Culture | A “Gulag Memorial Day”?

Against modern commemoration.

Tom X Hart
Nov 7 · 8 min read

An occasional complaint, particularly on the conservative right, is that there is no equivalent to Holocaust Memorial Day for the Gulag system of the USSR and the victims of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. The idea behind this demand is, essentially, that there were two great totalitarian disasters in the 20th century – the regime in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin.

We should, so says the good classical liberal or neoconservative, mark both events with equal gravity.

We must, in the view of Jordan Peterson, remind people that racial aggrandisement can lead to Auschwitz and envious socialism can lead to the Gulag labour camp. The fact, so the argument goes, that I can name Auschwitz but could not name a single Soviet labour camp is evidence that our commemorations are deeply unbalanced. We have only half corrected ourselves: we are on guard against the extreme right, but we give the extreme left a free pass.

If we can hold both in balance, so the idea goes, then we will never live through a similar catastrophe again.

The problem with this idea is that the desire to commemorate a massacre is, in its very conception, already of the left.

The rightist attitude – essentially a religious attitude – regarding death and massacre is not that these events should be commemorated in the style of a “never again” monument or day of remembrance; rather, the religious attitude understands that massacre, death, and suffering are an inevitable part of life. We cannot escape events like the Holocaust or the Gulag because man is fallen, or, if you only have a materialist take on life, man is an animal formed by an evolutionary history of rape and murder. These events, while horrific, are a tendency deeply embedded in us. Joseph Conrad warned that civilisation is like a thin crust covering lava, at any moment we may drop through into the fire; and this, in fact, is how we live.

The desire to commemorate the Holocaust or the Gulag as a “warning from history” is itself couched in a progressive liberal framework. The thought behind this approach holds that humans can “learn the lesson” of history and so improve (“never again”). This is certainly desirable, but it is a narrative of history as progress and improvement – it is inherently a leftist conceit. If you start from the perspective that man is fallen and imperfect, the idea that commemoration – essentially education – can improve him is naïve. In fact, it is worse, since it doesn’t deal honestly with quite how innately vile humans are deep down.

Once man’s fallen state is acknowledged, a person can move towards celebrating glory, honour, and courage. Christians do not remember Christ on the cross in the spirit of “never again” – only a materialist would say that the message of Christ’s sacrifice is that the death penalty should be abolished. Rather, in part, Christ on the cross stands for the suffering that we must, as men, inevitably endure; if Christ didn’t suffer on the cross, man could never be redeemed. This act of sacrifice, taking up his cross, changed the world; but it was a spiritual change, not a material betterment in how men treat each other.

The drive to commemorate massacres in a spirit of overcoming also derives from the notion of victimhood as the highest value in Western society. In the West today – indeed, for sometime – it has been glorious to be a victim; or, if not exactly glorious, victim-status has become a useful way to manipulate other people to do what you want through guilt and, in particular, shame. The person who has accepted the fallen nature of man can turn his eyes to something higher, but the person who believes man is perfectable must obsess over the bloodiness that will be overcome.

I suspect that this is all really connected to the absolute nihilism of the West. When we could conceive of a God, we could also conceive of sacrifice. Now that we only have our material lives to preserve, our priority has become holding on to life at all costs. We must avoid suffering and we must feel sorrow for victims. After all, we do not belong to God or a nation or a people; we are just a bag of chemicals here for a time to shop and fuck and then die. Why would we give ourselves for something greater? Why would we tolerate the idea of suffering? Isn’t being a victim – dying early and in physical pain – the worst thing we could imagine? How can we even begin to think like Christ?

Memorial days of all sorts are the purest hypocrisy under liberal progressivism, but this is especially true of those days that commemorate massacres – “genocides” (a post-war word) – of various sorts. The Western politicians who give pious speeches against genocide often retain an ample nuclear arsenal under their command. The very policy of Britain and America is that, should we be attacked by another nuclear state, a nuclear genocide should be unleashed upon the attacking state.

Britain’s nuclear arsenal alone could kill millions of people; if it was directed against, say, Russia, then the consequences would probably be the end of Russians as an ethnic group. Our state policy is genocide, and yet every year our politicians stand up and solemnly denounce genocide. Other states are no better, the French and Belgiums – whose intelligence networks were involved in the slaughter in Rwanda – are equally eager to state “never again”.

Our media publishes sentimental stories about genocides – Congress and Parliament debate motions condemning the Armenian Genocide – and yet our statesmen and taxes prepare the grounds for nuclear annihilation or, worse, use the concept of “humanitarian intervention” to plunge countries like Iraq and Syria into actual inter-ethnic slaughter.

