The cruelest and most monstrous tyrant of the 20th century chose the name Stalin because it meant “man of steel,” As a young man, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili of Georgia had a habit of giving himself nicknames, and one was Koba.
Martin Amis’ book, Koba the Dread, which I read this past week, brought back chilling memories of my hours spent with the writings of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived Stalin’s gulags, then lived to disclose the hell he visited on so many.
Josef Stalin, and Lenin (the nickname of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) were responsible for more deaths by murder, torture, exile, starvation and war than all the tyrants of the previous several centuries. They killed, between them, more than 20 million people.
Amis’ book refreshes what most would like to forget. He reconstructs the life of Stalin who famously observed as his working principle, “Death solves all problems. No man; no problem.”
More importantly, Amis, as Robert Conquest did in his famous book on the same subject, The Great Terror, reminds us once again how many intellectuals in the West romanticized Stalin, and Lenin.
There were the Webbs (Beatrice and Sidney), George Bernard Shaw, Jean Paul Sartre, Harold Laski, Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, Edmund Wilson and countless others who sought the favour of Koba, and continued to deny or make apologies for his criminality, even as evidence emerged from the dungeons of communist Russia.
Nothing much in human nature—especially of those who will turn an ideological blind eye to tyrants—has changed.
Our world today is full of little Kobas and their crimes, from Darfur in Sudan to North Korea and the lands in between.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein fashioned himself after Stalin. The evidence of his crimes is piling up as his prisons and unmarked graves divulge their secrets.
Removing Saddam from power was one of the minor acts of redemption in our world where the anguish of the tortured doesn’t stop our governments from trading with the torturers.
The toxin of tyrants continues to maim and kill long after they have been deposed. Russia has still not recovered from the agony visited upon it by Koba and his successors. Perhaps it will take many more generations.
In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, many of those tortured and maimed have returned to visit upon their population the cruelty learned from their own experiences.
It will take a long time for these societies to heal. It will take faith in the common good that our own future in the West is tied to the restoration of these societies to some level of well-being.
There is self-interest involved here—of not abandoning Iraqis and Afghans to the wolves that will certainly tear them apart if the West turns its back.
Yet this is the politics of the lib-left ideologues and—for instance, the Democrats in the U.S., obsessed with their dislike of President George Bush, or the Labourites in Britain who are pushing Prime Minister Tony Blair from office—with their unconscionable advocacy of withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. mid-term election less than two weeks from now might well be decided in favour of those Democrats who have made a virtue of the politics of “cut and run,” from Vietnam to Somalia to Iraq.
If this should happen, it will embolden the hearts of little Kobas around the world, even as that monster, Stalin, rotting in some inferno, smiles vengefully.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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