A well known and little respected member of the Israeli government has been subjected to heavy criticism for his mockery of captive opponents of his government.  The criticism came from all round the world.  It was not alleged that anyone was physically hurt in the relevant incident.  Some wondered about the depth of the reaction.  Have not 70,000 died in what is called the Gaza War?

Sixty years ago, I was in two minds about our involvement in the Vietnam War – and I am not proud of myself for saying that.  But I have a clear recollection that attitudes here and the U S and the rest of the world were changed by the publication of two photos.  One was of a man being shot in the head by a hand-gun at close range.  The other was of a young naked child fleeing Napalm.  The virulence of the response was later caught in the film Apocalypse Now with the line ‘I just love the smell of Napalm in the’ – music supplied by Richard Wagner.

Statistics are, well, just that.  They must at least risk degrading the worth of every single person referred to.  How can we get our heads around the estimates of those murdered by Stalin or Hitler?

Stalin knew all about this.  ‘The death of one person is a tragedy.  The death of a million is statistic.’

May I refer you to comments I made in a chapter – ‘Numbers’ – in my book Terror and the Police State set out at the end of this note?

You can see this reflection on our emotions when looking at the war in the Ukraine.  Russian casualties are now horrific.  So too has been the perfidious response of the United States.  The White House ambush of Zelensky was one of the most nauseating public abuses of power I have seen – far worse in my assessment than the incident referred to at the start of this note.

The Nazis kidnapped children as part of their war effort.  Is there a worse crime against humanity?  Ukraine alleges that the Russians have kidnapped 20,000 children.  You do not see reference to this crime against humanity when people say the Ukraine should make concessions. 

More importantly, can you begin to imagine what may have been the reaction if one of those 20,000 – just one – was a citizen of the United States?

Book Extract

The numbers

If you accept as an article of faith that each of us has our own dignity or worth just because we are human, then it is wrong for anyone to treat anyone else as a mere number.  We are at risk of doing just that when we seek to compile numbers of the victims of the three regimes that we have been looking at. 

The essential crime of both Hitler and Stalin was that they degraded humanity by denying the right to dignity, by denying the very humanity, of people beyond count – by denying the humanity of one man, woman, and child multiplied to our version of infinity.  Every one of those victims – every one – had a life and a worth that came with that life that was damaged or extinguished.  In his book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder endorsed the proposition that ‘the key to both National Socialism and Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human,’ and when we descend to statistics, we might do the same.  Should we not be concentrating on Jean Baptiste Henry, the eighteen-year-old apprentice tailor decapitated for sawing down a tree of liberty?  Of the mother of Angelina and Nelly who was separated from her children and sent to a concentration camp because she had not denounced her husband?  Or the young schoolboy at Munich whose brain was so washed that he could not abide the sight of a dirty Jew in his classroom in the form of a crucifix?  Would he grow up to fire up the ovens?

But, we have to make at least some comparisons. 

The Reign of Terror up to the execution of Robespierre accounted for about 30,000 deaths with another 10,000 who died in prison.  Much the greater part of those 30,000 were killed because of their alleged participation in the civil war.  The Revolutionary Tribunal despatched about 2,600.  Professor Hampson sought to add some perspective by adding that about 15,000 members of the Paris Commune were shot in May 1871, and that there were about 40,000 people executed after the liberation of France.  Of 14,000 victims of the Terror whose social origin is known, about 1150 came from the nobility and 200 from the upper middle class.  About seven out of thirty-five of the highest caste of nobility was killed.  Death alone could not therefore account for the decline and fall of the nobility.

The French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802 cost about two million lives.  The Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815 destroyed about five million lives.  We cannot get our heads around those figures any more than estimates of eight to ten million lives for the First World War.  None of these figures would mean anything to someone putting their head through the window or being dismembered by Napoleon’s cannons.

Stalin and Hitler murdered fourteen million people between them over twelve years.  Nearly 700,000 were shot in Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 to 1938.  Some four million Soviet citizens were in the Gulag when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.  As we saw, the NKVD massacred many of their own prisoners as the Germans advanced in order to stop the Fascists getting their hands on more forced labour.  The Soviets sentenced a further two and a half million people to the Gulag during the war.  The NKVD remained active anywhere that the Fascists did not reach – including those poor wretches starving to death in Leningrad under siege.  More than half a million deaths were recorded in the Gulag in two years.  They all died without grace or dignity.  The Germans killed about three million Soviet prisoners of war, which is about the number of Ukrainian peasants that were starved to death by the Soviets in 1932-1933.  The total Russian casualties of that war, civil or military, were of the order of twenty million which is more than two and half times greater than the casualties of all nations for the First World War.

Alan Bullock put a number of eighteen million on the victims of Nazi brutality for the whole of Europe and Russia (apart from the victims of the orthodox war) and he said this:

It is important to place these figures on record.  But because they can have the effect of numbing the imagination, which cannot conceive of human suffering on such a scale, it is equally important to underline that every single figure in these millions represents acts of cruelty, terror, and degradation inflicted on individual human beings like ourselves, a man, a woman, a child or even a baby.

Whatever else humanity can do, it cannot come to terms with its degradation like this, or, as the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe said:

Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.