Power and the Twentieth Century
Lukacs, John
"Power and the Twentieth Century" John Lukacs We must get rid of the clutter. Our minds are hampered by terms that no longer have much meaning. This occurs during the passing of an age, when people...
...and, just as the Dark Ages preceded the Middle Ages, these dangers may precede the emergence of a new kind of feudalism which I often think that the distant future may bring...
...but even then their accustomed antonyms, the accepted alternatives, will not do...
...Total tyranny, like total democracy, has proven to be a myth...
...In the Russian system they are almost a state within a state...
...He tried (and often succeeded) in establishing contacts with Hitler's enemies, including American intelligence organs and even Jewish international organizations...
...The standard answer given to this question by Communists and "non-Communists" alike was that the general strike and the mass meeting were "the people's response to terrorism," that the event proved that "it was time to be united," to show that "the country gave a united response, involving all democratic forces...
...Let me explain what I mean...
...This is not easy...
...All of Solzhenitsyn' s works are preoccupied with their existence...
...In the second place, the dominant political configuration of this world continues to be a compound of nationalism and socialism...
...he was interested in power...
...liberal was not being "solved...
...This new science has not been forthcoming...
...Near the end of the twentieth century the mass of Americans, the mass of Russians, the mass of Frenchmen, the mass of Chinese are as American or as Russian or as French or as Chinese as one hundred years ago...
...In the history of the twentieth century significant examples of such post-ideological societies exist, and not only in the prison camps of Nazi Germany or of Soviet Russia...
...and 9:30 a.m...
...The history of the German and of the Russian slave and concentration and extermination camps is full of meaning, but not always of the kind that is usually attributed to them...
...Successive thinkers found it now profitable to proclaim the fact of their convergence: that eventually Capitalism and Communism would become more and more alike, borrowing more and more from each other, whereof the detente of the United States and the Soviet Union would be but the inevitable consequence...
...This was perhaps the most extraordinary fact in the history of the twentieth century, just as Adolf Hitler was the most extraordinary person on its scene...
...In the Soviet Union, beginning with Stalin's great purges in the 1930s, the convinced Communists of the ruling class were being replaced with police bureaucrats of the state apparatus, a development that has continued to this day...
...Tocqueville, for example, wrote nearly one hundred and fifty years ago that "anew science of politics is necessary for a new world...
...Increasingly: but not absolutely...
...Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Castro, Peron, Brezhnev, Nehru, etc., were, or are, national socialists in one way or another...
...Both Mussolini and Stalin—the first, Hitler's eventual ally, because he felt so constrained...
...Like Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin was a dictator...
...We have been accustomed to look at the twentieth century as if it were marked by the contest of the two tremendous forces of Capitalism vs...
...Like Fascism and anti-Fascism, Communism and anti-Communism no longer mean very much...
...The danger that the rising power of the latter implies may be as great as the earlier dangers of lawlessness represented by totalitarian fanatics...
...When we consider the evolution of the Soviet Union and of the United States during the last twenty-five years, we must recognize certain truths, eventhough they may be unpleasant...
...He was not a Fascist...
...indeed, the remaining conservatives were, more than often, a handful of old-fashioned liberals...
...We ought, consequently, distinguish not only Fascism from National Socialism but also Hitler's National Socialism from the more universal phenomenon of national socialism that remains the dominant political reality in the world, having survived both Mussolini and Hitler...
...This is our problem, which is the historical one: Non omnis moriar.-In certain instances these words are still applicable, in spite of their diminished meanings...
...Antonio Martino Making Democracy Unsafe for Italy The Brigate Rosse, the terrorists who on March 16 mixed business (Aldo Moro's kidnapping) with pleasure (the slaughter of his escort), might not be—as some people claim—the tip of the iceberg, the vanguard of a wide underground revolutionary movement, but they still are politically significant.* The kidnapping took place on the very day the new government—based on an alliance between the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Communists (PCI), the first of its kind since 1947—was supposed to present itself to Parliament for a vote of confidence...
...Like Napoleon or Cromwell or Genghis Khan, he had not come out from nowhere...
...Let us look at what was happening in the Third Reich during the last year of the war (when it was already a post-Fascist state...
...the second, Hitler's eventual enemy, because he followed his natural inclinations—ended up imitating, and adopting, many of the features of Hitler's National Socialist regime, including some of its anti-Semitism...
...IV Stalin and Hitler and Mao Tse-tung belong to the past...
...They differ in their mix, but the essential and overwhelming elements of the dual compound remain...
