A Brief Response to Bob Cartwright

by Lawrence Bush

I’ve already had my say in my article, to which Bob Cartwright has made a lengthy reply. I just want to make two points in response to his discussion:

I do not believe the world of journalism, academic research, and grantmaking to be a vast, well-oiled operation of the capitalist class that produces false statistics and propaganda. As I wrote in my original piece, “to disbelieve the figures [about communist atrocities], you have to believe in a monumental conspiracy . . . on the part of survivors, historians, journalists, and their paymasters . . .” Bob Cartwright is willing to make that leap based on his sense of Marxism and the class struggle. I’m not.

The latest accounting of Stalinist atrocities, BLOODLANDS: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder of Yale University, relies on a hell of a lot of sources beyond Robert Conquest to detail how, in the zone between Germany and the USSR, more than fourteen million people were killed by the Nazi and the Stalinist regimes between 1933 and 1945: 3 million in the famine in the Soviet Ukraine (during which time the USSR, according to Snyder, was exporting grain while punishing its recalcitrant kulaks with mass starvation); half a million in exile in the Soviet gulag (Cartwright is relieved to report that the numbers in the gulag were less than the numbers now incarcerated in the U.S. — but that’s more than two million people, who in the case of the USSR were imprisoned, and often executed, in summary manner for bullshit crimes); in the Great Terror of 1937 and ’38, in which hundreds of thousands of members of Soviet national minorities were shot; in the dismantlement of Poland, where close to two hundred thousand of the educated classes were killed; with the Nazi invasion, which took more than four million lives in the region; and with the Holocaust, where more than five million Jews in the region were shot or gassed.

I have neither the time nor the expertise to examine Snyder’s sources. But the book has a forty-page bibliography and cites only one book by Conquest among hundreds of sources.

Meanwhile, Cartwright’s own statistics are not entirely credible. Five million Vietnamese deaths in the American war? I’ve never seen more than two million cited by the Vietnamese themselves. Nevertheless, my article did cite the “mountain range of corpses . . . piled up by worldwide capitalism and its associated plagues” in the many millions. Still, “at the risk of sounding sophomoric,” I wrote, “. . . two wrongs (or two hundred million wrongs) don’t make a right. The rejection of Marxist-Leninist communism need not signify an embrace of capitalism and its evils.” For Cartwright, however, as for many Marxists in the past, rage at capitalism’s many crimes does seem to fuel a (perhaps reluctant) acceptance of communist crimes in the name of class struggle.

As for his criticism of my embrace of certain transformative teachings of Judaism about community, wealth-redistribution, and other aspects of what we commonly think of as “socialism” — I admit to being a utopian socialist more than I am a Marxist. I believe it to be as plausible to influence people’s ways of thinking, through argument, art, therapy, love, non-violent confrontation, spiritual experience, drugs, and more — as it is to overthrow the class system and institute a new way of being based on working-class rule. I have lived through the transformations of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement and seen people affected by soul force and conscience, and I have lived through (though at a distance from) the transformations wrought by violent revolution, too. I’d rather invest my thinking in the possibilities of reform and transformation than in revolution, which lands me firmly in the tradition of utopian socialists and gradualists of the kind that Marx railed against.