The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: fii • ■■ * n. obviously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our polití ' '■ human artifice, the world which is the result of our common m ■ ,_. nated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man ■■.. ■( tl-, and countrysides. Deadly danger to any civilization is no lor .. '■ .*' ■ come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbariar "i,> , - , destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians thread 11 i i u.i>. for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governmer. s ■ nomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is tí' . i.i-universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians í • "■ ■- ■ *r midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, di. ,■ ».■ 'i pearances, are the conditions of savages.54 S4 This modern expulsion from humanity has much more radical coi Ihe ancient and medieval custom of outlawry. Outlawry, certainly thi ■ • fate which primitive law could inflict," placing the life of the outlawe . mercy of anyone he met, disappeared with the establishment of an effe law enforcement and was finally replaced by extradition treaties betwt ' ' It had been primarily a substitute for a police force, designed to com; ■ ■ surrender. The early Middle Ages seem to have been quite conscious of the < ■ in "civil death." Excommunication in the late Roman Empire meat.. —' death but left a person who had lost his m""1"'-u'~ all other resiw-tp c--' 302 IMPERIÁLI«-'! men of an animal species, called man. Much the same thing h* r» .. those who have lost all distinctive political qualities and have bccom ! ú : beings and nothing else. No doubt, wherever public life and iu , ^ equality are completely victorious, wherever a civiUzation succeed* ■■■ .;.'" inating or reducing to a minimum the dark background of difi'i ■ .,J. '] will end in complete petrifaction and be punished, so to speak, fir ,J,r forgotten that man is only the master, not the creator of the wojV * '*' The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to ■„,. , side the common world is that they are thrown back, in the mids . | u, |" ization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. r! _■. that tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from beiti- /i,.»' of some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer allowe I 11 r* -take in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the humai' i much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. I 4 ■ . adox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coinc L, ' *■ the instant when a person becomes a human being in general— i r profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a ■ K-which to identify and specify himself—and different in general, rep i ,pi|r; nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which. de| . „» .-expression within and action upon a common world, loses all sh.i . n The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: fir*,! . n i , obviously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our political '.k i -human artifice, the world which is the result of our common and ».■ - ,.,. nated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, w.. i wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man-m \ *.»,. and countrysides. Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likel, ■ come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians thieate- ■ destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Eu ■ -. for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a nomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a pl< 'n! universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians fron midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despi pearances, are the conditions of savages.54 54 This modern expulsion from humanity has much more radical conseqi the ancient and medieval custom of outlawry. Outlawry, certainly the "n fate which primitive law could inflict," placing the life of the outlawed pe mercy of anyone he met, disappeared with the establishment oř an effectivi law enforcement and was finally replaced by extradition treaties between I It had been primarily a substitute for a police force, designed to compel c surrender. The early Middle Ages seem to have been quite conscious of the dang in "civil death." Excommunication in the late Roman Empire meant e death but left a person who had lost his membership in the church full all other respects. Ecclesiastical and civil death became identical only in vingian era, and there excommunication "in general practice [was] limitec rary withdrawal or suspension of the rights of membership which might bt See the articles "Outlawry" and "Excommunication" in the Encyclopedia Sciences. Also the article "Friedlosigkeit" in the Schweizer Lexikon. PART THREE Normal men do not know that everything is possible. DAVID ROUSSET ten : A Classless Society The Masses \iing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general Ld of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with ey can be replaced. What Stalin accomplished laboriously over jrs through bitter factional struggles and vast concessions at least ime of his predecessor—namely, to legitimate himself as Lenin's heir—Stalin's successors attempted to do without concessions to of their predecessor, even though Stalin had thirty years' time and inipulate a propaganda apparatus, unknown in Lenin's day, to ize his name. The same is true for Hitler, who during his lifetime a fascination to which allegedly no one was immune,1 and who nagic spell" that Hitler cast over his listeners has been acknowledged many ;rly by the publishers of Hitlers Tischgespräche, Bonn, 1951 (Hitler's Table lerican edition, New York, 1953; quotations from the original German "his fascination—-"the strange magnetism that radiated from Hitler in such ng manner"-—rested indeed "on the fanatical belief of this man in himself" on by Gerhard Ritter, p. 14), on his pseudo-authoritative judgments about under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions—whether they dealt with jl effects of smoking or with Napoleon's policies—could always be fitted -encompassing ideology. ion is a social phenomenon, and the fascination Hitler exercised over his it must be understood in terms of the particular company he kept. Society prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a osing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern h its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, neone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many las been demonstrably wrong. Hitler, who knew the modern chaos of om first-hand experience, discovered that the helpless seesawing between inions and "the conviction . . . that everything is balderdash" (p. 281) be avoided by adhering to one of the many current opinions with "unbend-:ncy." The hair-raising arbitrariness of such fanaticism holds great fascina-ciety because for the duration of the social gathering it is freed from the ipinions that it constantly generates. This "gift" of fascination, however, icial relevance; it is so prominent in the Tischgespräche because here Hitler game of society and was not speaking to his own kind but to the generals irmacht, all of whom more or less belonged to "society." To believe that :cesses were based on his "powers of fascination" is altogether erroneous; qualities alone he would have never advanced beyond the role of a promi-in the salons. 3UÖ TOTAUTARlAHisy after his defeat and death is today so thoroughly forgotten that he < plays any further role even among the neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi gri 'u!^ postwar Germany. This impermanence no doubt has something to , '* "F _the proverbial fickleness^ of the masses and the fame that rests 01 i^'" more likely, it can be tracedto the perpetual-motion mania of tots i. ." movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep ' ■* and set everything around them in motion. Therefore, in a certain ,'.!"" this very impermanence is a rather flattering testimonial to the dead I *i" * insofar as they succeeded in contaminating their subjects with thí r ' fically totalitarian virus; for if there is such a thing as a totalitär! i»" sonality or mentality, this extraordinary adaptability and absence , >| tinuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics. Hence it migh- ■ r mistake to assume that the inconstancy and forgetfulness of the n signify that they are cured of the totalitarian delusion, which is occa^. i ■■ identified with the Hitler or Stalin cult; the opposite might well be tir- It would be a still more serious mistake to forget, because of ť permanence, that thetotalitarian jregimes, solong as they are in pew , Jhe_.totaUtarian..leaders) so long as theyareijdiye,!_"command_and re ■ i 4LRiass__suppprt" up to the end.2 Hitler's rise to power was legal in ti. i", \ majority rule3 and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the '. \ ship of large populations, survived many interior and exterior crij ^braved the numerous dangers of relentless intra-party struggles if tl . , 'not had the confidence of the masses. Neither the Moscow trials nor t liquidation of the Röhm faction would have been possible if these mass had not supported Stalin and Hitler. The widespread belief thai Hitler w simply an agent of German industrialists and that Stalin was victorious" the succession struggle after Lenin's death only through a sinister conspirai are both legends which can be refuted by many facts but above all byTfis" leaders' indisputable popularity.4 Nor can their popularity be attributed to the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and"stupidity, 2 See the illuminating remarks of Carlton J. H. Hayes on "The Novelty of Totalitarianism in the History of Western Civilization," in Symposium on the Totalitarian State, 1939. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1940 Vol. LXXXII. a This was indeed "the first large revolution in history that was carried out by applying the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing power"' (Hans Frank, Recht und Verwaltung, 1939, p. 8). 4 The best study of Hitler and his career is the new Hitler biography by Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, London, 1952. In the English tradition of political biographies it makes meticulous use of all available source material and gives a comprehensive picture of the contemporary political background. By this publication the excellent books of Konrad Heiden—primarily Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, Boston, 1944—have been superseded in their details although they remain important for the general interpretation of events. For Stalin's career, Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York, 1939, is still a standard work. Iiuac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, New York and London, 1949, is indispensable for its rich documentary material and great insight into the internal struggle^ of ihä Bolshevik party; it suffers from an interpretation which likens Stalin to—Ciomwell, Napoleon, and Robespierre. Ifiy v CLASSLESS SOCIETY ^'' '"' !' :y-£~'. •■ ^qj >. propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accom-totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and M.be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their l5t crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. The Nazis "were con-„ced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,"5 Bol-evjíí assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize dináry moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propa-flda, and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value eViI deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of ;re self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in litics. The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It fSIways been true that the mob will greet "deeds of violence with the miring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever."« The disturbing itor in the success of totalitarianism is rather the true selflessness of its fierents: it may be understandable that a Nazi or Bolshevik will not be" !ken in his conviction by crimes against people who do not belong to . movement or are even hostile to it; but the amazing fact is that neither fie likely to waver when the monster begins "to devour its owji chUdren lootjsyenTffTiěběcomes ajvičtimöf persecution himsehO he isľframed i condemned, if he is purged from .ÉeJpartylandrsentlto a forced-labor a concentration camp. On the contrary, to the wonder of the whole jIEéTworldJie may even be willing tohelp in his own prosecution and me his own death sentence if only his status as a "member of the movent is not touched.7 It would be naive to consider this stubbornness of [viction which outlives all actual experiences and cancels all immediate „ -interest a simple expression of fervent idealism. Idealism, foolish or heroic, always springs from some individual decision and conviction and is subject to experience and argument8 The fanaticism of totalitarian move- " Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy, London, 1940, p. 231. '"Quoted from the German edition of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion " Die Zionistischen Protokolle mit einem Vor- und Nachwort von Theodor Fritsch ' 1924 p. 29. ' ' TThis, to be sure, is a specialty of the Russian brand of totalitarianism. It is interring to note that in the early trial of foreign engineers in the Soviet Union Com-rrnriit sympathies were already used as an argument for self-accusation: "All the lime the authorities insisted on my admitting having committed acts of sabotage I had never done. I refused. I was told: 'If you are in favour of the Soviet Government as }ou pretend you are, prove it by your actions; the Government needs your con-region.'" Reported by Anton Ciiiga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p 153 \ theoretical justification for this behavior was given by Trotsky "We'can'only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in ;ho right. The English have a saying, 'My country, right or wrong' We have mučil better historical justification in saying whether it is right or wrong' in certain ■individual concrete cases, it is my party" (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 361) On the other hand, the Red Army officers who did not'belong to the movement had io be tried behind closed doors. _ - The Nazi author Andreas Pfenning explicitly rejects the notion that the SA were ng'ilmg for an "ideal" or were prompted by an "idealistic exnerienre " Th«v «h«.-,. = 308 TOTALITARIAN! ■ j merits, contrary to all forms of idealism, breaks down the moment i \ ■ ment leaves its fanaticized followers in the lurch, killing in then "..,'""" maining conviction that might have survived the collapse of the 11, * "l" itself.9 But within the organizational framework of the movemeni ', ' ^ as it holds together, the fanaticized members can„be..reached.^ n "J1 „experience,nor argument;, identification.withi the movement and i . i'" *" ioxmism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience "ľ"r". it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death. * ' The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing mass ■ not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states ~T! citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling"oi"publie afi :'-"' like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. While all political groups ■"■* pend upon proportionate strength, the totalitarian movements depem' , ■ the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes ^.'! impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries -,iii "relatively small populations.10 After the first World War, a deeply ]■ democratic, prodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian'm ■„'. ■ ments swept Europe; Fascist movements spread from Italy to near]. '*■ , Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech part of CzechosloC -. ; was one of the notable exceptions); yet even Mussolini, who was so :. i> ; of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-ftc.-.-. ■ ■ totalitarian regime11 and contented himself with dictatorship and onc-j-r- experience came into existence in the course of the struggle." "Gemeinschaft Staatswissenschaft," in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschap, Band 9h. !■, lation quoted from Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, New York and London, \ p. 192. From the extensive literature issued in pamphlet form by the main imlôi tion center (Hauptamt-Schulungsamt) of the SS, it is quite evident that the "idealism" has been studiously avoided. Not idealism was demanded of SS men but "utter logical consistency in all questions of ideology and the ruthless pursi. .: the political struggle" (Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, 1941, p. 99). 9 In this respect postwar Germany offers many illuminating examples. It ws tonishing enough that American Negro troops were by no means received with hoi- ■ in spite of the massive racial indoctrination undertaken by the Nazis. Bui c^^sSĚÍ5sJii]íijg J*"" TOiruŠTičlie^'lgeečOieloreTrie Twentieth-Part^CÄÖSeis^hatJi^ t. ^ qríy^n^i^ri7and_that^^sJHitler.f* "*■' "'*'' The point is that in all these smaller European countries nontotaljr dictatorships were preceded by totalitarian movements, so that it anr '"n that totalitarianism was too ambitious an aim, that although it had ■ "P"' well enough to organize the masses until the movement seized power" Í" absolute size of the country then forced the would-be totalitarian rul - ) masses into the more familiar patterns of class or party dictatorship. * i truth is that these countries simply did not control enough human m i -r. i to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in popular V " Without much hope for the conquest of more heavily populated terri'. -' the tyrants in these small countries were forced into a certain old-fuslik n • moderation lest they lose whatever people they had to rule. This i- '" why Nazism, up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over E m • lagged so far behind its Russian counterpart in consistency and ruthle; ;,„ * even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for tlu f.h development of this newest form of government. Only if Germany had won the war would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership an{i the sacrifices this would have entailed not only for the "inferior races'' but for the Germans themselves can be gleaned and evaluated from the Jesacy of Hitler's plans.10 In any event it was only during the war, after the conquests 14 We now know that Stalin was warned repeatedly of the imminent attack of Hitler on the Soviet Union. Even when the Soviet military attache in Berlin informed him of the day of the Nazi attack, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would violate the treaty. (See Khrushchev's "Speech on Stalin," text released by the Stale Department, New York Times, June 5, 1956.) '■'The following information reported by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, seems to be an outstanding illustration: "According to W. Krivitsky, whose excellent confidential source of information is the GPU: 'Instead of the 171 million inhabitants calculated for 1937, only 145 million were found; thus nearly 30 million people in the USSR arc missing.'" And this, it should be kept in mind, occurred after the dekulakizalion of the early thirties which had cost an estimated 8 million human lives. See Communism in Action. U. S. Government, Washington, 1946, p. 140. 18 A large part of these plans, based on the original documents, can be found in Léon Poliakov's Bréviaire de la Haine, Paris, 1951, chapter 8 (American edition under the title Harvest of Hate, Syracuse, 1954; we quote from the original 1 rench edition), but only insofar as they referred to the extermination of non-Germanic peoples, above all those of Slavic origin. That the Nazi engine of destruction would not have stopped even before the German people is evident from a Reich health bill drafted by Hitler himself. Here he proposes to "isolate" from the rest of the population all families with cases of heart or lung ailments among them, their physical liquidation being of course the next step in this program. This as well as several other interesting projects for a victorious postwar Germany are contained in a circular letter to the district leaders (Kreisleiter) of Hesse-Nassau in the form of a report on a discussion at the Fuehrer's headquarters concerning "measures that before . . . and after victorious termination of the war" should be adopted. See the collection of documents in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, 1946, et seq., Vol. VI], p. 175. In the same context belongs the planned enactment of an "over-all alien legislation," by CLASSLESS SOCIETY 311 . gast furnished large masses of people and made the extermination possible, that Germany was able to establish a truly totalitarian rule. " nversetyj the chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the ' L of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there imost inexhaustible material to feed the power-accumulating and man- " rrovíflg machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass "\'s typical feeling of superfiuousness—an entirely new phenomenon in 0oe the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth ne last 150 years—has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for value of human life.) Moderation or less murderous methods of rule hardly attributable to the governments' fear of popular rebellion; de- '" ,u|ation in their own country was a much more serious threat. Only ,re great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous ilts of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian rement, at all possible. 'otalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for r^so^nörrä^ptrier have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they jack -that specific^ class articulateness which Js expressed^ iri_delermiried, ljBiitedi-^od^pbtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of shee_r_numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on cninmon interest, into political parties or municipal governments or "pro: iessipnal organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every coun-trv and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls. It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 193017 that they recruiter their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom alii other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of means of which the "institutional authority" of the police—namely, to ship persons üii'-dcent of any offenses to concentration camps—-was to be legalized and expanded. iSľu Paul Werner, SS-Standartenführer, in Deutsches Jugendrecht, Heft 4, 1944.) hi connection with this "negative population policy," which in its aim at extermina-!ion decidedly matches the Bolshevist party purges, it is important to remember that "in this process of selection there can never be a standstill" (Himmler, "Die Schutzmittel," in Grundlagen, Aufbau und Wirtschaftsordnung des nationalsozialistischen Nantes, No. 7b). "The struggle of the Fuehrer and his party was a hitherto unattained section. - . . This selection and this struggle were ostensibly accomplished on January 30. 1933. . . . The Fuehrer and his old guard knew that the real struggle had just bjun" (Robert Ley, Der Weg zur Ordensburg, o.D. Verlag der Deutschen Arbeitsfront. "Not available for sale")- '"F. Borkenau describes the situation correctly: "The Communists had only very n-.o.lest successes when they tried to win iniluence among the masses of the working -l.!*s; their mass basis, therefore, if they had it at all, moved more and more away i'wn the proletariat" ("Die neue Komintern," in Der Monat, Berlin, 1949, Heft 4). 312 TOTALITARIANISM people who never before had appeared on the political scene. Th mitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propa and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these ments not only placed themselves outside and against the party sys a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to opposing arguments ahd"čohsístěntly preferred methods which en death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than cow They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep r social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individu therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a short« only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other j it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason equally hostile to all parties. The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of Hum. :'';■; pean nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that [Jj tJh.e_peo.p_le initsmajority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own orsomebqdy else's party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a_..democracy could, function according to rules ^ „which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic to illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically __indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and consii- __luted no.more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life _ of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions. It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and ..abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devil* ish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the classjys-tem, the only, social and political stratification of the European nation-states, \ CLASSLESS SOCIETY JJJ ■tainly was "one ofthe most dramatic events ..in. recent. German Mstoiy."1,8 a as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratifica-n in Russia's immense rural population (this "great flaccid body destitute political education^ almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling fion"1!1) was t0 tne Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky ygflirnent. Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers plicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with . end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while ruts in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolu-aary changes in Asia may take. Practically speaking, it will make little ference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or ,[^yismr organize the masses in the ~na^ pretend .,, follow..theJaws_of life and nature or of dialectics and economics. Indifference to public affairs^ neutralityonpolitical issues, are in them- \ ... -lyes no suffidentjcause for the rise of totalitarian movements. The_com-. -/ oetítl__ and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy i aI1d even'TioštiffiO*^ anc* not even primarily, Jxt \ "JíJě"socialjstrata which were exploited and excluded from active participation in _the__rule of the countr^jTOtj^^ long .J «sriod of false modesty, when the bourgeoisie .was. content with being the doíúnatingclass in society without aspiring to political rule, which it gladly left to the aristocracy, was followed by the imperialist era, during which the bourgeoisie grew increasingly hostile to existing national institutions and lic^an to claim and to organize itself for the exercise of political power. Both the early apathy and the later demand_for monopolistic dictatorial ^ dijreoiion of the nation'sforeignaffairs häcJ-their-XOOjtsJaawayjmd.philoso.-.. i ..... phy of life so.insistently and. exclusively centered on the individual's sue- y í cess or failure in ruthless competition thj^a.dtizen'_s_ i ties couldj3nly_.be .felt, to be, a need]ess__ilrai_n_on his limited time Jtnd ,j energy. These bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dic-latorship in which a "strong man" takes upon himself the troublesome responsibility for the conduct of public affairs; they are a positive hindrance to totalitarian ...movements which can tolerate bourgeois Jndiyidualism no '^ :p more thanany_jQther. kind .of individualism. The apathetic sections of a "-' * bourgeois-dominated society, no matter how unwilling they may be to assume the responsibilities of citizens, keep their personalities intact if only because without them they could hardly expect to survive the competitive struggle for life. The decisive differences between nineteenth-century mob organizations and twentieth-century mass movements are difficult to perceive because the modern totalitarian leaders do not differ much in psychology and mentality from the earlier mob leaders, whose moral standards and political devices so closely resembled those of the bourgeoisie. Yet, insofar as individualism William Ebenstem, The Nazi State, New York, 1943, p. 247. 314 TOTALITARIANISM characterized the bourgeoisie's as well as the mob's attitude to lif, L totalitarian movements can rightly claim that they were ihe first ' - i" antibourgeois parties; none of their nineteenth-century predecessors n ■ ■ the Society of the 10th of December which helped Louis Napoleon ■''"' power, the butcher brigades of the Dreyfus Affair, the Black Hundn \'!| the Russian pogroms, nor the pan-movements, ever involved ihcir mei.'h ' to the point of complete loss of individual claims and ambition, or hat" "f realized that an organization could succeed in extinguishing indiv'■ identity permanently and not just for the moment of collective heroic ;vi' ' The relationship between the bourgeois-dominated class sociely ar ' ■<■ masses which emerged from its breakdown is not the same as the K ship between the bourgeoisie and the mob which was a by-product ol talist production. The masses share with the mob only one charactt namely, that both stand outside all social ramifications and normal pi representation. The masses do not inherit, as the mob does—albei perverted form—the standards and attitudes of the dominating das reflect and somehow pervert the standards and attitudes toward affairs of all classes. The standards of the mass man were dclcrmint only and not even primarily by the specific class to which lie had belonged, but rather by all-pervasive influences and convictions whiel tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike. Membership in a class, although looser and never as inevitably deter by social origin as in the orders and estates of feudal society, was ger by birth, and only extraordinary gifts or luck could change it. Social was decisive for the individual's participation in politics, and except in of national emergency when he was supposed to act only as íl na regardless of his class or party membership, he never was direct!