...John Lukacs Power and the Twentieth Century Wmust get rid of the clutter...
...As soon as the news came out, the Communist-controlled unions proclaimed a general strike...
...Why a general strike...
...The telling prefixes are not pro- or anti...
...He is also a member of the National Council of the Italian Liberal Party...
...They are, more than often, pre- or post...
...Their overriding interest—this is probably true of some of Carter's people too— was not money or political ideology but the maintaining and the extending of their power...
...The purpose of this article is not the proposition of a new political terminology...
...The terms of the dialogue no longer apply...
...It grew naturally, from the very conditions of society...
...But the privileged state of this third class was not the result of political or ideological preferences...
...All of a sudden, by contrasting the mad and absurd behavior of the terrorists with the "responsible" attitude of the Communists, the miracle had been performed: Who could now question the democratic nature of the PCI ? Who could be so callous as to deny that the Communists, being different from the terrorists, were a * For nearly two months, the Italian government refused to negotiate with the terrorists: Moro was found dead on May 9. The American Spectator June/ July 1978 15...
...In the third place—in order, but probably first in importance—we live in a transitory situation...
...Eventually the world forces of Democracy and Communism were forced to combine in order to defeat it...
...and at what has been happening in the Soviet Union since Stalin (a country which, at the cost of little imprecision, could be called a post-Communist state...
...Inherent in historical, as distinct from modern social-scientific, thinking is the recognition that problems are rarely "solved" but that they are outgrown...
...Even international capitalism (another myth) has amounted to little, all of the talk about multinational corporations notwithstanding...
...In sum, while Fascism was a particularly Italian invention, National Socialism was a particularly extreme and horrid German variant of a more universal phenomenon...
...They were nationalism and socialism—massive phenomena which were less and less explainable within the old categories...
...When Hitler and Mussolini came in, common criminality decreased...
...In the first place—in order, though not necessarily in importance—all of the ideological frenzies of the 1960s and all of the double-talk about Eurocommunism notwithstanding, we live in a post-ideological era...
...It is, simply, a recognition that the only yardstick we have for measuring the historical impact of certain events and of certain men is by their consequences: and Hitler changed the course of The American Spectator June/ July 1978 13 this century to a greater extent than had anyone else...
...There are many reasons to believe that this underworld within the Soviet Union is enormous, nearer to the surface of power than we may think, and that in the event of a breakdown of the state this underworld, rather than some kind of a political opposition, may flood the surface of that vast country...
...Mussolini had experienced his conversion already in 1914, when he recognized the great failure of international socialism: He was an Italian first, and a socialist second...
...This truism has not yet been applied by the practitioners of modern political science...
...it is descriptive, not corrective...
...Democracy, in spite of the persistent advocacies of many of its proponents for extending unlimited license to degenerates, criminals, and subversives of all kinds, has become more and more restrictive of personal freedom...
...As in the German, in the Russian camps the " common" —or perhaps we should say "uncommon"—criminals, convicts, murderers, and thieves were, and are, privileged compared to the other prisoners...
...It was Marxist and leftist propaganda which, beginning as early as 19311932, put the label "Fascist" on Hitler, on German National Socialism, indeed on all kinds of dictatorships and regimes of an authoritarian kind...
...In other instances their shortcomings are more and more obvious...
...At first sight these camps showed a reversion to a brutal primitive society, consisting of two kinds of people: absolute masters ruling absolute slaves...
...Fascism," he once said, "is only a half-job...
...From a small array of Hitler's bodyguards the SS had grown into a state within the state...
...He represented some of the characteristics (many of the worst ones) of his race and his people—as well as the principal historical tendencies of his era...
...the same thing was true, mutatis mutandis, of the Germans and Hitler...
...And it was precisely because of this savage condition, of a kind of brutal opportunism, that the Kapos were the natural allies of the Germans, and that the criminals are the natural allies of the Soviet administrators...
...More than one hundred years ago—around 1870, an important milestone to which I shall have to return—the conservative-liberal antithesis lost much of its meaning, for the simple reason (the reason was simple, even though its consequences were complex) that both sides were adopting more and more of each other's policies and attitudes: The conservatives were becoming increasingly liberal, while the liberals were becoming increasingly conservative...
...Yet by 1944 Himmler, as well as some of his cohorts, was no longer a convinced follower of Hitler's National Socialist ideology...
...Presided over by Himmler, it had its own army, its own tank divisions, its own police force, its own national and international intelligence organizations, its prison camps...
...V What this means is that in the 1970s we have reached a turning-point, comparable in importance to the other great turning-point in the 1870s which I earlier attempted to describe...
