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Worlds Apart
Against the odds and in defiance of common sense, the concept of "Moral Equivalence" has been making a comeback. As the Elean Gonzalez affair showed, there are still tens of thousands of people out there who really do not believe that there are any fundamental moral differences between the communist world and the free world. Even using a term like "free world" would make these folks roll their eyes. "Free world? How free can it be when working people are exploited by greedy multinational corporations who rape the earth?"
I have found a cure for moral equivalence. I didn’t find it intentionally, but rather stumbled across it in the course of my summer reading program. I generally keep two books going at any given time, and for the past couple of weeks, the books at hand were "The Truth at Any Cost", the marvelous account of Ken Starr’s investigation of the Lewinsky affair, and "The Black Book of Communism", the massive review of communism’s horrors by a gaggle of European lefties.
I defy anyone to read these books in tandem or sequentially and not come away with a clear-as-glass understanding of the core differences in the real-world manifestations of communism and democracy.
The "Black Book of Communism" is staggering in its methodical and devastating review of the horrors of communism. The authors convincingly demonstrate that the evils of communism were not the excesses of a few out of control wild men, nor the result of bad reactions to stressful situations, but were instead an integral feature of the nature of communism itself. Wherever communism has reared its head, murder, torture, oppression, religious persecution and even genocide have followed. By consciously destroying established social and political orders and replacing them with the "will of the masses" as interpreted by a select few, communism replaced law predictability with will and arbitrariness.
Wasn’t it Stalin who noted that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of a million people is just a statistic? One gets that sense reading this book, as millions starve, or are shot, or are consigned to a slow freezing death. One cannot begin to grasp the untold human misery behind the ink. But what does come through is the awful, bloody arbitrariness. In the first wave of post-revolutionary terror, the Russians had "execution quotas" to meet. There was no law. The law was whoever knocked down your door with a rifle in one hand and a quota in the other. There was no order or continuity. High ranking communist officials one day were consigned to the Lubyanka the next. There was, in short, no rhyme or reason beyond the whims and quirks of whoever held the reins. This was true in the USSR, in China, across Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and it is still true in Castro’s Cuba.
Switching from this fascinating but depressing tome to "Truth at Any Cost" is like watching the sun break through the clouds at the end of a gloomy fall day. Here is a tale, wonderfully written by a pair of Washington journalists with no axe to grind, of the most powerful man in the world being taken to task for breaking a relatively minor law. Conversations recalled in the book show that this was a significant force driving Starr and his staff: the notion that the rights of the lowliest of trailer trash are just as important as those of the President of the United States. Not only is the President constrained by the law, but Starr and his crew, the agents of the law, are equally constrained by the law.
When Starr’s staff learn that the journalist Michael Isikoff plans to run a piece in Newsweek about the Lewinsky matter, they are panicked. Their strategy for nailing down the President depends on secrecy. What can they do? What does this powerful federal prosecutor do to stop the reporter from wrecking his investigation? He cajoles, begs, pleads, and appeals to his patriotism. That’s it. What a marvelous country we live in! A country where Isikoff’s editor has far more power over what he writes than do the President or Darth Starr.
It is easy to take this sort of fact for granted. That is why it pays to read the "Black Book of Communism" first. It helps put the miracle of this country into marvelous relief. It helps to shake one of complacency, of the serious danger that we will lose respect for our freedoms by taking them for granted.
We are obviously far from perfect, and we have a lot of work to do. But the infrastructure of freedom is sound. From time to time we need to pause and appreciate that. These books help.