the number by 40 percent, the remaining 60 percent would be about 21.5 million. In short, few would disagree that Hitler as number 1 and Stalin as number 2 were almost unparalleled in their causing deaths due to war or some other cause directly attributable to their administrations.

The situation with China is complex. Mao has been considered responsible for variously estimated numbers of deaths due to the Great Leap Forward program, with a minimum number of 18 million (see Wikipedia article). I am a much worse scholar of Chinese Communism than I am of Soviet Communism. On the surface, the highest estimate (see Wikipedia article) of 45 million would seem a much bigger number than either number Stalin and Hitler were respectively responsible for; and, true, 45 million is a mammoth number of souls. I tended not to think of this number in my account of McCarthyist paranoia, partly because the Stalinist and World War II atrocities were the (immediate) historical background of that phenomenon, and the Maoist havoc was yet to come.

But one interesting aspect of this is, in terms of sheer percentage of the relevant country’s population, the Mao number (even if it is 45 million) is smaller than that of either the Stalin number of the Soviet Union or, regarding some countries anyway, the Nazi regime (Mao number = < 8 percent of an estimated population in 1957 of 646.5 million, per Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1972 edition, vol. 5, p. 598; I could not factor out peculiarities here comprising how much the total-population number reflected deaths by the Maoist regime’s collectivization efforts or not; Stalin number = roughly 12 percent—20 million dead from a national population of, roughly, 165 million, with the latter number per Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations [New York: Viking, 1991], p. 324; Hitler number = roughly 11 percent of the Soviet Union alone, per Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 23, p. 802J; Poland’s percentage was much higher, though I don’t have the figures at hand). The point is that the Stalinist and Nazi regimes were more “efficient” about killing persons (on whatever justification) than the Maoist regime was.

One could also note that the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975-79, while responsible for about 1.5 million to 2 million deaths (The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2009 edition, p. 728), thereby did away with about one quarter of that country’s population. A Wikipedia article on the Khmer Rouge, noting the country’s population was 7.1 million before the Khmer Rouge took power, claims some 3+ million were killed under that regime. To play it safe, I’ll stick with the percentage killed that I have always kept in mind regarding that regime: one quarter of the population.

End note 2.

I was going on memory, but it turns out my memory served me well: this statement (with initial cap M) is quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951/1979), p. 324.

This book, incidentally, is my favorite book on the twin abominations of Nazi Germany as culminating in the Holocaust, and the Soviet Union in its worst state under Stalin (which Arendt, hardly in an original way, considers identical in numerous qualitative respects). Some aspects of this book’s content have been, I believe, superseded by subsequent scholarship; but for students of the themes related to the original forms of totalitarianism, it is a good starting place, simply for the conceptual grasp she brings to the topics, while demonstrating a wide range of documentation available to her at the time.

In fact, as abstruse and dark-themed as it is, I think it is a book that yet has a certain poetry and accessibility related to its fervor that is similar to those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which latter seems to have a grand humor to it built on profound indignation (Solzhenitsyn, of course, had spent time in the Soviet Gulag). Arendt’s book also answers the question, Was there any top-flight female philosopher within the twentieth century?—to which I answer, Yes, among whoever else, Hannah Arendt. Her writing style is rather tough to chew, but not impossible, reflecting, I think, (1) how people whose original language is German, when they write in English, can write cumbersome or at least heavily complex sentences; (2) her indignation at the outrage obviously posed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes; and (3) not at all a detracting feature here, some female outrage, too. These combine to give a certain personality to this book that somehow deeply clicks with me; that plus its flowing thematic development somehow leave it usually easy for me to track down passages in it, even years after I’ve read the book.

It annoys me today that commentators sometimes are dismissive of Arendt, citing in particular a phrase from one of her lesser books, Eichmann in Jerusalem, “the banality of evil,” which I think is often misunderstood. She didn’t mean that the Nazi evil was banal, as if it was not too profound; she meant that the evil was conducted by numerous people whose functioning in it was of the banal bureaucrat. She spells this view out much more explicitly and cogently in Origins (pp. 337-39).