It was Hegel, an early-19th Century German thinker, who placed the concept of Zeitgeist (spirit or mood of the age) at the core of the philosophy of history. The concept refers to the set of ideas, principles and objectives that prevail in a given period, to the point where they attain the rank of unquestionable truths. For Hegel, thus, every age operates a scale of values that distinguishes it from other periods of time.
A colossal endeavor, undoubtedly, is to attempt to decode the scale of values in question. An efficient way of approaching the problem, this author contends, would be to take a look at the crimes and abuses that go unnoticed or are justified outright at a given age for the crucial reason that they are compatible with the certainties or prejudgments anchored in the mindset of the period under scrutiny.
The phenomenon was at work at the time of the Inquisition. To burn heretics was too often perceived as a normal endeavor that could even turn out to be salutary to those who perished on the stake. Indeed, according to some theologians of those times, the heretics thus killed would through such execution be redeemed from their sins here on earth and spared from eternal punishment in hell.
A similar pattern ran throughout the conquest of the New World. Subduing the indigenous population was widely accepted on the grounds that it helped to expand Christendom. Never mind that the aborigines evangelized by force (for their own good, they were told) were thereby humiliated, exploited, and eventually brought to physical exhaustion and extermination.
The same happened with slave trading during the expansion of colonial empires. That contemptible practice did not arouse much reprobation. The reason: Racism was compatible with the well-entrenched prejudgments of those times.
The past hundred years have, too, their crimes and abuses absolved, or at least tolerated, by the prevailing Zeitgeist. Not all the reprehensible acts of this period fall within that category, though. For example, the crimes of Nazism were the subject of an exemplary trial at Nuremberg in the aftermath of World War II. Likewise, the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of napalm in Vietnam, led to multiple global initiatives to thwart nuclear proliferation and eradicate weapons of mass destruction.
As regards Latin America, last century’s right-wing military dictatorships and U.S. military interventions have been amply condemned, and justifiably so, by the media, academic circles, and political leaders on both sides of Rio Bravo.
What remains conspicuous by its absence is a similar, generalized acknowledgement of the devastation caused by self-proclaimed socialist regimes that have professed to represent and defend the have-nots of the world. The concentration camps in the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-Tung’s China, their Cuban equivalents (the so-called UMAP), the assassination of kulaks (peasants) by Stalin, the famines generated by Stalin and Mao, the genocide carried out in Cambodia by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army, the brutalities of Mengistu in Ethiopia, and other crimes of a similar nature perpetrated on behalf of the construction of socialism, left a death toll that, at the time of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, was estimated at 100 million by the well-documented Black Book of Communism. The research for that work was carried out by a team of reputed researchers led by French historian Stephane Courtois.
More recent studies indicate that the 100 million figure may well be an underestimation of the ravages of Communism.
Those crimes remain neglected. They are even justified by vast swaths of the public under the influence of so-called progressive leaders and activists, and a like-minded media. The reason: They are compatible with today’s Zeitgeist, in which whatever is done under the guise of the fight against inequality merits sympathy and praise – in the same manner as the crimes committed in the name of Christianity or of the expansion of European empires used to pass unnoticed, or were celebrated, in previous centuries.
Outside of the genocide committed by Pol Pot and his Khmers Rouges — an exception that proves the rule — those responsible for the ravages of socialism have managed to avert trials similar to the one held at Nuremberg against Nazi criminals.
The radical left will condemn the atrocities committed by its own camp only when its ideological leaders authorise it to do so. That was the case as regards Stalin, whose crimes were stubbornly denied by that left until the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in 1956, decided to recognize them. Recognition came not for the sake of justice, it should be recalled, but with the aim of reassuring party officials that the time of Stalinist purges and executions belonged to the past.
There is no better proof of the contemptible tolerance to the horrors of socialism than the stance taken publicly by Eric Hobsbawm, a universally-renowned “revolutionary” intellectual. When a journalist of the BBC asked him in 1994 (that is to say, at the time of the crumbling of the Soviet bloc) whether the loss of 15 to 20 million human beings would have been justified had such loss served to consolidate Communism, Hobsbawm had no problem in answering “yes”.
The hard-left mantra is so much attuned to today’s prevailing values that it has even managed to fabricate an icon of international stature: Che Guevara.
Here you have a full-fledged “revolutionary” whose image adorns the t-shirts and berets of men and women at university campuses in more than one continent. These men and women ignore or couldn’t care less about the desire to kill that kindled their idol, which he himself boasted about by asserting: “Here [I am] in the Cuban jungle, alive and blood thirsty.”
Other sentences of Che Guevara are no less disquieting. Take these:
“We must walk the path of liberation even if it costs millions of atomic victims.” This assertion doesn’t seem to upset the Che worshipers who, at the same time, swiftly condemn the launching of the atomic bomb by the “empire” over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of World War II.
“If the missiles had remained in Cuba [in reference to the October 1962 crisis], we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York.” This assertion doesn’t seem to upset the Che worshipers who, at the same time, claim to defend and represent the Latin American migrants who live in the “empire,” including in New York.
“The black is indolent and a dreamer, spending his meager wage on frivolity and drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving.” This assertion doesn’t seem to upset the Che worshipers who, on the university campuses of America and Europe, rebel against Donald Trump’s remarks on Mexicans and “shithole” countries.
Most fortunately, heretics are no longer burned in Europe; the indigenous population of the American continent is no longer subjugated by the conquerors of the New World; and slave trade is no longer carried out as a means of expanding colonial empires. What we do witness nowadays, however, is that dissidents and opponents to “progressive” regimes are currently repressed, tortured and killed, notably in Cuba and Venezuela, under the benevolent and even admiring gaze of Che Guevara’s political heirs.
The standard-bearers of today’s “Revolution” are destined to share the same fate as the eulogists of the Inquisition, of the subjugation of America’s indigenous population, and of the slave trade: History will blatantly condemn them once we manage to overcome, as surely will be the case, the Zeitgeist of Che Guevara.