Denialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2023

“Trump did nothing wrong.”

It’s a sentiment that’s become a chant, an incantation from Republicans-from their base to on high-that summarily dismisses Trump’s two impeachments and ninety-one criminal charges. And no one says it louder and stronger than Trump who proclaims in the third person that “Trump Won” at every opportunity.

“Trump did nothing wrong” is part of a long line of right-wing apologetics that started with the anti-semitic canard “Hitler was right” shortly after the second World War which evolved into the 4chan meme “Hitler did nothing wrong” by 2011. Proud Boy Tusitala “Tiny” Toese wore a “Pinochet did nothing wrong” t-shirt to a Portland, Oregon, far-right rally in 2018. Proud Boys at the December 12, 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally wore “Enrique Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirts to counter the revelation that Tarrio worked repeatedly as an FBI informant after his fraud arrest in 2012. And Proud Boy Tarrio himself wore a “Tarrio did nothing wrong” t-shirt after his indictment for seditious conspiracy and his sentencing to 22 years in prison for orchestrating the failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 election.

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My friend recently did a faux meme that made me laugh; a scruffy man wears a t-shirt captioned “Stalin did nothing wrong” from a sham company called “Tankie-Mind.” There’s been an uptick of declarations that “Stalin did nothing wrong” since 2014 as part of the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie idiocy that began after February, 1956. That’s when Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power in the Politburo with his secret speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality and its consequences for the Soviet Union. The changes he instigated in the USSR-his liberalizing domestic reforms and easing of Cold War tensions (the khrushchovskaya ottepel)-were opposed by increasing ranks of anti-revisionists, Mao being the “Stalin was right” OG. There were unrepentant Stalinists, then pro-Stalin Maoists and Hoxhaists, and now execrable Marcyists; all of whom continue to peddle their falsehoods on the Left that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

Clearly, pro-Stalin polemicists have often been orthodox, even vulgar Leninists like Ludo Martens, Domenico Losurdo and Michael Parenti, and Soviet fellow travelers like Paul Robeson, Joseph E. Davies and Grover Furr. But there are a number of far right apologists like conspiratorial Synarchist Annie Lacroix-Riz, neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton and mystic Eurasianist Aleksander Dugin who admired Stalin for fascistic reasons. There was even an occasional all-purpose appeaser of bloody dictators like E. H. Carr who praised not just Stalin and Mao but Hitler as well. That “Stalin did nothing wrong” or “Mao did nothing wrong” is more and more conflated with “Hitler did nothing wrong.” In this time of growing red/brown crossover politics it is captured in the congruity of the tropes used to defend their respective historical dictatorships. The pattern of argumentation used by Stalin apologists versus Hitler apologists is virtually identical.

I’ve concluded this column with two appendices listing historical crimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union respectively. To play the game of “they did nothing wrong” it’s not important whether the crimes were Fascist or Communist, nor what particular offense is singled out so much as the kneejerk defense that’s universally applied to them. The most infamous comeback is denialism, the claim that said crimes never happened. That for instance the Holocaust murder of six million Jews by the Nazis or the Holodomor starvation of five million Ukrainians by the Soviets never happened. There are concocted nuances to denialism; for instance that Hitler actually protected German Jews or that Stalin was desperately dealing with a countrywide famine caused entirely by climate. But the point of denialism is not to counter facts with facts, documents with documents, or experts with experts. Denialists make up facts to spec, construct documents to order, and recruit experts for hire. They outright lie, cherrypick or misrepresent evidence, and engage in false equivalencies, half truths or other disingenuous argumentation (by “moving the goalposts” and other debating tricks).

Closely related to denialism is trutherism, the idea that Hitler’s or Stalin’s crimes were deliberately faked or fabricated. Trutherism raises the claim more directly than denialism that someone or something is behind this falsification as an intentional hoax. And here’s where distinctions between Left and Right arise. For Stalin apologists it’s Nazis, Trotskyists, Khrushchevites, anarchists, Western liberals, the ruling bourgeoisie, the CIA and Zionists. For Hitler apologists it’s primarily the Jews and secondarily Marxists, Western race mixing liberals, the Freemasons, Illuminati, the New World Order, George Soros and our Lizard Overlords. The Stalin and Hitler trutherist apologists insist that their opponents engage in propaganda and subterfuge as part of dangerous conspiracies or as secret cabals bent on world domination. Without contradicting that their crimes never happened or that they were faked these apologists imply that the victims deserved what they got or brought their fate on themselves; for instance the Ukrainians for being class enemy kulaks and the Jews just for being Jews.[ 1]

An apologist ploy contends that even though Hitler and Stalin were ruthless dictators and while the crimes of their regimes were real enough they weren’t really in control of their governments or subordinates. It has been argued that the NKVD acted alone in Stalin’s Soviet Union and that the Gestapo actually ran the Third Reich. To argue that Hitler and Stalin weren’t really responsible is revisionism lite. Regular revisionism contends that neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s crimes were really all that bad, that the body counts of both regimes are exaggerated, that any evidence for genocide is hyperbole. Furthermore, the impact of each is minimized by comparing one to the other in a fallacy of totalitarian relativism and whataboutism. Stalin killed more people in the Holodomor than Hitler murdered in the Holocaust and visa versa.

