Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 6: The Moral Elements of Historical Paradigms
A complicating factor is that a very important and unspoken feature of many historical paradigms, like the totalitarian paradigm, is a tacitly accepted moral system that, at first, may seem to be only a component or adjunct of these paradigms that is separable from them and can be eliminated or ignored in the interest of objectivity if necessary. But in fact, such moral systems that seem like only "background material" actually hold sway over historical paradigms. They deeply influence selection and conscious use of historical models, but are rarely ever relevant to these processes in the modern physical sciences. This suggests that moral paradigms are more important to professional historians than their own historical paradigms, their ostensible areas of study, since there is no reason that the historical sciences - even though quantization as in the physical sciences does not seem feasible for them - cannot follow methods used in the descriptive physical sciences, such as taxonomy, meteorology, etc. These sciences are paradigm-based and lack quantization, but are moral-free. If moral paradigms are more important to historians than historical ones, there is little fundamental difference between historians, sophisticated layman, fictionists, and propagandists.
The influence of a moral system, which usually exists independently of - having pre-existed - a specialized historical paradigm that incorporates elements of it, is a subject ignored and avoided by even the better-grade, more empirical and scientific post-Cold War historians, despite their attempts to emulate, in historical and sociological studies, the processes of paradigm analysis and model selection that exists in the physical sciences. These historians are reluctant to cast doubt upon the implicit moral components of a reigning historical paradigm because they above all wish to remain "respectable" to peers in an academic and publishing world wherein little challenge to all but the most fundamentalist Christian moral ideas is offered or permitted even when "political correctness" is thrown to the winds. Allowable or even popular discussion of the "Biblical correctness" of a moral act is a big red herring: a more pervasive and deeply entrenched moral system based on both Judaism and Christianity still tacitly holds sway over historical discussions.
In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the view arose, especially in the English-speaking world, that a man disqualified himself from a role as leader or statesman if he achieved political success through treachery, cruelty, or murder. He thereby became "illegitimate." This was not always the view of intelligent and enlightened men before then, and there is no guarantee that it will be the opinion of enlightened thinkers in the distant future. This view holds sway more than ever in this century, despite - and perhaps because of - the notable successes in this century of methods as "base" as any used in ancient Rome or Renaissance Italy, eras which literate Europeans have studied for centuries. To challenge this view of "legitimacy" at all is considered ipso facto "atavistic," "unenlightened," or even "monstrous."
The ramifications of a shared moral system subliminally determining the rightness or acceptability of an historical paradigm will be dealt with at the end of this part (Part I) of the essay, where the Soviet social critic and reformer Roy Medvedev is taken up on the plea contained in the title of his influential book, Let History Judge!, a paraphrase of which is a leitmotif of the disenchanted Communist Arthur Koestler’s well-read 1940 novel about the era of the Stalinist purge trials in the 1930’s, Darkness At Noon. One cannot know what the future will say about Stalin or Yezhov, despite the implied confidence Medvedev and others seem to have had that the verdict will turn out "their way," because the future is unknown, and because humans have always been very, very poor at predicting it despite all they have to say about it. There may come a time, centuries from now, when children will hear in school that: "Once, once upon a time, and for a brief period, there were parts of the world in which slavery was abolished and one human being could not own another as property." Nevertheless, we can let the past speak. For this purpose, four "jurors" have been selected for the end of this part - all enlightened and educated men from Europe’s past (no Marxists or cultured Asians past or present) - to pass judgement on Stalin: Plato, Machiavelli, Sir James Frazer (an educated Englishman from the Nineteenth Century, author of The Golden Bough), and Friedrich Nietzsche. Medvedev and his cohort will not like the verdict delivered there, which is unanimous in Stalin’s favor. This discussion follows a more detailed discussion now of the totalitarian paradigm of Soviet society as described by Getty and Manning above, and how new archival evidence casts strong doubt upon the validity of the totalitarian paradigm and upon most of what has been written about Stalinist society for the past half-century.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
