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The cycle of terror.

Article Excerpt
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY had two world wars. It did something else, too, no less tragic and original. It was the first age to practise terror by concentrating civilians by the thousand for slaughter in lonely places.

The new terror was cyclic, and the cycle took exactly a century to complete. It began as a Marxian revolutionary doctrine in mid-nineteenth-century Germany; Lenin acted on it promptly after the October Revolution, Hitler after his conquest of r eastern lands in 1941; and it was finally turned against the Germans by Stalin in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1945. The last stage was little reported, however, being the work of an ally, and though recent it is now largely forgotten. It can be surprising to learn that Stalin used some of Hitler's concentration camps, notably Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for their original purpose. The last link in the cycle of terror is the least known.

The background may be briefly sketched. In January 1849, months before he migrated to London, Karl Marx published an article by Friedrich Engels in Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung announcing that in Central Europe only Germans, Hungarians and Poles counted as bearers of progress. The rest must go. "The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

Genocide arose out of Marx's master-theory of history--feudalism giving place inevitably to capitalism, capitalism to socialism. The lesser races of Europe--Basques, Serbs, Bretons and others--being sunk in feudalism, were counter-revolutionary; having failed to develop a bourgeoisie, they would be two steps behind in the historical process. Engels dismissed them as leftovers and ethnic trash (Volkerabfall), and called for their extinction.

So genocide was born as a doctrine in the German Rhineland in January 1849, in a Europe still reeling from the revolutions of 1848. It was to become the beacon-light of socialism, proudly held and proudly proclaimed, and for a century it remained...