...It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude
towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad,
based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection
of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary
to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism....


LRB | Vol. 27 No. 6 dated 17 March 2005 | Slavoj Zizek



The Two Totalitarianisms

Slavoj Zizek

A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the
newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the
public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of
conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist
countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the
hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be
dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological
identity.

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the
same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still
find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler!
is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring
old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’
to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look
rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level,
the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it
is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had
publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit
them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he
was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is
clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition,
according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter
how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But
for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological
constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were
guilty by virtue of being Jews.

In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised in
the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are all its
servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a speech,
stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism, when the
obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech, he stood up
and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, Hitler responds to
the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil myself!’ This is pure
humour because it could never have happened in reality, while Stalin
effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined others in the applause.
Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday, prisoners would send him
congratulatory telegrams from the darkest gulags: it isn’t possible to
imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler such a telegram. It is a tasteless
distinction, but it supports the contention that under Stalin, the ruling
ideology presupposed a space in which the leader and his subjects could meet
as servants of Historical Reason. Under Stalin, all people were,
theoretically, equal.
We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who
risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic
deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in
Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. Herein lies the flaw
(and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the conservative historian
Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position – i.e. to ask why we don’t apply
the same standards to the Communists as we apply to the Nazis. If Heidegger
cannot be pardoned for his flirtation with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht
and others be pardoned for their much longer engagement with Stalinism? This
position reduces Nazism to a reaction to, and repetition of, practices
already found in Bolshevism – terror, concentration camps, the struggle to
the death against political enemies – so that the ‘original sin’ is that of
Communism.

In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the so-called
Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be regarded as the
incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did Nazism, reprehensible as
it was, appear after Communism: it was an excessive reaction to the
Communist threat, and all its horrors were merely copies of those already
perpetrated under Soviet Communism. Nolte’s idea is that Communism and
Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and the difference between them
consists only in the difference between the empirical agents which fill
their respective structural roles (‘Jews’ instead of ‘class enemy’). The
usual liberal reaction to Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, reducing it
to a secondary echo of the Communist evil. However, even if we leave aside
the unhelpful comparison between Communism – a thwarted attempt at
liberation – and the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede Nolte’s
central point. Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it
did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and
Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian sense of
the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial
struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the
passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that
the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is
naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social
structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs
the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there
is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place
of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class
antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to
and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential
antagonism.

It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October Revolution:
both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its
Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to acknowledge that the
Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ than the Fascist violence:
its excess is an unmistakable sign that, in contrast to Fascism, Stalinism
was a case of an authentic revolution perverted. Under Fascism, even in Nazi
Germany, it was possible to survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’
everyday life, if one did not involve oneself in any oppositional political
activity (and, of course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late
1930s, on the other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly
denounced, arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was
‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while the
irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that reason,
Nazi police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active opposition
to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to fabricate
evidence, invent plots etc.

We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism.
It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to
produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. The exceptions
are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three
great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism – tended
towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, ‘administered’ society;
Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a
strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments;
and, finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who,
reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the
notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime –
interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist
totalitarianism. How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus
on the conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from
analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its focus
on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real
trauma?

It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude
towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad,
based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection
of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary
to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The
alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the
two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or
implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to
the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a
violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or
Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from
being an expression of Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of
an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity
hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to
understand the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist
symbols.

Slavoj Zizek, a psychoanalyst and dialectical materialist philosopher, is a
senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and international
co-director of the Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College in London.