} fronted with public affairs or felt directly responsible for their conduc rise of a class to greater importance in the community was always a panied by the education and training of a certain number of its me for politics as a job, for paid (or, if they could afford it, unpaid) b in the government and representation of the class in Parliament. Th majority of people remained outside all party or other political organization was not important to anyone, and no truer for one particular class than another. In other words, membership in a class, its limited group obligations and traditional attitudes toward government, prevented the growth of a citizenry that felt individually and personally responsible tor the rule of the country. This apolitical character of the nation-state's populations came to light only when the class system broke down and carried with it the whole fabric of visible and invisible threads which bound the people to the body politic. The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown of the party system, chiefly because these parties, being inLerest parties, could no longer represent class interests. Their continuance was of some importance to the members of former classes who hoped against hope to regain their old social status and who stuck together not because they had A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 575 ,,jrnofl interests any longer but because they hoped to restore them. The ". ties, consequently, became more and more psychological and ideological 1 heir propaganda, more and more apologetic and nostalgic in their polit-approach. They had lost, moreover, without being aware of it, those tral supporters who had never been interested in politics because they \ that parties existed to take care of their interests. So that the first fi of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the .jrtion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from :< . younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the 1 ŕ?í«tfzed masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever j _: saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition, i 'iic fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities I . ind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious I viduals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension ! „a. the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the : most respected, articulate and representative members of the community I ^rc fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as thev were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for [he' birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed porker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the ! form of a centrist or rightist party, and former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and unemployment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they , exited in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have supported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second World War. in this atmosphere of the breakdown of class society the psychology of the European mass man developed. The fact that with monotonous but abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individuals did not prevent their judging themselves in terms of individual failure or the world in terms of specific injustice. This self-centered bitterness, however, although repeated again and again in individual isolation, was not a common tond despite its tendency to extinguish individual differences, because it was ba-.ed on no common interest, economic or social or political. Self-cen-iercdness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation. Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the expression of individual idealism but a mass phenomenon. The old adage that the poor and oppressed have nothing to lose but their chains no longer applied to the mass men, for they lost much more than the chains of misery when they lost interest in their own well-being: the source of all the worries and cares which make human life troublesome and anguished was gone. Compared 316 TOTALITARIAN] -■; with their nonmaterialism, a Christian monk looks like a man h in worldly affairs. Himmler, who knew so well the mentality of th 'i"'**' he organized, described not only his SS-men, but the large strata ft >,, "".r "* he recruited them, when he said they were not interested in ,.'.*" problems" but only "in ideological questions of importance fo if ""*'■ -' and centuries, so that the man . . . knows he is working for a . ľ-V""'* which occurs but once in 2,000 years."20 The gigantic massing of n. ,.,■ V" produced a mentality which, like Cecil Rhodes some forty yea . h .-', thought in continents and felt in centuries. " *■ Eminent European scholars and statesmen had predicted, from I. nineteenth century onward, the rise of the mass man and the co .h-i ,r" mass age. A whole literature on mass behavior and mass psych .>. \. demonstrated and popularized the wisdom, so familiar to the an. _n \ the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob ■■!,.. .," tyranny. They had prepared certain politically conscious and ovei.- :.*„,,\ sections of the Western educated world for the emergence of deinasoru for gullibility, superstition, and brutality. Yet, while all these prediction p a sense came true, they lost much of their significance in view of *.:„■-unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-inter.-l-the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other per-.--.! catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notioi . .. guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious ru]_- f common sense. The masses, contrary to prediction, did not result from growing cqi of condition, from the spread of general education and its inevitable l< ■-.--ing of standards and popularization of content. (America, the classical r-. of equality of condition and of general education with all its shortcon ir. knows less of the modern psychology of masses than perhaps any ■ .■ country in the world.) It soon became apparent that highly cultured powere particularly attracted to mass movements and that, generally, highly differentiated individualism and sophistication did not prevent, indeed sometimes encouraged, the self-abandonment into the mass for which mass movements provided. Since the obvious fact that individualization and cultivation do not prevent the formation of mass attitudes was so unexpected, it has frequently been blamed upon the morbidity or nihilism of the modern intelligentsia, upon a supposedly typical intellectual self-hatred, upon the spirit's "hostility to life" and antagonism to vitality. Yet, the much-slandered intellectuals were only the most illustrative example and the most articulate spokesmen for a much more general phenomenon. Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movements 20 Heinrich Himmler's speech on "Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police," published in National-politischer Lehrgang der Wehrmacht vom 15-23. Januar 1937. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. U. S. Government, Washington, 1946, IV, 616 ff. 21 Gustave Lebon, La Psychologie des Foules, 1895, mentions the peculiar selflessness of the masses. See chapter ii. paragraph 5. 4 A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 317 ~h much more easily and earlier than they did the sociable, nonin-dualistic members of the traditional parties, attracted the completely ' reanized, the typical "nonjoiners" who for individualistic reasons al-. s had refused to recognize social links or obligations. he trutn *s tnat tne masses §rew out °f tne fragments of a highly atom-, society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the ■ yidual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The I characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but ," solation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-"en society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with onalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helpless of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent i jnalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts ■ purposes for purely demagogic reasons.22 I Neither tribal nationalism nor rebellious nihilism is characteristic of or * j ideologically appropriate to the masses as they were to the mob. But the ! most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather ,: :' i^n from the masses.33 Hitler's biography reads like a textbook example in • this respect, and the point about Stalin is that he comes from the conspira-! ,orV apparatus of the Bolshevik party with its specific mixture of outcasts ! and revolutionaries. Hitler's early party, almost exclusively composed of i misfite» failures, and adventurers, indeed represented the "armed bo- • hemians"2i who were only the reverse side of bourgeois society and whom, consequently, the German bourgeoisie should have been able to use suc- ■ cessfully for its own purposes. Actually, the bourgeoisie was as much í taken in by the Nazis as was the Röhm-Schleicher faction in the Reichs-j wehr, which also thought that Hitler, whom they had used as a stool- • pigeon, or the SA, which they had used for militaristic propaganda and paramilitary training, would act as their agents and help in the establishment of a military dictatorship.23 Both considered the Nazi movement in JJ The founders of the Nazi party referred to it occasionally even before Hitler too}, over as a "party of the Left." An incident which occurred after the parliamentary ulcľiions of 1932 is also interesting: "Gregor Strasser bitterly pointed out to his Lewder that before the elections the National Socialists in the Reichstag might have formed a majority with the Center; now this possibility was ended, the two parties utře less than half of parliament; . . . But with the Communists they still had a niajoiity, Hitler replied; no one can govern against us" (Heiden, op. cit., pp. 94 and -95. respectively). :< Compare Cariton J. H. Hayes, op. cit., who does not differentiate between the mot; and the masses, thinks that totalitarian dictators "have come from the masses -mIici than from the classes." "This is the central theory of K. Heiden, whose analyses of the Nazi movement Lre Mill outstanding. "From the wreckage of dead classes arises the new class of intellectuals, and at the head march the most ruthless, those with the least to lose, luna* the strongest: the armed bohemians, to whom war is home and civil war faiheiland" (op. cit., p. 100). ■"The plot between Reichswehr General Schleicher and Rohm, the chief of the V\. consisted of a plan to bring all paramilitary formations under the military ( authority of the Reichswehr, which at once would have added millions to the German 318 TOTALITARIANISM their own terms, in terms of the political philosophy of the mob overlooked the independent, spontaneous support given the nev leaders by masses as well as the mob leaders' genuine talents for c new forms of organization. The mob as leader of these masses \ longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else except the i That totalitarian movements depended less on the structureless! a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized a dividualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism an shevism which began in their respective countries under very d ,A circumstances. To change Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship iní / totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificially that atomi/ed ; which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historic cumstances. The October Revolution's amazingly easy victory occurred in a t where a despotic and centralized bureaucracy governed a structurclcs population which neither the remnants of the rural feudal orders r._ weak, nascent urban capitalist classes had organized. When Lenin said that nowhere in the world would it have been so easy to win power and so difficult to keep it, he was aware not only of the weakness of the Rus-sian working class, but of anarchic social conditions in general, which favored sudden changes. Without the instincts of a mass leader—he was no orator and had a passion for public admission and analysis of his own errors, which is against the rules of even ordinary demagogy—Lenin seized at once upon all the possible differentiations, social, national, professional that might bring some structure into the population, and he seemed convinced that in such stratification lay the salvation of the revolution. He legalized the anarchic expropriation of the landowners by the rural masses and established thereby for the first and probably last time in Russia that emancipated peasant class which, since the French Revolution, had been army. This, of course, would inevitably have led to a military dictatorship. In June. 1934, Hitler liquidated Röhm and Schleicher. The initial negotiations were started with the full knowledge of Hitler who used Röhm's connections with the Reichswehr to deceive German military circles about his real intentions. In April, 1932. Róhm testified in one of Hitler's lawsuits that the SA's military status had the full understanding of the Reichswehr. (For documentary evidence on the Röhm-Schleicher plan, see Nazi Conspiracy, V, 456 if. See also Heiden, op. cit., p. 450.) Röhm himself proudly reports his negotiations with Schleicher, which according to him were started in [931, Schleicher had promised to put the SA under the command of Reichswehr officers in case of an emergency. (See Die Memoiren des Stabschefs Röhm, Saarbrücken, 1934, p. 170.) The militaristic character of the SA, shaped by Röhm and constantly fought by Hitler, continued to determine its vocabulary even after the liquidation of the Röhm faction. Contrary to the SS, the members of the SA always insisted on being the "representatives of Germany's military will," and for them Hie Third Reich was a "military community [supported by] two pillars: Party and WelumuchE" (see Handbuch der SA, Berlin, 1939, and Victor Lutze, "Die Sturmabtei hi n ticn." in Grundlagen, Aufbau und Wirtschaftsordnung des nationalsozialistischen Staates, No. 7a). 26 Röhm's autobiography especially is a veritable classic in this kind oľ literature. fs A CLASSLESS SOCIETV 319 firmest supporter of the Western nation-states. He tried to strengthen ■ working class by encouraging independent trade unions. He tolerated ■ timid appearance of a new middle class which resulted from the NEP icy after the end of the civil war. He introduced further distinguishing ■ nires by organizing, and sometimes inventing, as many nationalities as «sible, furthering national consciousness and awareness of historical and liural differences even among the most primitive tribes in the Soviet '. -lion. R seems clear that in these purely practical political matters Lenin ovved his great instincts for statesmanship rather than his Marxist con-„ ions; his policy, at any rate, proves that he was more frightened by the ■ e nee of social and other structure than by the possible development of rtrifugal tendencies in the newly emancipated nationalities or even by growth of a new bourgeoisie out of the newly established middle and sant classes. There is no doubt that Lenin suffered his greatest defeat ." ;n, with the outbreak of the civil war, the supreme power that he orig-\\y planned to concentrate in the Soviets definitely passed into the hands Lhe party bureaucracy; but even this development, tragic as it was for tin: course of the revolution, would not necessarily have led to totalitarianism. A one-party dictatorship added only one more class to the already developing social stratification of the country, i.e., bureaucracy, which, according to socialist critics of the revolution, "possessed the State as private property" (Marx).2T At the moment of Lenin's death the roads were qtill open. The formation of workers, peasants, and middle classes need not necessarily have led to the class struggle which had been characteristic of European capitalism. Agriculture could still be developed on a collective, co-operative, or private basis, and the national economy was still free to follow a socialist, state-capitalist, or a free-enterprise pattern. None of í ihe-e alternatives would have automatically destroyed the new structure of the country. All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin's way when he began to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an itemized and structureless mass, he had first to liquidate the remnants of power in the Soviets which, as the chief organ of national representation, still played a certain role and prevented absolute rule by the party hierarchy. - it is well known that the anti-Stalinist splinter groups have based their criticism of ilie development of the Soviet Union on this Marxist formulation, and have Kluiily never outgrown it. The repeated "purges" of Soviet bureaucracy, which were u:ii.imount to a liquidation of bureaucracy as a class, have never prevented them from seeing in it the dominating and ruling class of the Soviet Union. The following ii ihs estimate of Rakovsky, writing in 1930 from his exile in Siberia: "Under our 4Cí has formed and is being formed a great class of directors which has its internal ■■-^divisions and which increases through calculated co-option and direct or indirect ruminations. . . . The element which unites this original class is a form, also original, o: private property, to wit, the State power" (quoted from Souvarine, op. cit., p. 564). llii- analysis is indeed quite accurate for the development of the pre-Stalinist era. l:u: the development of the relationship between party and Soviets, which is of .."isive importance for the course of the October revolution, see I. Deutscher, The ľ'orhet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, 1954. 320 TOTALITARIANISM Therefore he first undermined the national Soviets through the int*,ii tion of Bolshevik cells from which alone the higher functionaries ■ "™ť" central committees were appointed.28 By 1930, the last traces of jnr,lilS communal institutions had disappeared and had been replaced by a ii-'-'í' centralized party bureaucracy whose tendencies toward Russification a'!'' not too different from those of the Czarist regime, except that tĽ r^ bureaucrats were no longer afraid of literacy. * '*"* The Bolshevik government then proceeded to the liquidation of j ■■, and started, for ideological and propaganda reasons, with the pron-sľ^ owning classes, the new middle class in the cities, and the peasants iix'*'. country. Because of the combination of numbers and property, the pp.! I!.ť up to then had been potentially the most powerful class in the Union: i1 -liquidation, consequently, was more thorough and more cruel than i h. i" r any other group and was carried through by artificial famine and de!\w. tion under the pretext of expropriation of the kulaks and collectivi/.iim'," The liquidation of the middle and peasant classes was completed in ["■ ! early thirties; those who were not among the many millions of de vi ľ) the millions of deported slave laborers had learned "who is master hore" had realized that their lives and the lives of their families dependi\i n,,> upon their fellow-citizens but exclusively on the whims of the goveir.n-jn-which they faced in complete loneliness without any help whatsoevci fn.. the group to which they happened to belong. The exact moment ■■!-' collectivization produced a new peasantry bound by common iniĽu»:" which owing to its numerical and economic key position in the co.ntir.\ economy again presented a potential danger to totalitarian rule, , mr" a be determined either from statistics or documentary sources. But fot t! ■ ...> who know how to read totalitarian "source material" this moment nad come two years before Stalin died, when he proposed to dissolve the collectives and transform them into larger units. He did not live to carry out this plan; this time the sacrifices would have been still greater and the chaotic consequences for the total economy still more catastrophic than the liquidation of the first peasant class, but there is no reason to doubt that he might have succeeded; there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered. The next class to be liquidated as a group were the workers. As a class they were much weaker and offered much less resistance than the peasants because their spontaneous expropriation of factory owners during the revolution, unlike the peasants' expropriation of landowners, had been frus- 28 Jn 1927, 90 per cent of the village Soviets and 75 per cent of their chairmen were non-party members; the executive committees of the counties were made up of SO per cent party members and 50 per cent non-party members, while in the Central Committee 75 per cent of the delegates were party members. See the article on "UoKhevism" by Maurice Dodd in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. How the party members of the Soviets, by voting "in conformity with the instructions they received from the permanent officials of the Party," destroyed the Soviet system from within is described in detail in A. Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, London, 1934, chapter vi. \ CLASSLESS SOCIETY 321 ted at once by the government which confiscated the factories as state . perty under the pretext that the state belonged to the proletariat in any ". >nt. The Stakhanov system, adopted in the early thirties, broke up all "idarity and class consciousness among the workers, first by the ferocious '.^petition and second by the temporary solidification of a Stakhanovite * ;tocracy whose social distance from the ordinary worker naturally was : ■■ more acutely than the distance between the workers and the manage- - nt- This process was completed in 1938 with the introduction of the ■"■or book which transformed the whole Russian worker class officially -o a gigant'c. forced-labor force. On top of these measures came the liquidation of that bureaucracy which j helped to carry out the previous liquidation measures. It took Stalin iut two years, from 1936 to 1938, to rid himself of the whole adminis-.tive and military aristocracy of the Soviet society; nearly all offices, ■'jtories, economic and cultural bodies, government, party, and military rcaus came into new hands, when "nearly half the administrative per- - -nnel. party and nonparty, had been swept out," and more than 50 per ,-nt of all party members and "at least eight million more" were liqui-" :ed.-;' Again the introduction of an interior passport, on which all de- rtures from one city to another have to be registered and authorized, . --nplcted the destruction of the party bureaucracy as a class. As for its -idicai status, the bureaucracy along with the party functionaries was ■■■ft- on the same level with the workers; it, too, had now become a part i the vast multitude of Russian forced laborers and its status as a privi-■„-.cd class in Soviet society was a thing of the past. And since this general urge ended with the liquidation of the highest police officials—the same ujio had organized the general purge in the first place—not even the cadres of the GPU which had carried out the terror could any longer delude themselves that as a group they represented anything at all, let alone power. None of these immense sacrifices in human life was motivated by a raison ď etat in the old sense of the term. None of the liquidated social strata was hostile to the regime or likely to become hostile in the foreseeable future. Active organized opposition had ceased to exist by 1930 when Stalin, in his speech to the Sixteenth Party Congress, outlawed the rightist and leftist deviations inside the Party, and even these feeble oppositions had hardly been able to base themselves on any of the existing classes.30 -'"Ihese figures are taken from Victor Kravchenko's Book / Chose Freedom: The Fmunal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946, pp. 278 and 303. "lili*» i-, of course a highly questionable source. But since in the case of Soviet Russia v,e basically have nothing but questionable sources to resort to—meaning that we have to rely altogether on news stories, reports and evaluations of one kind or another— nil we can do is use whatever information at least appears to have a high degree of probability. Some historians seem to think that the opposite method—namely, to use exclusively whatever material is furnished by the Russian government—is more reliable, but this is the not the case. It is precisely the official material that is nothing »:it propaganda. :,"Sialin's Report to the Sixteenth Congress denounced the devations as the "re- 322 TOTALITARlANlSf Dictatorial terror—distinguished from totalitarian terror insofa threatens only authentic opponents but not harmless citizens withoi ical opinions—had been grim enough to suffocate all political life, clandestine, even before Lenin's death. Intervention from abroad, Vi i might ally itself with one of the dissatisfied sections in the population no longer a danger when, by 1930, the Soviet regime had been reeogn / i by a majority of governments and concluded commercial and other in national agreements with many countries. (Nor did Stalin's governr-^" eliminate such a possibility as far as the people themselves were «..V cerned: we know now that Hitler, if he had been an ordinary concur.i and not a rival totalitarian ruler, might have had an extraordinary ch ■■. to win for his cause at least the people of the Ukraine.) If the liquidation of classes made no political sense, it was positively o astrous for the Soviet economy. The consequences of the artificial far in-in 1933 were felt for years throughout the country; the introduction of i'i* Stakhanov system in 1935, with its arbitrary speed-up of individual ou: ■■] and its complete disregard of the necessities for teamwork in indu^rs-' production, resulted in a "chaotic imbalance" of the young industry.31 ji ! liquidation of the bureaucracy, that is, of the class of factory managers nj engineers, finally deprived industrial enterprises of what little experii.:^; and know-how the new Russian technical intelligentsia had been abL- -.i acquire. Equality of condition among their subjects has been one of the foreu.ix concerns of despotisms and tyrannies since ancient times, yet such eq.1 ■:. ization is not sufficient for totalitarian rule because it leaves more or k~. intact certain nonpolitical communal bonds between the subjects, sucl -family ties and common cultural interests. If totalitarianism takes its ■ ■;: claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has "to finish once i ■ for all with the neutrality of chess," that is, with the autonomous exisli \. of any activity whatsoever. The lovers of "chess for the sake of che«." aptly compared by their liquidator with the lovers of "art for art's sake ' are not yet absolutely atomized elements in a mass society whose comple'J;. heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitär' n-ism. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devotcIOí*3íí^^ cre- ating an atomized and individualized society thejikejof which we'Tiave ne\cr-seen-Jie^rg::^g^hlch^évents"or ^t^^phes^jjg^_.^^ld^TyardIy h;]vc_irought_abQu£^ Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race. Where, however, totalitarian rule has not been prepared by a totalitarian movement (and this, in contradistinction to Nazi Germany, was the case in Russia), the movement has to be organized afterward and the conditions for its growth have artificially to be created in order to make total loyalty—the psychological basis for total domination—at all possible. Šuch loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaint- ror irtlernal consumption emphasize time and again "the absolute necessity for under-iiimiing the futility of everything that is an end in itself" (see Der Reichsführer SS ■"M Chef der deutschen Polizei, undated, "only for internal use within the police"). ' the practice itself has been abundantly documented. W. Krivitsky, in his book to Stalin's Secret Services (New York, 1939), traces it directly to Stalin. 324 TOTALITÄR] \N)SV, ',"' ances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from ■-.., ■ longing to a movement, his membership in the party. " """ ,v: Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all < -content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The tot: I- -'» movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid „; .'* party programs which specified concrete content and which they far _.-■.,'*" from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development. No matter ho , r ,"■* cally they might nave been phrased, every definite political goal whLn t.""" not simply assert or circumscribe the claim to world rule, every ( iľ': *i program which deals with issues more specific than "ideological qi ■ -, ^'" of importance for centuries" is an obstruction to totalitarianism. I h-j. greatest achievement in the organization of the Nazi movement, Vii.M\ gradually built up from the obscure crackpot membership of a n >i%,"!" nationalistic little party, was that he unburdened the movement | i|,i'. party's earlier program, not by changing or officially abolishing . i,"-simply by refusing to talk about it or discuss its points, whose r [■" moderateness of content and phraseology were very soon outdated \i in's task in this as in other respects was much more formidable; the -w. , program of the Bolshevik party was a much more troublesome burden than the 25 points of an amateur economist and a crackpot politician '• But Stalin achieved eventually, after having abolished the factions of \1^ Russian party, the same result through the constant zigzag of the Conini_-nist Party lines, and the constant reinterpretation and application of Maoism which voided the doctrine of all its content because it was no Ion-.-possible to predict what course or action it would inspire. The fact rn[ the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide what -ever for political behavior—that, on the contrary, one could follow X party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had annoum...! the night before—naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the sai .■ concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what e:\, was doing, that Himmler's ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressu: "My honor is my loyalty."38 yn Hitler stated in Mein Kampf (2 vols., 1st German ed., 1925 and 1927 respectiv.i. Unexpurgated translation, New York, 1939) that it was better to have an aitliqu: . program than to allow a discussion of program (Book H, chapter v). Soon he via- > proclaim publicly: "Once we take over the government, the program will come ■' itself. . . . The first thing must be an inconceivable wave of propaganda. That i political action which would have little to do with the other problems of the monies See Heiden, op. cit., p. 203. ae> Souvarine, in our opinion wrongly, suggests that Lenin had already abolished t , role of a party program: "Nothing could show more clearly the non-existence ■ Bolshevism as a doctrine except in Lenin's brain; every Bolshevik left to him-wandered from 'the line' of his faction . . . for these men were bound together by 1 -■ temperament and by the ascendancy of Lenin rather than by ideas" (op. cit., p. f1*1 37 Gottfried Feder's Program of the Nazi Party with its famous 25 points has p!u>.' a greater role in the literature about the movement than in the movement itself- •,BThe impact of the watchword, formulated by Himmler himself, is difficult ■' render. Its German equivalent: "Meine Ehre heisst Treue," indicates an absolute . votion and obedience which transcends the me.flnini> nf mt»rj» ritoWina «• n.