Never speak ill of the dead? (History).

IT IS SAID that you should never speak ill of the dead, presumably because they're no longer around to defend themselves. But in this day and age, with so many mercenary lawyers around, talking libel and slander, you cannot even speak ill of the living without caution. So just when can you speak ill of those you believe deserve it?

Carousing in a number of Melbourne pubs in the week after the September 11 terrorist outrages in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, I found many people more than happy to slander the dead. I was told that the thousands of victims "deserved it" (including the thirty Australians who perished), that "the Americans brought it on themselves", that those who died "were yuppies whose death was no loss", and that rather than support the USA and its allies in the war against the perpetrators, we should all just "move on and forget about it". Forget the grieving families.

While nauseated by all of these responses, I found that the most vomit-inducing one, a true example of "the banality of evil", was from the bloke who said he was "sick" of the constant broadcasting of television footage of Americans mourning their dead, because it interrupted his regular program-viewing.

But I would "speak ill of the dead" in a recent case, if only because the deceased's obituarist chose to forgo judgment upon the effect of the recently-departed's political career. The Age of 19th October published a glowing obituary of David Chaim Rubin. In what was more of a panegyric than an analysis, his obituarist, David Langsam, described Rubin as someone who "fought for human rights and against injustice". Well, yes, as long as the injustices were deemed to have occurred in the capitalist world.

Dave Rubin was an unreconstructed communist who, in Langsam's words, "was at first defensive about the allegations of wholesale murder by Stalin and his henchmen and later deeply hurt by the betrayal". Rubin "remained pro-Stalinist long after it was fashionable".

As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his brilliant critique, Main Currents of Marxism:

 
   If, as in the typical Communist view, the slaughter of Soviet Communists in 
   the purges of 1936-39 is regarded as the true, "negative" significance of 
   Stalinism, it follows that the whole of Stalinism was a deplorable 
   accident--the implication being that everything is always for the best 
   under Communism until prominent Communists start being murdered.