THE ULTIMATE INDISTINGUISHABILITY OF TOTALITARIANISMS

Napoleon's Legacy Leads to the Gulag (Stephen Goode, Aug. 27, 2003, Insight on the News)

Dramatic subtlety has become an oxymoron in book marketing and among the reviewers who serve it, so it is not surprising that the prestigious journals that review literature didn't see anything to link these two new books. They should have.

Paul Johnson's concise and closely argued Napoleon is a biography of only 199 pages about the man who conquered most of Europe during the early years of the 19th century. It is part of the highly regarded "Penguin Lives Series" of the world's great men and women.

And, at 667 pages, Anne Applebaum's powerful and magisterial Gulag: A History isn't short at all. It is a detailed and deeply moving look at one of the 20th century's great evils, the vast network of Soviet concentration camps known as the Gulag where millions of men and women suffered, were starved and forced to do slave labor in the decades between 1917 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.

The first of these books is set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is about one man; the other encompasses much of the 20th century and tells the stories of millions. But in truth the two works tell us much about the same thing: the origins of modern dictatorships and the evils unleashed on the world by those dictatorships. [...]

How do the Gulag and Napoleon connect? In several ways. First, because it was Napoleon who set up the apparatus of state necessary to tyranny. Second, because of his example of ruthlessness. As Johnson points out, Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouch?, "operated the world's first secret police," the prototype of the Gestapo under Adolf Hitler and in the U.S.S.R. of the secret police, known under various acronyms as the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB. But under whatever name, it was the Soviet secret police who were responsible for much of the horror perpetrated in the U.S.S.R.

Napoleon's taste for mass slaughter, too, portends that of the Soviet Union. Millions died in Bonaparte's military adventures - Johnson estimates the number at between 4 million and 5 million. At Jaffa during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon ordered the slaughter of 4,500 prisoners. The mass killing was done by bayonet or by drowning to save ammunition.

In April 1940, the NKVD murdered more than 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn on Stalin's explicit orders, shooting each man in the back of the head, Applebaum reminds us. Then he covered it up, with subsequent help in doing so from his new ally Franklin Roosevelt, claiming that the Germans committed the massacre. It wasn't until 1991 that Boris Yeltsin admitted Soviet responsibility.

Johnson sees Napoleon as the prototype of much that has happened since his death. But, behind Bonaparte, Johnson names the French Revolution as the source of Napoleon's own lawlessness and contempt for life and tradition. Napoleon fulfilled the revolution's "example and teaching," Johnson argues. What was that example and teaching? "The revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarch of the ancien r?gime never dreamed of; centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority ... that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of the people."

As Simone Weil said: "It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, but revolution." Posted by Orrin Judd at August 27, 2003 3:51 PM