«™..:... CLASSLESS SOCIETY 325 } , ,,(£ of or ignoring of a party program is by itself not necessarily a sign ! tQia]jtarianism. The first to consider programs and platforms as needless ] an< of paper and embarrassing promises, inconsistent with the style and ■ " n'tus °^ a mOvement, was Mussolini with his Fascist philosophy of ac- ' Tsm and inspiration through the historical moment itself.39 Mere lust for 'vvsr combined with contempt for "talkative" articulation of what they tend i0 d° w^k ^ *s characteristic of all mob leaders, but does not come to the standards of totalitarianism. The true goal of Fascism was only i <;ei7.^ power and establish the Fascist "elite" as uncontested ruler over c country. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, .[flrly, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its 'guliar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, "aliuirianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing hu- an beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between ii rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the ill to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best, a secondary j* in substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the . nctionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual iposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects. Being a mere ■ nctionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends just as much i the "will" of the masses he embodies as the masses depend on him. ťithout him they would lack external representation and remain an amor- loiis horde; without the masses the leader is a nonentity. Hitler, who was ; i!v aware of this interdependence, expressed it once in a speech ad- ■císed to the SA: "All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, . ;sm through you alone."40 We are only too inclined to belittle such state- cnts or to misunderstand them in the sense that acting is defined here í ■ terms of giving and executing orders, as has happened too often in the i ilitical tradition and history of the West.41 But this idea has always pre- pposed someone in command who thinks and wills, and then imposes s thought and will on a thought- and will-deprived group—be it by per- • asion, authority, or violence. Hitler, however, was of the opinion that ; en "thinking . . . [exists] only by virtue of giving or executing orders,"42 !hfillness. Nazi Conspiracy, whose translations of German documents and Nazi ! řídíme are indispensable source material but, unfortunately, are very uneven, renders : SS watchword: "My honor signifies faithfulness" (V, 346). ;■ Mussolini was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal oaidm and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone. Behind this act ! ; tiio notion that the actuality of the moment itself was the chief element of inspira- m, which would only be hampered by a party program. The philosophy of Italian i lu-ni has been expressed by Gentile's "actualism" rather than by Sorel's "myths." I 'inpdie also the article "Fascism" in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The í otíraní of 1921 was formulated when the movement had been in existence two years | d contained, for the most part, its nationalist philosophy. J" Er úst Bayer, Die SA, Berlin, 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, i ■', 78?. : "Hu the first time in Plato's Statesman, 305, where acting is interpreted in terms 1 an (win and prattein—of ordering the start of an action and of executing this order. ■- A/.ir.»,.. T;,...i.----------:;_l- - -"<> 326 TOTALITARIANISM and thereby eliminated even theoretically the distinction between thir& n-and acting on one hand, and between the rulers and the ruled on the 0ti"--Neither National Socialism nor Bolshevism has ever proclaimed a ii"-form of government or asserted that its goals were reached with the sei/i"..* of power and the control of the state machinery. Their idea of domina.n^ was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can l'.', 'achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion: nan..-"' the permanent domination of each single individual in each and t\v,. sphere of life.43 The seizure of power through the means of violence is iu-¥ \ an end in itself but only the means to an end, and the seizure of powers any given country is only a welcome transitory stage but never the enc".,' the movement. The practical goal of the movement is to organize as n. hi people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them n motion; a political goal that would constitute the end of the movenj-i' simply does not exist. ii: The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Eh: what is more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditi n loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular suppoi- if totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements t • :■ on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be \ -indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naivclc, ■'. terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count ans- :.■ its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members. This attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understand» . ■■" totalitarian movements (though hardly of totalitarian regimes) as ■". ■ more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmospl-. .-the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It sh- ■ be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their ř-"1 pathizers are, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so .. ■ chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly foi i „ rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society, of *!■■." they are the most outstanding product. Those who voluntarily left so*.... before the wreckage of classes had come about, along with the mob, \\.. was an earlier by-product of the rule of the bourgeoisie, stand rcac :■ welcome them. The present totalitarian rulers and the leaders of totalit ■ movements still bear the characteristic traits of the mob, whose psyche ■ ■ 43 Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi. See also, for example, Dieter Schwarz. At ' auf die nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung: Aus dem Schwarzen Korp*. N 1936, who answers the obvious criticism that National Socialists after their r ■ power continued to talk about "a struggle": "National Socialism as an idc ■ [Weltanschauung] will not abandon its struggle until ... the way of life of ea- _ dividual German has been shaped by its fundamental values and these are re -every day anew." A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 327 • nil political philosophy are fairly well known; what will happen once the atfientic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be fair Suess tiiat he wili nave more *n common with the meticulous, cal- 'jlatcd correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, ill more resemble the stubborn dullness of Moiotov than the sensual vin- ■ "'čtivu cruelty of Stalin. ' jn jjus respect, the situation after the second World War in Europe does 3t diifer essentially from that after the first; just as in the twenties the ' -eologies of Fascism, Bolshevism, and Nazism were formulated and the ■ ovsments led by the so-called front generation, by those who had been •ousiht up and still remembered distinctly the times before the war, so the -esent general political and intellectual climate of postwar totalitarianism . being determined by a generation which knew intimately the time and ■e which preceded the present. This is specifically true for France, where q breakdown of the class system came after the second instead of after the -\ ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie. Yet it is .! ", true that the "front generation," in marked contrast to their own cl.-%-spiritual fathers, were completely absorbed by their desire to see the mu of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life. T his <-. -.. was so great that it outweighed in impact and articulateness all c ■!■.■■ attempts at a "transformation of values," such as Nietzsche had atlcrn; ■„■.,' or a reorganization of political life as indicated in Sorel's writings, or vival of human authenticity in Bakunin, or a passionate love of life r ;. purity of exotic adventures in Rimbaud. Destruction without mitig; i -chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.47 The genuineness of these feelings can be seen in the fact thai vc\\ "... of this generation were cured of their war enthusiasm by actual experv... of its horrors. The survivors of the trenches did not become pacifists, i „-. cherished an experience which, they thought, might serve to separate ■",.■■ 4S See the collection of material on the "inner chronicle of the first Woilil W; Hanna Hafkesbrink, Unknown Germany, New Haven, 1948, pp. 43, 45, 81. r ■ lively. The great value of this collection for the imponderables of historical :■ phere makes the lack of similar studies for France, England, and Italy all the deplorable. *eIbid., pp. 20-21. 47 This started with a feeling of complete alienation from normal life. Wroie I. ■ ■ Binding, for instance: "More and more we are to be counted among the dead, ;-the estranged—because the greatness of the occurrence estranges and separate.-rather than among the banished whose return is possible" {ibid., p. 160). A c '■ ■ reminiscence of the front generation's elite claim can still be found in Nim ."• account of how he finally hit upon his "form of selection" for the reorganizatí- ■ ■■ the SS: ". . . the most severe selection procedure is brought about by war, irie st for life and death. In this procedure the value of blood is shown through aJiicvi . . . War, however, is an exceptional circumstance, and a way had to be found to ■ ■ selections in peace time" {op. cit.). A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 329 tely from the hated surroundings of respectability. They clung to their )ries of four years of life in the trenches as though they constituted an tive criterion for the establishment of a new elite. Nor did they yield i temptation to idealize this past; on the contrary, the worshipers of ,Ľje the first to concede that war in the era of machines could not pos-bieed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor, and manliness,48 that it ,ed on men nothing but the experience of bare destruction together the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic wheel of (iter. jľ-, generation remembered the war as the great prelude to the break-of classes and their transformation into masses. War, with its constant uuCrous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the "great equal-r- ■>■■ and therefore the true father of a new world order. The passion for nality and justice, the longing to transcend narrow and meaningless class ^ lo abandon stupid privileges and prejudices, seemed to find in war a v out of the old condescending attitudes of pity for the oppressed and inherited. In times of growing misery and individual helplessness, it seems difficult to resist pity when it grows into an all-devouring passion as it is t to resent its very boundlessness, which seems to kill human dignity with nore deadly certainty than misery itself. In the early years of his career, when a restoration of the European status o was still the most serious threat to the ambitions of the mob,50 Hitler pealed almost exclusively to these sentiments of the front generation. The eulkir selflessness of the mass man appeared here as yearning for anonym-. for being just a number and functioning only as a cog, for every trans-■mation, in brief, which would wipe out the spurious identifications with scific types or predetermined functions within society. War had been ex-rienced as that "mightiest of all mass actions" which obliterated individual ierences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off in-,iduii!s through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted ■'an instrument of historical progress."51 Nor did national distinctions nil the masses into which the postwar elite wished to be immersed. The st World War, somewhat paradoxically, had almost extinguished genuine iional feelings in Europe where, between the wars, it was far more im-irtnnt to have belonged to the generation of the trenches, no matter on ;ich bide, than to be a German or a Frenchman.52 The Nazis based their '""Sec. for instance, Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel, London, 1929. ''H:ilkesbrink, op. cit., p. 156. '-'Heiden, op. cit., shows how consistently Hitler sided with catastrophe in the rl) d ? with "no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments >■."'. erty, not even a name of his own."*4 The antihumanist, antilibcra'l ť>~ individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their br !■■ „. and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the . . ward and pompous "scientific" proofs of the imperialist elite that a str i ■ ■" of all against all is the law of the universe, that expansion is a psycliolc ■"" necessity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by [* \ universal laws.55 What was new in the writings of the front generation their high literary standard and great depth of passion. The postwar w i,,-. no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics, and thev i -.' little if any use of the collected works of Gobineau or Houston St* -. ', Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural household o .-,. Philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.5" If they bel-.-./i at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to cor ■ ■: to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capaciti . f men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were muc i ■■. proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back ar-! r„- will against that of another. But in this War both adversaries lie on iho gi and only the War has its will" (ibid., p. 67). r'3 Bakunin in a letter written on February 7, 1870. See Max Nomad, Aposi Revolution, Boston, 1939, p. 180. 54 The "Catechism of the Revolutionist" was either written by Bakunin h . or by his disciple Nechayev. For the question of authorship and a translation complete text, see Nomad, op. cit., p. 227 ff. In any event, the "system of cot ;' disregard for any tenets of simple decency and fairness in [the revolutionľ>ťs tude towards other human beings . . . went down in Russian revolutionary \ under the name of 'Nechayevshchina'" (ibid., p. 224). 55 Outstanding among these political theorists of imperialism is Ernest Se Mysticisme et Domination: Essais de Critique Imperialisté, 1913. See also C ■ Sprietsma, We Imperialists: Notes on Ernest Seilliere's Philosophy of huperi New York, 1931; G. Monod in La Revue Historique, January, 1912; and Louis L Vně nouvelle Psychologie de ľlmpérialisme: Ernest Seilliěre, 1913. r'(' In France, since 1930, the Marquis de Sade has become one of the fnvore thors of the literary avant-garde. Jean Paulhan, in his Introduction to a new t' ■ of Sade's Les In fortunes de la Vertu, Paris, 1946, remarks: "When I see so writers today consciously trying to deny artifice and the literary game for thi of the inexpressible [un évěnement indicible] . . . , anxiously looking for the si in the infamous, for the great in the subversive . . . , I ask myself ... it our em literature, in those parts which appear to us most vital—or at any raLc ihl gressive—has not turned entirely toward the past, and if it was not precisely * who determined it." See also Georges Bataille, "Le Secret de Sade," in l.u Cr Tome III, Nos. 15-16, 17, 1947. A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 33 J -ate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship v thing that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or con-"and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted v's humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy. we compare this generation with the nineteenth-century ideologists, otiose theories they sometimes seem to have so much in common, their distinction is their greater authenticity and passion. They had been deeply touched by misery, they were more concerned with the per-ics and more deadly hurt by hypocrisy than all the apostles of good will jrotherhood had been. And they could no longer escape into exotic -KÍS, could no longer afford to be dragon-slayers among strange and excit-jneople. There was no escape from the daily routine of misery, meekness, ýstríLtion, and resentment embellished by a fake culture of educated talk; ) conformity to the customs of fairy-tale lands could possibly save them ,jn] the rising nausea that this combination continuously inspired. This inability to escape into the wide world, this feeling of being caught -iin and again in the trappings of society—so different from the conditions hich had formed the imperialist character—added a constant strain and s vearning for violence to the older passion for anonymity and losing lešélť. Without the possibility of a radical change of role and character, ■ch as the identification with the Arab national movement or the rites of an Jian village, the self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of de-•uciion seemed to be a salvation from the automatic identification with ■r-eslablished functions in society and their utter banality, and at the same ne m help destroy the functioning itself. These people felt attracted to the onou need activism of totalitarian movements, to their curious and only emingly contradictory insistence on both the primacy of sheer action and c overwhelming force of sheer necessity. This mixture corresponded pre-;ek to the war experience of the "front generation," to the experience of [btant activity within the framework of overwhelming fatality. \ciivism, moreover, seemed to provide new answers to the old and íublesome question, "Who am I?" which always appears with redoubled ■rshlence in times of crisis. If society insisted, "You are what you appear be," postwar activism replied: "You are what you have done"—for in-jnce, the man who for the first time had crossed the Atlantic in an air-nne (as in Brecht's Der Flug der Lindberghs)—an answer which after the conti World War was repeated and slightly varied by Sartre's "You are mr life" (in Huts Clos). The pertinence of these answers lies less in their üditv as redefinitions of personal identity than in their usefulness for an entual escape from social identification, from the multiplicity of inter-angeable roles and functions which society had imposed. The point was do something, heroic or criminal, which was unpredictable and undeterred by anybody else. The pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, their preference r terrorism over all other forms of political activity, attracted the intel-:tuiil elite and the mob alike, precisely because this terrorism was so ut- 332 TOTALITARIAN! ■; terly different from that of the earlier revolutionary societies. I , K longer a matter of calculated policy which saw in terrorist act: . ' means to eliminate certain outstanding personalities who, becau; . j ,. '* policies or position, had become the symbol of oppression. What i attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosoph ! , which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kini ■ cal expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which w '• ,,, lightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolut " ■ \' to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the reco^niti- r ,'-one's existence on the normal strata of society. It was still the same -i . and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual del.- : I Nazi Germany, announce with obvious delight that the Nazis, in c; ,; defeat, would know how to slam the door behind them and not to b. ." -gotten for centuries. Yet it is here if anywhere that a valid criterion may be found fei j tinguishing the elite from the mob in the pretotalitarian atmosphere. V,, • the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with great precision A , access to history even at the price of destruction. Goebbels' sincere o-i tion that "the greatest happiness that a contemporary can experience t- ■ -. is either to be a genius or to serve one/'7 was typical of the mob but n,- ;\-of the masses nor the sympathizing elite. The latter, on the contrary. . . anonymity seriously to the point of seriously denying the existence nf gN -: all the art theories of the twenties tried desperately to prove that the ■■ ■ '■. lent is the product of skill, craftsmanship, logic, and the realization ■■. ■ , potentialities of the material.58 The mob, and not the elite, was ch:.s .■ by the "radiant power of fame" (Stefan Zweig) and accepted enthusias" <. --: the genius idolatry of the late bourgeois world. In this the mob of the - -. ."-tieth century followed faithfully the pattern of earlier parvenus who had discovered the fact that bourgeois society would rather open its ■ . ■» to the fascinating "abnormal," the genius, the homosexual, or the Jew ľ • to simple merit. The elite's contempt for the genius and its yearnir ' anonymity was still witness of a spirit which neither the masses nor thi ■ ■ were in a position to understand, and which, in the words of Robcsj-.-strove to assert the grandeur of man against the pettiness of the great. This difference between the elite and the mob notwithstanding, th... no doubt that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frighten. .-í spectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members >. "'. elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of cmliz : for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in th-': " \forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the i'■ ■ strous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are ■■ .. and which announce themselves clearly enough in totalitarian propai " They had convinced themselves that traditional historiography was a ft- - ■ r'7 Goebbels, op. cit., p. 139. nii The art theories of the Bauhaus were characteristic in this respect. Si Bertolt Brechťs remarks on the theater, Gesammelte Werke, London, 1938. frl A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 333 iy case, since it had excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from nernory of mankind. Those who were rejected by their own time were \\ forgotten by history, and insult added to injury had troubled all fve consciences ever since faith in a hereafter where the last would be rst had disappeared. Injustices in the past as well as the present became ■rable when there was no longer any hope that the scales of justice ually would be set right. Marx's great attempt to rewrite world history . jus of class struggles fascinated even those who did not believe in the í tfivctness of his thesis, because of his original intention to find a device by jiich to force the destinies of those excluded from official history into the lénioiy of posterity. ■\\\c temporary alliance between th« elite and the mob rested largely on ,jS genuine-delight with..-which..the former watched the latter destroy re- ,0CtLibility, This could be achieved when the German steel baronš were -irc^d to deal with and to receive socially Hitler the housepainter and self- dmftted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries »rieirated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, y.(Atw as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of "| jiropiian history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was J --.[her gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate ! lose sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recogni- ! on in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical material- | nl. but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of ! lobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not ie traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti- ! leriiMÍism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits í nd the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The f. bject of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal ] facial history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of ! hicli the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the out- | -ard facade erected explicitlyto fool the people. To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its " (miction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the i la\ground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascina-' on in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventual Ky be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change * is own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood lty cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverer, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin's and Hitler's skill in íl ail of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted x fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared ; i receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality ■ f the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the eccssary inspiration for action. 334 TOTALITARIAN!? The attraction which the totalitarian movements exert on the long as and wherever they have not seized power, has been perplexin» u cause the patently vulgar and arbitrary, positive doctrines of totalitaria ■L are more conspicuous to the outsider and mere observer than the gen - i mood which pervades the pretotalitarian atmosphere. These doctrines v, -' so much at variance with generally accepted intellectual, cultural, and m.,-'-standards that one could conclude that only an inherent fundamental sf- i ■ coming of character in the intellectual, "la trahison des clercs" (J. ReJ or a perverse self-hatred of the spirit, accounted for the delight with Wiethe elite accepted the "ideas" of the mob. What the spokesmen of humar and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and t:-unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that ap "■ mosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evapor ^.i (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhau ■ their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absuul pr< i.. sitions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, prec -| because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. \ i" ,-garity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted thcc i carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all ., tenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life, fo ■; growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actt. '[■! the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocri' those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily lefi ■ . spectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not . content itself.511 Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicir> upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but of meanness! The intellectual elite of the twenties who knew little of the earlier connections between mob and bourgeoisie was certain mal the old game of épater le bourgeois could be played to perfection if one started to shock society with an ironically exaggerated picture of its own beharior. At that time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of this irony would "lU The following passage by Rohm is typical of the feeling of almost ihc wtiols younger generation and not only of an elite: "Hypocrisy and Pharisaism i tile They are the most conspicuous characteristics of society today. . . . Nothing could he moic lying than the so-called morals of society." These boys "don't find their v.u> in the philistine world of bourgeois double morals and don't know any longer how to distinguish between truth and error" (Die Geschichte eines Hochverräters, pp. 267 antl 269). The homosexuality of these circles was also at least partially an expiv-sion of their protest against society. A CLASSLESS,SOCIETY 335 the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde did not know they lře running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a ' Mrňous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, d would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the :rjt of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception /en Brecht's Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented nffsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangly. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the tjjence considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when > rnob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song the play, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral," was greeted th frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons, je mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie plauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long it it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expresní of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the un-iiing of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the ,rk was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bour-aisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden ilosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so it the only political result of Brecht's "revolution" was to encourage >ryone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept enly the standards of the mob. A reaction similar in its ambiguity was aroused some ten years later in ance by Celine's Bagatelles pour un Massacre, in which he proposed to [Tiiissacre all the Jews. André Gide was publicly delighted in the pages of the Sauvelle Revue Francaise, not of course because he wanted to kill the Jews of France, but because he rejoiced in the blunt admission of such a desire ,ijid in the fascinating contradiction between Celine's bluntness and the hypocritical politeness which surrounded the Jewish question in all respectable quarters. How irresistible the desire for the unmasking of hypocrisy ■AiiS among the elite can be gauged by the fact that such delight could not even be spoiled by Hitler's very real persecution of the Jews, which at the time of Celine's writing was already in full swing. Yet aversion against the philosemitism of the liberals had much more to do with this reaction than ii.itred of Jews. A similar frame of mind explains the remarkable fact that Hitler's and Stalin's widely publicized opinions about art and their persecution of modern artists have never been able to destroy the attraction which ■he totalitarian movements had for avant-garde artists; this shows the elite's ijck of a sense of reality, together with its perverted selflessness, both of 'AMch resemble only too closely the fictitious world and the absence of self-interest among the masses. It was the great opportunity of the totalitarian movements, and the reason why a temporary alliance between the intellectual -lite and the mob could come about, that in an elementary and undifferentiated way their problems had become the same and foreshadowed the problems and mentality of the masses. 