Totalitarianism Revisited

...During the years just after the Second World War, it was useful primarily to left or liberal anticommunists who wanted to separate themselves from the communist and fellow-traveling left while still opposing conservatism...

...How far it can carry us in analyzing the dangerous politics of our own times is far from obvious...

...As Goetz Aly points out in Hitler's Volksstaat, Hitler's charismatic leadership certainly promised national unity and community, along with a better life for all Germans, sustained by a high level of satisfaction for the "little people"—and by their compliance in the exclusion of all "so-called elements hostile to the Volk...

...Nor does the damage caused respectively by the terrorists and totalitarianism belong to the same scale of magnitude...

...Time magazine adopted the term in 1934, demonstrating that it could resonate across the political spectrum, from the left to Christians, New Deal liberals, and even to a few conservatives...

...Ironically, the 1970s was also the decade when totalitarianism was abandoned by most Sovietologists, as terror ceased to be the defining feature of Soviet rule and as détente replaced containment as U.S...

...After the attacks of September 11, this global interventionism was coupled with a new argument that the theater of antitotalitarianism now extended to the Middle East—which generated an intense debate in the months before the war in Iraq...

...For a survey of antitotalitarian arguments for the war, see Thomas Cushman, ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (University of California Press, 2005...

...Yet, new enemies bring new complexities and new historical realities, where analoDISSENT / Summer 2006 83 gies of past antitotalitarian moments are deceptive...

...Soviet camps were prisons of a particularly brutal and despairing character," writes Overy, "but they were never designed or intended to be centers of extermination...

...A Russian colleague who had emigrated during the early 1990s remarked to me that "once we started to use the word 'totalitarian' the communist regime was finished...

...Either it is totalitarian or it ceases to be communism...

...dysfunctional totalitarianism" (Zbigniew Brzezinski...

...It was strongly supported by Cohn-Bendit, Fis82 DISSENT / Summer 2006 cher, Glucksmann, and many others...

...At the same time we are led to believe that, as in the Second World War and the cold war, resolution and military power alone can bring about a democratic outcome...

...The period from 1993 to the debate on the Iraq War might then be called the fifth moment of totalitarianism, or the antitotalitarianism of the '68ers...

...policy...

...By asserting that totalitarianism encompasses Baathist dictatorship, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Qaeda, crucial distinctions are lost...

...Ironically, even during the Gorbachev era, some die-hard neoconservatives like Jean-Francois Revel refused to believe that the Communist regime could give way to democracy...

...The return of this term is instructive, because its history is not at all as luminescent as its advocates would have us believe.' With some justice, commentators such as Berman and George Packer argued that the overthrow of "secular totalitarianism" and the establishment of an Iraqi democracy might halt the spread of Islamist totalitarianism and possibly lead to a democratization of the Middle East...

...Hook exemplified the moment when he wrote, "Whoever believed that Nazi expansionism constituted a threat to the survival of democratic institutions must conclude by the same logic and the same type of evidence that Soviet communism represents today an even greater threat to our survival, because the potential opposition to totalitarianism is now much weaker in consequence of World War II...

...This is not to wholly dismiss the term, but to argue that more often than not over the years historical precision was sacrificed to the political gains of invoking the word...

...The anticommunist left naturally rejected these arguments as self-serving...

...False analogies carry serious consequences...

...But political blindness and duplicity vis-a-vis the Soviet Union were not limited to communists and fellow travelers...

...Coined by Italian antifascist socialists in the 1920s, it has floated around the political spectrum throughout the twentieth century...

...In the United States, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr first employed the term in a way that would become characteristic of its American usage, as hegemonic control over all aspects of life, the very antithesis of the liberal state...

...Is it compelling shorthand, as some of its first theorists insisted, used to argue that modern tyranny is unique because it is more invasive, more reliant on the total assent of the "masses" and on terror than old-fashioned despotism...

...The debate over the meaning of totalitarianism has always been far more intense on the left than among conservatives, who, for the most part, avoided the term until the 1980s— or regarded totalitarianism as the inevitable consequence of rejecting individualism and the free market, as Hayek argued in his 1944 manifesto, The Road to Serfdom...

...By 1928, the grand old man of Italian socialism, Filippo Turati, could write of the "worldwide conflict between fascistic totalitarianism and liberal democracy...

