More Lies from the Right - Bogus Martin Amis Book Review

For no good reason other than that I haven't written anything here in a bit, I thought I'd reproduce a review I just submitted to Amazon on Martin Amis' book Koba the Dread (On the USSR 1917-1953). I don't often write Amazon reviews; in fact this was only my third (the first was of the Turner Diaries, and as far as I know never published, the second of Phyllis Chesler's screeching "the New Anti-Semitism"). But was inspired by another review I'd read there which was a total distortion of the book's contents - plainly for political point-scoring and I thought it merited some correction.

The offending review was from Andrew S Rogers and was at the time of writing the first one here (I don't know if you can permalink an Amazon review?). I am reproducing only the latter two paragraphs - the rest was generally innocuous.

Uncovering why this is true [that the true horrors of Stalin's Russia is less well known than the Holocaust] makes up the final, and arguably most important, part of the book. That's because Amis takes aim at the myth -- so often heard even from people who should know better -- that Stalin's "excesses" were not endemic to communism, but rather were a result of the "cult of personality" that undermined true communism. Amis is having none of it. Terror, famine, slavery, and failure, "monotonous and incorrigible failure" (p. 30) are, he argues, the inevitable "Communist tetrarchy."

For Amis, the lesson of the twentieth century is what it teaches about Leftism and "revolution." Much of this book is intensely personal, because Amis believes some of his dearest friends -- and, for a while, his father as well -- were duped by Stalin and his mania. In wrestling with the ghost of Stalin, Amis is wrestling too with their demons, and his own. After gazing, in these pages, upon the twenty million, his conclusion that "the Revolution was a lie" (p. 258) is hard to refute.

These paragraphs represent an absolute and systematic distortion of the point of the book as I hope I made clear as follows:

Not a book about "Leftism", June 3, 2005, Reviewer: Brian OC (Boston)

One should not believe everything one reads. Even from Amazon Top 500 reviewers.

Despite what some might have you believe Amis' book is not about "Leftism", or even Communism in general. It is specifically about the Soviet Revolution (or "counter-revolution" as Amis dubs it here) and its deplorable excesses under Lenin and Stalin. Amis would be a poor writer indeed, if he claimed that one could base conclusions about "Leftism" in general on an examination of this limited topic. Amis is not a poor writer.

Defining Communism as a whole or attacking it was never part of Amis' ambit. (His ambit was better encapsulated in the question in his conclusion "Russia 1917-1953: what is it's genre? " (p258))

(Amis certainly never "takes aim at" or "is having none of" any "myths" about Stalinist crimes not being an intrinsic part of Communism. One marvels at the zealous miscomprehension of the true believer that could read the book and think this so.)

Soviet Russia was an abomination, all the more so in contrast to its claim to be rendering an earthly paradise. Its incarnation of Communism - the first on earth - combined "Terror, famine, slavery, and failure" and so these became the "Communist tetrarchy". Amis of course never seeks to claim that these four were "inevitable" consequences of Communism, that is a question perhaps for a different author, in a different book.

In fact Amis makes clear at numerous points in the book that he does not consider Marxism/Socialism/"Leftism" and Soviet Communism as synonymous.

Amis states his belief that Marx and Marxism was not the primary driving force behind the Russian Revolution:
"With its didactic portrait of the revolutionary New Man, its "russification" of current radical themes, and its contempt for ordinary people 'Chernyshevsky's novel [What is to be Done (1863) - read 5 times in one summer by Lenin], far more than Marx's Capital supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution'(Joseph Frank)"(p27)

Amis talks of Lenin distorting and abusing Marx's writings, failing to live up to them, and failing ultimately to implement Marx's notion of Communism:
"Let us consider 'the dictatorship of the proletariat.' Barely more than a footnote in Marx, the phrase was fetishized by the Bolsheviks as 'vanguardism': the elite revolutionaries establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the proletariat over time outgrows mere "trade-union consciousness," and catches up with the vanguard; the vanguard, the state, then famously "withers away" and full Communism is "realized". The Bolsheviks, as we are aware got stuck in the first phase of the process and never moved beyond it."

Amis clearly believes that the Soviet Union was not socialist (and therefore clearly his denunciation of the USSR is not a denunciation of Socialism, or "Leftism")
"In the USSR... Union was a lie. Soviet was a lie. Socialist was a lie. Republics was a lie."(p258, my emphasis)

Amis clarifes that he personally never had much faith to lose in the Soviet Union. He is not at all "wrestling with his own demons" over Communism, and speaks of his inability to fully empathize with someone who did.
"'Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,' he [Volkogonov an old Stalinist turned anti-Communist] wrote, 'was to break the faith I had held for so long.' The workings of Volkogonov's internal perestroika are altogether alien to me." (p250, my emphasis)

It would certainly be possible for someone avowedly on the right to pick through this book selectively and misrepresent it as Martin Amis's deunciation of leftwing politics as a whole. But it would take a modicum of dishonesty or incompetence or some combination of the two to accomplish that.

This is a book about the failure of some individuals on the left to face up to the monstrosity of the Soviet Regime 1917-1953, because of romanticised notions of the nobility of the struggle. It is not about rejecting left wing politics per se, and it would take an excess of right-politicised gymnastics to try and represent it that way.

(As a footnote it should be said that Martin Amis is still avowedly on the left and recently while he disagreed with his friend Christopher Hitchens' support of the Iraq War, he took some solace in the fact that Hitch's postion "is a position held from the left")

****

Just before I posted this, I thought I'd read some of Rogers' other reviews to ensure I was correct in characterising him as someone "avowedly on the right", (with Americans it is sometimes very hard to tell), to discover he'd written approvingly of Ann Coulter, had once run for office on the Libertarian ticket, and routinely uses the word "leftist" as a term of abuse. None of this surprised me in the slightest.

In short, if dunderheaded reactionary nitwits want to post their own political viewpoints on the web there are a myriad of forums where they can do so. But there is something quite infuriatingly dishonest about trying to insert those views into the mouths of established authors in an effort to bolster said views. I hope anyone in the future who reads Roger's mendacious review takes the time to read mine after it, and recognizes him for the charlatan that he is.
- posted by Brian OC @ 9:19 AM
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