(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
American historian Sean McMeekin has taken on the monumental task of writing a history of communism in one volume, with a tantalizing subtitle that suggests that communism is on the decline.
The first part of the book To Overthrow the World – The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communismdeals with communist theory, back to utopian thinkers from antiquity via French Enlightenment philosophers and up to Marx, Lenin and the discussions in the first and second The InternationalMcMeekin makes no secret of his anti-communism when he writes, and I suspect he deliberately misinterprets some key passages in capital og The communist manifest out of reluctance. But I still think this part appeared to be a fairly honest attempt at history writing. I learned a great deal about Gracchus Babeuf and the French revolutionary left during the reading, and it provides a clear presentation of non-Stalinist Marxist politicians and thinkers such as Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bukharin.
Tendency in storytelling
In the section on communism in practice, which makes up about three-quarters of the book and about which I have greater prior knowledge, the author's political agenda becomes much clearer. It is useful and important to familiarize yourself with the horrific history of Stalins reign of terror, which is presented in detail – and where the victims' stories are presented both as figures and in the form of personal accounts. It is also good that the suffering during the Russian Civil War, and the authoritarian development that followed the Bolsheviks' 'original sin' of dissolving the elected Constitutional Assembly, are being made known to a wider audience.
Communists are consistently portrayed as fanatical, deceitful, violent men.
The problem is that all the horror stories presented from the Soviet Union, the 'people's democracies' of Eastern Europe and the Maoist experiments in China and Cambodia (which McMeekin aptly refers to as "communism in absurdum"), appear as little more than horror stories. They are never placed in any contemporary context and are therefore difficult to understand. At first I thought this was due to space constraints in relation to such a vast subject, but gradually it dawned on me that it was due to tendentious storytelling. The Communists are consistently portrayed as fanatical, deceitful violent men, and those parts of history that do not confirm this worldview are silenced or distorted.
It seems strange, for example, to give such a detailed account of the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War – without even mentioning the White Terror, which killed hundreds of thousands of Jews. It is strange to write in such detail about the Chinese support for Pol Pot without mentioning that the United States also supported Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese communists intervened and reduced the regime of terror to a guerrilla movement.
It is strange to write in such detail about Chinese support for Pol Pot without mentioning that the United States also supported the Khmer Rouge.
It is strange to write about Cuban military activity in Africa without mentioning that their most important contribution was to defend Angola from a US-backed invasion by the apartheid regime in South Africa. I also find it strange that social welfare reforms, such as Cuba becoming the first country in Latin America to eradicate illiteracy, are not mentioned. As it stands, it appears as if the only thing about the Cuban revolution that appealed to the outside world was Soviet arms support and a lucky photograph of Che Guevara. The roughly 30 years of modernization, liberalization, and increasing prosperity in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's reforms are barely given any attention other than a few anecdotes and jokes.
Deliberate 'forgetfulness'
McMeekin 'reluctantly' admits that the US supported authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, referring to Pinochet in Chile, who is said to have been responsible for 3 executions. But if Indonesia he only writes that it was "a similar story" to that in Chile. In reality, the US-backed Suharto regime was responsible for the mass murder of between 500 and 000 million civilian communists, one of the worst crimes of the Cold War. Given McMeekin's thorough documentation of figures regarding the Soviet Union and China, this appears to be a deliberate 'omission' to fail to mention.
Peculiar interpretations
Several important historical events are characterized by the author's distinctive interpretations. The former head of the totalitarian Soviet secret police, Lavrentij Beria, who was the most powerful Soviet politician immediately after Stalin's death, is portrayed as a kind of hidden liberal who wanted to abolish an authoritarian system. This is justified by the fact that Beria released over a million prisoners from the gulags. What McMeekin fails to mention is that Beria only released common criminals. The political prisoners were granted amnesty only under Khrushchev. Nor is it mentioned that Beria merged the secret police forces MVD and MGB under his own leadership, which would have allowed for a continued personal dictatorship of the Stalin type, while under Khrushchev they were divided and decentralized, stripped of authority and subject to political control.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Even stranger is the description of Mikhail Gorbachev as a cunning dictator whose primary goal was to "revitalize the Soviet economy in order to increase military spending" and to secure financial loans from the West to maintain control over the satellite states of Eastern Europe. This stands in sharp contrast to the description given in the recently published and well-documented book Collapse – The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok (2022) that it was "a mixture of his neo-Leninist hubris, fierce idealism, and aversion to nuclear confrontation" that drove Gorbachev to seek disarmament agreements with the United States, democratization of the Soviet Union, and a non-interventionist policy toward the Eastern Bloc states. Gorbachev believed that the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had hampered a necessary modernization and democratization of socialism, ordering the military-industrial complex to convert factories from weapons production to the production of consumer goods – and he based his ideas on an intensive rereading of Marx, Lenin and Khrushchev.
In the name of communism
To Overthow the World can serve as a useful reference work on crimes committed in the name of communism. But some in particular understanding Unfortunately, one does not get any of the historical events that are depicted – nor any good basis for forming one's own understanding.
And the return of communism, as hinted at in the title? McMeekin finds it in phenomena as diverse as a so-called woke opinion police, corona restrictions, Chinese capital exports and the extensive digital surveillance by the US government and social media companies. It is descriptive of the author's worldview that he is unable to understand capitalist states' use of coercive power and illegal surveillance against their own citizens – other than that they have been 'corrupted' by communism.