...For the dedicated opponents of Nazism and Fascism, the antifascist struggle was premised on the idea that there could be no middle ground, no neutral space, and no noncombatants in the global confrontation between Geist and Macht, humanism and terror...

...Then, after the fall of communism, the horrors of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda made some of those leftists and liberals committed humanitarian interventionists...

...But, as Tzvetan Todorov writes: "[Whereas now you have the exaltation of religion and the cult of the past, earlier you had the rejection of religion and the cult of the future...

...British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called terrorism the "new totalitarianism," the world's greatest threat to democracy...

...Totalitarianism is a protean word, available and useful in new and ever-changing political constellations...

...Perhaps worst of all, it identified the enemy as the secular religions of the past rather than the religious antisecularism of the present...

...MICHNIK MAY WELL be right to claim that most of those who demonstrated in Europe and America on February 15, 2003, did not take Islamist radicalism seriously enough...

...But its renewal after 1947 enabled former "progressives" to make the turn from anti-Nazism to anti-Sovietism with invigorated moral and political conviction as U.S...

...His rhetoric perfectly bridged the turn from the antitotalitarianisms of the 1930s and 1950s to the antitotalitarianism of today...

...As Schlesinger wrote in The Vital Center, his enor80 DISSENT / Summer 2006 mously influential work of 1949: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped by the exposure of the Soviet Union and by the deepening of our knowledge of man...

...Unlike Stalinism, which employed violence, however extreme, as a means to an end, violence was "at the heart of National Socialism" which espoused a doctrine and ideology of racial warfare from the outset...

...ANSON RABINBACH is Professor of History and Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies at Princeton University...

...In 1984, the year of a major mid-course reevaluation occasioned by OrDISSENT / Summer 2006 81 well's 1948 book of that title, the future of totalitarianism on the left was in doubt...

...The classical theorists of totalitarianism— Friedrich Hayek, Carl J. Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Hannah Arendt—systematized a concept that had a long history before it acquired the patina of academic respectability...

...In his unjustly forgotten novel Arrival and Departure (dated July 1942—July 1943), Koestler imagined an ex-communist cured of his need for ideological crusades and washed up in a country called "Neutralia" as the war in Europe begins...

...In Europe too, liberals no longer could afford to hold onto the misalliance with the communist left...

...During the Vietnam era, the antiwar left was by and large indifferent to communism and anti-anticommunist...

...The genocidal eruptions of the late 1970s and early 1980s (especially in Cambodia) had turned former '68ers into liberal humanitarians opposed to totalitarianism in all its forms...

...And, according to the precepts of antifascism, communists and fellow travelers had to justify Stalin's crimes while decrying Hitler's...

...As William David Jones has pointed out, in The Lost Debate : German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism, the cold war version of totalitarian theory all but obscured this "lost debate" on the left that included exiled German opponents of Hitler—Franz Borkenau, Ernst Frankel, Rudolf Hilferding, Richard Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Arthur Rosenberg—and produced the first extensive literature on Nazi totalitarianism...

...During the post-Vietnam era (roughly 1975-1980), there was a fourth moment of totalitarianism during which a relatively small number of former movement intellectuals began to think seriously about how crazy the New Left had gone...

...Many liberals avoided any mention of Stalinist crimes because they believed that one could not fight Fascism by opposing or doing without the support of the communists or the Soviet Union...

...Even the Katyn massacre of some fifteen thousand Polish officers could be excused if its exposure would weaken allied unity and help Hitler...

...As Norman Podhoretz recalled in Breaking Ranks, "Whereas the anti-communist liberals were full of the dynamism, élan, and passion that so often accompany a newly discovered way of looking at things, the fellow travelers could marshal nothing but boring clichés and tired arguments...

...A mere ten years after its broad acceptance, one of its former defenders, political scientist Michael Curtis, admitted that "it does not serve the cause of comparative political analysis or of political understanding to cling to the concept of totalitarianism...

...relations with the Soviets deteriorated...

...TOTALITARIANISM WAS by no means a concept forged during or for the cold war...

...At its most lucid, it shifts our attention to a new political reality and reveals the strength of liberalism's repugnance for compromise with tyranny...

...Is it a "project," as Hannah Arendt famously argued, an experiment in "fabricating" humanity according to the laws of biology or history...

...failed totalitarianism" (Michael Walzer...

...During the 1930s, the rhetoric of antitotalitarianism became a political lingua franca that attempted to unite so-called "progressives...

