Choose Your Own Adventure: Hitler, or Stalin?

Laughter in the dark — and what happens next in America?

I’ve had a cold this week, and as a result have sometimes in the afternoon taken to the couch with a book, like some listless fop, not an indulgence I generally allow myself in the working week. As a result I’ve got a lot more reading done than usual. Because I know how to have a fun time, the subjects have been two of the most appalling, world-historical atrocities in human experience: the Holocaust, and the terror-famine in Ukraine in 1933.

I didn’t deliberately choose these, rather came upon them in the process of reading some of the few books by Martin Amis that I hadn’t yet read. Amis, who died last year, was one of my favorite authors (along with his father, Kingsley) and I’ve read much of his fiction (especially Money, London Fields, Success, Dead Babies and The Rachel Papers) multiple times. I mean, like, four or five times. His facility with the English Language is, to my mind, unequalled: every few pages you come across a line that makes you think “I didn’t even realize that thought was there to be expressed, never mind with such clinical elan”.

He was an astute essayist too, and as his career progressed he increasingly played with erasing the line between fiction and non-fiction, starting with his superb memoire Experience. It seems this may be a feature of imaginative writers of a certain type — they gradually begin to become more engaged with trying to understand and describe the world as it is, rather than as it’s not. During this period he also started to return to several subjects on a regular basis. As Anne Dillard quotes in her marvelous book The Writing Life: “Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life…. Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.”

Two of Amis’s bones became the Holocaust, and the excesses of the USSR.

He first dealt with the former in Time’s Arrow, a novel whose central conceit (perhaps borrowed from Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World, or at least previously seen there) involves a world where everything happens in reverse. I won’t spoil the effect by telling the story, I’ll just encourage you to read it. It’s short but incredibly powerful. The first time I finished reading it I looked up afterwards to find myself profoundly disconcerted to be in a place where time flowed in the wrong (but in fact correct) direction. The book I read this week was his penultimate novel (though perhaps the last full such, as Inside Story is more of a play on non-fiction), The Zone of Interest.

This novel has recently been loosely adapted for film. I haven’t seen it, and probably won’t. The entire point of Amis is his use of language (and how he uses it to shove ideas and thence emotions deep into your head), not what “happens”. The story is told from three revolving perspectives, and lands effectively, but its events are really there to allow the author to gnaw at trying to understand the kind of people who could commit something like the Holocaust (people like us, in other words). Humanizing the inhumane, then in the end finding himself unable — as most of us are — to decide which of those it truly was.

Everyone’s heard of the Holocaust. Far fewer people are aware of one of the subjects of Amis’s earlier non-fiction work, Koba the Dread — an intricate, deeply-researched, factual and yet highly-personalized account of the life (or effects) of Josef Stalin. That subject is the Holomodor, the deliberate famine that Stalin perpetrated against the people of Ukraine in 1932-33. It’s difficult to put a death toll on this, as it bleeds out into the other fiercely inventive ways that Stalin explored for murdering his own citizens (including the gulags, suppression of the Kulaks, and the nightmarishly accelerating avalanche of political executions for absolutely made-up crimes, subjects that much of Amis’s book is focused on) but most estimates seem to settle around a figure of six million. Comparable in fatality, therefore, to the Holocaust itself.

The eventual death toll from the combination of Stalin’s increasingly unhinged excesses are believed to be well north of ten million, possibly even twenty, over a two-decade period. Why am I tell you this? Not to depress you. But because it needs thinking about. And it needs thinking about because of Donald Trump.

A question Amis worries at over the course of Koba the Dread is that of laughter, specifically in response to world events. He suggests that while it’s possible (though not always easy) to view the Soviet Union with a touch of humor — Don’t you agree, Comrade! — the same is not, and will never be, true of the Third Reich. There’s truth in this, and I think perhaps there are two main reasons (though he doesn’t cite either).

The first is that most people simply don’t know how appalling Stalin’s reign was. Yes, they kinda get there was oppression and some secret police shit going down, and the stores often didn’t have any bread and it was all a bit grim and cold, ugh. But in terms of the ruthless, dedicated, endless, maniacal and yet focussed way in which millions and millions of men, women and children were deliberately slaughtered, the degree to which the state went functionally insane and started attacking itself as if in the throes of some kind of societal auto-immune disease… people just don’t know. People on the left may even unconsciously turn away from knowing, too, from giving it full weight, because of its sickening apparent undermining of ideals we may hold dear.

Whereas we do know what happened to the Jews in the second world war. We may not pay it enough attention, and some of the vile may deny it, but it’s a known thing and part of the general understanding of 20th Century history.

The second is — and this is more speculative on my part — that we believe Communism (broadly defined) was defeated. It was an idea, and it failed. The Soviet Union fell, and whatever the hell Putin’s up to now, it isn’t that. Sure the Chinese are doing something weird over there, but we understand that’s no longer quite the same thing either. We’re comfortable in the thought that whenever there’s been a revolution and people have started calling each other “comrade”, the whole thing has eventually messily fallen apart. I’m making no judgement on the value of the insights enshrined in Marxism, by the way — merely describing the historical impacts. As a guiding principle for the organization of a society, at least as manifested through non-angelic human beings, Communism broke, sank, became a joke. So we can laugh.

Nazism didn’t.