...when he had decided to enter politics, he joined one of the many already existing German National Socialist parties...
...In the Soviet Union the bureaucracy is dependent on the police...
...During the last twenty-five years life in the Soviet Union has become more tolerable, while life in the United States has become less tolerable...
...On the other hand Hitler, too, notwithstanding the extraordinary nature of his career, belonged to the development of his times...
...They were becoming the principal political realities, at least for the hundred years...
...This is not a moral judgment...
...We must come to terms with the phenomenon inadequately called "Fascism...
...The main events in the world of the last one hundred years were wars, not revolutions: the struggles of nations, not the struggles of classes...
...The universality of this phenomenon is such that it is also applicable to the United States, where the differences between so-called conservatives and so-called liberals, or between so-called Republicans and so-called Democrats, may be summed up by stating that while the former of these pairs have been, generally speaking, more nationalistic than socialistic, the latter have been, more than often, socialistic rather than nationalistic Let us glance again at the historical landscape of the twentieth century...
...This obscured the main issue, the essential nature of national socialism, including its German National Socialist variant, a semantic development which accorded with Stalin's wish to obscure the fact that his regime, too, had become a national—and not an international—socialist dictatorship of a certain kind...
...This occurs during the passing of an age, when people must change their minds about many things...
...Fascism was a dictatorship that promised a rigorous system of law and order, which was the principal reason why the Italian people, at a time of threatening anarchy, accepted Mussolini as their leader...
...The recognition that Hitler was not really a man of the Right does not mean that he was a man of the Left...
...He thought that the opponents of Hitler's Reich would have to deal with him...
...There was, however, a rising middle class, the significance of which grows ever sharper in retrospect...
...Moro had been kidnapped between 9 a.m...
...International socialists have amounted to little...
...The post-ideological era has come: As certain wags, including this writer, suggested decades ago, all the political Isms are now Wasms...
...Of these three great forces the one called—I repeat, inadequately—"Fascism" was the most dynamic one, at least for a while...
...Our political terms, basic ones such as "Right" and "Left," "Conservative" and "Liberal," etc., are at least one hundred and fifty years old...
...The Soviet Union, Britain, France, Japan, China are national socialist states...
...14 The American Spectator June July 1978 In the Third Reich, especially after the collapse of the anti-Hitler conspiracy in 1944, the most powerful organization was the SS...
...By 1900 there were few true conservatives left...
...I We must not mistake vocabulary for thought...
...By the time of the Second World War Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were the three principal dictators in Eurasia, the three principal figures on the world historical scene, each of them national socialists of a kind...
...a mass meeting organized in Rome, piazza S. Giovanni, at 5 p.m...
...If this is the kind of convergence that promises good things for the future, allow me to say, in the proverbial words of the worldly-wise American child, that it is spinach, and the hell with it...
...This development contributed to further misunderstandings or, rather, to the kind of obscurantism that politicians and intellectuals are inclined to propagate...
...In the United States the police is dependent on the bureaucracy...
...Every one of the more than one hundred states of the globe is, in one way or another, a welfare state...
...Mussolini invented Fascism...
...III Having mightily contributed to the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, the United States after 1945 found that it was confronted with the ever more disagreeable ambitions of its erstwhile ally, Stalin...
...We live in a post-totalitarian era, which is perhaps—but only perhaps—to the good...
...Let us take yet another look at the landscape of this century...
...Even the Russian revolution was the result of the First World War: the very contrary to the French or the American revolutions two centuries ago, which had caused world wars, and not the other way around...
...The breakdown of the traditional political state is wrought with all kinds of dangers...
...The most natural of such accomplices were the criminals: because they were tough, and because they were utterly devoid of any conviction above the impulses of savagery, that is, above the law of the jungle...
...Like Himmler or Brezhnev, Nixon progressed from ideological politics to police-power politics...
...This is all wrong, for many reasons: and one of them is the historical existence of "Fascism...
...today...
...The administrators of the prison camps needed accomplices among their victims...
...In the German camps these middle people were the so-called "Kapos": killers and thieves rising from the ranks of the prisoners who then would lord it over the rest...
...and even at certain developments within the government of the United States (a post-liberal state) in the 19705...
...He ruled over what was called a totalitarian state...
...The Soviet Union is no more a prototype of the Communist, or Totalitarian, state than is the United States a prototype of the Capitalist, or Democratic, state...
...perhaps even more so...
...They are still widely used—and, consequently, thought—even though they have become increasingly devoid of reality...
