Putin cancels Descartes

The Frenchman taught that all knowledge came out of comparing two or more things. That may be, generally speaking, said the Russian. But there are two things that shan’t be compared on pain of imprisonment: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The paper-trained Duma obediently rubberstamped Vlad’s new take on epistemology, turning it into the law of the land. However, to be fair to Vlad, he hasn’t banned any old comparison between the two. What he made illegal is showing that they had something in common.

No one would get in too much trouble by saying that, unlike the despotic Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia was a paragon of freedom and democracy. It’s only when some kind of similarity is suggested that comparisons become outlawed.

This new decree effectively proscribes any study of the period between 1933 and 1945. For any scholarly examination will show that the two regimes had enough in common to be considered dizygotic, though not identical, twins.

Both were dictatorships, with one man making every decision that mattered. Both hated the West, in particular its Anglo-Saxon part. Both had the distinction of being the only countries in Europe that boasted a wide network of concentration camps.

This last commonality wasn’t exactly coincidental. For the Soviets had begun to develop their GULAG system before Stalin took over, and certainly long before anyone outside the Nazi inner circle ever heard of Hitler.

Since the two regimes felt visceral kinship, partly coming from their shared status of post-Versailles pariahs, they pooled their expertise. Thus the NKVD-SS Friendship Society was formed in early 1940, which provided a framework for a fruitful exchange of ideas.

The NKVD taught the SS how to industrialise what Engels called “special guarded places”, linking them into a wide and efficient system. And the SS kindly shared with the NKVD their sophisticated torture instruments, which achieved the same results as the rubber truncheons favoured by the Russians, but without being as labour-intensive.

Both regimes practiced mass murder, but, if anything, the Germans compared favourably with the Russians in that respect. In Germany, it all came down to the accident of birth. Citizens who had the bad luck of being born to an ethnic group that had no right to live were exterminated. Yet anyone outside those groups was left unmolested, provided he kept his head down and didn’t indulge in objectionable politics.

In Russia, state violence was more comprehensive and largely arbitrary. Even after the upper (or just educated) classes and the industrious peasants were wiped out, no one could heave a sigh of relief.

Anybody, regardless of rank, could be picked up and tortured to death for the flimsiest of reasons or none. Crowds of people were often rounded up in the streets and thrown into torture cellars simply because the local NKVD branch had fallen short of its monthly quota.

That way the Soviets ran up a gruesome score higher by an order of magnitude than anything the Nazis managed. Hence the two regimes, while equally evil qualitatively, still had a hierarchy of quantitative evil, with the Soviets coming on top.

The economies of both countries were socialist, though not identical. The German National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the Soviet Communist Party enjoyed both a political and economic monopoly in their countries. Even the flags of the two countries were the same socialist red, although with different superimposed symbols.

But there were differences, again in favour of Germany. There the economy was corporatist, meaning that the state effectively controlled all the major industries, but without nationalising them.

The previous owners remained in place (unless they were Jewish), but they were turned into de facto managers. They were told what to produce and how much to charge, but they remained in their old offices and even generated some profits for themselves. Small businesses, such as shops, cooperatives, restaurants and so on, carried on as before.

The Soviet version of socialism was total, not to say totalitarian. Something like 85 per cent of all enterprises, and all the sizeable ones, belonged to the state, with the rest barely tolerated, or sometimes not. (You’ll notice that most of today’s Western countries are reaching tropistically for the Stalinist size of the public sector.)

Most important, on 23 August, 1939, the two countries became allies. The alliance, known as the Soviet-Nazi Pact, was a sine qua non of the Second World War. Without guaranteed security of their eastern borders, and the millions of tonnes of Soviet supplies of strategic materials (from rare metals to grain), the Nazis wouldn’t have been able to conquer even Poland, let alone Western Europe.

The Secret Protocol to the Pact divided Europe between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Germany started claiming her part of the loot on 1 September, the Soviets entered the war on Germany’s side on the 17^th. Once the two predators devoured Poland, they declared an eternal “friendship annealed by blood.”

Which country was more barbaric in treating their conquered populations is debatable. If anything, if Jews are taken out of the equation, the Soviets were even more cannibalistic.

For example, the Nazis didn’t shoot out of hand tens of thousands of Polish prisoners in their part of occupied Poland, which the Soviets did in theirs. Both countries practised mass deportations, but the Nazis sent their captives to work at factories and farms, whereas the Soviets sent theirs to the death camps.

Obviously no two countries are, or ever have been, identical. The Latin qualification of mutatis, mutandis always applies whenever parallels are drawn. Yet to ban drawing any parallels, especially those as obvious as between the two most evil regimes in history, is tantamount to banning critical thought, free speech and history as a science.

Interestingly, various subversive groups, such as Antifa, BLM or any extreme left factions in Western parliaments, happily compare their countries to Nazi Germany, even though the similarities are small to non-existent. Whereas in Russia anyone who dares to compare the two dizygotic twins as I’ve just done could be prosecuted.

That’s the difference between countries that are still residually free and Putin’s Russia, the darling of the fascisoid European fringes. Then again, since Putin finances most of their parties (and, one suspects, sympathetic pundits), their affection may not be entirely disinterested.