pauline and david are out....., page-53

Dave

you should think carefully before labelling people as fascists, nazis or whatever term you feel appropriate at the time.

An excerpt of an article in the New York Review of Books on Fascism.

"To Professor Yerushalmi I must reply that I cannot write an independent essay on fascism and totalitarianism because I am more than ever confused about the meaning of these terms. We have enough trouble trying to apply the concept of fascism to both Mussolini and Hitler; it is virtually impossible to accommodate under the same canopy those who resemble Mussolini and Hitler in their ideas and methods but who claim to be antifascists. Nor do we know how to apply the "totalitarian" model, simply because there has never been a truly totalitarian state. Hitler and Stalin ruled centralized states and ruthlessly disposed of their adversaries; Stalin systematically destroyed even his devoted followers. But neither Hitler nor Stalin knew how to transform permanently the minds of their subjects. Totalitarianism implies the voluntary and unconditional acceptance of ideas and directives emanating from above. Yet neither the Third Reich nor Stalin's Russia reached such a state of perfection. Rather than being superbly organized and efficient organisms, these two Brave New Worlds left plenty of room for at least silent dissent, as well as for sloth, corruption, mutual rivalries, and bureaucratic anarchy. In other words, both systems were unable to suppress individualism in the best and worst senses of the term. Only the death machines functioned perfectly. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were criminal organizations, not unlike the Mafia, run for evil purposes and on the foundation of shifting loyalties. Their ultimate argument has always been the gun.

Such so-called totalitarian systems are not eternal. Nazism died with Hitler and, since then, the West Germans have become model liberals. In the Soviet bloc, Marxist-Leninist philosophy died a long time ago, and terror has been reduced enormously. Many former Stalinists in Eastern Europe (or, I understand, in China) are now in opposition as advocates of democracy; others have reembraced the bourgeois values of their families. Now that the Soviet leaders have proven themselves able to remain in power with only a limited use of direct indoctrination and physical violence, one might ask oneself whether the Nazi leaders would not have been able to do the same. This seems rather unlikely, however, because social confrontation and war were the essence of Nazism, although not of all fascist philosophies.

What did Stalin and Hitler have in common? Something that we do not know how to name but that we intuitively understand. In their world, the individual was dissolved in the abstract interest of the collectivity. They sat in judgment in the name of the "People," a term they never bothered to define. Theirs were political systems that denied the humanity of men and women; that denied the value of individual dreams and aspirations, and that ascribed the darkest and most frightening human emotions to other human beings. For Stalin, the kulaks were the devil incarnate, so were the social democrats, or Trotsky, or his other fellow communists. For Hitler, the Slavs were scarcely human; the Jews were not only subhuman but actively evil. These subhumans were also all-powerful: they were the cause of all the injustice in the world; they were the incarnation of evil in the primal sense of the word. Destroy all Jews and destroy all evil; as everything Jewish is evil, therefore everything evil must be Jewish. Such was the essence of Nazism, and to call it "fascist" or "totalitarian" might blind us to this central and terrible fact of National Socialism.

Prof. Dr. Istv‡n De‡k Columbia University