FIRinG Line. SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIA TlON

Transcription

1 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIA TlON \ The copyright laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. If a user makes a request for, or later uses a photocopy or reproduction (including handwritten copies) for purposes in excess of fair use, that user may be liable for copyright infringement. Users are advised to obtain permission from the copyright owner before any re-use ofthis material. Use of this material is for private, non-commercial, and educational purposes; additional reprints and further distribution is prohibited. Copies are not for resale. All other rights reserved. For further information, contact Director, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. II FIRinG Line Guest: Subject: Robert Conquest, author, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties "GENOCIDE"

2 Correction, title page: "Elaine Middleweek" should read "Helene Middleweek". SECA PRESENTS ~ FIRinG Line Host: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. The FIRING LINE television series is a production of the Southern Educational Communications Association, 928 Woodrow St., p. O. Box 5966, Columbia, S.C., 29205, and is transmitted through the facilities of the Public Broadcasting Service. Production of these programs is made possible through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. FIRING LINE can be seen and heard each week through public television and radio stations throughout the country. Check your local newspapers for channel and time in your area. Guest: Subject: Student Participants: Robert Conquest, author, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties "GENOCIDE" Peter Riddell, Cambridge University graduate, financial writer Elaine Middleweek, Cambridge Univ'ersity graduate, social worker Roger Evans, Cambridge University graduate, lawyer FIRING LINE is produced and directed by WARREN STEIBt:L This is a transcript of the FIR ING LI NE program taped at Television International in London, England, on Fl;lbruary 8,1972, and originally telecast on PBS on April 16, Cover Artwork Ronald G. Chapiesky SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University.

3 1972 SOUTHERN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION MR. BUCKLEY: The news that continues to come out of Bangia Desh is of gravesite after gravesite, with the evidence increasing that between March and December of last year the Pakistani engaged in a riot of killing - the scale of which would appear to qualify it as genocide. The figure three million killed is gaining currency, and if that figure is correct, it would suggest not merely that killing is the activity the Pakistani are most efficient at, but that the eyes and ears of the world are strangely, perversely dull, since no one, that I know of, suspected that the killing was on such a scale. Robert Conquest is, perhaps, the most informed student of the great purges of Joseph Stalin and has inveighed against the strange refusal of leading members of the intellectual community to acknowledge undeniable data. Incredibly, Mr. Conquest is a poet, author of several well-received, highly received, books of poetry. On the other hand, the author of Alice in Wonderland was also a mathematician, and Mr. Conquest, in his role as statistician and historian, has written many scholarly books about the Soviet Union, the most renowned of which is called The Great Terror, Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, published in It is a book, by the way, which an observant reporter spotted on the bedside table of a New Yorker, who two weeks earlier had been elected President of the United States. Mr. Conquest was a student in Winchester and Magdalene Colleges in Oxford, and has taught at several American universities, including Buffalo U. and Columbia. His home is here in London. I should like to begin by asking Mr. Conquest: did you know about the scale of the killing in East Pakistan and, if so, how did you find out? MR. CONQUEST: No, I didn't know, and it's not an area I'd claim to be anything remotely resembling an expert on. But, I don't think one does know exactly the scale of these things till years later. It was evident. right from the start, that a good deal of killing was going on, but your figure of three million - whether that's right or not, it's clearly in the mill ions. MR. BUCKLEY: It clearly is in the millions, you say. MR. CONQUEST: Well, when one says clearly, one doesn't want to prejudge anything, of course, for history; but, at any rate, it's on a very large scale, indeed. I don't think any of us know it, or knew it. MR. BUCK LEY: Let me ask you this. Your book makes a number of things clear, and the exhu mations after we liberated Germany made clear the scale in which genocide was practiced there. What system is there, or ought there to be, on the basis of which the world community becomes alerted faster, rather than sooner, that millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people are being exterminated? MR. CONQUEST: Well, this is a very difficult problem. It applies to the whole question of atrocities, in a general sense, everywhere, I think. The Stalin terror was unknown, or term it unadmitted, very, very widely in the West, until the Russians, to a certain degree, admitted themselves that it had happened. Even the extermination of the Jews by Hitler wasn't bel ieved for a very long time. Nowadays, I think, we've gotten into a sort of state which is very dangerous - where everything is done as a sort of competition of atrocities. People don't decide anymore what's really going on. They decide according to a sort of Madison Avenue output, very often, by the one side or the other. It isn't necessarily left or right. I mean, we knew nothing whatever about the massacres of Communists in Indonesia, after the present government took power, which was a very large-scale operation, reportedly about half a mi II ion peoplenot, of course, genocide in the sense that they were trying to exterminate a particular nation or religious group or any of the other groups that come under the definition, the United Nations' definition. The whole competition does, so often, depend upon which side has the best publicity machinery. MR. BUCKLEY: I can understand the difficulties, for instance, that you had. There was a lot of sleuthing involved in finding out exactly how many millions of people were killed during the great massacres in the Soviet Union, and also you ran into a lot of ideological obstacles. People didn't want to believe, because they were parti pris, that the Soviet Union was not engaged in things that unpleasant. But, I don't know that the Pakistani had hold of massive Madison Avenue establishments Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University.