...3. George Packer, "Liberal Hawks Reconsidered," Slate, www.slate.com/id/2093620/entry/2093925...

...The term totalitarianism or "sistema totalitaria" was invented in 1923 by one of Benito Mussolini's earliest opponents and victims, the 78 DISSENT / Summer 2006 socialist Giovanni Amendola, who tried to forge a coalition from the democratic center to the communists...

...In almost every decade, the term has served to bridge changing political affiliations by redrawing lines of affiliation, bringing into being new political constellations and alliances, and redefining intellectual oppositions —often at the cost of obscuring moral and political ambiguities...

...The vanguard of this third moment included historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and Reinhold Niebuhr, who gathered in a Washington Hotel in January 1947 to create the Americans for Democratic Action and call for vigilance against "the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West...

...Is it an ideal type (in the Weberian sense) to which no real-world dictatorship actually conforms...

...The first Gulf War, the humanitarian disasters in Bosnia and Somalia, and the colossal failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda gave renewed credibility to the demand for a more aggressive global response from the West, especially when the United States could finally—at least so it seemed in the Clinton years—use its superior military force for good...

...Between the wars, European antifascism inspired a generation of political militants and intellectuals with the prospect of mobilizing all their resources for the "defense of culture...

...When the philosophers Sidney Hook and John Dewey formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom in May 1939, they brought together socialists (Norman Thomas), liberals (Dorothy Thompson and Elmer Davis), and conservatives (Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons) to oppose what all agreed was the rising tide of totalitarianism.' In 1939, when the American Philosophical Society held a "Symposium on the Totalitarian State," the term had evolved from describing dictatorship or the controlled economy to a general theory of ideology signifying conformity to the will or worldview of the party or state...

...As Borkenau wrote in his 1940 The Totalitarian Enemy, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the invasion of Poland by Germany and the USSR shattered the commonly held view "that Fascism and communism were deadly enemies, and that their hostility was the crux of world politics today" Antitotalitarianism, as it emerged during the period of the pact, signaled a commitment to remain an antifascist when the Comintern had banned the use of the very term "fascism" and when remaining an antifascist was synonymous with anticommunism...

...The most striking exception to the general decline in the uses of totalitarianism during the 1970s was in France, which had up to the 1970s proved the most resistant to the concept in Europe...

...During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet and East European dissidents breathed new life into the term...

...Though he explicitly opposed the unilateral use of military force, Joschka Fischer, then Germany's foreign minister, spoke of a "third totalitarianism"—after Nazism and cornmunism —"as the major challenge facing the international community in the twenty-first century...

...Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values...

...Polish dissident Adam Michnik defended the term most economically when he remarked that "there is no non-totalitarian communism...

...It looks back to the "fighting faith" of the 1940s and 1950s...

...The rhetoric of fighting totalitarianism may mobilize the liberal imagination, but it can just as easily muddy the political waters, sometimes against the best of liberal intentions...

...But where anticommunism still mattered, liberals were divided between those drawn to the right (the nascent neoconservatives) and the dwindling anticommunist left (Irving Howe and Michael Harrington), which tried to steer a middle course between dedicated anti-Sovietism and criticism of American foreign policy...

...THE TERRORIST ATTACKS of September 11, 2001, and the debate over the American war in Iraq, revived talk of totalitarianism among liberals and leftists thinking about radical Islamists and Middle East dictatorships...

...At its best, the return of antitotalitarian rhetoric evinces nostalgia for the moral clarity of what Berman calls the "grandest tradition of the left...

...The year 1948 marked the heyday of the third antitotalitarian moment in America, as well as the emergence of a domestic corollary, "totalitarian liberalism," which referred to those fellow travelers who refused to accept the new approach to the Soviets demanded by the Truman doctrine...

...Walter Laqueur shrewdly observed more than two decades ago that the debate over totalitarianism has never been a purely academic enterprise...

...Hook wrote of the utter isolation of the small circle of New York intellectuals that continued to attack the wartime Soviet ally, but even he tried to persuade them to accept the "lesser evil...

...During that final decade of Soviet rule, various epicycles were introduced to keep aspects of the theory of totalitarianism alive: "enlightened totalitarianism" (Adam Ulam...

...Is it an exact description or merely an epithet directed against all enemies of liberalism and democracy...

...In December 2004, in "An Argument for a New Liberalism, a Fighting Faith," Peter Beinart, editor of the New Republic, complained that "three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not been fundamentally reshaped by the experience...

