Hate Mail - The real and important moral question isn't whether to compare Putin to Hitler but to prevent him from outdoing Hitler because that might still be possible.

The Competitive Scrupulosity Of The Twittering Blog-rat Class Won't Save A Single Life Now.  I'm Not Playing That Game.

Certains prétendent, sur base des chiffres avancés par l’anglais Edmond D. Morel et Adam Hochschild, principales figures de proue de la campagne anti-léopoldienne, que la politique coloniale de notre souverain aurait décimé la moitié de la population du Congo c’est-à-dire près de 10 millions d’individus. Pour ce faire, ils comparent les recensements de la population effectués sous l’Etat Indépendant du Congo (1885-1908 ; propriété privée de Léopold II) avec ceux réalisés sous la période du Congo belge (1908-1960) et se basent sur leurs propres estimations. Ces démarches mènent à des résultats erronés pour plusieurs raisons. L’absurdité des méthodes de calcul employées est, dans un premier temps, méthodiquement démontrée par certains auteurs dont Jean Stengers[4]. En outre, l’exploitation du caoutchouc n’occupait qu’une petite partie du Congo, grand comme 80 fois la Belgique, et dans les années 1890, seuls 175 agents administratifs étaient en charge de cette dernière. De plus, de nombreuses maladies telle la maladie du sommeil firent des ravages tant dans les rangs des indigènes que des expatriés. Enfin, beaucoup s’accordent à dire qu’il n’exista pas de recensement fiable de la population avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Aymeric de Lamotte

THE INTELLECTUAL BATTLE over the size of the atrocities in the Congo in the period when it was propriété privée de Léopold II including murder, child concentration camps, amputation of hands when the rubber quotas weren't met by those held in virtual slavery, etc. is probably something that doesn't get much attention in the English speaking, college-credentialed world, fixated on Europe as we are.   The struggle over whether or not the "excess deaths" is 15 or 10 or 5 or merely 2 million is still an active issue, depending on the extent to which you want to be an apologist for the evil Leopold II of Beligium who was given the huge piece of Africa as a present by the Berlin Conference in 1885, dividing up Africa among the powers of Europe.  The story is sheer evil from start to finish and I'm sure it still reverberates consequentially in that horrific landscape.

I read the passage above and couldn't help but be reminded of the use of such arguments as there being no reliable census figures to use in coming up with a reliable estimate of how many millions were killed.  How the spread of endemic disease played into it - though much of that is certainly attributable to the colonial policy of Leopold II and his agents and their hired thugs, who numbered far more than the "only 175 administrative agents" de Lamotte uses to exonerate the murderous gangster whose evil was not different in kind than that of later 20th century and current rulers.  An evil that was copied by Germany in East Africa even as the old gangster died, with extermination camps and a later figure in Nazi science was merrily collecting body parts from those murdered. 

There are few differences between this exercise, sometimes explicitly undertaken to rescue national pride, and the kind of Holocaust denial that denies the numbers killed in the death camps, reality deniers who will claim that "disease" was what created the mountains of emaciated corpses, the ones they didn't conveniently dispose of in the crematoria that such scum as Holocaust deniers are apt to claim.  Reading that passage above was like hearing the echoing lies of Leuchter and Irving. 

There are differences in the ingredients of their stew of lies but the underlying poison is the same.  It's an international dish.  Every country which has a genocidal past should have to face it, every ideological faction that does should have to face that.  No one should get to hide behind another of this class of criminals as an excuse for "their genocidalist."

Hitler is reported to have cited the Turkish genocide of the Armenians a few years after as a model of how genocide could be done and it would be quickly forgotten.  His colleague in mass murder, Joseph Stalin, infamously said that " A single death is a tragedy,  a million is a statistic."   And, as we can see in such as choose to be apologists for mass murderers, they'll quibble about how many millions - or if those murdered are in the mere hundreds or tens of thousands. 

I'm not playing that game just like I won't play the old game of choosing which mass murdering gangster thugs are the good ones and which are the bad ones.   One of the things that came to mind while I was writing this was how Alexander Cockburn, till his death, continually quibbled over the numbers of millions of murders which were committed under Stalin's far longer and far more extensive terror sustained dictatorship.  He would continually downplay the crimes of the Stalin regime even when there was no more intellectual cover to be had for them. I have come to realize such practices are endemic to Marxists of all stripes.*  I think maybe reading such things as excusing Stalin because unlike Hitler he'd allow Jews to be in the Russian Army instead of killing them, outright, was the decisive revelation in the depravity of this game, for me.   Of course, if he hadn't died in his own filth during the early years of his own anti-Jewish murder spree he might have caught up with Hitler on that count.  He was certainly building up to it.

No. I'm not playing that game anymore.  I wouldn't be surprised if Putin cherishes a wish to outdo Stalin or Ivan the Terrible or whoever his nationalist dementia holds up as someone to match if not outdo in atrocity and conquest.  As Bertrand Russell reasoned, those who contemplate nuclear war as an option all seem to imagine outdoing all of the worst of those who went before.  He clearly is contemplating it now.  Which strikes me as making the issue of his evil rather relevant.

Maybe instead of having a hissy-fit over a retired diplomat violating a recently invented taboo (I'll bet I could come up with many such comparisons made by acceptable voices in the last sixty years) we should consider that such people are still living and still able to kill millions and billions.  I think that fact, that they can kill people now makes addressing and stopping that a moral imperative that we are unable to practice on the spent and lost past.  We can learn from the past but we can't change it.  The real and important moral question isn't whether to compare Putin to Hitler but to prevent him from outdoing Hitler because that might still be possible. 

The only honoring of the victims of past genocides would be to learn from what was done to them and stopping it in our time.  All the rest is a show we put on for ourselves, not them. 

* I was a sucker for the idiotic idea that if I rejected such people on the left the only alternative was to be suspected of joining the so often equally vile anti-Communists, the "which side are you on," game.  That game in which the Marxists and their ilk demanded that you choose their side or "that side" when you could reject both.  

The inhibition on imagining a position to the left of the Marxist friendly pseudo-left is an inadequate excuse but it is why I didn't imagine it well before the 1990s.  That is the truth of it.  Breaking out of that came only with a realization that the Jewish religious tradition, the economic justice of the Mosaic Law and its extension through the teachings of Jesus are entirely more radical than anything any secular leftist has ever imagined.  That is another truth.