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The force of this point goes far beyond historical analysis or philosophical speculation. It is immediately relevant for today's warriors in the battle against terrorism. If there is any part of the world where the apparatus and culture of Soviet repression--nighttime disappearances, cynical judges, isolation cells, physical and psychological torture--remains alive and well, it is on the territory of former Soviet republics, which have been closely allied with the United States in its war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. The ex-communist despots who rule these places have taken heart from the post-September 11 climate in world affairs. Their calculation is that as long as they provide the United States with military bases and air corridors, they will have a free hand to lock up their opponents and suppress freedom of speech. Should American policy vindicate this calculation? For the politicians, diplomats, and generals in the United States who are pondering this question, some sober reflection on the horrors of the Soviet gulag, skillfully and diligently documented in this book, would be time well spent. But it would be a pity if the only conclusion they draw is that America's enemies, past and present, are guilty of practicing terrible repression while simultaneously telling brazen lies. Unfortunately, America's friends commit those sins, too.

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when a nation or coalition has focused all its attention on the defeat of a single enemy, it can easily become blinded to the faults, indeed the downright evil, of other forces in the world--especially if those other forces happen to be helping in the struggle against the main adversary.

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?

I also happen to agree with Applebaum that

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Westerners--especially on the political left--have never ceased to underestimate the radically evil nature of the Soviet system, and the degree of suffering it inflicted on its own citizens.

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... with the proviso that many Russians and citizens of other former Soviet republics may underestimate it too. At least, as David Remnick pointed out in a recent New Yorker review of Applebaum's book, hardly anyone comes out to ceremonies of commemoration for victims of the GULAG, say.

"Evil" is an overused word. But if it makes sense to apply the word "evil" to Nazism, it makes sense to apply it to Soviet Communism as well.

[ 25 April 2003: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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I never did understand why people would, say, go to a protest in Ottawa and wave a Soviet flag.

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I like the Churchill comment... I never realized he said something like that.

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yeah...though it would have been nice if he hadn't said things like this:

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time ... I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken their place."

i hadn't realised this until today.

I've posted this before. But here's my absolutely favourite Churchill story ever, though he wasn't there and doubtless never heard about it:

In 1978, Mavis Gallant wrote the introduction to a book called The War Brides, about British (mostly) women who married Canadian soldiers during WWII. Writing of Canada in 1945, she said:

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Canadian ambivalence to Britain was never more marked than just then, as the tide of sentimentality began to ebb, leving elderly Anglo-Canadians stranded on prewar memories, unable to place English girls who did not seem English enough, and who brought with them a disconcerting glimpse of a socialist future. It was impossible for some Canadians to understand why Churchill had lost the first election after the war. In a discussion that took place in my presence, a new bride said, "Naturally I voted Labour. What has Churchill got to do with the working class?" If she had been foul-mouthed her husband's parents could not have been more upset and horrified. The idea that they had a daughter-in-law who was going to say such things in Canada was more than they could live with. The mother-in-law asked me not to write what her son's bride had said about Churchill. "You can see how we'd feel," she said. "After all, we own our own home."

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