...Some were appalled by the murderous Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy and Japan...

...Studies of Soviet social behavior have revealed a different picture: the existence of a regime attempting to expand control over ever-increasing domains of social life and a society that "opposed this control through an infinite range of diverse forms of resistance, generally passive in nature" (hooliganism, insubordination, malingering), undermining to a great extent the totalitarian model of control and domination...

...Yet, antitotalitarianism, for all its highmindedness, almost always means making a compact with unwelcome allies...

...The price of moral clarity in the Iraq debate was political myopia...

...rOCUSING ON THESE moments of totalitarianism sidesteps the debates over definition and brings into sharper relief the dilemmas that today's antitotalitarians face...

...Orwell, who criticized the leading British Labour Party intellectual Harold Laski for turning a blind eye to Russian "purges, liquidations, the dictatorship of a minority, suppression of criticism and so forth," was, it is often forgotten, a strong supporter of the war effort...

...Difference remains fundamental," Overy concludes, "for all the similarities in the practice of dictatorship, in the mechanisms that bound people and ruler together, in the remarkable congruence of cultural objectives, strategies, of economic management, utopian social aspirations, even in the moral language of the regime, the stated ideological goals were as distinct as the differences that divided Catholic from Protestant in sixteenth-century Europe...

...In the United States, by 1937, not only the anti-Stalinist left of Partisan Review and some American conservatives but also Christian periodicals such as Commonweal and the Christian Century, as well as the Catholic World, were all using the term totalitarianism to link if not equate Fascism and communism...

...THE SECOND and perhaps most unalloyed antitotalitarian moment came in response to the Hitler-Stalin pact...

...Still worse, it mapped the Iraqi dictatorship onto a European template that required either the reality or the preparation for total war sustained by the utopia of a democratic future and a long peace...

...Many new leftists endorsed third world dictatorships, and some even became Maoists...

...THE CONCEPT OF totalitarianism was invented and nurtured by exiles from countries overrun by one or another, and sometimes by both, of the European dictatorships...

...Unlike Soviet Russia, which witnessed permanent crisis and successive states of emergency and mobilization culminating in the Great Terror, the Third Reich was a consensual society...

...These events moved them to abandon their philocommunism and anticapitalism for antitotalitarianism and a more discerning commitment to human rights...

...It misidentified the Bush administration as the imperfect carrier of the ideals of 1936 and 1989...

...The rhetoric of apocalyptic and metaphysical violence that can be traced from Baudelaire, through the murderous nineteenthcentury nihilists, to the Nazi death cult, does in some respects bear chilling similarities to the writings of the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Quatb, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, as Berman persuasively demonstrates in Liberalism and Terror...

...In a scathing article, John Patrick Diggins argued in American Prospect (December 1, 2003) that the Republican Party, which the neoconservatives tout as having "won" the cold war, actually appeased communism whenever possible—in Korea, Hungary, Vietnam, and Tiananmen Square...

...At the height of the debate, Michnik, one of the leading supporters of the war, editor of Warsaw's leading paper, Gazeta Wyborcza, tellingly invoked the crucial "moments" of totalitarianism as the pillars of his argument: "Just as the murder of Giacomo Matteotti revealed the nature of Italian fascism and Mussolini's regime...

...it embraced liberals, socialists, communists, and Christians, all of whom hoped to avoid the disastrous political mistakes of the 1920s and early 1930s...

...Antitotalitarian liberals altered the political landscape, crushing Henry Wallace's third-party challenge and expelling communists and fellow travelers from liberal organizations and trade unions...

...Christians, socialists, Jews, communists, and liberals could link arms against the "common enemy" The historian Richard Cobb, who lived in Paris during the 1930s, recalled that "France was living through a moral and mental civil war . . . one had to choose between fascism and fellow traveling...

...There may be a good deal of irony in the fact that the word totalitarianism reemerged politically just as its conceptual star was fading...

...In Paris, the campaign in support of suppressed Solidarnosc took to the streets in 1981, whereas in Germany most Social Democrats and intellectuals regarded the Polish uprising as an impediment to the policy of "small steps" that marked the Social Democratic Party's Ostpolitik...

...Disgusted by the terrible moral compromises they were forced to make, some broke ranks and produced the great literature of disillusion— Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Manes Sperber...

...During the Second World War, many former leftwing intellectuals, just recently "gone up" from communism or Trotskyism, faced the choice described in Koestler's novel...

