What a splendid opportunity for fanatical prophets of hope, for demagogy promising to fill this void and endow life with a new meaning.
The first place where restlessness broke out was in Russia during the war, where they had deposed the rule of the tsar and tried to replace it with a democratic government. They decided not to end the war, however, and it didn’t appear that the new democracy could fulfill any of the hopes the people had placed in it. Nevertheless, the fall of the authoritatian regime made it possible for freedom, which had long been suppressed, to enter into life. An expanse opened up for both reformers and revolutionaries. The first to avail himself of this newly formed freedom was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, a fanatic with a utopian vision He placed the value of the ideas he propagated above the value of human life and was prepared to spill any amount of blood on their behalf. As soon as he took power he announced he was immediately embarking on the creation of a new, just societal order and that he would end the war because the workers were perishing in the interests of their exploiters. He would carry out land reforms, fulfill projects that previous utopias could only dream about but that two Communist theoreticians in the modern period, Marx and Engels, had scientifically worked out and deemed realizable. The new arrangement of society — which was not to be limited by national borders, since it was in the interests of all of the exploited classes, that is, most inhabitants of the planet — was supposed to develop in two phases. The first was socialism, which would do away with property inequality, seize the means of production, and thereby develop production to ensure general prosperity. Over the course of, at most, two generations, a new, free, and classless society would arise in which all could satisfy their needs. This second phase, which was suspicious to thinking people as a delirious and unrealizable utopia, was to be called communism. To lead people to this freest of societies, a dictatorship was required.
Lenin’s idea of revolution inspired enthusiasm even in other countries. The first reports of unbridled Bolshevik terror, however, also inspired revulsion and even fear among the propertied members of society as well as among enlightened intellectuals. Moreover, Lenin never denied that he despised democracy, which was supposed to exist (but in a distorted form) only inside his party. Despite troubling accounts issuing from the land of the Soviets, enough politicians in democratic countries agreed that the societal order that had heretofore existed was unsatisfactory. In a society laid low and impoverished by war, with an economy that had not yet managed to recover from its war wounds, future leaders eager to promise anything and commit any crime in order to acquire power began to prance about as prophets of new ideas and new hopes.
Two countries seemed to have been affected by war the most: defeated Germany and victorious Italy. Germany was humiliated, Italy frustrated in its hopes and cheated, it was assumed, out of the war booty it deserved. Immediately after the war, Germany was hit with inflation, impoverishing the majority of its citizens. Italy, weakened by worker unrest and quickly escalating violence perpetrated by members of the growing Fascist movement in their fight with Socialists, searched in vain for a government that could lead it out of recession.
It was primarily the workers in both countries, but also part of the intelligentsia, who saw a solution in Socialist rule. In both countries and at the same time, spokesmen and other opponents of democracy found receptive, eager adherents. In Italy it was a teacher and journalist, a demagogue intending to take power: Benito Mussolini. In Germany it was an unrecognized painter refused by art schools, a devotee of opera and ostentatious architecture, a half-educated deadbeat, pathological anti-Semite, and megalomaniac who was convinced of his calling: Adolf Hitler. They thundered against ineffectual democracy, warned of the dangers of Bolshevism (Hitler added Judaism), and promised to renew national glory and power and thereby provide their citizens with pride. They even offered a new savior who would solve everything and whose powerful will would rescue the country from all hardship. Everyone who believed in and followed him was promised a portion of the eternal glory in the new empire he would create.
Both men stood out as passionate opponents of Lenin’s revolution and, when we compare their deeds with the benefit of hindsight, we find that the dictatorships differed from each other only slightly. At the same time that each was maligning the other, each also was looking to the other for inspiration as they introduced despotism.
Dictatorship as asserted and defined by Lenin means nothing less than absolute power unlimited by any laws, absolutely unhampered by rules, and based on the direct exercise of force.
Almost simultaneously, Benito Mussolini announced: Now in light of new political and parliamentary experiences, the possibility of a dictatorship must be seriously considered. And elsewhere: Violence is not immoral; sometimes it can be moral.
Only a little later did the Spanish leader General Francisco Franco formulate his credo: Our regime is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.
During his brief stay in prison (convicted for an unsuccessful putsch), Adolf Hitler formulated his hatred of democracy:
For the view of life is intolerant and cannot be content with the role of a party among others, but it demands dictatorially that it be acknowledged exclusively and completely and that the entire public life be completely readjusted according to its own views. Therefore it cannot tolerate the simultaneous existence of a representation of the former condition. . With this, however, the movement is antiparliamentarian, and even its share in such an institution can only have the meaning of an activity for the smashing of the latter, for the abolition of an institution in which we see one of the most serious symptoms of mankind’s decay.
And in a political testament only a few hours before his suicide, once more and for the last time, he shouted out his tyrannical credo:
I am the last chance for [a united] Europe. A new Europe will not be built on parliamentary vote, not on discussions and resolutions, but only compelled by violence.
The fanatical revolutionary and prophet of class hatred, Lenin, died too early to view with satisfaction how his theory would travel around the world. He found, however, in his own country executors of his legacy. The seminary dropout, reckless revolutionary, and crafty intriguer Stalin transformed his theory into dogma no one could dispute. He who disagreed would not be convinced under Stalin’s rule; he would be executed.