Tuesday, June 1, 2010

A Hidden History of Evil

Why doesn't anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? (via Lew Rockwell)
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.
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3 comments:

MadMonarchist said...

It probably has something to do with why we are such big business partners with Red China. Does anyone think we would have the same policy with Germany if the Nazi Party still ruled and there was a huge portrait of Hitler hanging over the Brandenburg Gate? Mao and Stalin killed and enslaved more people than the Nazi dictator yet the ideology that drove them is advocated by many in Europe and the Americas, Hollywood elites sing the praises of Che, Castro and Chavez and while the war against the Axis was the "good war" every time we fought communist revolutionaries it was a "mistake" that could never be seen through. Ah well...

xavier said...

Maria Elena:

Echoing a bit what Mad monarchist said. I argue that reading through the archives would expose a lot of powerful and connected people as either fellow travellers or willing stooges.

Too many reputations are at stake to allow more diffusion of that period of history

xavier.

May said...

I've always been shocked by the double standard applied to Nazism and Communism. Many don't seem to grasp the true nature of Communism at all, often continuing to think of it as some sort of generous, good idea in the abstract, even if hard to implement and easily distorted by bad men. They don't see that the ideology itself is bad. And, in some cases, at least, they seem willfully ignorant...