Theodore Dalrymple, discussing academic British anti-Semitism, thinks so. I’m not so sure. Dalrymple says, “Socialist and anti-Semite alike seek an all-encompassing explanation of the imperfection of the world, and for the persistence of poverty and injustice: and each thinks he has found an answer.” Well, all-encompassing explanations are pretty popular all over the spectrum; I myself spend half my waking hours looking for them. Evangelical Christians find theirs in godlessness, and my friends the Objectivists find theirs in altruism.

Dalrymple continues, “The liberal intellectual who laments the predominance of dead white males in the college syllabus or the lack of minority representation in the judiciary uses fundamentally the same argument as the anti-Semite who objects to the prominence of Jews in the arts, sciences, professions, and in commerce. They both assume that something must be amiss a conspiracy if any human group is over- or under-represented in any human activity, achievement, or institution.” The same objection to Jewish prominence also manifests as good old-fashioned envy, which drives resentment politics both left and right. Genteel academic anti-Semitism is the poison of choice in Britain, whereas in America there’s a long tradition of vulgar backwoods Jew-hating of the Ku Klux Klan/Father Coughlin variety. (Pat Buchanan is the latest lightning rod for this sort of thing.) In short, Dalrymple understates the cultural factors. But the piece is interesting.

Oh God. Do I sound like a liberal? Somebody please slap me.

As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

–Emily Dickinson

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, by Martin Amis. Talk Miramax Books, 2002. 306 pp (small ones). $24.95.

Q: What do twenty million victims of Stalin’s Great Terror and Martin Amis’s sister have in common?

A: They’re dead.

And they both get a lot of ink in Martin Amis’s new book. And that’s about it. Wherein lies the problem. Amis keeps trying to explain the Great Terror, the largest mass slaughter of all time going away, in personal terms, when there’s really nothing personal about it. To begin with the obvious objection: Stalin’s policies were essentially a logical continuation of Lenin’s, yet the revolutionary atheist intellectual and the insecure ex-seminarian bureaucrat were not alike, personally, at all. Lenin veered off the strictly collectivist path with the New Economic Policy, but Stalin had his occasional zigs and zags as well, most notably in 1936-37, with a brief economic liberalization that he actually called “perestroika.” Stalinism is consolidated Leninism. Amis acknowledges this objection, once, in a footnote, without ever really answering it.

[Martin] Malia [author of The Soviet Tragedy]…dissents from [the view that nobody was keen on collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s, which Amis calls, mistakenly, “the consensus view”]; he sees Collectivization as structural to the Lenin-Stalin continuum, and he is eloquent. “For a Bolshevik party the real choice in 1929 was not between Stalin’s road and Bukharin’s; it was between doing approximately what Stalin did and giving up the whole Leninist enterprise.” The question remains: how approximately do we take the word “approximately”?

He loads the dice, but even here Malia wins on points.
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