...But the most important development was something quite different from this evolution through which the older conservative-liberal antithesis lost its recognizable edges...
...The society in which the influence of the criminal element increases is a post-ideological society...
...scape...
...Stalin's conversion was more gradual, less conscious, and also less honest, intellectually speaking: But all of this did not change the essential issue...
...Hitler had not invented national socialism, not even its peculiarly German-Austrian variety...
...He considered himself as Hitler's potential successor...
...Communism, if you wish...
...Nor can we any longer find a "solution" by sorting out "Rightist" and "Leftist" elements in their acts or in their thinking...
...Communism (or call it Democracy vs...
...Another version of this prospect was that the United States, representing Democracy, now had to confront the Soviet Union because of the latter's capacity as the prime representative of Totalitarianism...
...This promiscuous and indiscriminate usage of the "fascist" adjective thereafter spread rapidly across the world, accepted—rather thoughtlessly—by all kinds of people...
...That morning I was lecturing at the University of Naples...
...The students had heard of it at 9:30, and—together with the news of the kidnapping—Italy was notified of the unions' decision to strike and to organize the rally...
...After 1870 new political phenomena appeared...
...This is an extremely significant development, worth our attention: for prisons, like schools, reflect the conditions of their societies at large...
...This is but one of the many examples where Marx was proven wrong...
...They are not logical...
...Moro has been kidnapped, the escort killed, a general strike proclaimed, and Antonio Martino is professor of economics and director of the Istituto economico-finanziario, University of Naples...
...The "problem" of conservative vs...
...the recognition that Stalin was not a Marxist does not quite mean that he was an anti-Marxist...
...Its principal political configuration is that of national socialism...
...No loner: because we live in a time which is post-conservative and post-liberal and post-Marxist and probably even post-political...
...What was and remains ominous in the Nixon misdeeds was not so much the petty criminality of the Watergate business but the fact that behind this grim clinging to power looms the ominous and increasing shadow (consider but Nixon's dependence on the Teamsters) of the powerful criminal...
...He was a National Socialist, of a German-Austrian kind...
...They have their rules, their turf, and their own language, much more extensive than the jargon of criminals in the West...
...My lecture ended at 11:15, and the students, who had been sitting in the classroom since 10:00, reported the story to me...
...In both societies the police (including the state security police organizations) have been increasingly involved with criminals...
...The two great mountain ranges dominating this century were the two world wars...
...but it is because of its universality that this phenomenon is beginning to lose its meaning—just as one hundred years ago conservatism and liberalism had begun to lose their meanings because of their increasingly amorphous characteristics...
...International Communists have amounted to little...
...At the time of this writing, when the twentieth century is almost four-fifths over, we can recognize some of the features of its landJohn Lukacs' latest book is 1945: Year Zero...
...This is an essential difference: but we ought not take too much comfort from it...
...In the United States a man such as Richard Nixon, who made his political career largely because of his reputation as an anti-Communist, eventually found it very easy to get along with men such as Brezhnev or Mao: not because he had acquired a more moderate view of ideologies but because he recognized the congenial character of his counterparts, powerful bureaucrats at the pinnacle of their respective states...
...it was being "outgrown...
...and their masters are increasingly dependent on them...
...This century, contrary to accepted ideas, has not been a very revolutionary one...
...Yet, just as the Soviet Union had long ceased to be a classic Communist state, the United States had long ceased to be a classic Capitalist state...
...Like Tsarist Russia (where, in spite of the disagreeable principles proclaimed by the regime, all kinds of odd liberties managed to exist) the Soviet Union is not a total dictatorship—in spite, rather than because, of its political regime...
...There was a little more truth in this than in the above-mentioned lucubrations, but still not very much...
...International socialism, notwithstanding its theoretical pretensions, has amounted to little...
...Like a Vyshinsky or a Schellenberg, his minions, men such as Haldeman or Erlichman, had become Important Persons to whose thinking ideological attributes no longer applied: They were neither conservatives nor right-wingers, whatever their political inclinations in their earlier careers may have been...
...In sum, the criminals are increasingly powerful...
...He was no longer hampered by ideology...
...In reality, both of them are prototypes of a new combination of bureaucratic and police states...
...For twenty-five years during the second quarter of this century (more precisely, from about 1920 to 1945) the world struggle developed between three great historical forces, not two...
...People now thought that the final confrontation of the twentieth century was taking shape, between the United States and the Soviet Union, the first representing Capitalism, the second Communism...
...They are historical...
...The timing of this decision was disquieting...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