4 to protect their reputation and to apply the necessary cosmetics; nor was their society closed, in the sense that Hitler's concentration camps were closed during the war or the Soviet Union's were and remain closed. So, is there si mply a lack of ingenuity, of interest, of passion, of journalistic enterprise? Why, since there were 10 million refugees, we are told, fleeing East Pakistan, wouldn't an enterprising reporter or an enterprising humanitarian, for that matter, have canvassed those people and reported so that you and I could know this was going on? MR. CONQUEST: Well, I don't think the Pakistanis did have the machinery of keeping the information quiet, and it didn't stay quiet. It was only a matter of a few weeks and they managed to put a cordon around East Pakistan, and even then information was coming out. They didn't have the machinery of totalitarianism which could stop, for any length of time, the information from getting out. But then, on the other hand, people are skeptical, and it's very difficult to see what a journalist can do. He can't prove there are 10 million refugees except by counting them. How is he going to do that? He can go there and be told it by somebody and then, if he reports it, is he right or wrong? Suppose he is being taken in by one side's propaganda machine. It discredits the whole of the information concerned. It's very difficult. I mean, how many - now, for all one knows, they're killing a million Biharis, the other side. MR. BUCKLEY: For all one knows is a very good question. Now, for instance, I know, with some confidence, that if there is a case of bubonic plague in Tierra del Fuego discovered this afternoon, I'll read about it tomorrow in the London Times. What I want to know is why, if a million Biharis are being killed in Bangia Desh, it's going to take us so long to find out. In the first place, it's a logistical operation that is considerable. It's the kind of thing that presumably our "Peeping Tom" satellites might even discern. Are we really making a cultural point that genocide is becoming so banal in this century that it can't even make the papers? Why didn't Mrs. Gandhi, for instance, when she went to the United States, alert us to the scale of the killing there? Is it that she didn't know or that 2 she didn't care or that people don't know, that it's not newsworthy - what's the story? MR. CONQUEST: Well, I get the impression, as I said of the Indonesian thing, that there is a certain resistance to minding about massacres and things of this sort, until you've taken sides. You know Orwell's frightful remark was that whethe~ atrocities were reprehensible and, indeed, whether they had taken place at all, was always decided according to political predilection. If you've put your money on Pakistan, you will discount this awful psychological mechanism, which is the same as the one which concealed the Stalinists, in particular. MR. BUCKLEY: Okay, I grant that and I want to hear you discuss that extensively, but Pakistan is not a worldwide ideological movement. There aren't people who live or die according to whether Pakistan's reputation remains virginal, and Pakistan is, therefore, an extraordinarily interesting point, so far as I can see, for the genocide-detectors. There isn't anybody there, really. If it were the Israeli or if it were the Irish or if it were the Communists, you would run into ideological skepticism - or the Vatican or whatever. But, there isn't that here and, yet, now they are talking three million more people. The density of ~1:hat is really greater than the Soviet Union's or Hitler's - if, indeed it's true that they killed three million people in nine months - isn't it? MR. CONQUEST: Well, there's a more old-fashioned sort of killing in one sense. This is the sort of thing, I think, some people feel that Tamerlane would do - the pyramid of 80,000 skulls type of thing. As you said, it isn't an ideologic.al tradition. It's simply the old power and nationalism - not even nationalism, in the Western sense. It's power and group, almost tribal, tradition. And we don't, I think, feel so closely involved. People go around saying, "Well, after all, they've been doing this for centuries." Secondly, I think, this very fact that they are not ideological keeps them from exciting people as much as the mere facts of the killing should. But, it's not very obvious to the Westerner that these are pro or con his government or his culture. If you're an extreme leftwinger, you will refuse to see anything that is an atrocity against your own government or people, and accept anything which they do - if they shoot somebody down, it's an atrocity. If your enemies shoot you down, it isn't. I mean, you've signed with the enemy of your culture. When I say left, I mean the chap who wants to overthrow our society in favor of, say, another style of society. Whereas, if you're a rightwinger, it works the other way around. And so, I'd have thought in, say, Israel, there is a considerable commitment to the idea - and quite, I think, a true idea, that shouldn't affect one's judgment of facts - that Israel is a component of the Western democratic culture, if you want to use these expressions. People who oppose that culture automatically know they're against Israel, although this has cut across loyalities because of the national or because of the cultural phenomenon of even lehwing Jews being affected by it. But leaving that aside, if you're 100 percent against the Western culture, you're automatically against Israel. So, Israel does come into th is. Well, in a colonial situation or a Rhodesian situation or even an Irish situation, everybody in the West knows roughly their sides, and they pick their sides and they're ready to be horrified by whatever the other side does. Whereas, in Pakistan, there wasn't this, but there were just two lots of brown people shooting each other up, and it wasn't automatically pro or con the West. Well, it wasn't obvious that it was, anyway. MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, so that the people who want to make polemical capital out of it weren't even around, although I should think that this would not explain Mrs. Gandhi's extraordinary silence or relative silence, since she did want to make polemical capital. MR. CONQUEST: She did, of course, speak of the 10 mill ion refugees. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, but not of the killing. I'm distinguishing because I'm extremely - if I were to arrive at, say, the Daily Telegraph office here with a firsthand account of 100,000 people slaughtered in, say, Brazil, what kind of treatment would my account get in the next morning's papers? MR. CONQUEST: Well, you would have to go to all the papers and get different treatment from one than from the other. I should think. Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University. 3 MR. BUCKLEY: Well, I didn't mean to single it out, but - MR. CONQUEST: But, the first question is: who did the killing? The Brazilian government is listed on the progressive list as the bad one. This is known and so, if it did the killing, it would be bad. If it was the - MR. BUCKLEY: How about, say, a provincial governor, satrap, to get away from that? Is the fact of 100,000 people being systematically killed news in the 20th century, or is it only news if it ties in with an ideological point that people make? MR. CONQUEST: I think in this country it's probably news all ri,ght, but I do think it varies in its impact. Even leaving aside the question of taking ideological stances on the matter, I'd have thought that a million killed in Bengal would be about the same news as, say, a couple of hundred thousand killed in Brazil, which again would be about the same news as four killed in Kent State. MR. BUCKLEY: Or 13 in Londonderry. MR. CONQUEST: Or 13 in Londonderry. MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a sense in which non-hysterical people would call this racist? MR. CONQUEST: I think, probably, in a certain sense, it's racist. It's racist, certainly, in the sense that there's the feeling of it being people of our sort - I don't think, necessarily, blood - but people of our sort of culture. We know, roughly, what their background is. I don't think anybody here had a notion of what the background of the Muhammadan Bengali majority was, really, until it came out in the news. This is a legitimate ignorance on the part of the ordinary person. He can't be expected to identify to use a horrible expression - with people he knows absolutely nothing about, for a bit anyway, except in a very general sense, as a human being, of co.urse. But that isn't everything. It doesn't fill in the sort of detail and color. If your wife's killed, you feel it much more than if Mr. Smith, whom you don't know, is killed in San Francisco tomorrow. This isn't a disgraceful thing at all, but it is unfortunate and distorting, in a way, certainly.