336 TOTAL ITARIANR Closely related to the attraction which the mob's Jack of hypoi the masses' lack of self-interest exerted on the elite was the equ sistible appeal of the totalitarian movements' spurious claim to h; ished the separation between pnvate and public life and to have ri mysterious irrational wholeness in man. Since Balzac revealed tru lives of the public figures of French society and since Ibsen's dramatiyu ' ■" of the "Pillars of Society" had conquered the Continental theater, the 1 ľ,' of double morality was one of the main topics for tragedies, comedies - "i novels. Double morality as practiced by the bourgeoisie became the..-standing sign of that esprit de sérieux, which is always pompous and n ■". sincere. This division between private and public or social life had not '*'".. to do with the justified separation between the personal and public spj1(. but was rather the psychological reflection of the nineteenth-century stru *■ between bourgeois and citoyen, between the man who judged and usee1 ■■" public institutions by the yardstick of his private interests and the res -■■i,!. sible citizen who was concerned with public affairs as the affairs of ■$ i-, this connection, the liberals' political philosophy, according to which i ■ mere sum of individual interests adds up to the miracle of the common g -. appeared to be only a rationalization of the recklessness with which pri. interests were pressed regardless of the common good. Against the class spirit of the Continental parties, which had ah* ■ admitted they represented certain interests, and against the "opportun» resulting from their conception of themselves as only parts of a totsil. " „■ totalitarian movements asserted their "superiority" in that they earrk I Weltanschauung by which they would take possession of man as a whv Tn this claim to totality the mob leaders of the movements again formúl and only reversed the bourgeoisie's own political philosophy. The bouří. class, having made its way through social pressure and, frequently, tlimi an economic blackmail of political institutions, always believed ih;it public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, n public interests and influence. In this sense, the bourgeoisie's pout philosophy was always "totalitarian"; it always assumed an identity politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served c as the facade for private interests. The bourgeoisie's double standard, differentiation between public and private life, were a concession lo nation-state which had desperately tried to keep the two spheres apart. What appealed to the elite was radicalism as such. Marx's hopeful prei tions that the state would wither away and a classless society emerge w no longer radical, no longer Messianic enough. If Berdyaev is right in s ing that "Russian revolutionaries . . . had always been totalitarian," t the attraction which Soviet Russia exerted almost equally on Nazi and G munist intellectual fellow-travelers lay precisely in the fact that in Ru eo The role of the Weltanschauung in the formation of the Nazi movement h.is ' stressed many times by Hitler himself. In Mein Kampf, it is interesting to note he pretends to have understood the necessity of basing a party on a Wettanvhai through the superiority of the Marxist parties. Book II, chapter Í: "Wetlcnw hai and Party." rles A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 337 volution was a religion and a philosophy, not merely a conflict con-with the social and political side of life."61 The truth was that the rmation of classes into masses and the breakdown of the prestige and ty of political institutions had brought to Western European coun-LAjnditions which resembled those prevalent in Russia, so that it was accident that their revolutionaries also began to take on the typically sian revolutionary fanaticism which looked forward, not to change in Icial or political conditions, but to the radical destruction of every existing feed value, and institution. The mob merely took advantage of this new ooď a110" brought about a short-lived alliance of revolutionaries and crim-a]S which also had been present in many revolutionary sects in Czarist 'ussia but conspicuously absent from the European scene. The disturbing alliance between the mob and the elite, and the curious ifncidence of their aspirations, had their origin in the fact that these strata ad been the first to be eliminated from the structure of the nation-state and ie framework of class society. They found each other so easily, if only Jnporarily, because they both sensed that they represented the fate of the me, that they were followed by unending masses, that sooner or later the ajority of European peoples might be with them—as they thought, ready i make their revolution. It turned out that they were both mistaken. The mob, the underworld of e bourgeois class, hoped that the helpless masses would help them into 3wer, would support them when they attempted to forward their private terests, that they would be able simply to replace the older strata of bour-lois society and to instill into it the more enterprising spirit of the under-arid. Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit as not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, ich initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Ab-nce of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless malte of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philis-íes provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes .an so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were sll organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs. It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass rocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not i the military men nor by any other part of the co-ordinated masses of spectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who :re typical representatives of the mob.62 Nor was Himmler, the most power- 01 Nicolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, 1937, pp. 124-125. r'2 There is, for instance, the curious intervention of Welhelm Kube, General Com-ssar in Minsk and one of the oldest members of the Party, who in 1941, i.e., at the ginning of the mass murder, wrote to his chief: "I certainly am tough and wilting co-operate in the solution of the Jewish question, but people who have been brought in our own culture are, after all, different from the local bestial hordes. Are we 338 TOTALITARIANIS ful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" ( whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, tlvine of the original leaders of the Nazi movement."3 He was not a bohemian Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenbcr a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his sur/ ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex rtifini crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and s family men. * The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotioi matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, proc of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philfc is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual wh produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass i whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committee history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob rn;in was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried at nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everyiliin belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved ca to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thoush nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power criminated against even by the indigenous population? I could not do it. I ask \o give me clear-cut instructions to take care of the matter in the most human« way the sake of the prestige of our Reich and our Party." This letter is published in ' Weinreich, Hitler's Professors, New York, 1946, pp. 153-154. Kube's intervention quickly overruled, yet an almost identical attempt to save the lives of Danish J made by W. Best, the Reich's plenipotentiary in Denmark, and a well-knov,n N;t/i was more successful. See Nazi Conspiracy, V, 2. Similarly Alfred Rosenberg, who had preached the inferiority of the Slav peoples obviously never realized that his theories might one day mean their liquidation. C haraed with the administration of the Ukraine, he wrote outraged reports about conditions there during the fall of 1942 after he had tried earlier to get direct intervention rrom Hitler himself. See Nazi Conspiracy, III, 83 ff., and IV, 62. There are of course some exceptions to this rule. The man who saved Paiis rioni destruction was General von Choltitz who, however, still "feared that he would he deprived of his command as he had not executed his orders" even though he I row that the "war had been lost for several years." That he would have had the courage to resist the order "to turn Paris into a mass of ruins" without the energetic support of a Nazi of old standing, Otto Abetz the Ambassador to France, appears dubious, according to his own testimony during the trial of Abetz in Paris. See New York 'lima July 21, 1949. 03 An Englishman, Stephen H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built, London, IM9, describes Himmler as "a man of exquisite courtesy and stiil interested in tin; »imple things of life. He has none of the pose of those Nazis who act as demigods. ... No man looks less like his job than this police dictator of Germany, and I am convinced that nobody I met in Germany is more normal. . . ." (pp. 89-90)—This reminds one in a curious way of the remark of Stalin's mother who according to Holshevik propaganda said of him: "An exemplary son. I wish everybody were like him" (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 656). A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 339 latic co-ordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: "The only person hD iS still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep."04 s f„ all fairness to those among the elite, on the other hand, who at one •me or another have let themselves be seduced by totalitarian movements, 1 A who sometimes, because of their intellectual abilities, are even accused f having inspired totalitarianism, it must be stated that what these des-3 rate men °^ tne twentieth century did or did not do had no influence on 3 tálitarianism whatsoever, although it did play some part in earlier, suc-- isfulj attempts of the movements to force the outside world to take their ioctrines seriously. Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, thisj vhole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes pro-i, ■peded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic ini- \ 'alive is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob,! nd both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent iefsecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass ' eaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything ; fiev cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative n any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totali-arianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of heir sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence. ind creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.05 »'The remark was made by Robert Ley. See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., p. 178. "'■Bolshevik policy, in this respect surprisingly consistent, is well known and hardly leeds further comment. Picasso, to take the most famous instance, is not liked in lussia even though he has become a Communist. It is possible that André Gide's udden reversal of attitude after seeing the Bolshevik reality in Soviet Russia (Retour le FURSS) in 1936, definitely convinced Stalin of the uselessness of creative artists even as feliow-travelers. Nazi policy was distinguished from Bolshevik measures only nsofai as it did not yet kill its first-rate talents. It would be worthwhile to study in detail the careers of those comparatively few German scholars who went beyond mere co-operation and volunteered their services because they were convinced Nazis. (Weinreich, op. cit., the oniy available study, and misleading because he does not distinguish between professors who adopted the Nazi ,reed and those who owed their careers exclusively to the regime, omits the earlier ■.areers of the concerned scholars and thus indiscriminately puts well-known men of ureat achievement into the same category as crackpots.) Most interesting is the example of the jurist Carl Schmitt, whose very ingenious theories about the end of democracy and legal government still make arresting reading; as early as the middle forties, he was replaced by the Nazis' own brand of political and legal theorists, 'uch as Hans Frank, the later governor of Poland, Gottfried Neesse, and Reinhard Hoehn. The last to fall into disgrace was the historian Walter Frank, who had been i convinced antisemité and member of the Nazi party before it came to power, and ■■vho, in 1933, became director of the newly founded Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des Neuen Deutschlands with its famous Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage, and editor of ihe nine-volume Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1937-1944). In the early forties, Frank had to cede his position and influence to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg, whose Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts certainly shows no aspiration whatsoever to "scholar-•hip." Frank clearly was mistrusted for no other reason than that he was not a charlatan What neither the elite nor the mob that "embraced" National Socialism with such TOTALITARIAN fervor could understand was that "one cannot embrace this Order l. Above and beyond the willingness to serve stands the unrelenting necessity r ' ■*■■ that knows ne,ther extenuating circumstances nor clemency" (%T'y of ■" by the SS Hauptamt-Schulungsamt, n.d., p. 4). In other words concLt S, '" ■" »on of those who would belong to them the Nazis intended to make tnetr oľ ' ■-. regardless of the "accident" of any opinions. The same aooear ní"1 . selection of Bolshevists for the secret police. R Beck a™ ™Sin reÍL^ Purge and,he Extraction of Confession, 1951, p. 160, that the membertlľ 'V ' are c auned from the ranks of party members without having theStesf1 ' ^'"' to volunteer for this "career." **«gntest opp -: , . ,JTER ELEVEN \|i>vement I: Totalitarian Propaganda Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. Under . .. ions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian .. -tents struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and " ■.■ .vith other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing ,.- ile to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other . .ľ,..-s of information. I iras recognized early and has frequently been asserted that in total-i i-i countries propaganda and terror present two sides of the same coin.1 jiiis, .lowever, is only partly true. Wherever totalitarianism possesses absolute control, it replaces propaganda with indoctrination and uses violence not so much to frighten people (this is done only in the initial stages when political opposition still exists) as to realize constantly its ideological doctrines and its practical lies. Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.2 Equally important is the fact that the refusal to acknowledge unemployment realized—albeit in a rather unexpected way—the old socialist doctrine: He who does not work shall not eat. Or when, to take another instance, Stalin decided to rewrite 1 See, for instance, E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Technique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, p. 164 ff. The explanation is that "terror without propaganda would lose most of its psychological effect, whereas propaganda without terror does not contain its full punch" (p. 175). What is overlooked in these and similar statements, which mostly go around in circles, is the fact that not only political propaganda but the whole of modern mass publicity contains an element of threat; that terror, on the other hand, can be fully effective without propaganda, so kmii as it is only a question of conventional political terror of tyranny. Only when terror is intended to coerce not merely from without but, as it were, from within, when the political regime wants more than power, is terror in need of propaganda. In this sense the Nazi theorist, Eugen Hadamovsky, could say in Propaganda und nationale Macht, 1933: "Propaganda and violence are never contradictions. Use of violence can be part of the propaganda" (p. 22). '' "At that time, it was officially announced that unemployment was 'liquidated' in Soviet Russia. The result of the announcement was that all unemployment benefits ftri.- Miiallir '■WnmAitoA'1 " I Ant™, nli«a TUn »„,.,.,'„., B„:„m„ 1n„As.„ iCiAľk « IÍIOA The Totalitarian 342 TOTALITARIA the history of the Russian Revolution, the propaganda of his new consisted in destroying, together with the older books and document authors and readers: the publication in 1938 of a new official histon Communist Party was the signal that the superpurge which had dec a whole generation of Soviet intellectuals had come to an end Sip the Nazis in the Eastern occupied territories at first used chiefly anf: propaganda to win firmer control of the population. They neither nor used terror to support this propaganda. When they liquidated the part of the Polish intelligentsia, they did it not because of its oppnsiti because according to their doctrine Poles had no intellect, and wh* planned to kidnap blue-eyed and blond-haired children, they did not to frighten the population but to save "Germanic blood.3 Since totalitarian movements exist in a world which itself is no tarian, they are forced to resort to what we commonly regard as prop; But such propaganda always makes its appeal to an external sphere the nontotalitarian strata of the population at home or the nomotalj countries abroad. This external sphere to which totalitarian propn ■■ ■ makes its appeal may vary greatly; even after the seizure of power ■ ■. tarian propaganda may address itself to those segments of its own popu|a. tion whose co-ordination was not followed by sufficient indoctiiruiiion. In this respect Hitler's speeches to his generals during the war aru veritable models of propaganda, characterized mainly by the monstrous ]iL>s y^ which the Fuehrer entertained his guests in an attempt to win rlium over.4 The external sphere can also be represented by groups of sympathizers who 3 The so-cafled "Operation Hay" began with a decree dated February \r, 1942, |»-Himmler " concerning [individuals] of German slock in Poland," stipuialn ľ ih;u 'iiejr children should be sent to families "that are willing [to accept them] whiiout icícívirions, out of love for the good biood in them" (Nuremberg Document K I **. photostated by the Centre de Documentation Juive, Paris). It seems that in Jiu:c, 1'JW, fte Ninth Army actually kidnapped 40,000 to 50.000 children and subsequently luirnporied them to Germany. A report on this matter, sent to the General Staff of the Wohl macht in Berlin by a man called Brandenburg, mentions similar plans for the Ukiainr (Doui-ment PS 03J, published by Léon Poliakov in Bréviaire de la Háine, p. 31"). Himmler himself made several references to this plan. (See Nazi Conspiracy anil ,1ir:ľ(.-\ior,, Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of AxK CiiniinJity, U.S. Government, Washington, 1946, III, 640, which contains excerpts from Himmlers speech at Cracow in March, 1942; see also the comments on HimmleiS nveJi at Bad Schachen in 1943 in Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., p. 244.) How the uleciion of these children was arrived at can be gathered from medical certificates nude out by Medical Section II at Minsk on August 10, 1942: "The racial examination ol Natalie Harpf, born August 14, 1922, showed a normally developed girl of predominantly East Baltic type with Nordic features."—"Examination of Arnold Comic-., born ľcb-ruary 19, 1930, showed a normally developed boy, twelve years old, of predominantly Eastern type with Nordic features." Signed: N. Wc. (Document in the ::rcfii\es or the Yiddish Scientific Institute, New York, No. Occ E 3a-17.) For the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, which, in Hitler's opinion, eou'ii be "wiped out without qualms," see Poliakov, op. cit., p. 321, and Document NO 2172. 4See Hitlers Tischgespräche. In the summer of 1942, he still talks about "|kicking! even the last Jew out of Europe" (p. 113) and resettling the Jews in Sibeua m Allien (p. 311), or Madagascar, while in reality he had already decided on the tion" prior to the Russian invasion, probably in 1940, and orrierpH th~ .. "fi THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 343 vot yet rea(ty t0 accept the true aims of the movement; finally, it often ,eos that even party members are regarded by the Fuehrer's inner circle 3 members of the elite formations as belonging to such an external ce and in this case they, too, are still in need of propaganda because cannot yet be reliably dominated. In order not to overestimate the stance of the propaganda lies one should recall the much more mimer-nstances in which Hitler was completely sincere and brutally unequivocal e definition of the movement's true aims, but they were simply not pledged by a public unprepared for such consistency.5 But, basically cing, totalitarian domination strives to restrict propaganda methods f to its foreign policy or to the branches of the movement abroad for urpose of supplying them with suitable material. Whenever totalitarian urination at home comes into conflict with the propaganda line for imption abroad (which happened in Russia during the war, not when .... i na(i concluded his alliance with Hitler, but when the war with Hitler brought him into the camp of the democracies), the propaganda is ex-i]ained at home as a "temporary tactical maneuver."6 As far as possible, jhjs distinction between ideological doctrine for the initiated in the movement, who are no longer in need of propaganda, and unadulterated propa-^.nda for the outside world is already established in the prepower existence ,'/ iltc movements. The relationship between propaganda and indoctrination u-uaify depends upon the size of the movements on one hand, and upon iHitMde pressure on the other. The smaller the movement, the more energy ;t will expend in mere propaganda; the greater the pressure on totalitarian reüiines from the outside world—a pressure that even behind iron curtains aiinc>t be ignored entirely—the more actively will the totalitarian dictators k- id up in the fall of 1941 (see Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, II, pp. 265 ff.; HI, pp. 783 if. Document PS 1104; V. pp. 322 ff. Document PS 2605). Himmler al-:c:uk knew in the spring of 1941 that "the Jews [must be] exterminated to the last m. n by the end of the war. This is the unequivocal desire and command of the Fi.elu.ir" (Dossier Kersten in the Centre de Documentation Juive). In this connection there is a very interesting report, dated July 16, 1940, on a iSeinsion at the Fuehrer's headquarters, in the presence of Rosenberg, Lammers and kciti-1. which Hitler began by stating the following "basic principles": "It was now ís-onnal not to parade our ultimate goal before the entire world; . . . Hence it must -oi I'ľ obvious that [the decrees for maintaining peace and order in the occupied ter-ii'niu-i] point to a final settlement. All necessary measures—executions, resettlements - -L.iii. and will be, carried out in spite of this." This is followed by a discussion which nuke- no reference whatever to Hitler's words and in which Hitler no longer partici-pjiei. He quite obviously had not been "understood" (Document L 221 in the Centre jc Documentation Juive). "Tor Stalin's confidence that Hitler would not attack Russia, see Isaac Deutscher, Miiiiii. a Political Biography, New York and London, 1949, pp. 454 ff., and especially 'he footnote on p. 458: "It was only in 1948 that the Chief of the State Planning Com-11 mi on, Vice-Premier N. Voznesensky, disclosed that the economic plans for the third i|ľiiu-r of 1941 had been based on the assumption of peace and that a new plan, -i.iiv-il for war, had been drafted only after the outbreak of hostilities." Deutschere iVimute has now been solidly confirmed by Khrushchev's report on Stalin's reaction to iL- (ii-rman attack on the Soviet Union. See his "Speech on Stalin" at the Twentieth i i.in....ee as r^lpüspff hv the. State. Denartment. New York Times, June 5, 1956. 344 TOTALITARIAľ engage in propaganda. The essential point is that the necessities for n-ganda are always dictated by the outside world and that the mov ?''~ themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate. Conversely W" trination, inevitably coupled with terror, increases with the strength ,,, ." movements or the totalitarian governments' isolation and security fro '. 1" side interference. ' '" Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of "psychological warfare' terror is more. Terror continues to be used by totalitarian reaime ' ■ when its psychological aims are achieved: its real horror is that it i V' over a completely subdued population. Where the rule of terror is hini .1* to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears e* ii' \ it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany.7 Propaganda, in i"i'""-/ words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalu 1 ľ.' ; . ism for dealing with the nontotalitariän world; terror, on the contr the very essence of its form of government. Its existence depends as li I ■ psychological or other subjective factors as the existence of law* :■■ constitutionally governed country depends upon the number of people wl-transgress them. Terror as the counterpart of propaganda played a greater role in Nazis:. than in Communism. The Nazis did not strike at prominent figures as, b:^ been done in the earlier wave of political crimes in Germany (the miird t of Rathenau and Erzberger); instead, by killing small socialist functionari or influential members of opposing parties, they attempted to prove to t\ population the dangers involved in mere membership. This kind of nu«. terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased stead !■. because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political < -fenders on the so-called Right. It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist h aptly called "power propaganda":8 it made clear to the population at lac .■ that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and th ■ it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than loyal Republican. This impression was greatly strengthened by the specii. use the Nazis made of their political crimes. They always admitted tht publicly, never apologized for "excesses of the lower ranks"—such apology were used only by Nazi sympathizers—and impressed the population being very different from the "idle talkers" of other parties. The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism arc t 7 "Education [in the concentration camps] consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have for the most part slave-like souls" (Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.). 8 Eugen Hadamovsky, op. cit., is outstanding in the literature on totalitarian propaganda. Without explicitly stating it, Hadamovsky offers an intelligent and revealing pro-Nazi interpretation of Hitler's own exposition on the subject in "Propaganda and Organization," in Book tl, chapter xi of Mein Kampf (2 vols., 1st German edition, 1925 and 1927 respectively. Unexpurgated translation, New York, 1939).—See ako F. A. Six, Die politische Propaganda der NSDAP im Kampf um die Macht, 1936, pp. 21 ff. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 345 i to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangster-has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without ad-i, it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their anda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity. \i e specific in totalitarian propaganda, however, than direct threats and/ , against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints all who will not heed its teachings and, later, mass murder perpe-. ■ an "guilty" and "innocent" alike. People are threatened by Commu-* ■ ipaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly .■i i their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threat-■ -y the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life, . i irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. The strong i Us of totalitarian propaganda on the "scientific" nature of its asser-,as been compared to certain advertising techniques which also ad-,,„ themselves to masses. And it is true that the advertising columns of :ry newspaper show this "scientificality," by which a manufacturer proves h facts and figures and the help of a "research" department that his is "best soap in the world."0 It is also true that there is a certain element violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind : assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of öopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the "only soap that ■vents pimples" may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who not use his soap. Science in the instances of both business publicity and alitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obses-n of totalitarian movements with "scientific" proofs ceases once they are : power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to ve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for irely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans. i3ut there is nothing more to the frequently overrated similarities between ss advertisement and mass propaganda. Businessmen usually do not pose prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their dictions. The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological fin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more irly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality. There is of course a great appeal to the masses in "absolutist systems which represent all the events of history as depending upon the great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race" (in the words of Tocqueville). But it cannot 'Hitler's analysis of "War Propaganda" (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter vi) stresses r.e business angle of propaganda and uses the example of publicity for soap. Its imparlance has been generally overestimated, while his later positive ideas on "Propa-S'iiida and Organization" were neglected. 346 TOTALITARIAN!