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.