5 MR. BUCKLEY: How morally embarrassing do you find it, involved as I know you to be in mankind, that when the Rwandi throw the Burundi into the river by the tens of thousands, people sort of yawn about it, even if we are prepared to greet their leaders as perfectly civilized people in, say, the United Nations' atmosphere, or something of the sort? Is it a form of cultural snobbism, or is it simply an accommodation to reality7 What is it when we fail to do what we can to stoke the engines of resentment against genocide when it is committed by non-whites? MR. CONQUEST: think there is something ideological in it on both sides. When your Watusi and Bahutu kill each other, as you were saying, your rightwinger says, "Well, they're always doing that," and your leftwinger says, "Oh, imperialism isn't to blame." So, neither of them is interested ideologically. You've got that cut out straightaway. MR. BUCKLEY: Neither of them is interested ideologically, or they are interested ideologically? MR. CONQU EST: No, neither of them is. It's not in the pro or anti imperialism league, as it were. To use an unfortunate metaphor, it's sort of like a far away match in a game you don't play, like pelota or something, which isn't going to raise much of a thrill with the American or British audiences. MR. BUCKLEY: When, for instance, Rolf Hockhuth made in his play about Pius X II the highly damaging point - never mind, for a moment, whether it's historically correct - that the Pope did not as much as he might have to save the Jews from being killed in Germany, he was obviously making a point of universal moral significance. He wasn't simply making a historical criticism for the sake of the retroactive record. He was saying people in the future - Popes in the future, if you like, moral leaders in the future - oughtn't to make the same mistake. MR. CONQUEST: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: Now, we know that there simply have not been vigorous, let alone universal, protests against continuing genocide. We know, for instance, that by one estimate as many as 50 million Chinese have been killed in the course of giving flesh to the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung, and we also know that English leaders and American leaders haven't protested it, the Pope hasn't protested it, in any dramatic way. What is it that isn't clicking here? What is the eternal message of what happened in the concentration camps in Germany? Surely not that it was unique. MR. CONQUEST: Well, genocide is not necessarily misleading, but it's a slightly vague word, because Stalin's killings - and, I should have thought, the Chinese ones were not, strictly speaking, genocide, in the sense that they were directed to the actual annihilation of a people - not, necessarily the physical annihilation, but the cultural annihilation of a race or a particular group. The Chinese - MR. BUCKLEY: The UN defines genocide, as I remember, rather loosely. If you set out to ki II a group, it doesn't have to be racially homogeneous. For instance, if you kill, say, just Christians, notwithstanding that they may be black, yellow, and white, it's still genocide, isn't it, by the UN definition? MR. CONQUEST: Religious does come in - religious, racial, or national - MR. BUCKLEY: Well, what about an economic group? MR. CONQUEST: No, an economic group doesn't, you see. You're allowed to kill the peasantry, if you want to, as peasants. I mean, you don't kill them as Christians or - MR. BUCKLEY: You have to use genocide as a metaphor, if you refer, say, to.the genocidal extinction of the kulaks. MR. CONQUEST: Yes, that certainly would not be covered. He could plead "not guilty" and be acquitted by the international court for that - Stalin could. But the size of the kiltings - of Stalin's killings - was as great as Hitler's, and Hitler, I think - put it this way: Hitler was committing genocide - sticking to this technical point for the moment. He was committing, or attempting to commit, genocide against the Jews and the Gypsies, but not against the Poles and the Russians. He was killing the Poles by the millions, but he wasn't, at this point, trying to exterminate them as a race. You may argue, of course, that he was trying to exterminate them as a cultural entity in the long run - MR. BUCKLEY: Which is genocide or is not, formally? MR. CONQUEST: It is, I think. There is a definition I wish we'd brought it, although we don't, naturally, want to get bogged down in the detail of what is used, you rightly say, as a metaphor. But, at any rate, there is a distinction, I think it's fair to say, between trying to kill all Jews and trying to kill all kulaks. I would, though, further agree with you that it doesn't really make much difference to the millions being killed what they are being killed for. When we get back to the human problem, one might prefer not to use the word "genocide," but the killing of five million, or however many people it is - of course, the Pakistanis weren't trying to actually exterminate the Bengalis. They were trying to terrorize them into total submission. MR. BU.CKLEY: Well, presumably that will be ascertained. I mean, if you kill three million people, that's an awful lot of terrorism, isn't it? MR. CONQUEST: It's a hell of a lot of terrorism, but I'm saying it's a terrorism of the Stal in-type, as it were. MR. BUCKLEY: If there were only one Hottentot left in the world and you killed him, are you guilty of genocide? MR. CONQUEST: Yes, I think that would be genocide, don't you? MR. BUCKLEY: Hm mmm, if you kill him because he's a Hottentot. MR. CONQUEST: Well, this raises, again, these rather technical definition points, but I would have thought under the definition - the United Nations'definition, of which the Soviet Union is a signatory, for example - that would be the case. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, now, in the course of researching the progress of Mr. Stalin's purges, you - I'd rather hear you say it ran into a skepticism, even among people whose minds you have a very high opinion of. This was caused by what, and who specifically were you thinking of? MR. CONQUEST: I don't think now there's much skepticism about Stalin's purges or, indeed, even about their extent; but, partly, I hope, that's due to my assembling all the materials in a sort of solid way. But, even before that it was generally accepted, after Khrushchev's secret speech of 1956, that there had been a very unpleasant terror going on, and hundreds of thousands and millions of people had been killed. MR. BUCKLEY: Did John Dewey's investigation report on the scale of the killings or only on the quality of the trials? MR. CONQUEST: Only on the trials, but that wasn't accepted. I mean, these were public trials - to speak of the Moscow trials of '36 to '38 - which Dewey was making his report on, and it was quite clear that they were fakes. I mean evidence was given from abroad of people meeting at hotels which had been pulled down 20 years before - things like that, two or three things like that. And, a good deal of the evidence was either impossible or incredible in various ways. It