Yes, Hitler was defeated. But the lurid, disgusting, insane impulses at the heart of its treatment of the Jews didn’t go away. That dehumanizing impulse — easily transportable in Lite version to other races, when required, like the Palestinians in Gaza, or anybody else whose skin isn’t quite the same shade as ours — is alive and well in the core of the human heart. We know this, feel it queasily in our gut, and that’s why Nazism isn’t funny and never will be. It isn’t over.

Reading these two books back-to-back at a time when Donald Trump is blustering and lying and stomping his way to a third Republican nomination could not help but make me consider his position in relation to them. And I’ll say right here that if your response is an eye-roll and “Christ, another lib whining on about Hitler, chill out loser, Trump’s just a joker, he speaks for the little man, what about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” then I can’t help you. If, despite everything that’s happening in the world right now in places like Ukraine and Gaza (but certainly not limited to them), you somehow think humankind stepped over some magical threshold at some point in the 1980s and is no longer capable of apocalypse (despite the fact there are people still alive who were around during both the Holocaust and Holomodor) then you have a bright-eyed naivety I’m almost disinclined to disabuse you of.

It must be nice, being that fucking dim. Good luck to you.

What all this made me think, however, is that the common comparison of Trump to Hitler is wrong, or inexact. I believe he’s more like Stalin. Not (just) because we can laugh at Trump, for now — his stupid hair and spray-tan, his little dance, his word salad speeches, his relentlessly dismal taste in everything — but because his primary modus operandi is very similar to one Amis highlights in Stalin: a relentless war on truth.

A desire, in fact, to break truth entirely. To render it meaningless.

He’s been at it right from the start. His refusal to cough up his tax returns when he ran the first time, with attendant ludicrous falsehoods. Right from those pre-election moments, a determination to turn true/false into a non-binary, to break the cause-and-effect chain of act-and-consequence. His subsequent assaults on the press, designating the reporting of these “enemies of the people” as fake news, and his administration's breezy invention of the concept of “alternative facts”. The way in which he, and his quick-to-learn lackeys across the Republican Party, will now stand and look you in the eye and gaslight the living crap out of you about everything from Congresspeople taking credit for Bills they voted against, to claiming the events of January 6th didn’t happen, when millions of people all around the world literally saw them happen, in real time, on live television — right up to, of course, the Big Lie: claiming they won an election that they lost by a huge margin.

My argument is that this, whether consciously or otherwise, is not a series of unconnected events but represents a wholesale attack on truth itself. On meaning. And it’s not a game, just a fun way of owning the libs. There is a cold point to it, a strategic advantage. This is one of the reasons Stalin was able to conduct his atrocities: because everything had stopped making sense (and this is perhaps another minor part of why the Soviet Union can sometimes in retrospect be found risible: it glows with the surreality of senselessness, prat-falling us like some semantic or epistemological banana skin). When nothing makes sense you are powerless to fight it. You can’t dance about architecture and you cannot have meaningful discourse with people who deny reality.

There is no rebuttal for non-sense.

This is what Trump is about. I don’t believe he’s a nazi. I don’t think he hates the Jews. I don’t think he cares much about them either way (I don’t believe he cares much about anybody either way). He puts on the coat of nazism as it suits him, and sometimes slyly co-opts its language (the talk of vermin who need to be expunged from the country, and enemies within) because he understands that his autocratic nature is appealing to people who really are racist, nazi-adjacent motherfuckers. He doesn’t care about their views enough to even figure out whether he fundamentally shares them. He just wants their support. Their vote, while we’re still organizing things that way, and then after that, their muscle, their inchoate fury, their guns.

Stalin was a small man. Five feet, four inches. Trump is not physically small, though it’s instructive how determined he is to add a couple of inches to his height whenever the subject comes up. That’s the act of a man who’s very small inside. Internal smallness is not a sign of weakness, however. Sometimes it can be like a black star, a super-massive black hole, something so dense and heavy that it warps the light around it. Such men either vent their insecurity upon the close-at-hand, their wives or children or dogs, or they yearn for a much larger canvas. Through a series of mis-steps and media failures (Hilary’s emails!) and other depressing undercurrents, Trump is now again within reach of one of the largest canvases of all. While in no sense smart, he is possessed of a brutal, feral cunning — a style of intelligence that has no truck with “truth” or “meaning”, but instead is wholly concerned with goals: with achieving what he wants. Coyotes can’t read, but they know what to do in order to kill your cat. Trump has found within the moral void of the modern Republican Party a gang of drooling, grifting opportunists who’re realizing they can’t win a popular vote with their archaic grab-bag of “beliefs”, and so are happy to come along for the ride.

This is why we so often stare at the news, furrow-browed, listening to Trump or one of familiars, thinking “But… that’s not true”. How quaint of us. How old-fashioned. The Trump campaign will continue to break truth to the point where there is no false, no right or wrong, no “this happened, and that didn’t”. And that’s why, should the horrific possibility of him winning in November come to pass, the result will be more like the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s than Germany over the same period. When everything stops making sense, perfectly good people will do perfectly terrible things. And “wrong” won’t mean anything any more, so there will be nothing to stop it until the regime blows itself apart. In Stalin’s case, that took thirty years.

Of course it won’t happen all at once. America’s a big place, and some of the states will fight it. It’ll be gradual. But it’ll happen, if we’re not careful.

And it won’t be funny. It won’t be funny at all.