"Human knowledge," once wrote Pierre Rigoulot, the French historian of communism, "doesn't accumulate like the bricks of a wall, which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social, cultural and political framework."
Tri thức nhân loại không tích tụ theo kiểu thợ nề xây tường. Sự phát triển, cũng vậy, sự trì trệ, đóng váng của nó, tùy thuộc bộ khung xã hội, văn hoá và chính trị.
The reputation of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been deeply damaged by his brief, overt support of Nazism, an enthusiasm which developed before Hitler had committed his major atrocities. On the other hand, the reputation of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has not suffered in the least from his aggressive support of Stalinism throughout the postwar years, when plentiful evidence of Stalin's atrocities was available to anyone interested. "As we were not members of the Party," he once wrote, "it was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps; we were free to remain aloof from the quarrels over the nature of the system, provided no events of sociological significance occurred.". On another occasion, he told Albert Camus - Like you, I find these camps intolerable, but I find equally intolerable the use made of them every day in the bourgeois press."
Danh tiếng của Heidegger bị tổn thương trầm trọng, vì phò Nazi, trong khi Sartre phò Cộng điên cuồng, lại chẳng hề hấn gì. Người phán, tớ đâu có phải là Đảng viên?
Người còn 'xạc' Camus: Thì tao cũng nghĩ như mày, trại tù VC thì đếch chịu được thật, nhưng mấy thằng mũi lõ làm quá, cứ mang ra chửi ra rả, làm sao tao chịu thấu?
We remember D-Day, the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the children welcoming American GIs with cheers on the streets. No one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen. "I have a real liking for Stalin," the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, "he has never broken his word." There are many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.
Chẳng ai muốn biết, chúng ta chiến thắng Đệ Nhị Thế Chiến, với sự tiếp tay của Quỉ Sứ.
At a very deep level, the two systems are related.They are related, first of all, because both Nazism and Soviet communism emerged out of the barbaric experiences of the First World War and and the Russian civil war, which followed on its heels.
Ở dưới đáy của chúng, hai hệ thống này là bà con. Chúng đều nhờ những man rợ của Đệ Nhất Thế Chiến, và với Nga xô, của cuộc nội chiến theo liền sau đó, mà bật ra.
Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that both the Nazi and the Bolshevik regimes created "objective opponents" or "objective enemies," whose "identity changes according to the prevailing circumstances - so that, as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another." By the same token, she added, "the task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population." Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Cách đây nửa thế kỷ, Hannah Arendt viết, cả hai chế độ Nazi và Bolshevik tạo ra "địch thủ khách quan" và "kẻ thù khách quan", và, tùy theo hoàn cảnh, mà đội mũ nón cho chúng, sao cho thích hợp. Khi làm thịt xong địch thủ, thì tới kẻ thù, đại khái như thế. Và cũng đại khái như thế, nhiệm vụ nào cũng hoàn thành của mấy ông công an chế độ ta, không phải, khám phá tội ác, nhưng luôn trong tư thế sẵn sàng còng tay loại người nào vừa được nhà nước ban cho nón mũ mới.
Again: people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.
Lại nữa: nhân dân bị bắt không phải vì đã làm gì, mà đã là thứ gì?
*
One problem is that all the best-known memoirists were trusties-prisoners rewarded with an extra ration or a comfortable job in return for their collaboration with the camp authorities. Solzhenitsyn even claimed that nine tenths of survivors had been trusties. Ginzburg, Razgon, Shalamov, and Solzhenitsyn were all trusties, and everything they wrote must thus be judged with this in mind-that they survived and did so perhaps at the cost of other people's lives. Primo Levi wrote about the Nazi camps, "We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses." The "true witnesses" - those in full possession of the unspeakable truth- are the sommersi: the drowned, the dead, the disappeared.
Chúng tôi, những kẻ sống sót không phải là những chứng nhân thực sự. Những chứng nhân thực sự, những người sở hữu đầy đủ cái gọi là sự thực không thể nói lên được - là những sommersi: những kẻ chết đuối, những người chết, những kẻ biến mất.

But this, it seems to me, is not an explanation of the Western public's general indifference toward the Stalinist terror. That must surely be explained by simple Western prejudice: whereas Hitler's victims were European Jews (read: urbane and educated people like ourselves), Stalin's, in the main, were laborers, peasants, and Communist officials from the provincial back waters of Eurasia. Films and literature are also relevant. Stalin's victims have not found their Steven Spielberg. And while Solzhenitsyn's short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) was very widely read, no Gulag memoir has the standing in the West of Primo Levi's If This Is a Man - though Lev Razgon's True Stories and Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind certainly deserve to be bettter known.