was believed by very prominent figures, in your country as well as in Britain, who signed great manifestos in favor of the trials, saying, "These people should be shot. Yes, of course, they're Hitler's agents and, of course, they put glass in butter, and things like that." Dewey met this total skepticism; but, ' in the early Fifties here and in America, when an enormous amount of information had come out about the labor camp system, your Dallin and Nikolaevskii produced a sort of order of battle of the whole labor camp system, which only - MR. BUCKLEY: Maps and everything. MR. CONQUEST: Maps - they'd left out, probably, a few camps they hadn't gotten reports on. In fact, there are camps we still don't know about - the death camps up in Novaya Zemlya and places, practically nothing is known about them. But this was absolutely documented by hundreds of witnesses, and it still wasn't believed because, in this case, of ideological prejudice. MR. BUCKLEY: Ideological prejudice can account for it's not being believed by Beatrice Webb, but it can't easily account for it's not being believed, let's say, by the 4 Board of Trustees of the L land Stanford Jr. University. 5

6 typical editor of The New York Times; or, did they not believe it because their representative, Walter Duranty, was skeptical? How do you account for the fact that the skepticism reaches beyond those who are ideologically committed? MR. CONQUEST: Well, there you get this whole problem. They rely on certain experts - journalists, diplomats, scholars, and so on - and the man in the street can't be really expected to know what's going on. An intellectual in the street, even, can't be expected to make a firsthand study. MR. BUCKLEY: No, but why don't journalists make firsthand studies? MR. CONQUEST: Yes, that's the answer. MR. BUCKLEY: No, I'm asking you. MR. CONQUEST: The people in between are not the guilty men, in a sense. They were certainly guilty - in some cases, they were just bloody fools. They were guilty of ignorance and boneheadedness. In other cases, like Walter Duranty, there was conscious lying - which, I think, is now established, isn't it? Who was it here Alexander Worth says he suppressed information about the labor camps when reporting to the West, because he thought it was all in a good cause. There were these conscious misrepresentations. MR. BUCKLEY: What about someone like Owen Lattimore, touring Siberia with Henry Wallace - would he be in that category? MR. CONQUEST: should think that Lattimore is a man capable of a great deal of self-deception rather than making any conscious angling beyond a certain point, anyway. But that was a horrifying case. Vice-President Wallace, with Lattimore and others, actually went to the capital of a sort of slave empire in northeast Siberia where there were probably about two million people who had died in that area alone at that time, and the camp population was about half a million, but they died very quickly - and they didn't see a damn thing. MR. BUCKLEY: Not only that - they exculpated the area, or did they? MR. CONQUEST: Well, they hardly had to. They went around taking shots of miners, which were actually - there's a photograph of Lattimore produced in the National Geographic saying that these miners are husky and they h a vet 0 be to stand the Siberian winter. Well, the answer is they weren't miners. They were N.K.V.D. men dressed up, and the real miners weren't husky and they didn't stand the Siberian winter - they died. We have that from Soviet sources as well as people who have come to the West since. One of the chaps now writing in Russia says you couldn't get through more than one winter. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, now, is that kind of thing, on the basis of your information, continuing to go on in China? We know that people were dying, to use a metaphor, on a genocidal scale up until - at least we know - two or three years ago. Is it still happening? Do we not know whether it's happening? What are we to think about people who, like Mr. Reston, go there and come back and say, "I'm very much impressed with China because it is there that one sees an attempt at a true brotherhood of man." Is he the Walter Duranty or is he the Owen Lattimore concerning whom people will be scoffing a year or two, or a decade or two, from now, or do you not know? MR. CONQUEST: Well, I'm in, and you yourself are in, the layman's position about China. I know no more than what I read through people who write about it - as you may say I write, a lot of people with different views write, about Russia. MR. BUCKLEY: But from your experience, you're an expert, aren't you, at detecting - you see little indices that other people would miss, right? MR. CONQUEST: Well, I daresay I do, but I don't see enough about China to be able to do it. It is a very different field, but I would agree with you that there is enough for anybody to see that a good deal of killing has been going on. MR. BUCKLEY: Has been, or is? MR. CONQUEST: Has been; well, is - one isn't thf'rf' so one can't tell. but I presul11e is. Well, I mean one knows that there have been public announcements by the minister of state security - when was it, eight or 10 I I J years ago - that two million bandits had been killed. This is an awful lot of bandits. So there are indications which are - MR. BUCKLEY: Especially non-capital ist society. (laughter) MR. CONQUEST: Yes. Perhaps they're trying to rebuild it - capitalism - in their own way. You're quite right. Reston is quite clearly, I would have thought, going in and not seeing - MR. BUCKLEY: What he doesn't want to see. MR. CONQUEST: Well, how can he in a country that size? But one mustn't report posi tively about what one hasn't seen, and that is, in fact, what he is doing. MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, now, the world of morality and the world of diplomacy we know are discrete entities; but we know, also, that there is a sense in which the one must inform the other. Assuming that as much was known as we now know about Stalin and the rate at which he was killing people, what would have been the proper bearing of this, so far as you can suggest, on the treatment of him by, oh, say, Churchill or Roosevelt? MR. CONQUEST: During the war? MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, or right after, if you like. MR. CONQUEST: Well, during the war - MR. BUCKLEY: Take the hardest - right after. MR. CONQUEST: Yes, still, you have to work up the way - you start out as an ally in '45, and during the war, however foully he was behaving, as you say, the state and interests of humanity were more in defeating Hitler than in not being allied with Stalin. And I don't - MR. BUCKLEY: That's certainly a debatable question, but - MR. CONQUEST: Well, at any rate, half Europe is now not under - MR. BUCKLEY: I read an essay by you 6 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 7 in a this morning in which you say that Hitler, after all, is dead and forgotten, and there is no residual Hitlerism on a significant scale - MR. CONQUEST: It's true. MR. BUCKLEY: - but the Soviet Union endures in