February 13, 2013
The Totalitarian Temptation: Liberalism's Enemies, Then and Now
Andrew Nagorski in Foreign Affairs:
One evening in June 1940, an excited crowd in Berlin awaited Adolf Hitler's arrival at the opera. The German army was scoring victory after victory in Europe at the time, and when the dictator finally entered the room, the audience greeted him with impassioned cries of "Sieg Heil!" "Heil Hitler!" and "Heil Fuehrer!" With the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact still in force, one of the attendees that night was Valentin Berezhkov, an interpreter for Stalin. "As I am watching all that," he recalled in his memoirs, "I am thinking to myself -- and the thought scares me -- how much there is in common between this and our congresses and conferences when Stalin makes his entry into the hall. The same thunderous, never-ending standing ovation. Almost the same hysterical shouts of 'Glory to Stalin!' 'Glory to our leader!'"
The parallels between communism and fascism have often been noted, fueling endless debates over whether the movements were fundamentally similar or different. The Devil in History, a new book by the political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, presents a genuinely fresh perspective on this topic, drawing enduring lessons from the last century's horrifying experiments with totalitarianism.
Instead of writing a historical treatise, Tismaneanu set out to produce "a political-philosophical interpretation of how maximalist utopian aspirations can lead to the nightmares of Soviet and Nazi camps epitomized by Kolyma and Auschwitz."
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:27 AM | Permalink
Comments
The article appears to be gated. However, here is an ungated version: http://www.ewi.info/system/files/FA_Nagorski_Final_JanFeb.pdf
This book reminds me of something Clive James once said: "A measure of our slowness to face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the expression "Kirov Ballet" does not strike us as obscene. The expression "Himmler Youth Orchestra" would.
Posted by: Sundar | Feb 13, 2013 1:05:59 PM
Democracies that practice and cover-up the same atrocities on spiritual grounds are no different than "godless" regimes.
Posted by: Dredd | Feb 13, 2013 1:48:13 PM
In response to @Dredd above:
Again quoting Clive James (I just happened to be reading him yesterday): "Nixon, when he killed innocent people, did so as the price of political success. Mao killed them as the condition of it, and killed more by many, many times. Why Mao should have been the more difficult one to despise is a key question for an as yet untapped academic subject: the sociology of the international intelligentsia."
Posted by: Sundar | Feb 13, 2013 1:59:08 PM
Sundar,
Please explain to me the distinction Clive James is drawing between killing as the "price" and killing as the "condition" of political success. Is he saying that Nixon regretted killing innocent people while Mao sought to kill them?
Posted by: David Hammer | Feb 13, 2013 4:25:42 PM
Nixon's innocent victims (presumably a reference to the Vietnam war) were killed collaterally. And the war became a political liability. Mao's victims were specifically targetted. He did not regard them as "innocent" at all. Not to mention that their number was greater by several orders of magnitude, millions vs. thousands. And Mao was cheered not only in China but by useful idiots around the world.
Posted by: Kyle | Feb 13, 2013 5:10:45 PM
Here we go..using the numbers of victims to measure the "weight of the sins" of Nixon and Mao. Both of these men committed atrocities (or allowed them to be committed) that made them monsters in their own way. The difference is that Nixon was constrained by the institutions of a democratic government whereas Mao suffered no such impediment. Nixon would surely have used nuclear weapons on North Vietnam had he not been constrained by saner minds. How many millions would have died if Nixon held the unconstrained power that Mao did?
Atrocity is atrocity, whether one is murdered or a million! Unconstrained political power and unaccountable government institutions are the real dangers to any society. Go back and read Hannah Arendt's dissection of Stalin and Hitler in her book on tyranny. It is chilling stuff.
Posted by: Bill | Feb 14, 2013 3:52:52 AM
Bill,
Nixon may have been a sleazy character but the suggestion that he "would have used nuclear weapons on North Vietnam" if he hadn't been "constrained" is a bit disingenuous. The "constraint" was both personal (read his "diary") and political. Although the US military has always had plans for the use of nuclear weapons (they still do... as does every member of the "nuclear club"), there was a strong "nuclear taboo" that prevented any serious consideration of even a very limited and narrowly targetted use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnamese military sites. None of this had to do with democratic institutions or "saner minds". Devastating weapons (napalm bombs, agent orange) were already being used in areas where civilian casualties were inevitable. Small nuclear tactical weapons would probably have resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. But the "nuclear taboo" meant that such planning never got very far. Using atomic weapons, even in a very limited way, would have entailed an immense political "fallout". If that's all that you are implying by "constrained by the institutions of a democratic government", then fine. But while Nixon may have been a "crook", there is no evidence that he would have been a killer of Mao's dimensions. Numbers do matter: in the law and in morality. In the 20th century, Mao's crimes are comparable only with those of Hitler and Stalin.
See more details here:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB195/index.htm
Posted by: Kyle | Feb 14, 2013 8:45:56 AM
I will start with two quotes, first from the article:
"many intellectuals who spent much of
their lives behind the iron Curtain ended
up believing that communism and fascism
were basically alike." and the second from the post of Sundar: "This book reminds me of something Clive James once said: "A measure of our slowness to face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the expression "Kirov Ballet" does not strike us as obscene. The expression "Himmler Youth Orchestra" would."