^. be doubted either that the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and n,i merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the following: "The n... -.a ' curately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and life, . (. the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more in?i \ '" have into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes. ■«' i' * quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin's creed two sentences which might run as follows: "The more accurately we rec,'.'' nize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more ■ we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into ciiulcc t" materialism, the greater will be our success." Stalin's notion of "corr. , leadership,"11 at any rate, could hardly be better illustrated. Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its t^'-. nique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of c j. ciency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speakh there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an ;u- ■■ ment from the control of the present and by saying that only the future i i reveal its merits. However, totalitarian ideologies did not invent this n,. cedure, and were not the only ones to use it. Scientificality of mass pre -aganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics iha ■ has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with scíľk. which has characterized the Western world since the rise of matheniaľ. and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be o.!. the last stage in a process during which "science [has become] an idol i i will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.' And there was, indeed, an early connection between scientificality and ■ N rise of the masses. The "collectivism" of masses was welcomed by those w ■■ hoped for the appearance of "natural laws of historical development" wh would eliminate the unpredictability of the individual's actions and " havior.13 There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could aire; l-"see the time approaching when the 'art of moving the masses' will be perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet will pos« the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathei ■ ticían solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substanc. 10 See Martin Bormann's important memorandum on the "Relationship of Nalii-Socialism and Christianity" in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 1036 ff. Similar formulations be found time and again in the pamphlet literature issued by the SS for the '"itlcol-- " cal indoctrination" of its cadets. "The laws of nature are subject to an uncbange;' will that cannot be influenced. Hence it is necessary to recognize these laws" ("SS-M und Blutsfrage," Schriftenreihe für die weltanschauliche Schulung der OrdmtngsptA. 1942). All these are nothing but variations of certain phrases taken from Hit I ■ Mein Kampf, of which the following is quoted as the motto for the pamphlet mentioned: "While man attempts to struggle against the iron logic of nature, he ľOuh..> into conflict with the basic principles to which alone he owes his very existence n\ man." 11 J. Stalin, Leninism (1933), Vol. If, chapter iii. 13 Eric Voegelin, "The Origins of Scientism," in Social Research, Decern ber, 1948. 13See F. A. v. Hayek, "The Counter-Revolution of Science," in Econom'uu, Vnl. VIII (February, May, August, 1941), p. 13. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 347 l has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and I* l whatever the shortcomings of positivism, pragmatism, and behavior-md however great their influence on the formation of the nineteenth-y brand of common sense, it is not at all "the cancerous growth of the tiljtarian segment of existence"15 which characterizes the masses to whom taljtarian propaganda and scientificality appeal. The positivists' conviction, -o we know it from Comte, that the future is eventually scientifically preferable, rests on the evaluation of interest as an all-pervasive force in history and *ne assumption that objective laws of power can be discovered. Rohan's political theory that "the kings command the peoples and the interest commands the king," that objective interest is the rule "that alone can never fail," that "rightly or wrongly understood, the interest makes ,oVernments live or die" is the traditional core of modern utilitarianism, jositivist or socialist, but none of these theories assumes that it is possible 'to transform the nature of man" as totalitarianism indeed tries to do. On lie contrary, they all implicitly or explicitly assume that human nature is jways the same, that history is the story of changing objective circum-tances and the human reactions to them, and that interest, rightly undertook, may lead to a change of circumstances, but not to a change of human eactions as such. "Scientism" in politics still presupposes that human relfare is its object, a concept which is utterly alien to totalitarianism.10' It is precisely because the utilitarian core of ideologies was taken for ranted that the anti-utilitarian behavior of totalitarian governments, their omplete indifference to mass interest, has been such a shock. This intro-uced into contemporary politics an element of unheard-of unpredictability. ! btalitarian propaganda, however—although in the form of shifted emphasis -indicated even before totalitarianism could seize power how far the lasses had drifted from mere concern with interest. Thus the suspicion of ie Allies that the murder of the insane which Hitler ordered at the begrn-ing of the war should be attributed to the desire to get rid of unnecessary ouths to feed was altogether unjustified.17 Hitler was not forced by the war t4lbid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Producteur, I, >9 ir'Voegelin, op. cit. Iü William Ebenstein, The Nazi Stale, New York, 1943, in discussing the "Pennant War Economy" of the Nazi state is almost the only critic who has realized that ie endless discussion ... as to the socialist or capitalist nature of the German onomy under the Nazi regime is largely artificial . . . [because it] tends to over->k the vital fact that capitalism and socialism are categories which relate to estcrn welfare economics" (p. 239). 17 The testimony of Karl Brandt, one of the physicians charged by Hitler with carrying out the program of euthanasia, is characteristic in this context (Medical Trial. US against Karl Brandt et at. Hearing of May 14, 1947). Brandt vehemently protested against the suspicion that the project was initiated to eliminate superfluous food consumers; he emphasized that party members who brought up such arguments in the discussion had always been sharply rebuked. In his opinion, the measures were dictated solely by "ethical considerations." The same is, of course, true for the deporta- 348 TOTALITARIANI! to throw all ethical considerations overboard, but regarded the mass sh -..i ter of war as an incomparable opportunity to start a murder prom" which, like all other points of his program, was calculated in terms oF ! lennia.18 Since virtually all of European history through many centiir' had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and ;ii Htical events by their particular underlying interests, they were siulc r1. confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability. Bucau<* r its demagogic qualities, totalitarian propaganda, which long before*!,' seizure of power clearly indicated how little the masses were driven b\ \ famous instinct of self-preservation, was not taken seriously. The succe ,,} totalitarian propaganda, however, does not rest so much on its demagon /-' as on the knowledge that interest as a collective force can be felt only \\:;V stable social bodies provide the necessary transmission belts betweer -| ■ individual and the group; no effective propaganda based on mere in: [ est can be carried on among masses whose chief characteristic is that i!„. belong to no social or political body, and who therefore present a verii !."'. ■chaos of individual interests. The fanaticism of members of totalit:a.i,-*" movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of r u , bers of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of m -. who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves. The Nazis have proved -h ■ . one can lead a whole people into war with the slogan "or else we shnil ^ down" (something which the war propaganda of 1914 would have av< L i carefully), and this is not in times of misery, unemployment, or frusi 1.1 national ambitions. The same spirit showed itself during the last niontl - ■■" a war that was obviously lost, when Nazi propaganda consoled an air ■. -. badly frightened population with the promise that the Fuehrer "in his ■ i-dom had prepared an easy death for the German people by gassing the ■ ■ i case of defeat."13 Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying tliem of their utilitarian content, the interests of a class or nation. The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content.20 The chief qualification of a mass leader has tions. The files are filled with desperate memoranda written by the military complaining that the deportations of millions of Jews and Poles completely disregarded all "military and economic necessities." See Poliakov, op. cit., p. 321, as well as the documentary material published there. 18 The decisive decree starting all subsequent mass murders was signed by Hitler on September 1, 1939—the day the war broke out—and referred not merely lo the insane (as is often erroneously assumed) but to all those who were "incurably sick." The insane were only the first to go. 10 See Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten, Stuttgart, 1947, p. 190. 3U Hitler based the superiority of ideological movements over political p.irtics on the fact that ideologies (Weltanschauungen) always "proclaim their infallibility" (Mein Kampf, Book II, chapter v, "Weltanschauung and Organization").—The first paces ot the official handbook for the Hitler Youth, The Nazi Primer, New York, 1938, consequently emphasize that all questions of Weltanschauung, formerly deemed "'unrealistic" and "ununderstandable," "have become so clear, simple and definite j my ilalfcsl that evp.rv comrade can understand them and cn-onerate in their solution." THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 349 3nie unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.21 The assump- . of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence ,n the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or ire, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they i bound to assert themselves in the long run.22 Mass leaders in power J 3 one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make ! ^ r predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of ( war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring « lit as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make 1lU. their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat. I'he propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a j niiire interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian ! dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of | prophecy. The most famous example is Hitler's announcement to the Ger- j .nan Reichstag in January, 1939: "I want today once again to make a j prophecy: In case the Jewish financiers . . . succeed once more in hurling ■ ' [fir peoples into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the | Jewish race in Europe."23 Translated into nontotalitarian language, this ! meruit: I intend to make war and I intend to kill the Jews of Europe. Similarly Stalin, in the great speech before the Central Committee of the Com- . nmiiist Party in 1930 in which he prepared the physical liquidation of inu sparty right and left deviationists, described them as representatives of "dung classes."24 This definition not only gave the argument its specific ■sharpness but also announced, in totalitarian style, the physical destruc-j lion of those whose "dying out" had just been prophesied. In both instances .' the same objective is accomplished: the liquidation is fitted into a historical * process in which man only does or suffers what, according to immutable Liws, is bound to happen anyway. As soon as the execution of the victims hus been carried out, the "prophecy" becomes a retrospective alibi: nothing happened but what had already been predicted.25 It does not matter ' The first among the "pledges of the Party member," as enumerated in the Organi-íiuonsbuch der NSDAP, reads: "The Führer is always right." Edition published in 1936, p. 8. But the Dienstvorschrift für die P.O. der NSDAP, 1932, p. 38, puts it this v,h\: "Hitler's decision is final!" Note the remarkable difference in phraseology. " I heir claim to be infallible, [that] neither of them has ever sincerely admitted an ťiTůj" is in this respect the decisive difference between Stalin and Trotsky on one hand, dilti Lenin on the other. See Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York, 1939, p. 583. Ji That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being rishi, because they permit the interpretation of all defeats as the beginning of victory, \- olivious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred ;i:iťi 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize '.lüi Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party. 2 Quoted from Goebbels: The Goebbels Diaries (1942-1943), ed. by Louis Loch-;ľi. Mew York, 1948, p. 148. J1 Stalin, op. cit., loc. cit. *~ In a speech he made in September, 1942, when the extermination of the Jews ■ vins in full swing, Hitler explicitly referred to his speech of Januarv 30. 1939 rniihlished 350 TOTALITÄR! W ism whether the "laws of history" spell the "doom" of the classes and * representatives, or whether the "laws of nature . . . exterminate" all ti 7 elements—democracies, Jews, Eastern subhumans (Untermenschen) the incurably sick—that are not "fit to live" anyway. Incidentally, j ,| too spoke of "dying classes" that ought to be "eliminated without n \ ado."2C This method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof . . after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truf ■ .'•-falsity of a totalitarian dictator's prediction is as weird as arguing wi" potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive—í i: by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide p ■*" of the correctness of his statement. The only'valid argument under such .-i. ditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Be;i-mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propagand. ■ marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such,27 for in their opi- . fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The a ,.-tion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie onl. . long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In c! -words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalite ■•, propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since ■ ■■'■ in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler pos1 * realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies. The language of prophetic scientificality corresponded to the need masses who had lost their home in the world and now were prepared to ne reintegrated into eternal, all-dominating forces which by themselves would bear man, the swimmer on the waves of adversity, to the shores of safety. "We shape the life of our people and our legislation according to the verdicts of genetics,"28 said the Nazis, just as the Bolsheviks assure their followers that economic forces have the power of a verdict of history. They thereby promise a victory which is independent of "temporary" defeats and failures in specific enterprises. For masses, in contrast to classes, want victory and success as such, in their most abstract form; they are not bound together by those special collective interests which they feel to be esse to their survival as a group and which they therefore may assert eve as a booklet titled Der Führer vor dem ersten Reichstag Grossdeutschlands, 1939) to the Reichstag session of September 1, 1939, when he had announced that "if J should instigate an international world war to exterminate the Aryan peoplt Europe, not the Aryan peoples but Jewry will [rest of sentence drowned by appla (see Der Führer zum Kriegswinterhilfswerk, Schriften NSV, No. 14, p. 33). au In the speech of January 30, 1939, p. 19, as quoted above. 27 Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, undei Hitler's "phenomenal untruthfulness," "the lack of demonstrable reality in near! his utterances," his "indifference to facts which he does not regard as vitallj portant" (pp. 368, 374).—In almost identical terms, Khrushchev describes "St reluctance to consider life's realities" and his indifference to "the real state of aff op. cit. Stalin's opinion of the importance of facts is best expressed in his period] visions of Russian history. 20 Nazi Primer. THE TOTALITARUN MOVEMENT 351 ace of overwhelming odds. More important to them than the cause that be victorious, or the particular enterprise that may be a success, is the tL_)ry of no matter what cause, and success in no matter what enterprise. Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but |t neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for '■n:in by fifty years of the rise of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-úřiie» when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier n'oii leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did m,t care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in klence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society |::iil hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption. Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics. flie origin of mystery did not matter; it could lie in a reasonable, politically comprehensible desire for secrecy, as in the case of the British Secret Servis or the French Deuxiěme Bureau; or in the conspiratory need of revolutionary groups, as in the case of anarchist and other terrorist sects; or in the qtjucture of societies whose original secret content had long since become «eil known and where only the formal ritual still retained the former mystery, as in the case of the Freemasons; or in age-old superstitions which had woven legends around certain groups, as in the case of the Jesuits and the Juva. The Nazis were undoubtedly superior in the selection of such topics for mass propaganda; but the Bolsheviks have gradually learned the trick, although they rely less on traditionally accepted mysteries and prefer their own inventions—since the middle thirties, one mysterious world conspiracy hss followed another in Bolshevik propaganda, starting with the plot of the frotskyites, followed by the rule of the 300 families, to the sinister imperialist (i.e., global) machinations of the British or American Secret Services.30 1 he effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time. What the masses refuse to recognize is the fortuitousness that pervades '" It is interesting to note that the Bolsheviks during the Stalin era somehow accumu-Ľiíi! conspiracies, that the discovery of a new one did not mean they would discard liu lormer. The Trotskyite conspiracy started around 1930, the 300 families were Aiilsil during the Popular Front period, from 1935 onward, British imperialism became -i; Ritual conspiracy during the Stalin-Hitler alliance, the "American Secret Service" ii'lUiwed soon after the close of the war; the last, Jewish cosmopolitanism, had an irvious and disquieting resemblance to Nazi propaganda. 352 TOTALITARIAN! - reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain ■ mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventin ',," ",* embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of e . ''"" dent. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality h- ,\"„l" from coincidence into consistency. ' ■ The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot ■■ 11,. longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible ■ i .' dictable world without seriously conflicting with common sens !■ ,\ instance, all the "confessions" of political opponents in the Soviet I -i * '' phrased in the same language and admit the same motives, the consist, i " hungry masses will accept the fiction as supreme proof of their truthfuln *,»" whereas common sense tells us that it'is precisely their consistency ',/ \ is out of this world and proves that they are a fabrication. Figuratively s i' ing, it is as though the masses demand a constant repetition of the rn ■ of the Septuagint, when, according to ancient legend, seventy isolated i s b* lators produced an identical Greek version of the Old Testament. Cor -i,.-sense can accept this tale only as a legend or a miracle; yet it could al ■ I adduced as proof of the absolute faithfulness of every single word in ■ * translated text. In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a i" i to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they ci ■ ■■. longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that :■ longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the hunitln mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. í The revolt of the masses against "realism," common sense, and all "the plausibilities of the world" (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. While it has been the specialty of Nazi propaganda to profit from the longing of the masses for consistency, Bolshevik methods have demonstrated, as though in a laboratory, its impact on the isolated mass man. The Soviet secret police, so eager to convince its victims of their guilt for crimes THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 353 ■ never committed, and in many instances were in no position to corn-completely isolates and eliminates all real factors, so that the very logic, very consistency of "the story" contained in the prepared confession " )I1)es overwhelming. In a situation where the dividing line between jn and reality is blurred by the monstrosity and the inner consistency he accusation, not only the strength of character to resist constant ats but great confidence in the existence of fellow human beings—rela-; or friends or neighbors—who will never believe "the story" are required esjst the temptation to yield to the mere abstract possibility of guilt. '"7-0 be sure, this extreme of an artificially fabricated insanity can be ,-hieved only in a totalitarian world. Then, however, it is part of the propa-í-nda apparatus of the totalitarian regimes to which confessions are not Qjspensable for punishment. "Confessions" are as much a specialty of u'olshevik propaganda as the curious pedantry of legalizing crimes by retro-s-icctive and retroactive legislation was a specialty of Nazi propaganda. The .jni in both cases is consistency. ' Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doc-■riiies, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which jä more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in «hich, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and ;iie spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal •o human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda—before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains m prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of Lin entirely imaginary world—lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers to the understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses—whom every kw stroke of ill luck makes more gullible—are, so to speak, its lacunae, !he questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumors it does not d,:rv to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and deformed way, some sore spot. From these sore spots the lies of totalitarian propaganda derive the element of truthfulness and real experience they need to bridge the gulf between leality and fiction. Only terror could rely on mere fiction, and even the lenor-sustained lying fictions of totalitarian regimes have not yet become entirely arbitrary, although they are usually cruder, more impudent, and, so 10 speak, more original than those of the movements. (It takes power, not propaganda skill, to circulate a revised history of the Russian Revolution in which no man by the name of Trotsky was ever commander-in-chief of the Red Army.) The lies of the movements, on the other hand, are much subtler. They attach themselves to every aspect of social and political life [hat is hidden from the public eye. They succeed best where the official authorities have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of secrecy. In lite eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior "realism" because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden. Revelations of scandals in hieh societv. nf mrmntinn nf ™ii*;«i™n <«— 354 TOTALITARIA NíSIM thing that belongs to yellow journalism, becomes in their hands of more than sensational importance. a v S The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a world conspiracy. Concentration on antisemitic propaganda had í common device of demagogues ever since the end of the nineteenth a and was widespread in the Germany and Austria of the twenties. Th< consistently a discussion of the Jewish question was avoided by all and organs of public opinion, the more convinced the mob becam ■'" Jews were the true representatives of the powers that be, and that thv i,.' ish issue was the symbol for the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the -i , system. The actual content of postwar antisemitic propaganda was nei i monopoly of the Nazis nor particularly new and original. Lies about , ;. 1 ish world conspiracy had been current since the Dreyfus Affair and themselves on the existing international interrelationship and interé ...;.■ ence of a Jewish people dispersed all over the world. Exaggerated r ■. of Jewish world power are even older; they can be traced back to tl. ■ ■. of the eighteenth century, when the intimate connection betwen K-. business and the nation-states had become visible. The representation -i ■ Jew as the incarnation of evil is usually blamed on remnants and su : tious memories from the Middle Ages, but is actually closely connecte-' ■', the more recent ambiguous role which Jews played in European ;■■ . since their emancipation. One thing was undeniable: in the postwar \ Jews had become more prominent than ever before. The point about the Jews themselves is that they grew prominei i ■ conspicuous in inverse proportion to their real influence and posit m . \ power. Every decrease in the stability and force of the nation-states direct blow to Jewish positions. The partially successful conquest 01 tne state by the nation made it impossible for the government machine to maintain its position above all classes and parties, and thereby nullified the value of alliances with the Jewish sector of the population, which was supposed also to stay outside the ranks of society and to be indifferent to party politics. The growing concern with foreign policy of the imperialist-minded bourgeoisie and its growing influence on the state machinery was accompanied by the steadfast refusal of the largest segment of Jewish wealth to engage itself in industrial enterprises and to leave the tradition of capital trading. All this taken together almost ended the economic usefulness to the state of the Jews as a group, and the advantages to themselves of social separation. After the first World War, Central European Jewries became as assimilated and nationalized as French Jewry had become during the first decades of the Third Republic. How conscious the concerned states were of the changed situation came to light when, in 1917, the German government, following a long-established tradition, tried to use its Jews for tentative peace negotiations with the Allies. Instead of addressing itself to the established leaders of German THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 355 «ry. it went to ^e small and comparatively uninfluential Zionist minority ;ch were still trusted in the old way precisely because they insisted on existence of a Jewish people independent of citizenship, and could there-be expected to render services which depended upon international con-jons and an international point of view. The step, however, turned out ave been a mistake for the German government. The Zionists did some-g that no Jewish banker had ever done before; they set their own con-,ns and told the government that they would only negotiate a peace out annexations and reparations/10 The old Jewish indifference to po-jl issues was gone; the majority could no longer be used, since it was Pilger aloof from the nation, and the Zionist minority was useless because [d political ideas of its own. Jie replacement of monarchical governments by republics in Central ,pe completed the disintegration of Central European Jewries, just as establishment of the Third Republic had done it in France some fifty s earlier. The Jews had already lost much of their influence when the governments established themselves under conditions in which they ;d the power as well as the interest to protect their Jews. During the e negotiations in Versailles, Jews were used chiefly as experts, and antisemites admitted that the petty Jewish swindlers in the postwar mostly new arrivals (behind whose fraudulent activities, which dis-lished them sharply from their native coreligionists, lay an attitude h oddly resembled the old indifference to the standards of their environ-;), had no connections with the representatives of a supposed Jewish national.31 mong a host of competing antisemitic groups and in an atmosphere ripe antisemitism, Nazi propaganda developed a method of treating this :ct which was different from and superior to all others. Still, not one \u\ slogan was new—not even Hitler's shrewd picture of a class struggle caused by the Jewish businessman who exploits his workers, while at the same time his brother in the factory courtyard incites them to strike.33 The only new element was that the Nazi party demanded proof of non-Jewish descent for membership and that it remained, the Feder program notwithstanding, extremely vague about the actual measures to be taken against Jews once it came to power.33 The Nazis placed the Jewish issue at the center ■'See Chaim Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, New York, 1949, p. 185. "'.See, for instance, Otto Bonhard, Jüdische Geld- und Weltherrschaft?, 1926, p. 57. ''Hitler used this picture for the first time in 1922: "Moses Kohn on the one side c.kMinages his association to refuse the workers' demands, while his brother Isaac in ilio l.icrory invites the masses . . ." to strike. {Hitler's Speeches: 1922-1939, ed. [Jiji.js, London, 1942, p. 29.) It is noteworthy that no complete collection of H.llci"? speeches was ever published in Nazi Germany, so that one is forced to resort m she English edition. That this was no accident can be seen from a bibliography iít.mpi'ed by Philipp Bouhler, Die Reden des Führers nach der Machtübernahme, l')J(): only the public speeches were printed verbatim in the Völkischer Beobachter; :.■. for speeches to the Fuehrerkorps and other party units, they were merely "referred V in that newspaper. They were not al any time meant for publication. J56 existence- nn ™ e ,ntimate concern «f mai°nty, or a c ' «« «he hi"h° ™, C0UW, be a "«nbeľww f.