The prescriptive society
Sir: Mr Szamuely's 'Personal Column' (29 August) is much exaggerated. Specially the comparison with Lysenko is simply wrong. After all, the opponents of Mr Szamuely use arguments—right or wrong—and don't pro- pose either to kill or to put in prison those who oppose nudity or who indulge in gene- tical research!
However, even more wrong and danger- ous is his implied excuse of Hitler, even if it is only a relative excuse. I shall not indulge in body count, although it is quite possible that Nazism is responsible for more dead than Mr Szamuely's figure for Russia. e.g. twenty-five million (the China estimate is only a wild guess). However, there are two important qualitative differences: 1) Hitler ordered extermination of babies who are guiltless by definition, and total extermina- tion of peoples. This never happened in a communistic regime. 2) Hitler's purpose was to eliminate a great part of the human past, of the cultural heritage common to all humanity. Characteristically enough, one of
his reasons was that it is 'degenerate', and sexual permissiveness was for him a sure sign of 'degeneracy'. Stalin, with all his crimes against the living literature, kept faithfully the cultural heritage of Russia, and of Europe.
I am fully aware of the horrible crimes of Stalin. But to confuse this with Hitler's aims is a fearful error, into which George Orwell never fell. For it is only a short step from attacking 'permissiveness' and excusing Hitler into actually recommending him as defender of western society, a step taken by many in the 'thirties.
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