Vote for the Czar, it's important: A Polish ex-Communist taught me a hard-earned lesson in the difference between bad and worse
By
American
politics are in such a scramble that we need to think about how we
vote, not just for whom. Should our choice be determined by party
loyalty, policy, the perceived qualities of the candidates? I turned
conservative when I learned to vote for the lesser of evils.
That
lesson was unexpected. On my first trip to Poland, in 1978, I was put
in touch with a woman who offered to show me around the Jewish ruins.
She was an excellent guide, but as we came to the memorial for the 1943
uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, she said that I could learn about that
phase of Jewish history on my own. What she had to tell me, however, I
could hear only from her.
In
the late 1920s in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), she had been a
student of the Jewish literary historian Max Erik, a fervent Communist
who one day stole across the sealed border to the Soviet Union so that
he could join the great socialist experiment. Radicalized by him, she
had joined the Communist Party, which was illegal in Poland. She
followed his example and emigrated several years later. But once in
Soviet territory, she was arrested as a “Polish spy” and sent to labor
camps in the Gulag. In the last of them, she met her former
teacher—before his execution in 1937. Erik didn’t want to talk, except
to tell her one thing: “It was better under the czars.”
This
was no endorsement of czarism. Life under that regime had been grim,
for Jews especially. Historians debate whether czarist authorities
instigated anti-Jewish pogroms or merely allowed them to rage until
their energies were spent. There were expulsions and political
suppression. By reneging on his promises to allow democratic reform,
Czar Nicholas II, who reigned from 1894 until his abdication in 1917,
spurred the coming Communist revolution. Erik was among thousands of
idealists who embraced socialism in defiance of czarist and
authoritarian rule.
Rather
than justify Erik’s youthful idealism, or her own, for having resisted
oppression, my guide wanted to ensure that as a student of the Jewish
ruins I understood what was truly at stake. There were three parts to
the lesson—two that she spelled out for me, and a third that I have
since added on my own.
The
first was the all-important political distinction between bad and
worse. Czarism might have seemed intolerable, but the Communist regime
proved crueler than the evils it had come to replace. The Communists had
learned from their time in czarist prisons to make conditions harsher,
torture more painful and deadlier. When weighing political options,
never assume that change is for the better. First ascertain with
ultimate caution that you aren’t opening the door for something far
worse.
Far
worse than czarism was the socialist road to totalitarian hell. That
was the second lesson. The Poland under communism I saw in 1978 was
freer than the Soviet Union had been under Stalin, but my guide wanted
to be sure I appreciated the full lie of the socialist promise. Under
the guise of raising the downtrodden, it trod everyone down equally to
the lowest level in culture, education, health and prosperity. She
hadn’t left Poland with most of the remaining Jews after the
anti-Semitic purges of 1968 only because she felt too exhausted to start
over in Israel. But even for Jews it had been better under the czars.
This
wasn’t what I had expected from my visit to Warsaw. The venue she chose
for this tutorial seemed especially incongruous. Approaching what had
been the ghetto, my mind throbbed with images of Nazi brutality and its
consequences—starved children in the streets, the heroism of the Jewish
fighters, the treachery of the Jewish police, the horror of the final
liquidation.
That
might have been why my guide felt certain that I could learn about the
Holocaust on my own. Thanks to the Allied victory over Germany and to
Jewish insistence on commemorating the victims of Nazism, Americans had
been made doubly alert to the evil of fascism. I would never
underestimate that threat. Socialist progress, on the other hand, still
enjoyed some of its romantic glow. Hence the third lesson: In my own
politics, I should concentrate on warding off the likelier mistake.
America
today is far removed from czarist Russia, but that lesson has governed
my political thinking ever since. Because we in the U.S. start from such
a better place, our “progressives” may destroy even more of the good
that exists. When there is no better choice, it is all the more
important to vote for the merely bad over the worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment