The Devil in History

legitimacy is grounded in the fact that their owners are owners of truth. If you oppose such a state or its system, you are an enemy of truth.”⁶ Both movements pretended to purify humanity of agents of corruption, decadence, and dissolution and to restore a presumably lost unity of humanity (excluding, of course, those regarded as subhuman, social and racial enemies). For the Communists, the fiend was represented by private property, the bourgeoisie, the priests, the kulaks. The Nazis identified the Jewish “vermin,” “Judeo-Bolshevism,” “Judeo-plutocracy,” and Marxism as the sources of all calamities. Fascism (and its radical version, Nazism) was adamantly anti-Communist. In the 1930s, Stalinism made anti-Fascism a pillar of its propaganda, seducing intellectuals and galvanizing resistance movements worldwide. Indeed, in the absence of anti-Fascist rhetoric, it is hard to imagine Stalinism becoming such an extraordinary magnet for so many otherwise intelligent and reasonable individuals. These people were convinced that by supporting the Popular Fronts, especially during the Spanish Civil War, they were opposing Nazi barbarism. The Communist International’s propaganda machine defended human rights against the abominable atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, obscuring the fact that, until 1939, most mass crimes in Europe were in fact committed by Stalinists in the USSR.⁷

Both revolutionary party-movements execrated and denounced liberalism, democracy, and parliamentarianism as degradations of true politics, which would transcend all divisions through the establishment of perfect communities (defined as classless or racially unified). Fundamentally atheistic, both Communism and Fascism organized their political objectives in discourses of alleged emancipation, operating as political religions meant to deliver the individual from the impositions of traditional morality and legality.⁸ To employ Italian political thinker Emilio Gentile’s terminology, both were forms of a sacralization of politics of an exclusive and integralist character that rejected “coexistence with other political ideologies and movements,” denied “the autonomy of the individual with respect to the collective,” prescribed “the obligatory observance of [their] commandments and participation in [their] political cult,” and sanctified “violence as a legitimate arm of the struggle against enemies, and as an instrument of regeneration.”⁹ In the universe of these political movements, evil carried the name of those who refused, rejected, or did not qualify for the illumination delivered by the infallible party gospels. In the case of left-wing totalitarianism, historian Igal Halfin provides an excellent formulation: “The apotheosis of Communist history—humanity holding hands and marching toward a classless paradise—cannot thus be disassociated from Stalin’s systematic attempt to eliminate those who reached the Marxist well but refused to drink from it.”¹⁰ Or, to turn to Nazism, for Hitler, Jews incarnated evil simply because for him they fell below the pale of humanity. They were simultaneously cowardly and omnipotent, capitalist and Communist, ostentatious and insidious, and so on. After seeing with Goebbels the so-called documentary The Eternal Jew, a piece of heinously crude propaganda, the German dictator concluded that “these are no longer human beings. They are animals. So it’s not humanitarian but a surgical task. Otherwise Europe will perish through the Jewish disease.”¹¹

Psychological and psychopathological explanations for these uniquely murderous regimes are not sufficient. Whereas Stalin and Hitler were in-controvertibly driven by paranoid exclusionary and exterminist impulses, it would be hard to consider Lenin a mentally unbalanced individual. As a matter of fact, even a staunch critic of Bolshevism like Christian existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev saw Lenin as a paradoxical personality, an antidemocratic, neo-Jacobin revolutionary, yet a humane individual, animated by a thirst for equality and even a passion for freedom. Moreover, an additional dilemma that haunts any attempt at understanding the horrors of the twentieth century lies in the difficulty of fathoming “the level of the pathological debauchery accepted, approved of, and sustained by masses of people—including highly intelligent ones—and coming to be regarded as normal and justifiable practice.”¹² Here is where the understanding of Fascism and Communism’s revolutionary passion becomes vital. It is this spirit of radical transformation and renewal that mobilized the masses who pushed forward both movements throughout their existence. Fascism and Communism were incarnations or materializations of “a revolutionary experience of standing on the edge of history and proactively changing its course, freed from the constraints of ‘normal’ time and ‘conventional’ morality.”¹³ Both were born in the wreckage of the First World War in a Europe that seemed to have entered a new era where politics had to be radically redefined toward the glorious dawn of new left or right civilizations.

In fact, the catastrophe started earlier, in the Bolshevik apocalyptic vision of an unprecedented break with all liberal values and traditions, including the pluralist ethos of international social democracy. Going beyond the established comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, historian Robert Gellately brought Lenin back into the story of totalitarian political movements as the true architect of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the real founder of the gulag system, a fervent ideologue convinced that his vanguard party (a revolutionary political invention that shattered the praxis of international social democracy) was entrusted by an almost mystically defined history to achieve its goals and make humanity content forever, no matter the human costs. And the costs were indeed appalling, defying our capacity for representation. Ideological fanaticism mixed with all-consuming resentment explain Lenin’s destructive ambitions. Lenin was not only the founder of political propaganda, the supreme priest of a new ecclesiology of the omniscient, infallible party, but also the demiurge of the concentration camp system and the apostle of universal terror. A true Bolshevik, Martin Latsis, one of the Cheka’s leaders, said in 1918, “We are not waging war on individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, we do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against the Soviet power. The first questions you ought to put are: to what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education and profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.”¹⁴

In the same vein, Hitler saw the war with the Soviet Union and Western democracies as an ideological crusade meant to totally destroy the ideologically dehumanized enemy.¹⁵ Gellately quotes the recollections of one of Hitler’s secretaries: “We will win this war, because we fight for an idea, and not for Jewish capitalism, which drives the soldiers of our enemies. Only Russia is dangerous, because Russia fights with the same fanaticism as we do for its worldview. But the good will be the victor, there is nothing else for it.”¹⁶

Bolshevism cannot be understood without admitting Lenin’s paramount role. Without Lenin, there would have been no Bolshevism. Stalin was indeed the beneficiary of a system that Lenin had imagined and developed. In the absence of the ideology developed by Lenin, these regimes would have remained traditional tyrannies.¹⁷ Indeed, as sociologist Daniel Chirot emphasized, we deal with two types of despotic regimes: tyrannies of corruption (the traditional ones) and tyrannies of certitude, based on ideological hubris.¹⁸ It was the ideological pretense, the conviction that he was fulfilling a grandiose historical mission, that made Lenin engage in his reckless attempt to radically transform society. In his footsteps, Stalin pursued the same all-transforming agenda: nature, science, and language all had to be subordinated to the sacrosanct goal. The same ideological ardor, impervious to doubt or self-questioning, motivated Hitler’s delusional visions of global race warfare.¹⁹ As Arthur Koestler demonstrated long ago, totalitarian movements disregard ethics and despise moral absolutes: “Since about the second half of the nineteenth century our ethical brakes have been more and more neglected until totalitarian dynamism made the engine run amok. We must apply the brake or we shall crash.”²⁰

In spite of its claim to transcend alienation and rehabilitate human dignity, Communism was morally sterilized, or, in the words of Steven Lukes, it suffered from moral blindness.²¹ Once it subordinated the notion of the good to the interests of the proletariat, Communism annulled the universality of moral norms. The same can be said about Fascism, with its exaltation of the primeval tribal virtues and total disregard for the common humanity of all human beings. Both assigned to the state its own morality, granting only to it the right to define the meaning and ultimate aim of human existence. The ideological state became the supreme and absolute value within the framework of an eschatological doctrine of revolution. The horrors that defined the past century were thus possible because of a “moral inversion”: “The state’s crimes [were] explicable not as crimes but as necessary precautions to prevent greater injustice.”²² Through the cult of absolute unity along the path to salvation by knowledge of history, both Communism and Fascism produced new and total social and political projects centered on purifying the body of the communities that fell prey to these ideological spells. The new men or women brought about by these movements left behind their “little ego, twitching with fear and rickets,” for they had surrendered what the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky called despairingly the “farce of individuality.”²³ Or, as a former member of the German Communist Party once declared: “A man who fought alone could never win; men must stand together and fight together and make life better for all engaged in useful work. They must struggle with every means at their disposal, shying at no lawless deed as it would further the cause, giving no quarter until the