part, because of our diplomacy of 25 years ago. MR. CONQUEST: Post-war, but we did have a heritage of having to be allied during the war, and this strikes me as a perfectly sensible thing. We should have been allied with them. And when you have an ally - in a democracy, it's very difficult to sort of publish a lot of articles saying how foully he behaves internally. George Orwell, you remember, couldn't get anything published in England. He couldn't get Animal Farm published for ages. MR. BUCKLEY: I did not know that. MR. CONQUEST: And a lot of - he had articles - MR. BUCKLEY: You mean because people were afraid of offending the Soviet Union? MR. CONQUEST: No, they thought it was bad taste. I mean they thought you mustn't - MR. BUCKLEY: People publishing bad taste, do England? don't they mind in MR. CONQUEST: (chuckling) This is long ago, remember. MR. BUCKLEY: They used to mind publishing what was in bad taste. MR. CONQUEST: I meant bad taste in a very broad sense - that this was offensive to the glorious anti-fascist coalition, that sort of feeling. But this did, very largely, deceive English people because we were allied with Russia. It deceived a lot of English people into thinking that pipe-smoking Uncle Joe was a great Democrat, and in America, too, you got that. I think, when you say that they are two of a kind - one of them, at least, had the virtue of being on our side. This is what strikes me as nonsense when one's arguing about Greece - saying it's worse - MR. BUCKLEY: He wasn't on our side; he

7 was against Hitler. MR. CONQUEST: Well, he was, in effect, on o'ur side. MR. BUCKLEY: Our side was to guarantee the freedom of Poland, as I remember it I mean historically. MR. CONQUEST: All right, but anyhow half Europe was kept out of totalitarian hands. So, we did make a net gain. But, after the war, I do agree that there was this period when it was very difficult to get people to accept - I don't mean only leftwingers or pro-communists, but anybody - that Russia was rotten in the way that Stalin had actually made it. It wasn't an easy thing to do. In England, we had the advantage that there were labor leaders in the government and they'd had a lot of experience with communism in Russia, and Ernie Bevin was the first. But, in America, you had sort of liberals - you'd had that frightful fool as your ambassador in Moscow, Joe Davis, who wasn't in the least a leftwinger. He was a millionaire, I suppose, of the rightwing, who reported that all the trials were absolutely correct, and that they'd stamped out a fifth column. The State Department had been fed a lot of dribble for years and was full of nonsensical people. It was an awful thing. Well, during the war, this did come up because, you remember, the two Polish Jewish leaders were shot in Russia in '41 or '42, Erlich and Alter. They were accused of being Nazi spies - a very unlikely story. Dubinsky, of the Garment Workers' Union in New York, who was a very radical, strong-minded leftwinger, though anti-communist, raised the subject. They had a hell of a difficulty with Eleanor Roosevelt and the State Department, who said, "Oh, dear, you mustn't say anything about it now_" They went through and had meetings to release them. That was during the war. Afterwards, there was something of the same feeling, because, a lot of people had committed themselves to this view. A lot of people, I think, both in diplomacy and in the press, had committed themselves to this idea - that Russia was a fine country, and you got reports from these horrible Rakosi dictatorships in Hungary and Bierut in Poland, saying that People's Poland was doing fine.when one says "fake," 8 it's difficult to say - you get a sort of compulsive blindness against the Poles. MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, I understand the autohypnotic aspect, especially with countries which tend to be moralistic and, under the circumstances, don't want to believe something unpleasant about their allies - like "old Joe" as Harry Truman said, and Harry Truman was a pretty salty, realistic guy. But, then the war ends and as you report, the purges resu med alon~ around In point of fact, there was a cold war going on in What kind of a reaction is there in the postwar period of a kind that might generate anti-genocidal sentiment, or was that not known? MR. CONQUEST: Well, it wasn't - MR. BUCK LEY: Siansky was rather publicly hanged. MR. CONQUEST: That's '52, and the anti-semitism of Stalin's last period is then becoming public, and is, by that time, causing a certain amount of ill feeling. But even then, it's surprising how much people wouldn't believe. Also, they have a double defense mechanism: that he's not doing it or, secondly, if he is, it's grossly exaggerated, and the people he is killing deserve it is the third method. It's not being done, and it's not a crime if it is. This is very good. You cover yourself on both sides, if you do that. There's a vague feeling that - MR. BUCKLEY: It's not true and, anyway, they deserved it. MR. CONQUEST: They were troublemakers of one sort or another. And then, I think a little bit of this cultural "This isn't us" still comes in. "This is Russia, where people do kill people and, after all, the czar was worse," and so on which, of course, was nonsense. MR. BUCKLEY: This gets back to the racist point. It's all right for the Viet Cong to torture people because that's the way things are done in that part of the world. MR. CONQUEST: And also, they're against us, remember. It's most important. If they're anti-west, they have a vast moral charge in their favor immediately, to start with. Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, yeah. Well, then do you take the gloomy position that, in fact, the world has not, at least, organizationally, or even morally, learned anything from the Nazi and the Soviet experiences; that all of this sensitivity training that we went through on the subject of genocide has, in fact, not taught us how we might maximize our opposition to genocidal practices? Is that your gloomy position as a historian? MR. CONQUEST: Well, I'd say that we've been a bit numbed by Stalin and Hitler. If you say three million were killed, that's not the record anymore. If they'd been killed in the Twenties, it would have been a horrorifying thought. And after all, in 1910, when the Germans more or less genocided the Hereros in Southwest Africa, there were only about, what, 30,000 of them, and I think that they killed about 15,000 of them partly by - not necessarily shooting them - moving them into sterile territory and that sort of thing. That caused a frightful outpour in the West. MR. BUCKLEY: For the Turks and the Armenians? MR. CONQUEST: Well, the Armenians that was more like a genuine genocide on a large scale. That caused not more but less, because the Turk is a massacrer, and always was a massacrer, in those days, at least. And that was felt to be, possibly, the petering out of an old thing; whereas, a German was supposed to be a civilized European who wasn't supposed to massacre people. We say that this is an unfair way of looking at it, but there is something to be said for