An interesting footnote to revisionist Stalin apologetics is that it was championed by the arch anti-revisionist Mao Zedong. Mao argued that Stalin’s crimes were merely “mistakes” because he didn’t really understand contradictions and dialectics very well. Clever how the Great Helmsman managed to simultaneously minimize Stalin’s crimes while demoting his Marxist-Leninist credentials. That Mao’s bloody reign was historically less murderous than Stalin’s and that Mao’s legacy remains potent in China to this day attests to the shrewdness of those who promote “Mao did nothing wrong.”

I’m not talking here about the relative body counts of Nazism versus Stalinism. I’ve detailed that in past columns Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?”, July 2015, MRR #386 and Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022. I’m also not averse to refuting apologists for genocide with history and fact. I have taken on Holocaust denialism in Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2023 for example. But neither Stalin apologists nor Hitler apologists are really interested in facts, truth, history or reality. They are delusional at best or lying sacks of night soil at worst and debating them has only limited value. What’s more, I consider the merits of free speech in the “public square” and “marketplace of ideas” in countering threats to individual and collective freedoms highly overrated. Apologists for murder and genocide are not quite the same as advocates for totalitarianism although they are siblings frequently working hand-in-glove. Yes, information, education and debate are necessary but by no means sufficient. Organizing and taking action are absolutely crucial. That intra-Left and red/brown alliances have made Left/Right political distinctions dubious at best. Formulating plans against apologists is also problematic. For instance, activists have long advocated deplatforming Nazis from social media. Whether deplatforming Stalinists would even be possible for Leftists to conceive of let alone carry out makes the difficulty of acting against Stalin apologists obvious.

The Left considers itself one grand solidarity, one extended family. Yet from 1918 to 1953, Stalin presided over-in one capacity or another-the mass arrest, imprisonment, reeducation, and murder of Mensheviks, anarchists, syndicalists, Social Revolutionaries, renegade Bolsheviks, Left Communists, Trotskyists, Left Oppositionists, Bukharinists, et al. Fellow Leftists all, and part of the Soviet Union’s bloodstained body count under Stalinism. As a libertarian socialist, I’ve often felt like I’m in an abusive relationship with the Left. We must not kowtow to our would-be executioners, the Stalinist/anti-imperialist/anti-revisionist/campist/tankie Left. Nor must we accept their epitaph for us that “Stalin did nothing wrong.”

FOOTNOTES:
[ 1] There are also those who are proud of their legacy of mass murder. There are Nazis who contend that all Jews are the spawn of Satan, and Stalinists who blame everything on “counterrevolutionaries” and “social fascist Trotskyites.” For them, genocide was too good for their victims.

APPENDIX ONE: HITLER’S CRIMES:

• Holocaust-6 million Jews killed
• Soviet POWs-3.3 to 5 million killed
• Polish/Slavic ethnic cleansing-3 to 5 million killed
• Le Paradis massacre
• Wormhoudt massacre
• Lidice massacre
• Normandy Massacres
• Ardenne Abbey massacre
• Graignes massacre
• Malmedy massacre
• Wereth massacre
• Wahlhausen massacre
• Gardelegen war crime
• Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
• Massacre of Kalavryta
• Medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners
• Liquidation of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Vilna Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Bialystok Ghetto Uprising
• Liquidation of Slonim, Łachwa, Mizoch, Mińsk Mazowiecki, Częstochowa, Będzin, Kraków, Łódź, Lwów, Lutsk, Marcinkonys, Minsk, Pińsk, Riga, Sosnowiec Ghetto uprisings
• Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant shipping.
• The intentional destruction of major medieval churches of Novgorod, of monasteries in the Moscow region (e.g., of New Jerusalem Monastery) and of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg.
• Commando Order
• Commissar Order
• Nacht und Nebel decree

APPENDIX TWO: STALIN’S CRIMES:

• Forced collectivization of agriculture
• Forced industrialization
• Dekulakization of Ukraine-800,000 to 5 million killed
• Holodomor/Ukraine famine-3.5 to 10 million killed
• Kazakhstan famine-1.5 to 2.3 million killed
• Political purges
• The Great Purge
• Moscow Show Trials
• Gulag prison camp system
• Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
• Katyn massacre
• Murder/deportation of Crimean Tatars
• Murder/deportation of Chechens
• Murder/deportation of Ingush
• Murder/deportation of Germans
• Murder/deportation of Balkars
• Murder/deportation of Kalmyks
• NKVD Polish Operation
• NKVD German Operation
• NKVD Greek Operation
• NKVD Latvian Operation
• NKVD Korean Operation
• NKVD Chinese Operation
• NKVD Estonian Operation
• NKVD Finnish Operation

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Originally published at http://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com on November 1, 2023.