...Others focused on the tragedies of the Vietnamese boat people and the Cambodian genocide...

...The first moment was "antifascism" or antifascist anti-totalitarianism, a concept that galvanized European intellectuals during the 1920s...

...The communists, who just two years earlier had been staunch anti-interventionists, aggressively mobilized for war against "Nazi-fascism...

...The same dilemmas bedevil today's left and liberal antitotalitarians...

...For liberal interventionists, the European peace movements and opponents of the use of force in Iraq were simply "recycling" arguments used by the old Stalinist peace movements, while for the antiwar intellectuals— such as Habermas and Derrida—the February 2003 peace marchers represented the "avantgardist core of Europe...

...For the most part, however, those who most emphatically opposed the pact tended to be ex-communists or those on the left whose experience with the party had already led them to a breach...

...A sober look at the history of the term DISSENT / Summer 2006 77 shows that totalitarianism has always been elusive, its meaning constantly shifting...

...The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism...

...But is the term useful...

...2. For a discussion of the term in the United States, see Benjamin Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (University of North Carolina Press, 2003...

...it was the Democrats who launched both major anticommunist wars and for whom the cold war became an ideological crusade...

...Koestler's hero finds himself with no compass to guide him in the choice between lesser evils...

...Many scholars —most recently for example, Richard Overy in his scrupulous comparison of Hitler's and Stalin's rule, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia—conclude that although both preached the idea of an exclusivist utopia, embraced science, pursued the elimination of social and racial enemies, and rejected the morality of the bourgeois-liberal age, the differences still vastly outweighed the similarities...

...Berlin became the "front line city" of the cultural cold war, scene of the famous Congress for Cultural Freedom International Congress in June 1950, a German-American enterprise organized by Melvin Lasky under John McCloy and Shepard Stone's stewardship...

...Unlike most terms in our political vocabulary, totalitarianism was coined in the twentieth century to describe a specifically modern phenomenon...

...authoritarian totalitarianism" (Juan Linz...

...Michael Walzer wrote that "totalitarian ambition bred by authoritarian politics and terror . . . seems more likely to figure in the future of old-fashioned tyrannies than in the future of failed totalitarianisms...

...Pierre Hassner once observed that the great virtue of the idea of totalitarianism is to remind us that literature or philosophy periodically "demonstrates that something escapes the conceptualizations and the empirical research of the applied sciences...

...During the brief period from August 1939 to June 1941, the word "totalitarian" explicitly came to indicate either the equivalence or the close parallels between the newly joined tyrannies...

...Antitotalitarianism, as I have argued, can both illuminate and obscure...

...They too find themselves in an antitotalitarian moment, analogous to the one faced by left-wing anticommunists of the late 1940s and 1950s, but with a longer history: this is only the latest of several antitotalitarian moments...

...It was briefly rescued by conservatives such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, who wrote in a famous Commentary article in 1979 that it was necessary to distinguish friendly autocracies (authoritarian) that were presumably internally capable of reform, such as the Argentine Junta, from incorrigible and unchangeable (totalitarian) enemies like the Soviets...

...French antitotalitarianism succeeded in ending the hegemony of Marxism, in undermining the identification of French Jacobinism with Bolshevism and the PCF, and in reestablishing the legitimacy of liberal anticommunism and republicanism...

...Despite the effervescence of antitotalitarianism in the late 1930s, the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, and the creation of the Grand Alliance placed on hold the moral and political arguments elaborated by excommunists and social democrats in favor of a consensual understanding of the war that occluded any criticism of the Soviet ally...

...it would certainly rid Iraqis and the world of a murderous tyrant...

...For some, DISSENT / Summer 2006 79 like Sperber, the pact was no tactical "trick" but brought to light the "real symmetries between Hitler and Stalin's rule...

...Under the combined influence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (published in 1974), the hangover of 1960s Maoism, the growing influence of the French Communist Party (PCF) in French electoral politics, and the impact of Solidarnosc and Charta 77, a sea change occurred in the French left, led by the intellectual heretics of the old (initially Trotskyist) "Socialism or Barbarism" group—Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet, and Claude Lefort—as well as the '`new philosophers" Glucksmann and BernardHenri Levy, whose most important interventions appeared in 1977...

...but in the final scene, having joined the Royal Air Force, he parachutes into Germany...