that point of view - to introduce a new thing. But now, the point of the thing is simply that the scale of the few thousand Hereros was horrorifying in those days. Now we are told three million - in the first place, of course, the mind boggles a bit. It is a difficult thing to imagine. Then, we don't see them as individuals. What's the difference between 300,000 or three million Bengalis? It becomes a statistic, in the sense it wasn't with Treblinka, but particularly now because we have the Anne Frank diaries and things like that. Incidentally, can I parenthesize that Stalin did, in fact, now I come to think of it, commit genocide as well as the odious killings around the country. He did deport the eight nations from the caucuses with a 9 view to destroying them as entities, which comes under the genocide convention. About half of them actually died, and they suppressed their teaching and their languages and so forth. And they were destined to die out. But that only accounted for about half a million dead, so it's, by Stalin's standard, nothing practically. MR. BUCKLEY: So, then you don't know that there has been any improvement in an international understanding about how concertedly to apply pressure against people who practice genocide? The UN thing is simply a dead letter, isn't it - the so-called genocide convention? MR. CONQUEST: I'd have thought that the United Nations could send a team to Bangia Desh, but it would have to be a very good, skeptical team, prepared not to believe till it's shown the facts. This is the difficulty; it's getting your United Nations' team, isn't it? Because there again the United Nations' team consists of people from various countries, and they all, mostly, will have their predilection by now about the whole affair, in any case. I've got two strands in a way: one, we've had such a lot of genocide that perhaps we're hardened a bit, as we shouldn't be; but secondly, a certain skepticism comes over one because one does know that - not, I think as you said, particularly in Bengal, but over a large part of the world - one gets the story of the party with the greatest access to the media. So, Greece, for example, is made to be worse than Yugoslavia, for two reasons, I think: partly because the Greek Communist Party is well organized and can produce evidence, whether it exists or not, of whatever it wants to show, and partly because Greece is less blocked off. That's a random example, and it certainly doesn't mean that the Greek regime is a good one or anything like it. It's simply the amount of what you might call atrocity that gets into the media does depend upon the way in which the prevailing trend in the media views the regime. Sometimes, they don't know. MR. BUCKLEY: Right. MR. CONQUEST: I mean I don't think that anybody knows whether to regard, say Libya, as left or right. And there was an article in the Statesman the other day,

8 incidentally, by Anthony Hartley, saying that if Huey Long had only called himself leftwing, he'd have been welcomed by everybody. (laughter) MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. CONQUEST: And he was leftwing in a sense, of course. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes, of course. Mr. Riddell. MR. RIDDELL: I'd like to develop the issue you both have been talking about over the last 20 minutes which is the numbness to genocide, because it seems to be an extremely important one. We had upwards of between five and 10 million Jews killed in the war by the Germans, and three million now seems insignificant; but related to this is the factor of how it is presented. We heard about the atrocities during the war through newspapers and on the radio and that type thing. But now, everything's on the television screen. Once you've seen one pile of bodies, you've aim ost seen them all. I think there's this increasing feeling there, and that's allied with the problem of scale - seeing the films about Mylai or famine or anything like that - the public becomes inured to seeing stories about three million Bengalis being killed. I think this is very important. How can anything be more directly presented than, shall we say, on color television which is showing the bodies? What more can you do to show people? MR. CONQUEST: Showing the bodies doesn't show the ext e n t 0 f it, I think. I mean on the Biafra question, which I personally couldn't decide though I was inclined against Biafra, as I suppose we all were, as the sort of losing side was doing all the dying. Even now, I'm not at all clear what the actual scale whether it's true that two million were killed or died of famine or whether it was an immensely lower number, and this is years after. MR. RIDDELL: But, the result of this is to numb - leaving aside the committed and the educated - the public of response to it. In this country, which was directly involved in Biafra in supplying arms, the public was - it was a completely non-issue. You know, we had a general election a few months after the ending of Biafra and, because the films were shown repeatedly on television, everyone just shrugged his shoulders and said, "So what?" I think this is certainly happening even with Bengal, where we are involved indirectly. MR. BUCKLEY: Did they say, "So what?" or did they say, "Well, there's nothing we can do about it"? MR. RIDDELL: I think the two are possibly connected, as well. In fact, in relation to Biafra, there's certainly something we could have done, which was stop arms. But, I think the "So what?" almost led on to the other response. I think the other response of "What can we do?" applies in the majority of instances, and certainly would in Bengal. MR. CONQUEST: But the other thing, I think, about a comparison between the massacres in Bengal and, indeed, the Biafran situation, and Hitler - there is a difference. I think it's a moral difference,as well as a merely physical one, between a crowd of fanatical soldiers going in and massacring people, as it were, in hot blood, and being sort of pushed off in trains to gas ovens. It, perhaps, is of no benefit to the victim, indeed, and you may well say that the commander in chief was responsible for the massacres in Bengal, though we don't know that yet. It may have simply been a natural the "Punjabis, now have a crack at the Bengalis - you always wanted to" type of order. But there's something particularly horrible about the gassing of the Jews which, in a sense, even the Stalinist camps don't quite get; although, as Ibsen says somewhere, if Stalin had gassed people and Hitler had starved them and frozen them to death, like Stalin, we'd now be told that Stalin used a humane method of getting rid of them. MR. BUCKLEY: Miss Middleweek. