Rather than admit it was wrong about Mugabe, Europe made excuses instead

A FRIEND spent the weekend in Prague and came across open-air stalls in the side streets where they sell old Soviet memorabilia.

Big sellers to visitors, particularly stag-party visitors, those caps and belt buckles embossed with the hammer and sickle.

It’s a curious thing. Even the most reckless stag-party tourist would not tend to bring home from overseas items associated with Hitler’s regime. But nobody worries much about owning items associated with that of Stalin. Older tourists remember Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” the smiling guy in the pictures with Churchill and Roosevelt as the three rulers tied up the loose ends after the second World War. Maybe he was a bit on the tough side, those older people felt, but you need a tough guy as your ally when you’re setting out to defeat someone totally evil, like Hitler, who exterminated six million human beings in the Holocaust. Younger people — except those who studied his era as part of a modern history degree — hardly know Stalin at all. His name, for them, is not instantly synonymous, as is Hitler’s, with torture, starvation, anti-semitism and concentration camps.

The fact is that Stalin sent millions more to concentration camps than did Hitler, and was responsible for more deaths in those camps. Yet — in modern terms — he has a better image than Hitler.

One of the reasons, of course, is that Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago of labour camps was so far to the north of a country where any kind of internal travel was discouraged and monitored, and where travel by foreigners was completely controlled, meant that finding out about his camps was more difficult. Another is that he eschewed the technology of gas chambers. Camp inmates died of overwork, starvation, disease, and mass execution.

Nevertheless, Anne Frank and her Polish peer, teenager Rutka Laskier, whose diary was found sixty years after she was exterminated in a Nazi concentration camp, both knew what they faced if they were taken from their hiding places. In the same way, it was possible to know, during the much longer period during which Stalin’s Gulag operated, that an even larger system of human destruction was in operation. Yet governments in the West, who, at the time, had a pretty good idea of what was going on, chose to ignore it. And not just governments.

Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was a prominent and influential supporter of Stalinism.

“As we were not members of the [Communist] Party,” he rationalised, “it was not our duty to write about Soviet labour camps.”

He wasn’t a denier, in the way David Irving denies the Holocaust. He never convinced himself the Gulag didn’t exist. Indeed, when Albert Camus said that he, Camus, found the camps intolerable, he agreed.

“But I find equally intolerable,” he said indignantly, “the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press.”

Now, THERE’s a comparison only a revered intellectual could get away with. On the one hand, we have countless camps filled with dissidents, gypsies, Jews, former members of the Red Army repatriated by the allies after the war, criminals and millions of people selected at random. They are fed less than 500 grammes of rotted bread a day. They have no drugs, no winter clothes to withstand temperatures twenty degrees below freezing, no contact with their children. They are whipped, beaten and shot at the whim of the guards.

But, hey, what’s just as bad is these rotten capitalist columnists who criticise these minor negative spin-offs necessary for the building of socialism… The dearth of feeling, in the present time, about Stalinism, according to historian Anne Applebaum, is partly explained by the dearth of images in Western popular culture.

“Steven Spielberg, probably Hollywood’s leading director, has chosen to make films about Japanese concentration camps and Nazi concentration camps, but not about Stalinist concentration camps,” she writes. “The latter haven’t caught Hollywood’s imagination in the same way.”

Because we have no real and present, top-of-the-mind images of Stalin’s camps, it is possible, even today, for old socialists to seek ways to avoid seeing the truth of the tundra locations in which Stalin exterminated anybody who looked crooked at him, and a majority who went to their deaths still believing in him. Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, for example, describing the difference in the two similar inhumanities, described the Nazis as “evil” but Stalinism as socialism “deformed”.

Once imprinted with a positive view of an individual or regime, we are extraordinarily reluctant to relinquish that positive view and admit we were wrong. Like an older person beginning to slip into dementia, we confabulate. We develop explanations that we believe cover off the gaps and inconsistencies. Or we simply draw in our antenna, like snails touched on their horns, and slither back into the comfortable shell of what is familiar to us, safe to us.

A long, long time ago, Europe became imprinted with a positive view of a reforming African leader named Robert Mugabe. They felt, to put a Bushism on it, that they could “do business with this guy”. He was not at all the kind of floridly vicious illiterate his contemporary, Idi Amin was. You’d expect to find the heads of assassinated opposition people in Amin’s fridge. But Mugabe was different. Charismatic. Visionary. Educated. Much more like us.

Even when Mugabe began to take actions flatly contradicting everything the West believed him to be, the West confabulated. All the old exculpatory clichés came into play. Tough times require tough leaders. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Some of those white settlers were overdue a bit of reduction in status.

When he turned up at international conferences about hunger, “smiling, smiling, damned villain”, the West said it was better to have him inside the tent, where they could influence him, (although they didn’t) rather than keep him outside. The stories of atrocities came through to western media the way financial statements floated down from overhead when the Twin Towers were hit: fragmented and meaningless because of that fragmentation. And because, bluntly, the West isn’t really into Africa. Bit like Siberia in the fifties.

The occasional visitation by a BBC crew never produced images as riveting or talkers as understandable as the footage from Columbine or any of the other American shooting sprees which killed minuscule numbers compared to Mugabe’s actions. Radio and TV producers knew that the minute they did a story about Africa (unless it was about Naomi Campbell getting axed from the Nelson Mandela concert because of assaulting police officers) the viewership and listenership would drop like a stone.

The “international community” — that impotent contradiction in terms — says Mugabe did not win a free and fair election.

Which didn’t stop him running his inaugural yesterday, before the results of that “election” were officially released and prior to him jetting off to another international conference, leaving his heavies to beat up Zimbabweans who couldn’t prove they had cast their vote in his favour.

He reportedly believes only divine intervention can remove him from office.

Let us pray.