Paul Hollander devoted a lot of his life and his tutorial profession to telling the reality about communism. The primary title of the basic work he printed in 1981 immediately entered the discourse. It was referred to as Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, and in it Dr. Hollander documented that main liberals had been most favorable of their assessments of these three regimes exactly when their respective communist leaders had been at their most damaging: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics throughout the Stalinist purges of the 1930s; China throughout the bloody Cultural Revolution of the 1960s; and Cuba throughout the 1960s when the Isle of Pines jail overflowed with political prisoners, lots of them former comrades of Fidel Castro.
These “goal” students made excuses, ignored monstrous crimes, argued that communist and capitalist societies would by some means converge, and substituted their utopian goals for the nightmare actuality of communist dictatorships. Hollander, himself a professor on the College of Massachusetts Amherst, was by no means fooled, and by no means allowed intellectuals of the Left to neglect how they'd allowed themselves to be fooled.
He got here by his anticommunism naturally, having been born in communist Hungary and escaped following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with solely the leather-based jacket on his again. After incomes levels on the London Faculty of Economics and Princeton, he taught at Harvard earlier than settling in at UMass Amherst to show political sociology.
Anne Applebaum, in her introduction to a different Hollander work (2006’s From the Gulag to the Killing Fields), salutes the writer for his assortment of memoirs by those that had personally skilled the violence and repression of communism. She factors out that Dr. Hollander permits us to see the direct line from Vladimir Lenin to Josef Stalin, from to Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot, from Castro to the Individuals’s Motion for the Liberation of Angola.
Amongst Hollander’s associations was the Victims of Communism Memorial Basis, of whose nationwide advisory board he was a founding member. He was till not too long ago an lively participant in its occasions, notably its annual Roll Name of Nations, when dozens of overseas ambassadors and representatives of ethnic teams collect in Washington, D.C. to put a wreath for these of their native international locations who had suffered and died underneath communism.
Sympathetic Western intellectuals usually envisioned the communist states as heirs to the objectives and traditions of the Enlightenment or a humane socialism. Such gross misconceptions had been formed by ignorance and wishful pondering, traits not shared by Dr. Hollander, who wrote that underneath communism:
The centralized economic system didn't result in effectivity besides in assembly the wants of the army; indoctrination didn't produce loyalty in the long term; repression stifled initiative. . . . ; low wages and salaries undermined incentives . . . ethnic tensions weren't eradicated, solely suppressed. Final however not least, each communist system failed to attain its proudest declare: the creation of a brand new, extra moral human being.
As scholar and instructor, Paul Hollander was as fearless as he was meticulous, and set the best attainable normal for truth-telling about communism, essentially the most lethal “ism” of the 20th century.
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