í™vidua, "" tree had ÄSS^ Nazi &£$^ was'^ shevjsm changed 7h », y the same token ti, me* ríher back í, stored so™ o ^ »s <* «^I^SO6?1*' "" ' "on in society but akn spect tbey h^ forAerlľn at'0n whH better Candidatesor ° T™ a k>nd °l ■I"SÄ5ľed fr°m ' ><-! »ovement couid setiľel? f"™™- Through th; ffe."1** "'»< «"• by Koppe, S p"mo! íem,"sm i" Modern Ge' ',? P™enim. ' "''» °nsinaliij,_tn w, A" lh« demands »nil Presses the lad „f *'""■» tee&£=££ Sg: %— w /«*£ ,„,.'■ S« "■ Bec, and w. <&£-£ *™*d p£í"iŕZZf „ .„.iucuĽies of McCarth) „ ...^ -—.„a .-.now most £irti-ingiy in the attempt not merely to persecute Communists, but to force ev citizen to furnish proof of not being a Communist. ;'7 "One should not overestimate the influence of the press . . . , it decreases general while the influence of the organization increases" (Hadamovsky, op. cit., 64). "The newspapers are helpless when they are supposed to fight against the gressi've force of a living organization" {ibid., p. 65). "Power formations which have their origin in mere propaganda are fluctuating and can disappear n»'"1,1" " violence of an organization simr.^-*- - ......„icases" {Hadamovsky, op. cil., ; , „lt, ueipiess when they are supposed to fight against the a fc.wssive force of a living organization" (ibid., p. 65). "Power formations which have their origin in mere propaganda are fluctuating and can disappear quickly unless the violence of an organization supports the propaganda" (ibid., p. 21). THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 357 that it offered to the isolated individuals of an atomized society.38 same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out was apparent in the Nazis' treatment of other relevant issues. When attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and soon the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and jiillv constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the t tjie "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nazi) offered a rfieM'' supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose hie trademark of "German" and "Worker" connected the nationalism of Ritilit with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi anient stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended liciily t° incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic tical doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in , a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and c who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior ,ter motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these ,gs ai once? is interesting that even in their beginnings the Nazis were prudent .luh never to use slogans which, like democracy, republic, dictatorship, monarchy, indicated a specific form of government.39 It is as though, in tf)is one matter, they had always known that they would be entirely original. Every discussion about the actual form of their future government could be dismissed as empty talk about mere formalities—the state, according to Hitler, being only a "means" for the conservation of the race, as the state, iccording to Bolshevik propaganda, is only an instrument in the struggle jf classes.40 ■'«"The mass-meeting is the strongest form of propaganda . . . [because] each in-1 lividual feels more self-confident and more powerful in the unity of a mass" (ibid, ,. 47). "The enthusiasm of the moment becomes a principle and a spiritual attitude hrough organization and systematic training and discipline" (ibid., p. 21-22). 39 In the isolated instances in which Hitler concerned himself with this question at II, he used to emphasize: "Incidentally, I am not the head of a state in the sense of a [ictator or monarch, but I am a leader of the German people" (see Ausgewählte leden des Führers, 1939, p. 114).—Hans Frank expresses himself in the same spirit: The National Socialist Reich is not a dictatorial, let alone an arbitrary, regime. Rather, fie National Socialist Reich rests on the mutual loyalty of the Führer and the people" m Recht und Verwaltung, Munich, 1939, p. 15). 40 Hitler repeated many times: "The state is only the means to an end. The end is: ■ conservation of race" (Reden, 1939, p. 125). He also stressed that his movement "does ot rest on the state idea, but is primarily based on the closed Volksgemeinschaft" see Reden, 1933, p. 125, and the speech before the new generation of political laders [Fiihrernachwuchs\, 1937, which is printed as an addendum in Hitlers Tisch- espräche, p. 446). This, mutatis mutandis, is also the core of the complicated double talk which is Stalin's so-called "state theory": "We are in favor of the State dying out, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of 35S TOTALITARIANISM In another curious and roundabout way, however, the Nazis gave a ri\, ganda answer to the question of what their future role would be, an-" {•'. was in their use of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as a model f.- 'ú' future organization of the German masses for "world empire." The i . r the Protocols was not restricted to the Nazis; hundreds of thousai'iU "■ copies were sold in postwar Germany, and even their open adoption handbook of politics was not new.41 Nevertheless, this forgery was n-iř,! used for the purpose of denouncing the Jews and arousing the mob .- i' dangers of Jewish domination.42 In terms of mere propaganda, the dist..■...,* of the Nazis was that the masses were not so frightened by Jewish y.^-'"*, rule as they were interested in how it could be done, that the popula., , ,t the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rathe i|, on hatred, and that it would be wise to stay as close as possible to t „.i „. of their outstanding formulas, as in the case of the famous slogan: ' It- ■,■ is what is good for the German people," which was copied from the Pin-,,, cols' "Everything that benefits the Jewish people is morally right and sacred."43 The Protocols are a very curious and noteworthy document in many respects. Apart from their cheap Machiavellianism, their essential political characteristic is that in their crackpot manner they touch on every important political issue of the time. They are antinational in principle and picture the nation-state as a colossus with feet of clay. They discard national sovcrei»nty State which have existed up to the present day. The highest possible development of the power of the State with the object of preparing the conditions for the «.lying out of the State; that is the Marxist formula" (op. cit., loc. cit.)- 41 Alexander Stein, Adolf Hitler, Schüler der "Weisen von'Zion," KaiKbiid, [93fi was the first to analyze by philological comparison the ideological identity ol ihu lathings of the Nazis with that of the "Elders of Zion." See also R. M. Blank, A doli Hitler et les "Protocoles des Sages de Sión," 1938. The first to admit indebtedness to the teachings of the Protocols w as Theodor Fritsch, the "grand old man" of German postwar antisemitism. He writes in (he epilogue to his edition of the Protocols, 1924: "Our future statesmen and diplomas will have to learn from the oriental masters of villainy even the ABC of government, anil for this purpose, the 'Zionist Protocols' offer an excellent preparatory schooling." 42 On the history of the Protocols, see John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocol* of Zion, 1942. The fact that the Protocols were a forgery was irrelevant for propaganda purposes, The Russian publicist S. A. Nilus who published the second Russian edition in 1905 was already well aware of the doubtful character of this "document" and added the obvious: "But if it were possible to show its authenticity by documents or by the testimony of trustworthy witnesses, if it were possible to disclose the persons standing at the head of the world-wide plot . . . then . . . 'the secret iniquity' could be broken. . . ." Translation in Curtiss, op. cit. Hitler did not need Nilus to use the same trick: the best proof of their authenticity is that they have been proved to be a forgery. And he also adds the argument of their "plausibility": "What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously made clear. And that is what counts" (Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi). 43 Fritsch, op. cii., "[Der Juden] oberster Grundsatz lautet: 'Alles, was dim Volke Juda nutzt, ist moralisch und ist heilig.'" THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 359 believe, as Hitler once put it, in a world empire on a national basis.4* ,, are not satisfied with revolution in a particular country, but aim at the uest and rule of the world. They promise the people that, regardless of " Priority in numbers, territory, and state power, they will be able to ^ve world conquest through organization alone. To be sure, part of persuasive strength derives from very old elements of superstition. notion of the uninterrupted existence of an international sect that has jed the same revolutionary aims since antiquity is very old45 and has „>d a role in political backstairs literature ever since the French Revolu- . even though it did not occur to anyone writing at the end of the eenth century that the "revolutionary sect," this "peculiar nation . . . e midst of all civilized nations," could be the Jews.46 ; was the motif of a global conspiracy in the Protocols which appealed . to the masses, for it corresponded so well to the new power situation. I ler very early promised that the Nazi movement would "transcend the „arrow limits of modern nationalism,"47 and during the war attempts were .i-'World Empires spring from a national basis, but they expand soon far beyond ,■ (Reden). •' Henri Rollin, L'Apocalypse de Notre Temps, Paris, 1939, who considers the popu-Iniiv of the Protocols to be second only to the Bible (p. 40), shows the similarity h>:v»L'en them and the Monita Secreta, first published in 1612 and still sold in 1939 on ■h; streets of Paris, which claim to reveal a Jesuit conspiracy "that justifies all Vilnius and ail uses of violence. . . . This is a real campaign against the established jrJeľ" (P- 32). II This whole literature is well represented by the Chevalier de Malet, Recherchen -Juiques et historiqites qui prouvent I'existence ďune secte révolutionnaire, 1817, who iiioiL-s extensively from earlier authors. The heroes of the French Revolution are to I im 'mannequins" of an "agence secrete," the agents of the Freemasons. But Free-nvMinry is only the name which his contemporaries have given to a "revolutionary •ej" which has existed at all times and whose policy always has been to attack "re-niimng behind the scenes, manipulating the strings of the marionettes it thought con-■■eniiMt to put on the scene." He starts by saying: "Probably, it will be difficult to Micve in a plan which was formed in antiquity and always- followed with the same ..o.Mancy: . . . the authors of the Revolution are no more French than they are iicrman, Italian, English, etc. They constitute a peculiar nation which was born and !v> grown in darkness, in the midst of all civilized nations, with the aim of subduing liiiMii all to its domination." hor an extensive discussion of this literature, see E. Lesueur, La Franc-Maconnerie uihlenne ait 18e siěcle, Bibliothěque d'Histoire Révolutionnaire, 1914. How percent these conspiracy legends are in themselves, even under normal circumstances, i:i:i be seen by the enormous anti-Freemason crackpot literature in France, which is ieiiily less extensive than its antisemitic counterpart. A kind of compendium of all liieunes which saw in the French Revolution the product of secret conspiracy so-Jdirs can be found in G. Bord, La Franc-Maconnerie en France děs origines ä 1815, .VIJ«. " Reden.—See the transcript of a session of the SS Committee on Labor Questions t SS headquarters in Berlin on January 12, 1943, where it was suggested that the word ■"luiun," a concept being burdened with connotations of liberalism, should be elimi-■B-ted as it was inadequate for the Germanic peoples (Document 705—PS in Nazi Con-viu.iy and Aggression, V, 515). 360 TOTALITARIAN^! made within the SS to erase the word "nation" from the National vocabulary altogether.) Only world powers seemed still to have a cl independent survival and only global politics a chance of lasting That this situation should frighten the smaller nations which are nt powers is only too understandable. The Protocols seemed to shov out that did not depend upon objective unalterable conditions, but the power of organization. Nazi propaganda, in other words, discovered in "the supranational I* cause intensely national Jew"4S the forerunner of the German master *": the world and assured the masses that "the nations that have been the h ■ to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to t íl his place in the domination of the world."4!l The delusion of an aire--'* existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of fut'u-"" German world domination. This was what Himmler had in mind when ■■'■ stated that "we owe the art of government to the Jews," namely, to tjI" Protocols which "the Führer [had] learned by heart."00 Thus the ProtO(-i* presented world conquest as a practical possibility, implied that the wh.,-affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that n." body stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but patently small people, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instrunic vi of violence—an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discove ol and their method emulated on a larger scale. í Nazi propaganda concentrated all these new and promising vistas in ■?„ ! concept which it labeled Volksgemeinschaft. This new community, tentatively realized in the Nazi movement in the pretotalitarian atmosphere, tvhs ; based on the absolute equality of all Germans, an equality not of rights but of nature, and their absolute difference from all other people.51 After the Nazis came to power, this concept gradually lost its importance and gave ; way to a general contempt for the German people (which the Nazis had j always harbored but could not very well show publicly before) on one í hand,52 and a great eagerness, on the other, to enlarge their own ranks from 48 Hitler's Speeches, ed. Baynes, p. 6. 4" Goebbels, op. cit. p. 377. This promise, implied in all antisemitic propagandu of the Nazi type, was prepared by Hitler's "The most extreme contrast to the Aryan is the Jew" {Adein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi). so Dossier Kersten, in the Centre de Documentation Juive. 51 Hitler's early promise (Reuen), "I shall never recognize that other nations have the same right as the German," became official doctrine: "The foundation of the national socialist outlook in life is the perception of the unlikeness of men" (Nazi Primer, P- 5). " For instance, Hitler in 1923: "The German people consists for one third of heroes, for another third, of cowards, while the rest are traitors" (Hitler's Speeches, ed. Baynes, p. 76). After the seizure of power this trend became more brutally outspoken. See. for instance, Goebbels in 1934: "Who are the people to criticize? Party members? No. The rest of the German people? They should consider themselves lucky to be still alive. It would be too much of a good thing altogether, if those who live at our mercy should be allowed to criticize." Quoted from Kohn-Bramstedt, op, cit., pp. 178-179,—During the war Hitler declared: "I am nothing but a magnet constantly moving across the I THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 361 ryans" of other nations, an idea which had played only a small role in j prepower stage of Nazi propaganda.53 The Volksgemeinschaft was; rely the propagandistic preparation for an "Aryan" racial society whichj (he end would have doomed all peoples, including the Germans. ' To a certain extent, the Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazis' attempt to inter the Communist promise of a classless society. The propaganda ap-jl of the one over the other seems obvious if we disregard all ideological plications. While both promised to level all social and property differences, classless society had the obvious connotation that everybody would be eled to the status of a factory worker, while the Volksgemeinschaft, with connotation of conspiracy for world conquest, held out a reasonable )e that every German could eventually become a factory owner. The even ater advantage of the Volksgemeinschaft, however, was that its establish-nt did not have to wait for some future time and did not depend upon ective conditions: it could be realized immediately in the fictitious world the movement. The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organiza-i^the "accumulation of power without the possession of the means of íence."54 For this purpose, originality in ideological content can only considered an unnecessary obstacle. It is no accident that the two totali-ian movements of our time, so frightfully "new" in methods of rule and enious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, it never invented an ideology which was not already popular.35 Not the [Wising successes of demagogy win the masses, but the visible reality and power of a "living organization."50 Hitler's brilliant gifts as a mass orator did not win him his position in the movement but rather misled his opponents into underestimating him as a simple demagogue, and Stalin was '• able to defeat the greater orator of the Russian Revolution.57 What distin- Gcrinaa nation and extracting the steel from this people. And I have often stated that ine time will come when all worth-while men in Germany are going to be in my camp. And those who will not be in my camp are worthless anyway." Even then it was cLsr to Hitler's immediate environment what would happen to those who "are worthies', anyway" (see Der grossdeutsche Freiheitskampf. Reden Hitlers vom 1. 9. 1939— in. 3. 1940, p. 174).—Himmler meant the same when he said: "The Führer does not ihink in German, but in Germanic terms" (Dossier Kersten, cf. above), except that ■*e know from Hitlers Tischgespräche (p. 315 ff.) that in those days he was already making fun even of the Germanic "clamor" and thought in "Aryan terms." " Himmler in a speech to SS leaders at Kharkov in April, 1943 (Nazi Conspiracy, IV. 572 ff.): "I very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries. . . ." An ;.:r\y prepower indication of this non-national policy was given by Hitler (Reden): \Vt shall certainly also receive into the new master class representatives of other i ..tions, i.e., those who deserve it because of their participation in our fight." "'"Hadamovsky, op. cit. "Heiden, op. cit., p. 139: Propaganda is not "the art of instilling an opinion in the nurses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses." 'Hadamovsky, op. cit., passim. The term is taken from Hitler, Mein Kampf (Book U chapter xi), where the "living organization" of a movement is contrasted with the ' Jciid mechanism" of a bureaucratic party. '"It would be a serious error to interpret totalitarian leaders in terms of Max 362 TOTALITARIANISM guishes the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simpfe-m single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements ■"'* '" ftxiifino1 iHŕ»nIfiaipc whiŕ-h nrf» hpcf fitter! tn Ki»i>nmf> the. f»nsln___. ,|l,!l: other, entirely fictitious world. The fiction of the Protocols was as adt- ' as the fiction of a Trotskyite conspiracy, for both contained an elem ..", '^ plausibility—the nonpublic influence of the Jews in the past; the strugM i' power between Trotsky and Stalin—which not even the fictitious woild 7 totalitarianism can safely do without. Their art consists in using, and il power between Trotsky and Stalin—which not even the fictitious woild ', -totalitarianism can safely do without. Their art consists in using, and il' same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences ^ the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then a definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience Wth such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to com pete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical con" sistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and strictness of th" organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies—the power of the Jews after their helples«; slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky. The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick, and, at least in the case of Stahn, cannot be explained by the psychology of the liar whose very success may make him his own last victim. Once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a "living org?iniza-{tion," they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure /The assumption of a Jewish world conspiracy was transformed by totalitarian propaganda from an objective, arguable matter into the chief element of the Nazi reality; the point was that the Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself. Racism for them was no longer a debatable theory of dubious scientific value, but was being realized every day in the functioning hierarchy of a political organization in whose framework it would have been very "unrealistic" to question it. Similarly, Bolshevism no longer needs to win an argument about class struggle, internationalism, and unconditional dependence of the welfare of the proletariat on the welfare of the Soviet Union; the functioning organization of the Comintern is more convincing than any argument or mere ideology can ever be. Weber's category of the "charismatic leadership." See Hans Gerth, "The Nazi Party," in American Journal of Sociology, 1940, Vol. XLV. (A similar misunderstanding is also the shortcoming of Heiden's biography, op. cit.) Gerth describes Hitler as the charismatic leader of a bureaucratic party. This alone, in his opinion, can account for the fact that "however flagrantly actions may have contradicted words, nothing could disrupt the firmly disciplinary organization." (This contradiction, by the way, is mucli more characteristic of Stalin who "took care always to say the opposite of what he did, and to do the opposite of what he said." Souvarine, op. cit., p. 431.) For the source of this misunderstanding see Alfred von Martin, "Zur Soziologie der Gegenwart," in Zeitschrift für Kulturgeschichte, Band 27, and Arnold Koettgen, "Die Gesetzmässigkeit der Verwaltung im Führerstaat," in Reichsverwaltungsblatt, IV36, both of whom characterize the Nazi state as a bureaucracy with charismatic leadership. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 363 ■he fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda r the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for " members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue ut which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouch- . j an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of "entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out \ f under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity ■ acism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a ľ-íceí depended upon an "Aryan" physiognomy (Himmler used to select lie applicants ^or tne ss fr°m photographs) and the amount of food upon !-T. number of one's Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence rfihe world. The advantages of a propaganda that constantly "adds the power of organization"ň8 to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are ob-Jous beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality ■A-hich the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality. It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian/ propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its mem-; beis cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still \ vviire ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the j íiclitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to/ their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new func-j lion in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluous-. ns^. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as ihc movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots).5i) Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad h;l and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement. The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed Mil convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be laken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism lib an ideology had been so fully "realized" that its content ceased to exist ■ Hadamovsky, op. cit., p. 21. For totalitarian purposes it is a mistake to propagate :hcn ideology through teaching or persuasion. In the words of Robert Ley, it can be sillier "taught" nor "learned," but only "exercised" and "practiced" (see Der Weg zut Ordensburg, undated). '' R. Hoehn, one of the outstanding Nazi political theorists, interpreted this lack of j doctrine or even a common set of ideals and beliefs in the movement in his Reichsge-mdnschaft und Volksgemeinschaft, Hamburg, 1935: "From the point of view of a fiiik community, every community of values is destructive" (p. 83). 364 TOTALITARIANISM as an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so t0 destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, leasts'1*.' thfi fanaticism nf hfilipvprs '■ ■!" I'liľ, n: Totalitarian Organization the forms of totalitarian organization, as distinguished from then Logical content and propaganda slogans, are completely new.60 Thv""0" designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven ^m'^ a central fiction—the conspiracy of the Jews, or the Trotskyites, \ r\'" families, etc.—into' a functioning reality, to build up, even under nonii i !' tarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react accordireV" the rules of a fictitious world. In contrast with seemingly similar partL- ľ.; movements of Fascist or Socialist, nationalist or Communist orientati ■• \. of which back up their propaganda with terrorism as soon as thei ij, ! reached a certain stage of extremism (which mostly depends on the u". of desperation of their members), the totalitarian movement is re; :-, ",J earnest about its propaganda, and this earnestness is expressed mucli "i. -.. frighteningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical linuji dation of its opponents. Organization and propaganda (rather than terror and propaganda) are two sides of the same coin.61 The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers. Compared to this" invention other typically totalitarian features, such as the appointment of functionaries from above and the eventual monopolization of appointments by one man are secondary in importance. The so-called "leader principle" is in itself not totalitarian; it has borrowed certain features from authoritarianism and military dictatorship which have greatly contributed toward obscuring and belittling the essentially totalitarian phenomenon. If the functionaries appointed from above possessed real authority and responsibility, we would have to do with a hierarchical structure in which authority and power are delegated and governed by laws. Much the same is true for the organization of an army and the military dictatorship established after its model; here, absolute power of command from the top down and absolute obedience from the bottom up correspond to the situation of extreme danger in combat, which is precisely why they are not totalitarian. A hierarchically organized chain of command means that the commander's power is dependent on the whole hierarchic system in which he operates. Every hierarchy, no matter ,in Hitier, discussing the relationship between Weltanschauung and organization, admits as a matter of course that the Nazis took over from other groups and parties the "racial idea" {die völkische Idee) and acted as though they were its only representatives because they were the first to base a fighting organization on it and to formulate it for practical purposes. Op. cit.. Book II, chapter v. ei See Hitler, "Propaganda and Organization," in op. cit.. Book II, chapter xi. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 365 . „ authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter « arbitrary or dictatorial the content of orders, tends to stabilize and u}d have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian move- at,«s In the language of the Nazis, the never-resting, dynamic "will of Fuehrer"—and not his orders, a phrase that might imply a fixed and "mmscribed authority—becomes the "supreme law" in a totalitarian " [e m It is only from the position in which the totalitarian movement, gits to its unique organization, places the leader—only from his func- ial importance for the movement—that the leader principle develops . totalitarian character. This is also borne out by the fact that both in ler's and Stalin's case the actual leader principle crystallized only rather wly, and parallel with the progressive "totalitarianization" of the move- ^n anonymity which contributes greatly to the weirdness of the whole nomenon clouds the beginnings of this new organizational structure. We not know who first decided to organize fellow-travelers into front organ-ions, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses—upon whom all ties used to count at election day but whom they considered to be too fluctuating for membership—not only a reservoir from which to draw party members, but a decisive force in itself. The early Communist-inspired or- '■'Himmleťs vehemently urgent request "not to issue any decree concerning the tefinition of the term 'lew'" is a case in point; for "with all these foolish commit-'lonts we will only be tying our hands" (Nuremberg Document No. 626, letter to ljŤ"er dated July 28, 1942, photostatic copy at the Centre de Documentation Juive). "■■''The formulation "The will of the Fuehrer is the supreme law" is found in all cdcial rules and regulations governing the conduct of the Party and the SS. The best iiuirce on this subject is Otto Gauweiler, Rechtseinrichtungen und Rechtsaufgaben der l'nwegung, 1939. ■■'Heiden, op. cit., p. 292, reports the following difference between the first and the following editions of Mein Kamp}: The first edition proposes the election of party mliJafs who only after their election are vested with "unlimited power and authority"; all following editions establish appointment of party officials from above by the next higher leader. Naturally, for the stability of totalitarian regimes the appointment from iitiove is a much more important principle than the "unlimited authority" of the appointed official. In practice, the subleaders' authority was decisively limited through ihe Leader's absolute sovereignty. See below. Stalin, coming from the conspiratory apparatus of the Bolshevik party, probably never thought this a problem. To him, appointments in the party machine were a ijijuition of accumulation of personal power. (Yet, it was only in the thirties, after he hud studied Hitler's example, that he let himself be addressed as "leader.") It must be admitted, however, that he could easily justify these methods by quoting Lenin's ihcory that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by .I-, own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness," and that its leader-vup therefore necessarily comes from without. (See What Is to be done?, first published in 1902, in Collected Works, Vol. IV, Book II.) The point is that Lenin considered [he Communist Party as the "most progressive" part of the working class and at the sume time "the lever of political organization" which "directs the whole mass of the proletariat," i.e., an organization outside and above the class. (See W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, New York, 1935, II, 361.) Nevertheless, Lenin Jul not question the validity of inner-party democracy, though he was inclined to rennet democracy to the working class itself. 