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: That is, I think, very culturally oriented. I mean, someone else would say, ".It was more horrible in Bengal" that, you know, the less sophisticated methods of killing were going on. And there's this terrible thing that everyone has some sort of emotional cut out about SUffering. Because they cannot cope with the knowledge of the scale of suffering that goes on, they choose which knowledge they will have. There is some knowledge, you know, in a way, that is self-indulgent - just to know the exact facts of what is going on while it's going on in Bengal - unless you're going to do something about it. And so, people somehow prefer to know afterward that three million died, rather than that three million are dying, when there is then a responsibility for some sort of reaction to that knowledge. And one reacts on a time scale as well as on an ideological thing. We were more interested, in Britain, in Biafra because of our colonial heritage there, and because there were things we could do about arms shipment. In the same way, there are sufferings of racial groups in Africa at the moment - for example, in the Sudan. Now, I had no knowledge of what was going on in southern Sudan until I went to Israel. Now, in Israel, because it's.arabs who are doing the killing in the Sudan, there is an interest in that particular area of the world, but somehow it's not newsworthy in Great Britain. It involves people in Israel. And there is this power bloc thing. We just don't value human life qua human life anymore. It's human life that is white or that is communist or that is on some point of reference, scale of reference, that you can relate t o. MR. CONQUEST: Yes, I think that's very true; and I think that one can distinguish, though, or must distinguish, between these vast massacres - these that we call in a general way genocide - and just a certain amount of killing. Suppose, in the last war, you could prove that some Allied troops had massacred some German civilians, as I'm certain probably happened, and you filmed it. This would not, in any way, affect the rightness of the All ied cause. Now, we're in the position, leaving aside these absolute maximum massacres - in which massacre and killing itself is the point of the issue - when you just get 10 or 20, or whatever it is, people shot, it does not affect the - even if they're absolutely, totally innocent and the whole massacre is entirely the fault of the other side, it doesn't necessarily prove the other side is wrong on the political issue. MR_ BUCKLEY: Which is what a lot of people are nowadays inferring. 10 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 11 MR. CONQUEST: I think they want to draw a line between this vast scale massacre and the occasional atrocity in the general sense. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: Yes, but the scale of your massacre - whether it's genocide or not - will depend on whether it's a small nation or a large one. You know, you can genocide 100,000 people if they're the only national group - your one Hottentot. MR. BUCKLEY: Like the Hottentot, yeah. Mr. Evans. MR. EVANS: I would suggest that this numbness is really rather a more profound phenomenon. Hitler we had to fight because he threatened us. Stalin we just avoided fighting. Now, in the situation where Britain has withdrawn from Africa and Asia - we've retreated - in the situation where America is retreating from Asia at the moment, there was a time when a massacre in Bengal was a matter of very considerable importance to the English conscience. And there was a time when one would do something about it. Isn't this numbness really more a reflection of the fact that the only real, practical way in which you can stop massacres on the Indian subcontinent or in the Sudan, indeed - where, in fact, the British went in to stop the slave trade and stop the sort of massacres the black Africans and the Arabs are currently undertaking - is when you can do something about it and when you are prepared to become involved and to rule these countries; or, if not to ru Ie, at least to go in and send troops. We all know the United Nations may protest, but, in fact, it has got no real political power or army to actually affect any policy in the present consequence. Isn't this numbness really just an excuse to calm our conscience in an era when we are just weak, basically, and aren't able to do anything about these horrors, which we've always recognized in the West, particularly in England and America? MR. CONQUEST: Yes, I'm sure that's true, and in a sense, of course, if we aren't responsible and can't do anything, it's natural and not terribly reprehensible in one way. What is the point? There are peoples who make a hobby of massacres, and get frightfully excited, and one gets sometimes a horrible feeling that they can't do anything about it, and it has become

9 sort of a grisly thing for them, in a way however good motives they often have ones that we can't do anything about. I'm putting the worst side of it because, of course, a tremendous amount of goodness is involved in this as well, but one does occasionally get the sort of vampire feeling, living on blood. During the period of the Empire, it's quite true that liberal opinion and the people who would influence the government - 10,000 people would get hit up by a massacre, in the Sudan, say - but I don't think the public gave a damn what went on - the great general public in England overseas. The only - MR. EVANS: I just don't think that's right in this case. The.unpopularity of Gadsden's government between - MR. CONQUEST: I was just going to go on and say that Gadsden's campaign about the Balkans seems to be the great exception, where we couldn't do anything except fight. MR. EVANS: But, isn't Bengal a particularly interesting exa mple because, as in South Vietnam, at the moment, the really crucial question in 1946 was: have the British got the will, in a worsening political and military situation, to actually stay in India and stop the six million or whatever it was that died as a resu It of a similar form of Moslem-Hindu massacring after we withdrew? Isn't the same question now in Vietnam: have the Americans - MR. BUCKLEY: Or the French in Algeria.- MR. EVANS: Well, no, it isn't quite the same for the French, because in no sense have they quite the same liberal tradition as England or America. There was no strong feeling, in respect to British policy in India, that this was done for a moral objective as, in fact,' the Americans went into South Vietnam originally. MR. CONQUEST: Well, the French view is, too, a cu Itural objective. MR. EVANS: No, I'm just not convinced that's so. