Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

denying it is like saying evil doesn’t exist. But if you say mild things
about Joseph Stalin nobody will object. One of the great tragedies
of the Soviet Union is that it discredited the name of socialism.
Poles often tell me that for them communism equals socialism.
When they say they are right wing, they mean they don’t like communism.
This leads to a lot of confusion as to what is left and what
is right in politics.
In Poland people have no idea what liberalism is, since liberalism
was condemned both by the communists and by the Catholic
Church. The confusion this caused still continues. Garton Ash organised
an excellent conference here at Saint Anthony’s, on liberalisms.
Not liberalism, I mean the plural. Interestingly a lot of
Chinese participated, all very interested in hearing what liberalism
is about.
Q: We are struggling in our political work with the so very different
perspectives on European history. In Western Europe, despite
broad awareness of the crimes of Stalin, the Russian Red Army is
often seen as liberator, but in the countries of Central Europe views
are, understandably, completely different. More and more these are
becoming subject of political debate, which, as you can easily
imagine, is often hard to resolve. How should we handle these differences?
My latest book on the Second World War, ‘Europe at War’ gives the
background to the problems you have. It deals with why Western
Europe developed views on the Second World War so very different
from those in Eastern Europe. Western Europe saw a war between
fascism, basically the Nazis and the Italian fascists, and
Western liberal powers, who because of American intervention, only
just survived after being almost knocked down in 1940. Eastern
Europe saw a very different war, where there were two enemies.
Theirs wasn’t a war against fascism, but a war in which the fascists
were fighting the Soviets. Several hundred million people were
caught in the middle of this double war. The result is that in Western
minds, especially from the American point of view, the Nazis –
and to a lesser extent Mussolini and Franco – are the apex of evil.
Their emblematic crime is the Holocaust. To anybody from Eastern
Europe this looks simplistic, because the peoples of Central and
Eastern Europe had two great enemies: Nazi Germany and the
47 Norman Davies