366 T°TALITARHNIS¥ ganizations of sympathizers, such as the Friends of the Soviet Unio Red Relief associations, developed into front organizations but wp ■"' ':,: inally nothing more or less than what their names indicated: a gathe'i ' "l-" sympathizers for financial or other (for instance, legal) help. Hitler v'"' ■*' first to say that each movement should divide the masses which hav' '" won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and roe '^' "This in itself is interesting enough; even more significant is that he bas ■ "^ division upon a more general philosophy according to which most pen"1.'' too lazy and cowardly for anything more than mere theoretical insie] ■* V-only a minority want to fight for their convictions.tir' Hitler, conseq ■ ■ -i"' was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the r ■". "-sympathizers while at the same time keeping the. number of party ml- "*"'' strictly limited.Ge This notion of a minority of party members surroun I ■":. a majority of sympathizers comes very close to the later reality 0 V',,' * organizations—a term which indeed expresses most aptly their t\ \'i"' function, and indicates the relationship between members and sympa., within the movement itself. For the front organizations of sympathi» ■ no less essential to the functioning of the movement than its actual bership. The front organizations surround the movements1 membership ■ , protective wall which separates them from the outside, normal wo 11 the same time, they form a bridge back into normalcy, without whi !i ■ members in the prepower stage would feel too sharply the differences between their beliefs and those of normal people, between the lying ficťnious-ness of their own and the reality of the normal world. The ingeniousness of this device during the movements' struggle for power is that the front'organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination. It is the difference between his own and the fellow-traveler's attitudes which confirms a Nazi or Bolshevik in his belief in the fictitious explanation of the world, for the fellow-traveler has the same convictions, after all, albeit in a more "normal," i.e., less fanatic, more confused form; so that to the party member it appears that anyone whom the movement has not expressly singled out as an enemy (a Jew, a capitalist, etc.) is on his side, that the world is full of secret allies who merely cannot, as yet, summon up the necessary strength of mind and character to draw the logical conclusions from their own convictions.07 characteristic of each layer of the movement—to act as the magic defensi ■: the movement against the outside world; and at the same time, to be i direct bridge by which the movement is connected with it. The Leader rei :„■-sents the movement in a way totally different from all ordinary party lc. '-ers; he claims personal responsibility for every action, deed, or misdi.' committed by any member or functionary in his official capacity. This t ' ■. responsibility is the most important organizational aspect of the so-called Leader principle, according to which every functionary is not only appointed by the Leader but is his walking embodiment, and every order is supposed to emanate from this one ever-present source. This thorough identification of the Leader with every appointed subleader and this monopoly of responsibility for everything which is being done are also the most conspicuous signs of the decisive difference between a totalitarian leader and an ordinary dictator or despot. A tyrant would never identify himself with his subordinates, let alone with every one of their acts;87 he might use them as seape- m The circumstances surrounding Stalin's death seem to contradict the infallibility of these methods. There is the possibility that Stalin, who, before he died, undoubtedly planned still another general purge, was killed by someone in his environment because no one felt safe any longer, but despite a great deal of circumstantial evidence this cannot be proved. 87 Thus Hitler personally cabled his responsibility for the Potempa murder to the SA assassins in 1932, although presumably he had nothing whatever to do with it What mattered here was establishing a principle of identification, or, in the language of the Nazis, "the mutual loyalty of the Leader and the people" on which "the Reich rests" (Hans Frank, op. cit.). «} HE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 375 id gladly have them criticized in order to save himself from the oi the people, but he would always maintain an absolute distance from ,, subordinates and all his subjects. The Leader, on the contrary, can- lerate criticism of his subordinates, since they act always in his name; wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried out; if he wants to blame his mistakes on others, he must kill them.88 within this organizational framework a mistake can only be a fraud: impersonation of the Leader by an impostor. This- tota^ resPons'bility for everything done by the movement and this t.;l identification with every one of its functionaries have the very prac-.a[ consequence that nobody ever experiences a situation in which he has he responsible for his own actions or can explain the reasons for them. lCl; t tie Leader has monopolized the right and possibility of explanation, appears to the outside world as the only person who knows what he is iflii. i.e., the only representative of the movement with whom one may [[ talk in nontotalitarian terms and who, if reproached or opposed, cannot y. Don't ask me, ask the Leader. Being in the center of the movement, the ader can act as though he were above it. It is therefore perfectly under-ndjble (and perfectly futile) for outsiders to set their hopes time and am on a personal talk with the Leader himself when they have to deal th totalitarian movements or governments. The real mystery of the totali-jan Leader resides in an organization which makes it possible for him assume the total responsibility for all crimes committed by the elite formani, of the movement and to claim at the same time, the honest, innocent pect ability of its most naive fellow-traveler.80 / - One of Stalin's distinctive characteristics ... is systematically to throw his own r-i»(Jci;ds and crimes, as well as his political errors ... on the shoulders of those riose discredit and ruin he is plotting" (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 655). It is obvious that . [otalitarian leader can choose freely whom he wants to impersonate his own errors iirce all acts committed by subleaders are supposed to be inspired by him, so that . nybody can be forced into the role of an impostor. ■■"That it was Hitler himself—and not Himmler, or Bormann, or Goebbels—who .i!«ays initiated the actually "radical" measures; that they were always more radical i!.,[n the proposals made by his immediate environment; that even Himmler was .ippalled when he was entrusted with the "final solution" of the Jewish question— ,11 this has now been proved by innumerable documents. And the fairy tale that St ilin was more moderate than the leftist factions of the Bolshevist Party is no longer believed, either. It is all the more important to remember that totalitarian uders invariably try to appear more moderate to the outside world and that their wA role—namely, to drive the movement forward at any price and if anything to s'ľp up its speed—remains carefully concealed. See, for instance, Admiral Erich Rc.eder's memo on "My Relationship to Adolf Hitler and to the Party" in Nazi Con-i.-racy, VIII, 707 ff. "When information or rumours arose about radical measures of ilio Party and the Gestapo, one could come to the conclusion by the conduct of the I nchrer that such measures were not ordered by the Fuehrer himself. ... In the LOisrse of future years, I gradually came to the conclusion that the Fuehrer himself .ilways leaned toward the more radical solution without letting on outwardly." 376 TOTALITARIAN^' ■ The totalitarian movements have been called "secret societies es il ■ ■ in broad daylight."1'0 Indeed, little as we know of the sociologie .| ^ -"""' ture and the more recent history of secret societies, the structur V'r movements, unprecedented if compared with parties and factions . ,' ^ one of nothing so much as of certain outstanding traits of secret soui '^ Secret societies also form hierarchies according to degrees of "inithf\ regulate the life of their members according to a secret and fictitious"' sumption which makes everything look as though it were something -l"" adopt a strategy of consistent lying to deceive the noninitiated cxtei i*-masses, demand unquestioning obedience from their members who are li Vi together by allegiance to a frequently unknown and always myster-1 *' leader, who himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a sir !1 group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the half-initialed *'•■', form a "buffer area" against the hostile profane world.92 With secret cieties, the totalitarian movements also share the dichotomous divisior ■ í the world between "sworn blood brothers" and an indistinct inarticulate ri « In the intraparty struggle which preceded his rise to absolute power, Stalin was r-ful always to pose as "the man of the golden mean" (see Deutscher, op. cit,, pp. 29* -i. though certainly no "man of compromise," he never abandoned this role :Uto"c When, for instance, in 1936 a foreign journalist questioned him about the moverr. i aim of world revolution, he replied: "We have never had such plans and intent1 . . . This is the product of a misunderstanding ... a comic one, or rather a tra»jc- :n one" (Deutscher, op. cil., p. 422). IJ" See Alexandre Koyré, "The Political Function of the Modern Lie," in Cat ■ • porary Jewish Record, June, 1945. Hitler, op. cit.. Book II, chapter ix, discusses extensively the pros and cons of •,• : 1 societies as models for totalitarian movements. His considerations actually led him 10 Koyré's conclusion, i.e., to adopt the principles of secret societies without their secretiveness and to establish them in "broad daylight." There was, in the piepower stage of the movement, hardly anything which the Nazis consistently kept secret. It was only during the war, when the Nazi regime became fully totalitarianized .mil the party leadership found itself surrounded from all sides by the military hierarchy on which it depended for the conduct of the war, that the elite formations were instructed in no uncertain terms to keep everything connected with "final solutions"—i.e., deportations and mass exterminations—absolutely secret. This was also the time when Hitler began to act like the chief of a band of conspirators, but not without personally announcing and circulating this fact explicitly. During a discussion with the General Staff in May, 1939, Hitler laid down the following rules, which sound as if they had been copied from a primer for a secret society: "1. No one who need not know must be informed. 2. No one must know any more than he needs to. 3. No one must know any earlier than he has to" (quoted from Heinz Holldack, Wu\ wirklich geschah, 1949, p. 378). 01 The following analysis follows closely Georg Simmeľs "Sociology of Secrecy ar.d of Secret Societies," in The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XI, No. 4, January, 1906, which forms chapter v of his Soziologie, Leipzig, 1908, selections of which are translated by Kurt H. Wolff under the title The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950- 92 "Precisely because the lower grades of the society constitute a mediating transition to the actual center of the secret, they bring about the gradual compression of the sphere of repulsion around the same, which affords more secure protection than the abruptness of a radical standing wholly without or wholly within could secure" (ibid., p. 489). THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 577 vorn enemies.n3 This distinction, based on absolute hostility to the sur-díng world, is very different from the ordinary parties' tendency to le people into those who belong and those who don't. Parties and open .ties in general will consider only those who expressly oppose them to uteir enemies, while it has always been the principle of secret societies lat ''whosoever is not expressly included is excluded."94 This esoteric prince seems to be entirely inappropriate for mass organizations; yet the Saľis gave their members at least the psychological equivalent for the ini-',[ it-en ritual of secret societies when, instead of simply excluding Jews, from' membership, they demanded proof of non-Jewish descent from their mem-usr;, and set up a complicated machine to shed light on the dark ancestry -•í some 80 million Germans. It was of course a comedy, and even an ex-; -jnsive one, when 80 million Germans set out to look for Jewish grand-faihers; yet everybody came out of the examination with the feeling that he belonged to a group of included which stood against an imaginary multi-/ mili; of ineligibles. The same principle is confirmed in the Bolshevik move-: rlent through repeated party purges which inspire in everybody who is not) ^eluded a reaffirmation of his inclusion. Perhaps the most striking similarity between the secret societies and the totalitarian movements lies in the role of the ritual. The marches around the Red Square in Moscow are in this respect no less characteristic than the pompous formalities of the Nuremberg party days. In the center of the Nazi ritual was the so-called "blood banner," and in the center of the Bolshevik ritual stands the mummified corpse of Lenin, both of which introduce a strong element of idolatry into the ceremony. Such idolatry hardly is proof ■■The terms "sworn brothers," "sworn comrades," "sworn community," etc., are repeated ad nauseam throughout Nazi literature, partly because of their appeal to meníte romanticism which was widespread in the German youth movement. It was Tijinly Himmler who used these terms in a more definite sense, introduced them into iris "central watchword" of the SS ("Thus we have fallen in line and march forward to .i distant future following the unchangeable laws as a National Socialist order of Noulic men and as a sworn community of their tribes [Sippen]," see D'Alquen, op. .■;>.} and gave them their articulate meaning of "absolute hostility" against ail others [«■&: Simmel, op. cit., p. 489): "Then when the mass of humanity of 1 to V/z milliards •mľj lines up against us, the Germanic people, . . ." See Himmler's speech at the meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen, October 4, Í943, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 55 K. '"Simmel, op. cit., p. 490.—This, like so many other principles, was adopted by liic Nazis after careful reflection on the implications of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion " Hitler said as early as 1922: "[The gentlemen of the Right] have never yet understood that it is not necessary to be an enemy of the Jew to drag you one day . . to the scaffold ... it is quite enough . . . not to be a Jew: that will secure the suifriild for you" (Hitler's Speeches, p. 12). At that time, nobody could guess that this pajtiuular form of propaganda actually meant: One day, it will not be necessary to be :m enemy of ours to be dragged to the scaffold; it will be quite enough to be a Jew, or. ultimately, a member of some other people, to be declared "racially unfit" by some Health Commission. Himmler believed and preached that the whole SS was based on she principle that "we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else" (op. cit., loc. cit.). 378 TOTALITARIAN^) __as is sometimes asserted—of pseudoreligious or heretical tendenc "idols" are mere organizational devices, familiar from the ritual (. societies, which also used to frighten their members into secretivi means of frightful, awe-inspiring symbols. It is obvious that people e securely held together through the common experience of a secret rit by the common sharing of the secret itself. That the secret of toi movements is exposed in broad daylight does not necessarily ch; nature of the experience.05 These similarities are not, of course, accidental; they cannot simply h.. explained by the fact that both Hitler and Stalin had been members "ř modern secret societies before they became totalitarian leaders—Hitlci !■' the secret service of the Reichswehr and Stalin in the conspiracy sectior .'r the Bolshevik party. They are to some extent the natural outcome of i ■ conspiracy fiction of totalitarianism whose organizations supposedly h ■' been founded to counteract secret societies—the secret society of the }■ \I or the conspiratory society of the Trotskyites. What is remarkable in the ■ talitarian organizations is rather that they could adopt so many organs -tional devices of secret societies without ever trying to keep their own r ■ ■ a secret. That the Nazis wanted to conquer the world, deport "racially ali. í." peoples and exterminate those of "inferior biological heritage," that i. Bolsheviks work for the world revolution, was never a secret; these aľ n on the contrary, were always part of their propaganda. In other wo ■. the totalitarian movements imitate all the paraphernalia of the secret * ■-cieties but empty them of the only thing that could excuse, or was imposed to excuse, their methods—the necessity to safeguard a secret. In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism airivec1 the same organizational result from very different historical beginnings, i-r Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, n- „■ or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elder; ľ Zion, whereas the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary party, whose n was one-party dictatorship, passed through a stage in which the party ■.: /'"entirely apart and above everything" to the moment when the Politbi: [of the party was "entirely apart from and above everything";fl,; fin -. Stalin imposed upon this party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of conspiratory sector and only then discovered the need for a central licí.- ■■ to maintain the iron discipline of a secret society under the conditions ( ■ mass organization. The Nazi development may be more logical, more t l-sistent in itself, but the history of the Bolshevik party offers a better i! --tration of the essentially fictitious character of totalitarianism, prcci . because the fictitious global conspiracies against and according to which si-Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have not been ideologic ; fixed. They have changed—from Ůvq Trotskyites to the 300 families, tľ n to various "imperialisms" and recently to "rootless cosmopolitanism"—««J were adjusted to passing needs; yet at no moment and under none of the 95 See Simmel, op. cit., pp. 480-481. 90 Souvarine, op. cit., p. 319, follows a formulation of Bukharin. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 379 various circumstances has it been possible for Bolshevism to do with-;ome such fiction. ije means by which Stalin changed the Russian one-party dictatorship a totalitarian regime and the revolutionary Communist parties all over tforld into totalitarian movements was the liquidation of factions, the tion of inner-party democracy and the transformation of national Com-ist parties into Moscow-directed branches of the Comintern. Secret so-;S in general, and the conspiratory apparatus of revolutionary parties V 'n particular, have always been characterized by absence of factions, sup-' nrc-iii°n °^ dissident opinions, and absolute centralization of command. All frieze measures have the obvious utilitarian purpose of protecting the mem-•icrri against persecution and the society against treason; the total obedience iskiid of each member and the absolute power in the hands of the chief were only inevitable by-products of practical necessities. The trouble, however, j; tíiat conspirators have an understandable tendency to think that the most efficient methods in politics in general are those of conspiratory societies and that if one can aPply them in broad daylight and support them with a whole / nation's instruments of violence, the possibilities for power accumulation "f -íecome absolutely limitless.97 The conspiratory sector of a revolutionary paity can, as long as the party itself is still intact, be likened to the role of the army within an intact political body: although its own rules of conduct dilTer radically from those of the civilian body, it serves, remains subject to, and is controlled by it. Just as the danger of a military dictatorship arises when the army no longer serves but wants to dominate the body politic, so the danger of totalitarianism arises when the conspiratory sector of a revolutionary party emancipates itself from the control of the party and aspires , to leadership. This is what happened to the Communist parties under the I Stalin regime. Stalin's methods were always typical of a man who came from ! the conspiratory sector of the party: his devotion to detail, his emphasis on the personal side of politics, his ruthlessness in the use and liquidation of comrades and friends. His chief support in the succession struggle after Lenin's death came from the secret policeö8 which at that time had already become one of the most important and powerful sections of the party." It was only natural that the Cheka's sympathies should be with the representative of the conspiratory section, with the man who already looked upon it / "T Souvarine, op. cit., p. 113, mentions that Stalin "was always impressed by men ] who brought off 'an affair.' He looked on politics as an 'affair' requiring dexterity." '" In the inner-party struggles during the twenties, "the collaborators of the GPU I wer»; almost without exception fanatic adversaries of the Right and adherents of Stulln. The various services of the GPU were at that time the bulwarks of the Stalinist section" (Ciliga, op. cit., p. 48).—Souvarine, op. cit., p. 289, reports that Stalin even before had "continued the police activity he had begun during the Civil War" and been the representative of the Politburo in the GPU. 99 Immediately after the civil war in Russia, Pravda stated "that the formula 'All power to the Soviets' had been replaced by 'All power to the Chekas.' . . . The end of the armed hostilities reduced military control . . . but left a ramified Cheka which perfected itself by simplification of its operation" (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 251). 380 TOTALITARIANISM as a kind of secret society and therefore was likely to preserve and to pand its privileges. e* The seizure of the Communist parties by their conspiratory sector ]l0 ever, was only the first step in their transformation into totalitarian mm.' ments. It was not enough that the secret police in Russia and its agents ^" the Communist parties abroad played the same role in the movement as ť ^ elite formations which the Nazis had constituted in the form of paramilih-' troops. The parties themselves had to be transformed, if the rule of t,i* secret police was to remain stable. Liquidation of factions and inner-pan-* democracy, consequently, was accompanied in Russia by the admission i'j large, politically uneducated and "neutral" masses to membership, a noIi\\ which was quickly followed by the Communist parties abroad after the p0(1. ;ular Front policy had initiated it. Nazi totalitarianism started with a mass organization which was on!-gradually dominated by elite formations, while the Bolsheviks started wji'j ; elite formations and organized the masses accordingly. The result was ť« ■ same in both cases. The Nazis, moreover, because of their militaristic tn* dition and prejudices, originally modeled their elite formations after the army, while the Bolsheviks from the beginning endowed the secret police with the exercise of supreme power. Yet after a few years this difference too disappeared: the chief of the SS became the chief of the secret police and the SS formations were gradually incorporated into and replaced the' former personnel of the Gestapo, even though this personnel already consisted of reliable Nazis.100 It is because of the essential affinity between the functioning of a secret society of conspirators and of the secret police organized to combat il that totalitarian regimes, based on a fiction of global conspiracy and aiming at global rule, eventually concentrate all power in the hands of the policeľ In the prepower stage, however, the "secret societies in broad daylight" offer other organizational advantages. The obvious contradiction between a mass organization and an exclusive society, which alone can be trusted to keep a secret, is of no importance compared with the fact that the very structure of secret and conspiratory societies could translate the totalitarian ideological dichotomy—the blind hostility of the masses against the existing world regardless of its divergences and differences—into an organizational principle. From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according to the principle that whoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations, and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and un- 100 The Gestapo was set up by Goring in 1933; Himmler was appointed chief of the Gestapo in 1934 and began at once to replace its personnel with his SS-men; at the end of the war, 75 per cent of all Gestapo agents were SS-men. It must also be considered that the SS units were particularly qualified for this job as Himmler h.td organized them, even in the prepower stage, for espionage duty among partv members (Heiden, op. cit., p. 308). For the history of the Gestapo, see Giles, op. cit., and also Nazi Conspiracy, Vol. II, chapter xii. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 381 parable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.101 j ttřhat inspired them with the unwavering loyalty of members of secret so-' cieties was not so much the secret as the dichotomy between Us and all others- This could be kept intact by imitating the secret societies' organizational structure and emptying it of its rational purpose of safeguarding a secret. Nor did it matter if a conspiracy ideology was the origin of this development, as in the case of the Nazis, or a parasitic growth of the conspiratory sector of a revolutionary party, as in the case of the Bolsheviks. ■rjje claim inherent in totalitarian organization is that everything outside fbe movement is "dying," a claim which is drastically realized under the jflurderous conditions of totalitarian rule, but which even in the prepower stage appears plausible to the masses who escape from disintegration and disorientation into the fictitious home of the movement. Totalitarian movements have proved time and again that they can command the same total loyalty in life and death which had been the prerogative 0f secret and conspiratory societies.102 The complete absence of resistance in a thoroughly trained and armed troop like the SA in the face of the murder of a beloved leader (Röhm) and hundreds of close comrades was a curious spectacle. At that moment probably Röhm, and not Hitler, had the power of the Reichswehr behind him. But these incidents in the Nazi movement have by now been overshadowed by the ever-repeated spectacle of self-confessed "criminals" in the Bolshevik parties. Trials based on absurd confessions have become part of an internally all-important and externally incomprehensible ritual. But, no matter how the victims are being prepared today, this ritual owes its existence to the probably unfabricated confessions of the old Bolshevik guard in 1936. Long oefore the time of the Moscow Trials men condemned to death would receive their sentences with great calm, an attitude "particularly prevalent among members of the Cheka."103 So long as the movement exists, its peculiar form of organization makes sure that at least the elite formations can no longer conceive of a life outside the closely knit band of men who, even if they are condemned, still feel superior to the rest of the uninitiated world. And since this organization's exclusive aim has always been to deceive and fight and ultimately conquer 101 It was probably one of the decisive ideological errors of Rosenberg, who fell from the Fuehrer's favor and lost his influence in the movement to men like Himmler, Bormann, and even Streicher, that his Myth of the Twentieth Century admits a racial pluralism from which only the Jews were excluded. He thereby violated the principle that whoever is not included ("the Germanic people") is excluded ("the mass of humanity"). Cf. note 87. 102 Simmel, op. cit., p. 492, enumerates secret criminal societies in which the members voluntarily set up one commander whom they obey from then on without criticism and without limitation. 103 Cíliga, op. cit., pp. 96-97. He also describes how in the twenties even ordinary prisoners in the GPU prison of Leningrad who had been condemned to death allowed themselves to be taken to execution "without a word, without a cry of revolt against the Government that put them to death" (p. 183). 382 TOTALITARIAN!; ', the outside world, its members are satisfied to pay with their Hvs » this helps again to fool the world.104 lln'i The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societit ' ,,. izational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass ore m ', l~ does not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional bélou i ■ "* loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostilii „'.? outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safe»,, i'-", the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical s*r ■' ture of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to partv m'.\ bers, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and theLe I'« himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of j i*|i] bility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank ->« standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lyins* Sr . ments of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction ol -j ■ movement. A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding chara- ■.