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: It's a different moral issue. This is why I think you are dangerous. You're assuming that because the country has an economic interest - some sort of vested interests, some imperial heritage - it wou Id therefore intervene on the side of justice. I think that's - MR. EVANS: I'm not saying anything mo..e than historically, in terms of England and America, the weakness to be able to do anything about these former massacres in India or in Vietnam or in Asia merely explains why the English and American publics are numbed by these figures of people being killed in Bangia Desh, Biafra, and Indonesia. MR. BUCKLEY: What, if any, is the idealistic imperative? I'm anxious to know. Do we simply take the position that rather than take the risk of involving ourselves in a Vietnam, we ought to do nothing about the prospect of three million people being killed in East Pakistan? Or, do we say, "We're not going to involve ourselves in that particular way, but we must, in order to acquit ourselves as human beings, as moral human beings, do something." And the question is: why haven't we done that something, whatever it is? MR. EVANS: Because we can do nothing in practical terms that's really effective. MR. BUCKLEY: We could give a speech, for God's sake. You can write an editorial. That may be platonic, but it's still a gesture. One can refuse to go to the cocktail parties of people, let's say, whose health we are toasting who are using their health in order to kill other people. That's something. MR. RIDDELL: This is more effective, in a way. One can make it better known that this - which ties up with what you were talking about a few moments ago 'about Russia - is something which is very important in, shall we say, the lesser killing and atrocity areas, like the Sudan. One can make it better known that this is going on. This is, I think, one of the most important things. MR. BUCKLEY: At least Lady Astor said to Stalin, "When are you going to stop killing people?" And that was the most anti-communist thing that the whole West managed to do in 10 years. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: Yes, and if you are regarding genocide as a crime against humanity - you're not regarding it in any ideological spectrum - then you have to do something about organizations of world community. MR. BUCKLEY: Correct. Correct. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: Because it's not for an individual nation - it's not for Britain - to go in and say, "Stop fighting, boys, justice is on this side." If genocide is some sort of international offense, then surely it calls for some sort of international - MR. BUCKLEY: Mobilizing the - MR. CONQUEST: It is establishing the facts for ourselves, surely, and for the world, and this involves not only getting hold of the facts, but unblocking our prejudices in each case. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: Yes, absolutely. MR. CONQUEST: Can I put just the opposite view, which I don't necessarily agree with - not the opposite view but a French view, since you raised the French thing. The French - De Gaulle was famous for "Our blood dries quickly." And anyhow, one of the comparisons I'd make is that we had nine or 10 Mau Maus who were killed at the Hola Camp in 'Kenyawhen was it, 10 or 15 years ago - in circumstances which were thought to be disgraceful. There was terrific trouble in England. The French, about '49 and '50, had a rebellion in Madagascar, and I believe about 30,000 people were killed. They were killed by being popped through sawmills and God knows what. Now, the French are on excellent terms with Madagascar and they have the Foreign Legion stationed there. They have only a battalion or so, and they've never had any trouble - this is De Gaulle's view because, since the French don't care, or very few of them care, there's no motive - MR. BUCKLEY: Care about what? MR. CONQUEST: About shooting people down much. They've never had that tradition. I know there was Sartre and so on, but, in the general way, the French are much harder-headed and tougher about this. Now, the argument that they would put - there are, of course, plenty of holes in it - is that by not putting a premium on keeping the subject boiling all the time, you have given the next generation a chance. This is, of course, said in England - that in 900, in the whole of eastern England, Danes were sort of massacring and being massacred; but because there weren't any intellectuals to keep the hatred goi ng, a generation later they were all assimilated. (laughter) MR BUCKLEY: Is this a prescription? MR. CONQUEST: No, it's not. I'm simply pulling in a point that hasn't been made, which I - it's not something I'd agree with or not, exactly. It's another sort of line that there is something to be said once the thing is over - well as, in a certain sense, the Israeli attitude to Western Germany, which has been completely - "We suffered horrors at your hands, but you're not doing it now, and your younger people don't know about it. We're not going to rub it in your faces all the time. If you want to arrest your war criminals still, go ahead. And also, we will kidnap them if we find them." But leaving that aside, there is that argumj!nt. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: But then are you contributing to the sort of debasement of feeling about killing? You know, it's exactly the same argument about whether Begin should have visited England, having been someone who committed atrocities against British soldiers when they were in Palestine. You 'know, do you forgive and forget? And by forgiving and forgetting, do you say that suffering doesn't matter? MF.l. CONQUEST: No, I wouldn't urge forgiving and forgetting, but I'm saying that there is an element of - MR. BUCKLEY: Forgiving, yes, but not forgetting. MR. CONQUEST: Yes, that's right. Certainly not forgetting, because if you forget - the real trouble is if you don't know what has gone on, you're going to be hadfor a sucker again next time.one must get the habit of knowing what happened under Stalin, and not be taken in because you don't hear any bad except from the few refugees. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: But nice distinction, really. admitting people into an community, into the that's a very I mean by international diplomatic 12 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. 13

10 relationships, you are really forgetting as well as forgiving. MR. CONQUEST: Oh, don't think diplomatic relations come into it. One's always on terms - I remember I was in the embassy in Sofia, and we had to present our credentials about a week after they'd hanged Nichola Petkov, the leader of the democratic opposition. And we just bloody had to do it, that's all. Admittedly, the president wasn't involved and was supposed to be against it, but it was a thing - I mean it's not much good to have any sort of second secretary going along and saying, "I won't come," if it's the order of the day. MISS MIDDLEWEEK: When do you make the gesture? MR. BUCKLEY: Your point is that the diplomatic requirements simply have to prevail in a situation like that? MR. CONQUEST: Well, if you keep out of world community everybody who doesn't come up to your standards, you'll be ostracizing the Norwegians by the time we're finished. (laughter) MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you very much, Mr. Conquest, and members of the panel, thank FIRinG une TRANSCRIPTS ISPECIAL l-year SUBSCRIPTION OFFER Please send me the next 46 issues (1-year subscription) of FIRING LINE transcripts at the special rate of $ Name Address City If a gift, please add the following: Donor's name Address City (Please print) State State Zip Zip (Enclose check or money order and mail to:) FIRING LINE Post Office Box 5966 Columbia, South Carolina Individual issues will be furnished for 25 cents per copy. o Check enclosed o Money Order enclosed 14 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.