It is only the pacifists – the absolute metaphysical pacifists, not the part-time Marxist pacifists – who are unyielding in their views and so are willing to point out the hypocrisy.

Since the 1930s, the West has been run by people who subscribe to an ideology that basically says man is improvable through education. This group of people, today’s progressive liberals, have been gaining in power steadily over the centuries, always preaching, as happened during the French Revolution, that man in perfectable and that his perfection can be attained through education. If reality is unpleasant, these people give it another name and insist that it does not exist. Until everyone has been educated to be a vegan, then no one will be allowed to do anything glorious, dangerous, or beautiful. The wolf will dwell with the lamb, but as utopians, the progressives expect that to happen in their lifetimes – yolo, after all. This is their standpoint, and, as materialists, they will use shame and fear of death and suffering to manipulate other people to do what they want.

You can see the last glimmer of the old order in how we commemorate the Great War. The purpose of Remembrance Sunday in the Commonwealth was to remember the sacrifices of those who fought for their countries. While there was some hope for peace in the commemoration, it was up to strict pacifists to argue that Remembrance Sunday should be about “never again”. Indeed, pacifists used to condemn Remembrance Day for promoting war and futile sacrifice. It is a day when what Wilfred Owen called “the old lie” – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – is in the air. Remembrance Sunday did not “educate people for peace”; it reminded them of what was required to sustain the nation, a blood sacrifice that made the poppy fields grow. This way of thinking has now been completely superseded by the prominence of progressive liberal ideas.

This is why the moderate right’s call for a Gulag Memorial Day will never work: the hegemony of liberal progressive ideas is almost complete in the Western political sphere. “Gulag Memorial Day” is an approach similar to those rightists who claim that Labour are the “real racists”. The concept of “racism” is inherently leftist, and the rightist alternative is to accept the reality of race and deal with it as best we can. To take up the concept “racism” is to move to the left. Similarly, the act of educative commemoration is of the left in essence. The right commemorates glory, sacrifice, and hardship. The right says, “Life is a massacre, but we can still make beauty amid the massacre. We can still have great men and achievements to be proud of.” This is not to say that the right does not remember the dead or give tragedy its due, but this is for the private sphere – it is done in churches, mosques, and synagogues.

The Soviet Union and the communist countries are conceptualised, even in the West today, as educative experiences. When the left talks about these countries it is in the context of an “unfortunate experiment”, whereas the fascist regimes are regarded as unregenerate evil. Liberal progressives were not entirely in support of the communist countries, but they thought that they tended in the right direction – even if they went about things “excessively” sometimes.

The Gulags, the “reeducation camps”, are not something that the West can memorialise; if we memorialised these events, it would be admitting that there is a perverse or disordered element to our entire worldview – the view that people can be “educated” out of their human instincts and desires. This is why it is very difficult to imagine a Gulag Memorial Day: we are also living, in a milder form, in a reeducation system. The system cannot grant a commemoration that would undermine its own ideological logic.

The religious attitude to the Holocaust, in part, asks: “Did this happen because we have forgotten God?”. For those of a Christian background, this question is posed in terms of examining why Europeans abandoned the numinous for the ideology of race. In Jewish terms, the religious person asks if the Jewish Enlightenment – the entry of Jews into gentile society in a secular way – was a spurning of God repaid by punishment, or, alternatively, if the Holocaust was another test, one of many, that God has sent for the Jewish people. These attitudes are entirely different to the secular and progressive outlook that claims that genocidal events serve the cause of “political education”.

I say that we can only avoid these catastrophes – insofar as we can – by acknowledging our nature; we are, whether God exists or not, fallen creatures and our capacity to improve ourselves is limited by our very bungling and confusion. In fact, I would say that we haven’t even taken the first step: we haven’t even admitted how much we enjoy murder, rape, and destruction. We have only become very good at pretending that we were sorry and that it won’t happen again (even as we conspire to make it happen again).

When Jordan Peterson asks that we remember the Gulag as a balance to the Holocaust – extreme left and right held in equal opprobrium – he has misunderstood the nature of balance. We do not achieve balance by copying everything the other side does perfectly; rather, we achieve balance through low level antagonism and opposition – harmony arrives through contention and contradiction.

The left must – and will – preach a message that says blood, horror, and sacrifice can be removed from the human story, and the right must offer the corrective of absolute materialist nihilist realism and/or absolute spiritual redemption. The right must say that man is flawed and yet capable of great acts of courage and honour, despite the fact that he must suffer and kill in order to live. The right will build monuments to men who have conquered – militarily, artistically, or scientifically – and will remember the necessary sacrifices that are required to sustain a human community, but they will not celebrate victimhood. They will mourn in private.

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