Both have the same question,alive even today: "why western intellectuals were against Fascism, but made excuses for Communism?" some argue -as Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bill (here)- that are equivalent in Evil. Bill even says:" Atrocity is atrocity, whether one is murdered or a million! "
I will try to explain by the four factors:
1. Ideology...Communism is the old pure, beautiful and sacred Utopian dream of humanity, the Age of Gold before the sin, present in Antiquity, in Christian ethos. Free equal men, no poor, no rich...a global, universal and anti-racist dream that was followed by the liberal intellectualism and religion schisms in all the periods.
Fascism is also a dream of radical authoritarian nationalism, an affirmation of superiority of one race/nation over the other; is conditioned in time and geographical space...but if you are not of this race, there is no reason to love too much this credo; a French fascist doesn't like by definition a German Fascist, mostly if we are speaking about Alsace and Lorraine and to whom belong. Communism - in theory - has no borders...
2.Racism: Communism - in theory - is anti-racist. Fascism - in theory and in practice - is racist, and the Hitler-ism was concentrating in targeting and killing to extermination Jews and Rommas...and after this the inferior nation/Slavic races Poles, Russians...
3. Propaganda and Role of Intellectuals in the "socialist" state: The fathers of the revolution, Lenin, Stalin,Trotzky, Zinoviev...were all auto-didactic intellectuals; books and poems and philosophic articles influenced them and made what they were. So they respected the creators and fed them as princes on the condition that they served the Party;for a wrong word/article/book they would lose all their splendid positions; the false image was projected inside the "socialist" camp but also outside by the most extraordinary ministry of information and disinformation of the world; even today some leaders of the Third and Arab World were the students of this academy of propaganda. BTW the father of the same Vladimir Tismaneanu was the product and also one of the founder in Romania of this ministry of ideological manipulation.
4. Time Period: Hitler died in 1945, and with him the Germany of the Third Reich. Stalin died in 1953 but the Soviet Union in the "socialist" form continued till 1991; however after 1953 the killing of dissidents ceased and in many satellite countries of Eastern Europe as Romania the massacres in their Stalinist period (1944-1953)hadn't the amplitude that characterized the Soviet Union exterminations.
After the Stalinist Era, the "socialist" camp is looking as a grey prison of boredom and stupidity, of people without hopes, of laziness and corruption from the grassroots till the upper nomenklatura. But it is a period where people are studying free of charge, are making trips, are drinking and making parties, seeing movies, theater production and reading books (at a very low price or free), traveling inside their own country, enjoying long vacation and sport; a life with low pay where nobody was working, many stealing; a world where to buy a book or a piece of meat you had stay on long ques or to pay bribes. A prison that some had a good life (as the author of the book, a student in the University in the same years with myself), and for the most a miserable life ...but not a death camp not even for dissidents, that were put in prison or send to work in isolated places where they would communicate their subversive ideas to illiterate farmers and their cows. So it was enough time to forget and to wipe those crimes from the Stalinist times with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Choir of the Red Army.
Posted by: mirel | Feb 14, 2013 1:14:07 PM
Anyone who thinks Mao and Nixon were the same needs their head examined.
But who could possibly examine so many heads? and what would other heads be doing in the meantime? Stupidity is part of our condition. I am stupid about contless things that I know little of. And since I know little about most things..since all of us know little about most things (there being far too many things), this problem may be insoluble.
Of course, there is stupidity and then there stupidity. I continue to believe that with effort, one CAN rise just a shade above the level of total bullshit. Perhaps one should aim for that?
As Borges (who could rise well above that level, but we cannot all be Borges)put it: It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words..can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them..at least in an infinitesimal way..does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others
Posted by: omar | Feb 14, 2013 3:08:45 PM
“It's always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it's the victim of violence who is "really" inciting it.”
― Christopher Hitchens
One of the explanation to the success of such books in our days is the tendency of the equivalent of evil: Communism is the same evil as Fascism.Stalin is the same kind of killer as Hitler. In the same time, a note of revanchism and excuse for Hitlerism by the New Extreme Right: Hitler was bad, Stalin was bad, the crimes of Hitlerism are excused by the crimes of Communism; most of the Communists were Jews; so the crimes against Jews were excusable, as coming as retaliation of those crimes...
This is a false equivalence and a " two wrongs make a right " argument loved by the new historians that instead searching the past, are looking for arguments to their scandalous theory that may sell their books and tenure.
This kind of a logical fallacy is present not only in Fascism-Communism comparison, but also in other acute problems of the present and because we are now in a age of Faece-books, forums and comments, we are familiar with many others as the war of the Western world/USA against Terror, where the most juicy quote belongs to Noam Chomsky:
"“The U.S. is one of the leading terrorist states in the world according to its own legislation”
Posted by: mirel | Feb 15, 2013 4:32:22 AM
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