avva | о коммунизме и фашизме (англ.)

Любопытная запись и дискуссия после неё в (часто интересном) веблоге американского экономиста Брэдфорда ДеЛонга.

ДеЛонг цитирует полностью статью британского историа Найла Фергюсона, в которой Фергюсон размышляет о недавней книге другого британского историка, и многолетне преданного марксиста, Ерика Хобзбома. Фергюсон спрашивает, а ДеЛонг повторяет за ним этот вопрос: почему на Западе считается хорошим тоном уважать или симпатизировать западным марксистам, но абсолютно невозможно уважать или симпатизировать западным фашистам? Словами ДеЛонга:

The extremely, extremely smart and amazingly prolific Niall Ferguson uses the occasion of the publication of British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's memoir to ask--seriously and thoughtfully--just why is it that we have some sympathetic tolerance for the likes of Eric Hobsbawm (who spent the 24 years from 1930 to 1954 in enthusiastic and unthinking corpse-like obedience to the every whim of Josef Stalin) while we would have no tolerance at all for an equivalent enthusiastic and unthinking corpse-like obeyer of Adolf Hitler [...].

ДеЛонг пытается дать свой ответ на этот вопрос, в котором, несомненно, есть доля истины. В длинной дискуссии после записи, местами скучной, но местами и весьма интересной, затрагиваются вопросы о том, кто сколько убил миллионов, о том, у кого (фашизма или коммунизма) был лучший пиар, и ещё и ещё.

Кроме того, в этой дискуссии нашлаь также ссылка на замечательную, по-моему, статью Тома Вульфа ещё 1987-го года, тоже посвящённую "респектабельности" социализма и поддержки соц.режимов в Америке: The Intelligent Coed's Guide to Socialism. Статья заслуживает прочтения. Цитата:

It was Matthew Arnold who used the word 'culture' to refer to forms of expressions rather than social mores. He came up with the word 'commuters' referring to hopeless ciphers who shuttle back and forth from homes back in the suburbs to jobs in the city. And he applied the term 'Philistine,' to the middle classes. Arnold said there were now four classes in society: the upper classes, which he called "barbarians," the middle classes, which he called "Philistines," the lower classes, which he called the "populace." And then he said there has arisen a fourth class, a new class. He called them the "people of sweetness and light." The people of sweetness and light would become the new rulers of England. He assumed they would all be Oxford men. He was an Oxford man himself. In passing, he made an interesting comment. He said, "Today, in our country, there's a great deal of rowdiness, popular unrest, vandalism. And with good reason. The populace is disturbed by injustice. But when the people of sweetness and light reach their ascendancy, we will give the populace a perfect order. Once they are given a perfect order, we will no longer tolerate hooliganism."

This is the germ of what Solzhenitsyn spoke of when he said that the problem with the Soviet Union was not Stalin: the problem was not Lenin; the problem was not Marxism. The problem, he said, is any system of thought that seeks to sweep away the accretion of moral standards over the centuries and announce that we are now starting from zero.