...The New York Times, to mention one example, largely defended Soviet foreign policy as supporting democracy against fascism throughout the 1930s...

...84 DISSENT / Summer 2006...

...With varying degrees of enthusiasm, respected former dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America such as Paul Berman, Andre Glucksmann, Richard Herzinger, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, as well as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Jose Ramos-Horta justified, if not military intervention, then an aggressive and principled policy toward Saddam Hussein's regime —largely on liberal-humanitarian grounds, invoking the imperative of resisting totalitarianism...

...He is currently working on a book on the history of European antifascism...

...0 PPOSITION TO communism was initially a project of the anti-Stalinist left, of anarchists, Trotskyites, and liberals...

...During the 1930s, antifascist antitotalitarians created the mentality that eventually led to the popular fronts—a Europe-wide alliance against Fascism and quasi-fascist regimes from the Iberian Peninsula to Hungary...

...Its return is buoyed by the implicit heritage of the heroic antifascist campaigns, cold-war liberalism, and the anticommunist dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s...

...Though communism still held on to its diehard adherents, it was never a serious challenger in European politics after 1947 (despite the brief flare-up of Eurocommunism in the 1970s...

...just as `Kristallnacht' exposed the hidden truth of Hitler's Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge...

...Many of the same people who called for a new post–cold war human rights foreign policy turned to the term "totalitarian," after 2001, to describe not only al-Qaeda and the threat of political Islam but also Saddam's Baathist regime...

...But the polyvalent associations of totalitarianism created dilemmas for the anticommunist left of the cold war era, especially when they found themselves thrown together with right-wing anticommunists...

...Or can the term only be defended negatively—it represents the ultimate rejection of pluralism, legality, democracy, and Judeo-Christian morality...

...I. The term "third totalitarianism" was first used by Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer...

...Only in 1993, in a conversation with Michnik, founder of the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) and a leading dissident in Communist Poland, did Jurgen Habermas admit that he had avoided any fundamental confrontation with Stalinism because he did not want "applause from the wrong side...

...The concept had notoriously failed to distinguish a developmental trajectory over different stages, especially during the post-Stalinist era...

...Antitotalitarianism became the official ideology of the Federal Republic of Germany (as antifascism did in the German Democratic Republic...

...Popular Front antifascism was by no means homogenous...

...The intervention in Serbia in 1998-1999 to prevent genocide in Kosovo mobilized, like no other event, the former left...

...Even if the Bush administration was unable or unwilling to acknowledge it, we were, as Berman put it, "in a war of ideas...

...In this new but brief constellation, the liberalleft of the American political spectrum was reconfigured, presaging the undoing of the antifascist consensus of the 1930s and reassembling the forces that would eventually unite under the banner of liberal antitotalitarianism after the Second World War...

...Debate over totalitarianism has its place, Packer observes with marked resignation, but "its altitude is too high to explain the war and its aftermath...

...The anti-Soviet dissidents in Eastern Europe further inspired this shift...

...The danger, however, as historian Francois Furet rightly emphasized in his influential 1995 study of the communist ideal, The Passing of an Illusion, was that the Comintern's shift to a policy of united or popular fronts—however welcome it appeared to be at the time—transformed dedicated Bolsheviks into false champions of liberty, marching hand in hand with democrats under the banner of humanity and hatred of Hitler...

...Among the Europeans who made this move early were Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer, and Andre Glucksmann...

...During the war even dedicated anticommunists such as Raymond Aron and Sidney Hook turned down the volume of criticism until the defeat of Nazism was achieved...

...Just as the antifascists had to embrace communists during the 1920s and 1930s, just as anticommunist liberals found themselves helpless in drawing boundaries against McCarthyism or against Vietnam hawks, today's antitotalitarians face a similar dilemma: how to stand their ground against those on the left who wantonly minimize or deny the danger of terrorism and Islamist fundamentalism without at the same time falling into line with the failed neoconservatives whose vision of pax Americana has come to a very bad end...

...whereas now you have the action of stateless individuals and the willingness to sacrifice oneself, earlier you had the actions of all-powerful states and the willingness to sacrifice the lives of others...

...Its main protagonists were intellectuals born in East Central Europe—Hayek, Friedrich, Arendt, Brzezinski, and, more recently, Pierre Hassner, Tzvetan Todorov, Glucksmann, Michnik, and Havel—each from countries whose fates were buffeted by Hitler and Stalin, whose formative years were spent under the yoke of occupation...