This is the last of four articles about the 1990 PBS series "Stalin." The first three articles (see jumps at the end) exposed how the series was made up of lies. This one examines what we should learn from it.
This is something different. These articles have shown that:
In other words: The PBS series involved conscious, deliberate misrepresentations at every stage; in selection of sources and "experts," by the "experts" themselves, and by the writers of the series.
Take a minute to think about this. Reread the three Challenge reviews, if you need to. It is very important to learn this lesson -- and very hard to learn it!
Virtually all of us, including both new readers of Challenge and long-time, experienced communists, still have many illusions about the capitalist media. We are too apt to think: "Where there's smoke, there must be fire." We find it hard to accept that the bosses' media and experts can really be lying as totally as they are.
We tend to think that culture is somewhat independent of capitalist control. But why shouldn't the ruling class use its media, schools, newspapers, experts, etc., to lie in their own behalf? What else are these means of miseducation except a way to prop up capitalists' power and serve their interests?
The Challenge reviews have pointed out how, in several instances, anti-communist lies in the series were simply copied directly from Nazi propaganda. 1 "Soviet studies" in the West was begun by three groups. Most important were Nazis and their collaborators, who were hired after World War II by the CIA as anti-communist experts, often given jobs at American or British universities. The other two groups -- CIA, MI-6 agents themselves (like Robert Conquest), and Trotskyites, Mensheviks and a few other pre-war defectors, long cut off from the USSR, drew heavily upon the tainted sources of the Nazis or of Nazi collaborators, "laundered" the Nazi lies and gave them credibility.
The Nazis themselves had an entire research and propaganda apparatus concerned with anti-communist propaganda. Much Nazi propaganda -- like the story of the "man-made" famine in the Ukraine -- was simply reprinted in the Western capitalist media at the time, and is still being passed off as the truth, its Nazi origins hidden. A recent book, Blowback, by Christopher Simpson, begins to sum up the tremendous extent to which false Nazi propaganda created the anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War.
In his autobiography Mein Kampf head Nazi Adolf Hitler described the "Big Lie" technique of propaganda:
"...the size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad... They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts ... Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most impudent lie, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end."
The "Big Lie" is the key to understanding capitalist propaganda against communism and the working-class movement generally. With fascist forces emerging openly in the USSR for the first time since the revolution, with a fascist advance against the working class raging throughout the world, we can expect to see and hear more and more lies about communism, especially about the period of Stalin's leadership.
The attack on Stalin and on the first workers' state is basically outright fascism. It runs like this: "Communist revolution inevitably means 'Stalinism' -- terror and millions of innocents killed. Therefore it must be stopped at any cost." This kind of argument has been and remains the main justification of fascist repression of workers and peasants everywhere, ever since Hitler dreamed it up.
How can intellectuals and others be won to torturing, killing, and terrorizing Vietnamese, or Peruvian, or Salvadoran, Filipino, etc., workers and peasants who are rebelling against tremendous exploitation and repression by landlords, capitalists and their governments? Here's how: Convince them that Marxism-Leninism and communist revolution leads inevitably to a "gulag," to "mass killings equal to or worse than the Nazis." It follows that workers and peasants fighting brutal oppression are really worse than their fascist oppressors, and so must be stopped at any cost. This fascist line is the logical conclusion of anti- Stalinism -- in fact, it is the reason anti-Stalinism exists at all!
"Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially not insofar as
it might bring out something favorable for the opponent."
-- Adolph Hitler
We can never hope to disprove the lies as fast as the bourgeoisie can grind them out. Furthermore, we do not have access to the media to bring out the truth. We must therefore win our friends and co-workers -- and, first of all, ourselves -- to this axiom: Don't drink water from a poisoned well. Never believe anything the bosses or their "experts" say about communism! The louder they say it, the more the exploiters unite -- Russian, British, American, whoever -- the less we should believe them.
The capitalists have much to lose from the truth, as this series has shown. Their lies about working-class history are a means to protect their privileges, to preserve their right to exploit. Only the working class can afford to look at the world objectively, because, as Marx and Engels said in 1948, at the dawn of the communist era, "We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win." Join us!
1. There are certainly more lies of Nazi origin in the PBS series than the Challenge reviews indicated. For instance: in Part Two, unidentified film footage was shown while the narrator told of Soviets killing East European nationalists upon the Nazi invasion. This is undoubtedly Nazi newsreel footage, used without acknowledgement, and usually staged for the camera. Back.
First: want to read the other articles in this series? Click here for the first article, here for the second; and here for the third.
A note on bourgeois (non-communist, therefore capitalist) sources: in addition to those cited in the three-part review and in the series on the Ukrainian famine hoax, see any articles by: Jerry Hough, Stephen Wheatcroft, R.W. Davies, J. Arch Getty, Lewis Siegelbaum, William Chase, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Roberta Manning, Lynne Viola, Robert W. Thurston, in Soviet Studies (Edinburgh), The Russian Review, Slavic Review, Russian History / Histoire Russe. Some have published books also.
A good start can be had by reading the works described in Challenge, February 15, 1984, pp. 7-8. If you have trouble finding this article (Challenge is carried by many larger libraries), send a few dollars to PLP and we will mail you a copy.
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