October 10, 2011
Prologue
Totalitarian Dictators and Ideological Hubris
When I used the image of Hell, I did not mean this allegorically, but literally: it seems rather obvious that men who have lost their faith in Paradise will not be able to establish it on earth; but it is not so certain that those who have lost their belief in Hell as a place of the hereafter may not be willing and able to establish on earth exact imitations of what people used to believe about Hell. In this sense I think that a description of the camps as Hell on earth is more “objective,” that is, more adequate to their essence than statements of a purely sociological or psychological nature.
—Hannah Arendt, Essays on Understanding
No century witnessed and documented so much atrocious suffering, organized hatred, and devastating violence as the twentieth. The concentration camps represented the ultimate humiliation of human beings, the destruction of their identity, their inescapable dehumanization, and their mass annihilation. Neither Communism nor Nazism can be understood without taking into account the centrality of what Albert Camus once called l'univers concentrationnaire. In his book If This Is a Man, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, wrote:
Perhaps it is not possible to comprehend, indeed perhaps one should not even try, since to comprehend is almost to excuse. Let me explain: to “comprehend” a human intention and action means (even etymologically) to contain it, to contain its perpetrator, by putting oneself in his place, identifying with him. Now, no normal person could ever identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and countless others. While this appalls us it is also relief since it is probably just as well that their words (and also, alas their deeds) should remain beyond our comprehension. Those words and deeds are inhuman, indeed anti-human, without historical precedent and barely comparable to the cruelest manifestations of the biological struggle for existence.1
In Stalinized Romania between 1949 and 1951, a diabolical experiment took place, meant to transform the six hundred inmates of the Pitești penitentiary (all students arrested for real or imagined antiregime activities) into “new men.” The method, apparently inspired by Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko's teachings as adopted by the secret police in the Soviet Union and its satellites, was supposed to make the victims their own tormentors and thereby “educators.” A phalanx of regime collaborators, headed by a former Fascist arrested in 1948 on charges of having lied about his past, engaged in unspeakable, barbaric brutalities against their fellow prisoners, who experienced two levels of transformation: the external re-education and the inner one, when the victim turned into a tormentor. There were only two possibilities for the inmates: to become accomplices or to die under horrifying conditions. In fact, as one of the very few survivors of this lurid experiment said, there was a third possibility: to go insane.
What happened in Nazi and Communist camps (Pitești was for all practical purposes such an institution) was bound to destroy basic features of humanity such as compassion, reason, and solidarity.2 Historian Timothy Snyder superbly concluded his essential work Bloodlands by stating that “the Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers…. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”3 The basis for these horrors was the conviction that human beings can become subjects for radical social engineering conducted by self-appointed custodians of universal happiness. To paraphrase a historian, the twentieth century became destructive once “the historically self-conscious presumption that contingency abounds and has to be managed, that chaos is about to take over and has to be negotiated, that society can be designed and revolution made”4 became the justification for sacralizing the political and converting it into a substitute for traditional religions. This book is a comprehensive, comparative essay on the intellectual origins, the crimes, and the failure of the radical totalitarian movements that ravaged the last century: Communism and Fascism. It therefore starts from the premise that in this “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm) the question of evil is the basic question.5
For Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, Bolshevism and Fascism represented two incarnations of the disastrous presence of the devil in history: “The devil … invented ideological states, that is to say, states whose legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth.”6 Both movements pretended to purify humanity of agents of corruption, decadence, and dissolution and to restore a presumably lost unity of humanity (excluding, of course, those regarded as subhuman, social and racial enemies). For the Communists, the fiend was represented by private property, the bourgeoisie, the priests, the kulaks. The Nazis identified the Jewish “vermin,” “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “Judeo-plutocracy,” and Marxism as the sources of all calamities. Fascism (and its radical version, Nazism) was adamantly anti-Communist. In the 1930s, Stalinism made anti-Fascism a pillar of its propaganda, seducing intellectuals and galvanizing resistance movements worldwide. Indeed, in the absence of anti-Fascist rhetoric, it is hard to imagine Stalinism becoming such an extraordinary magnet for so many otherwise intelligent and reasonable individuals. These people were convinced that by supporting the Popular Fronts, especially during the Spanish Civil War, they were opposing Nazi barbarism. The Communist International's propaganda machine defended human rights against the abominable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, obscuring the fact that, until 1939, most mass crimes in Europe were in fact committed by Stalinists in the USSR.7
Both revolutionary party-movements execrated and denounced liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, which would transcend all divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (defined as classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both Communism and Fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, operating as political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.8 To employ Italian political thinker Emilio Gentile's terminology, both were forms of a sacralization of politics of an exclusive and integralist character that rejected “coexistence with other political ideologies and movements,” denied “the autonomy of the individual with respect to the collective,” prescribed “the obligatory observance of [their] commandments and participation in [their] political cult,” and sanctified “violence as a legitimate arm of the struggle against enemies, and as an instrument of regeneration.”9 In the universe of these political movements, evil carried the name of those who refused, rejected, or did not qualify for the illumination delivered by the infallible party gospels. In the case of left-wing totalitarianism, historian Igal Halfin provides an excellent formulation: “The apotheosis of Communist history—humanity holding hands and marching toward a classless paradise—cannot thus be disassociated from Stalin's systematic attempt to eliminate those who reached the Marxist well but refused to drink from it.”10 Or, to turn to Nazism, for Hitler, Jews incarnated evil simply because for him they fell below the pale of humanity. They were simultaneously cowardly and omnipotent, capitalist and Communist, ostentatious and insidious, and so on. After seeing with Goebbels the so-called documentary The Eternal Jew, a piece of heinously crude propaganda, the German dictator concluded that “these are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it's not humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.”11