Remembering The Gulag

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum concluded Gulag: A History with:

Already, we are forgetting what mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of 'the West' together for so long [during the 'Cold War']: we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is.

And not only our own particular past. For if we go on forgetting half of Europe's history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century's mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others. Every one of these events had different historical, philosophical and cultural origins, every one arose in particular local circumstances which will never be repeated. Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been - and will be - repeated again and again our transformation of our neighbours into 'enemies', our reduction of our opponents to lice or vermin or poisonous weeds, our re-invention of our victims as lower, lesser or evil beings, worthy only of incarceration or expulsion or death.

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbours and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again', as the cliche would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the 'objective enemy', as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why - and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

Applebaum, Anne (2004), Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, Penguin Books:Australia, pp.513-514.

Emphasis Mine

Our PM, John Howard, refers to parts of Australian history as the black-arm view. Other historians have played down the brutality of the frontier. The Australian ruling class wants people to forget about the ugliness of Australia's past. But as Ms Applebaum wrote in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. To fully understand the current state of Australia, we have to confront those ugly facts. Henry Reynolds

...has researched and explained the high level of violence and conflict involved in the colonisation of Australia, and the aboriginal resistance that resulted in numerous massacres of indigenous people. Reynolds, and other historians, estimates that up to 3,000 Europeans and 20,000 indigenous Australians were killed directly in the frontier violence, and many more aborigines died indirectly through the introduction of European diseases and starvation caused by being forced from their productive tribal lands.

It is this blindness towards the atrocities that have been committed in the past that blinds many Australians to the crimes being committed today by governments (both Liberal and Labour). We now have:

• Indefinite administrative dentention. This has been upheld by the High Court for the case of refugees. Capitalist legal used to hold that only a judge, in open court, could deprive a person of liberty. Now a bureaucrat can now do the same thing subject to appeals to other bureaucrats.
• A crime is now whatever the Executive determines it to be. A ministerial edict can classify an organisation as a terrorist one, and anyone who had any sort of dealings with it are then subject to arrest and trial. Stalin would have understood the logic of that. Specific acts and proveable intent are no longer needed to condemn someone of a crime.

The brutality of the past continues today for the same reason it existed in the past: to protect the interests of the ruling class.