■ istic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of m;i In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached -i point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and not n ■ think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixtum in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism 'the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. What had been a demonstrable reaction of mass audiences became an important hierarchical principle for mass organizations. A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility. The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the movement: "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.105. lül Ciliga reports how the condemned party members "thought that if these executions saved the bureaucratic dictatorship as a whole, if they calmed the rebellion* peasantry (or rather if they misled them into error), the sacrifice of their lives would not have been in vain" {op. cit., pp. 96-97). 105 Goebbels' notion of the role of diplomacy in politics is characteristic: "There is í ■t I THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 383 •je machine that generates, organizes, and spreads the monstrous false- |s of totalitarian movements depends again upon the position of the Jer. To the propaganda assertion that all happenings are scientifically ■ictable according to the laws of nature or economics, totalitarian or- ", i&tion adds the position of one man who has monopolized this knowl- and whose principal quality is that he "was always right and will "lv/ays be right." m To a member of a totalitarian movement this knowledge ijab nothing to do with truth and this being right nothing to do with the active truthfulness of the Leader's statements which cannot be disproved lv facts, but only by future success or failure. The Leader is always right in his actions and since these are planned for centuries to come, the ultimate jeSt of what he does has been removed beyond the experience of his con- •emporaries.107 [ he only group supposed to believe loyally and textually in the Leader's norJs are the sympathizers whose confidence surrounds the movement with in atmosphere of honesty and simple-mindedness, and helps the Leader to fulfill half his task, that is, to inspire confidence in the movement. The party members never believe public statements and are not supposed to, but are complimented by totalitarian propaganda on that superior intelligence which supposedly distinguishes them from the nontotalitarian outside world, which, in turn, they know only from the abnormal gullibility of sympathizers. Only Nazi sympathizers believed Hitler when he swore his famous legality o;ith before the supreme court of the Weimar Republic; members of the movement knew very well that he lied, and trusted him more than ever because he apparently was able to fool public opinion and the authorities. VVhen in later years Hitler repeated the performance for the whole world, when he swore to his good intentions and at the same time most openly prepared his crimes, the admiration of the Nazi membership naturally was boundless. Similarly, only Bolshevik fellow-travelers believed in the dissolution of the Comintern, and only the nonorganized masses of the Russian psople and the fellow-travelers abroad were meant to take at face value Stalin's prodemocratic statements during the war. Bolshevik party members were explicitly warned not to be fooled by tactical maneuvers and were asked to admire their Leader's shrewdness in betraying his allies.108 Without the organizational division of the movement into elite formations, membership, and sympathizers, the lies of the Leader would not work. no doubt that one does best if one keeps the diplomats uninformed about the background of politics. . . . Genuineness in playing an appeasement role is sometimes the most convincing argument for their political trustworthiness" (op. cit., p. 87). 100 Rudolf Hess in a broadcast in 1934. Nazi Conspiracy, I, 193. 107 Werner Best op. cit., explained: "Whether the will of the government lays down the 'right' rules ... is no longer a question of law, but a question of fate. For actual misuses . . . will be punished more surely before history by fate itself with misfortune and overthrow and ruin, because of the violation of the 'laws of life,' than by a State Court of Justice." Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 490. 10S See Kravchenko, op. cit., p. 422. "No properly indoctrinated Communist felt that the Party was 'lying' in professing one set of policies in public and its very opposite in private." 384 TOTALITARIANISM The graduation of cynicism expressed in a hierarchy of contempt is at I as necessary in the face of constant refutation as plain gullibility. The v '".' is that the sympathizers in front organizations despise their fellow-citi/""1' complete lack of initiation, the party members despise the fellow-travt' "%* gullibility and lack of radicalism, the elite formations despise for similar re" sons the party membership, and within the elite formations a similar h'a' archy of contempt accompanies every new foundation and development >* The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes ]J credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicis** of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leadčľ will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeníousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense. While the membership does not believe statements made for public consumption, it believes all the more fervently the standard cliches of ideological explanation, the keys to past and future history which totalitarian movements took from nineteenth-century ideologies, and transformed, through organization, into a working reality. These ideological elements in which the masses had come to believe anyhow, albeit rather vaguely and abstractly were turned into factual lies of an all-comprehensive nature (the domination of the world by the Jews instead of a general theory about races, the conspiracy of Wall Street instead of a general theory about classes) and integrated into a general scheme of action in which only the "dying"—the dyinff classes of capitalist countries or the decadent nations—are supposed to stand in the way of the movement. In contrast to the movements' tactical lies which change literally from day to day, these ideological lies are supposed to be believed like sacred untouchable truths. They are surrounded by a carefully elaborated system of "scientific" proofs which do not have to be convincing for the completely "uninitiated," but still appeal to some vulgarized thirst for knowledge by "demonstrating" the inferiority of the Jews or the misery of people living under a capitalist system. The elite formations are distinguished from the ordinary party membership in that they do not need such demonstrations and are not even supposed to believe in the literal truth of ideological cliches. These are fabricated to answer a quest for truth among the masses which in its insistence on explanation and demonstration still has much in common with the normal 109 "The National Socialist despises his fellow German, the SA man the other National Socialists, the SS man the SA man" (Heiden, op. cil., p. 308). f THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 385 rid. The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members' whole educa- ■! is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth I falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their lity immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of l purpose. In distinction to the mass membership which, for instance, needs 1 ioriie demonstration of the inferiority of the Jewish race before it can safely : L asked to kill Jews, the elite formations understand that the statement, all jcv/s are inferior, means, all Jews should be killed; they know that when they Í ,ire told that only Moscow has a subway, the real meaning of the statement js that all subways should be destroyed, and are not unduly surprised when ; [hey discover the subway in Paris. The tremendous shock of disillusion which í !fie Red Army suffered on its conquering trip to Europe could be cured only ! £,v concentration camps and forced exile for a large part of the occupation ■ n'oops; but the police formations which accompanied the Army were pre- ; n;ired for the shock, not by different and more correct information—there ; fs no secret training school in Soviet Russia which gives out authentic facts ; ;iböut life abroad—but simply by a general training in supreme contempt j for all facts and all reality. , This mentality of the elite is no mere mass phenomenon, no mere con-! sequence of social rootlessness, economic disaster, and political anarchy; ] ji needs careful preparation and cultivation and forms a more important, [hough less easily recognizable, part of the curriculum of totalitarian leadership schools, the Nazi Ordensburgen for the SS troops, and the Bolshevik training centers for Comintern agents, than race indoctrination or the techniques of civil war. Without the elite and its artificially induced inability to understand facts as facts, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the movement could never move in the direction of realizing its fiction. The \ outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality. The topmost layer in the organization of totalitarian movements is the intimate circle around the Leader, which can be a formal institution, like the Bolshevik Politburo, or a changing clique of men who do not necessarily hold office, like the entourage of Hitler. To them ideological cliches are mere f devices to organize the masses, and they feel no compunction about changing them according to the needs of circumstances if only the organizing principle if kept intact. In this connection, the chief merit of Himmler's reorganization of the SS was that he found a very simple method for "solving the problem of blood by action," that is, for selecting the members of the elite according to "good blood" and preparing them to "carry on a racial struggle without mercy" against everyone who could not trace his "Aryan" ancestry back to 1750, or was less than 5 feet 8 inches tall ("I know that people who have reached a certain height must possess the desired blood to some de- 386 TOTALITARIANIS gree") or did not have blue eyes and blond hair.110 The importanc racism in action was that the organization became independent o all concrete teachings of no matter what racial "science," indepertc of antisemitism insofar as it was a specific doctrine concerning th and role of the Jews, whose usefulness would have ended with 1 termination.311 Racism was safe and independent of the scientificalit *.-propaganda once an elite had been selected by a "race commission" ■ ľi placed under the authority of special "marriage laws,"112 while at ih! opposite end and under the jurisdiction of this "racial elite," concentran ■*■ camps existed for the sake of "better demonstration of the laws of inh-n' tance and race."113 On the strength of this "living organization," the Ht>~ could dispense with dogmatism and offer friendship to Semitic peoples V . the Arabs, or enter into alliances with the very representatives of the Yel". I Danger, the Japanese. The reality of a race society, the formation of -i. elite selected from an allegedly racial viewpoint, would indeed have b \ a better safeguard for the doctrine of racism than the finest scientific !■■ pseudo-scientific proof. The policy-makers of Bolshevism show the same superiority to their c-.r avowed dogmas. They are quite capable of interrupting every existinc c i*-! struggle with a sudden alliance with capitalism without undermining 'i^. reliability of their cadres or committing treason against their belief in c « struggle. The dichotomous principle of class struggle having become -i organizational device, having, as it were, petrified into uncompromi> si ■ hostility against the whole world through the secret police cadres in Rus : 110 Himmler originally selected the candidates of the SS from photographs. I. -a Race Commission, before which the applicant had to appear in person, approved ■ disapproved of his racial appearance. See Himmler on "Organization and Obligatio i the SS and the Police," Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff. 1,1 Himmler was well aware of the fact that it was one of his "most important .! lasting accomplishments" to have transformed the racial question from "a ncgin . ■ concept based on matter-of-course antisemitism" into "an organizational task ■ -. building up the SS" (Der Reichsführer SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei, "exclusr for use within the police"; undated). Thus, "for the first time, the racial question h ■ been placed into, or, better still, had become the focal point, going far beyond ■ negative concept underlying the natural hatred of Jews. The revolutionary ides the Fuehrer had been infused with warm lifeblood" (Der Weg der SS. Der Rei • fiihrer SS. SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt. Dust jacket: "Not for publication," tindai p. 25). 112 As soon as he was appointed chief of the SS in 1929, Himmler introduced .■ principle of racial selection and marriage laws and added: "The SS knows very ■■.' that this order is of great significance. Taunts, sneers or misunderstanding don't to '• us; the future is ours." Quoted from d'Alquen, op. cit. And again, fourteen years I;--" in his speech at Kharkov (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 572 ff.), Himmler reminds his ""» leaders that "we were the first really to solve the problem of blood by action . and by problem of blood, we of course do not mean antisemitism. Antisemilisn. exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. 1 • a matter of cleanliness. . . . But for us the question of blood was a reminder of ■ own worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people ■ gether." 113 Himmler, op. cit., Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff. THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 387 the Comintern agents abroad, Bolshevik policy has become remarkably of "prejudices." t is this freedom from the content of their own ideologies which char-frizes the highest rank of the totalitarian hierarchy. These men consider .fining and everybody in terms of organization, and this includes the i eader who to them is neither an inspired talisman nor the one who is infallibly right, but the simple consequence of this type of organization; he J needed, not as a person, but as a function, and as such he is indispensable jo the movement. In contrast, however, to other despotic forms of government, where frequently a clique rules and the despot plays only the repre-putative role of a puppet ruler, totalitarian leaders are actually free to do whatever they please and can count on the loyalty of their entourage even ;f they choose to murder them. The more technical reason for this suicidal loyalty is that succession to the supreme office is not regulated by any inheritance or other laws. A successful palace revolt would have as disastrous results for the movement as 2 whole as a military defeat. It is in the nature of the movement that once ihc Leader has assumed his office, the whole organization is so absolutely identified with him that any admission of a mistake or removal from office uould break the spell of infallibility which surrounds the office of the tender and spell doom to all those connected with the movement. It is not [ju truthfulness of the Leader's words but the infallibility of his actions which is the basis for the structure. Without it and in the heat of a discussion which presumes fallibility, the whole fictitious world of totalitarianism aocs to pieces, overwhelmed at once by the factuality of the real world which only the movement steered in an infallibly right direction by the Leader was i.lile to ward off. However, the loyalty of those who believe neither in ideological cliches nor in the infallibility of the Leader also has deeper, nontechnical reasons. What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible. It is true that these men, few in number, are not easily caught in their own specific lies and that they do not necessarily believe in racism or economics, in the conspiracy of the Jews or of Wall Street. Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous convic-;ion that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy. Confident that power of organization am destroy power of substance, as the violence of a well-organized gang might rob a rich man of ill-guarded wealth, they constantly underestimate the substantial power of stable communities and overestimate the driving force of a movement. Since, moreover, they do not actually believe in the factual existence of a world conspiracy against them, but use it only as an organizational device, they fail to understand that their own conspiracy may eventually provoke the whole world into uniting against them. Yet no matter how the delusion of human omnipotence through organiza- 388 TOTALITARIANISM tion is ultimately defeated, within the movement its practical conse i-is that the entourage of the Leader, in case of disagreement wiih hia "V never be very sure of their own opinions, since they believe sincerely th""' their disagreements do not really matter, that even the maddest device h a fair chance of success if properly organized. The point of their loyalt not that they believe the Leader is infallible, but that they are convinced th '• everybody who commands the instruments of violence with the sune'' methods of totalitarian organization can become infallible. This delusion"-' greatly strengthened when totalitarian regimes hold the power to demon«? * the relativity of success and failure, and to show how a loss in substa — can become a gain in organization. (The fantastic mismanagement of inj?* trial enterprise in Soviet Russia led to the atomization of the working cla^ and the terrifying mistreatment of civilian prisoners in Eastern territori-" under Nazi occupation, though it caused a "deplorable loss of labor" "thinking in terms of generations, [was] not to be regretted."1") fcf0r. over, the decision regarding success and failure under totalitarian circumstances is very largely a matter of organized and terrorized public opinio-! In a totally fictitious world, failures need not be recorded, admitted, an' remembered. Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon tli-' existence of the nontotalitarian world. 114 Himmler in his speech at Posen, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558. i riAPTER TWELVE: Totalitarianism in Power X"\ 7hen a movement, international in organization, all-comprehensive in V V its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration, seizes power i one country, it obviously puts itself in a paradoxical situation. The socialist lovement was spared this crisis, first, because the national question—and iat meant the strategical problem involved in the revolution—had been Liriously neglected by Marx and Engels, and, secondly, because it faced . overnmental problems only after the first World War had divested the Sec-nd International of its authority over the national members, which every--here had accepted the primacy of national sentiments over international . jlidarity as an unalterable fact. In other words, when the time came for ie socialist movements to seize power in their respective countries, they ad already been transformed into national parties. This transformation never occurred in the totalitarian, the Bolshevik and ie Nazi movements. At the time it seized power the danger to the move-lent lay in the fact that, on one hand, it might become "ossified" by taking rer the state machine and frozen into a form of absolute government,1 id that, on the other hand, its freedom of movement might be limited f the borders of the territory in which it came to power, To a totalitarian lovement, both dangers are equally deadly: a development toward abso-itism would put an end to the movement's interior drive, and a develop-lent toward nationalism would frustrate its exterior expansion, without hich the movement cannot survive. The form of government the two [oyements developed, or, rather, which almost automatically developed om their double claim to total domination and global rule, is best char-;terized by Trotsky's slogan of "permanent revolution" although Trotsky's leory was no more than a socialist forecast of a series of revolutions, from ie antifeudal bourgeois to the antibourgeois proletarian, which would tread from one country to the other.sJPnly the term itself suggests "per- 1 The Nazis fully realized that the seizure of power might lead to the establishment absolutism. "National Socialism, however, has not spearheaded the struggle against leralism in order to bog down in absolutism and start the game all over again" Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, p. 20). The warning expressed here, as in courtt-ss other places, is directed against the state's claim to be absolute. 2 Trotsky's theory, first pronounced in 1905, did of course not differ from the revo-tionary strategy of all Leninists in whose eyes "Russia herself was merely the first imain, the first rampart, of international revolution: her interests were to be sub-dinated to the supernational strategy of militant socialism. For the time being, iwever, the boundaries of both Russia and victorious socialism were the samfi" "saac rVtifc.-*"«- ?*"'■'" A "-'--- ' -■ 390 TOTALITARIAN^ manency," with all its semi-anarchistic implications, and is, strictK i* i .'ing, a misnomer; yet even Lenin was more impressed by the term'thari '■■" 'its theoretical content. In the Soviet Union, at any rate, revolutions in -l"* form of general purges, became a permanent institution of the Stal"" regime after 1934.3 Here, as in other instances, Stalin concentrated"\n attacks on Trotsky's half-forgotten slogan precisely because he had decid'-,-to use this technique.4 In Nazi Germany, a similar tendency toward r "-manent revolution was clearly discernible though the Nazis did not hatíme to realize it to the same extent. Characteristically enough, their"Vr-manent revolution" also started with the liquidation of the parly fact:ui" which had dared to proclaim openly the "next stage of the revolution" "■-. '' The year 1934 is significant because of the new Party statute, announced at : ■ Seventeenth Party Congress, which provided that "periodic . . . purges arc to [he] " -ried out for the systematic cleansing of the Party." (Quoted from A. Avtorkhanov, -\ cial Differentiation and Contradictions in the Party," Bulletin of the Institute for ; Study of the USSR, Munich, February, 1956.)—The party purges during the early y ' of the Russian Revolution have nothing in common with their later totalitarian per ■ sion into an instrument of permanent instability. The first purges were conducted bj " cal control commissions before an open forum to which party and non-party mCm i had free access. They were planned as a democratic control organ against hup . cratic corruption in the party and "were to serve as a substitute for real electii (Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 233-34).—An excellent short survey of the developmen " the purges can be found in Avtorkhanov's recent article which also refutes flit let' i that the murder of Kirov gave rise to the new policy. The general purge had be before Kirov's death which was no more than a "convenient pretext to give it ai ' ■ drive." In view of the many "inexplicable and mysterious" circumstances surrouiv ■■ ■ Kirov's murder, one suspects that the "convenient pretext" was carefully planned ■ executed by Stalin himself. See Khrushchev's "Speech on Stalin," New York Tit June 5, 1956. 4 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 282, describes the first attack on Trotsky's "permanent .. olution" and Stalin's counterformulation of "socialism in one country" as an acci- ■■ of political maneuvering. In 1924, Stalin's "immediate purpose was to descredit Tro! ■ . . . Searching in Trotsky's past, the triumvirs came across the theory of 'pci -nent revolution,' which he had formulated in 1905. ... It was in the course of i ■ polemic that Stalin arrived at his formula of 'socialism in one country.'" 5 The liquidation of the Röhm faction in June, 1934, was preceded by a shon ■ terval of stabilization. At the beginning of the year, Rudolf Diels, the chief of . political police in Berlin, could report that there were no more illegal ("revolur ary") arrests by the SA and that older arrests of this kind were being inveMig; I (Nazi Conspiracy. U. S. Government. Washington, 1946, V, 205.) In April, I ■ Reichsminister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, an old member of the Nazi Party, is1 a decree to place restrictions upon the exercise of "protective custody" (ibid., III. .'"*■ in consideration of the "stabilization of the national situation." (See Das An'. April, 1934, p. 31.) This decree, however, was never published (Nazi Conspiracy, "-ll 1099; II, 259). The political police of Prussia had prepared a special report on the ■■ cesses of the SA for Hitler in the year 1933 and suggested the prosecution of flic s-leaders named therein. Hitler solved the situation by killing these SA leaders without legal proceed and discharging all those police officers who had opposed the SA. (See the sworn davit of Rudolf Diels, ibid., V, 224.) In this manner he had safeguarded hin completely against all legalization and stabilization. Among the numerous jurists "■ enthusiastically served the "National Socialist idea" only very few comprehended * was really at stake. In this group belongs primarily Theodor Maunz, whose- e ■ TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 391 precisely because "the Fuehrer and his old guard knew that the real \ joggle had just begun." ° Here, instead of the Bolshevik concept of per- / arient revolution, we find the notion of a racial "selection which can never I and still" thus requiring a constant radicalization of the standards by í dich the selection, i.e., the extermination of the unfit, is carried out.7 The/ jjnt is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability. There could have been no better solution for the perplexities inherent in e co-existence of a government and a movement, of both a totalitarian ajm and limited power in a limited territory, of ostensible membership in cofflity of nations in which each respects the other's sovereignty and claim world rule, than this formula stripped of its original content. For the talitarian ruler is confronted with a dual task which at first appears contra-ctory to the point of absurdity: he must establish the fictitious world of e movement as a tangible working reality of everyday life, and he must, ! the other hand, prevent this new world from developing a new stability; r a stabilization of its laws and institutions would surely liquidate the jvement itself and with it the hope for eventual world conquest. The talitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the lint where a new way of life could develop—one which might, after a iie, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differ-l and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth. The sment the revolutionary institutions became a national way of life (that oment when Hitler's claim that Nazism is not an export commodity or alin's that socialism can be built in one country, would be more than an empt to fool the nontotalitarian world), totalitarianism would lose its 3tal" quality and become subject to the law of the nations, according to lieh each possesses a specific territory, people, and historical tradition lich relates it to other nations—a plurality which ipso facto refutes every; ntention that any specific form of government is absolutely valid. Practically speaking, the paradox of totalitarianism in power is that the ssession of all instruments of governmental power and violence in one untry is not an unmixed blessing for a totalitarian movement. Its disregard (.'ff/.' und Recht der Polizei (Hamburg, 1943) is quoted with approval even by those hor., who, like Paul Werner, belonged to the higher Fuehrer Corps of the SS. ■Robert Ley, Der Weg zur Ordensburg (undated, about 1936). "Special edition . ior the Fuehrer Corps of the Party . . . Not for free sale." Heinrich Himmler, "Die Schutzstaffel," in Grundlagen, Aufbau und Wirtschafts-'i-ii'j des nationalsozialistischen Staates, Nr. 7b. This constant radicalization of piinciple of racial selection can be found in all phases of Nazi policy. Thus, the l to lie exterminated were the full Jews, to be followed by those who were half-■<-\\ and one-quarter Jewish; or first the insane, to be followed by the incurably ^ ..ml, eventually, by all families in which there were any "incurably sick." The Itction which can never stand still" did not stop before the SS itself, either. A i'nioi decree dated May 19, 1943, ordered that all men who were bound to foreigners liimily ties, marriage or friendship were to be eliminated from state, party, Wehr-tht and economy; this affected 1,200 SS leaders (see Hoover Library Archives, miller File, Folder 330). 24 392 TOTALITARIANISM fi TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 393 for facts, its strict adherence to the rules of a fictitious world, become s.c , ily more difficult to maintain, yet remains as essential as it was before [w. means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism in power ^ constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge. Propaganda and ■'* ganization no longer suffice to assert that the impossible is possible, that ť'-. incredible is true, that an insane consistency rules the world; the chief psycC" logica! support of totalitarian fiction—the active resentment of the st-j!' quo, which the masses refused to accept as the only possible workups'..* longer there; every bit of factual information that leaks through the inn curtain, set up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the oth-r nontotalitarian side, is a greater menace to totalitarian domination thVr counterpropaganda has been to totalitarian movements. The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth tip elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in tv totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as tr^r ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they h .\; already seized. Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably diiv-inated only under global totalitarian conditions. Ascendancy to power tfo\-fore means primarily the establishment of official and officially recogni^'d headquarters (or branches in the case of satellite countries) for the rno',> ment and the acquisition of a kind of laboratory in which to carry out !io experiment with or rather against reality, the experiment in organizing people for ultimate purposes which disregard individuality as well as n -tionality, under conditions which are admittedly not perfect but are suftic^-r1. for important partial results. Totalitarianism in power uses the state adr-:-istration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction . f the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the exi\ .-tors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transfoniTi ■ reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination. i: The So-called Totalitarian State history teaches that rise to power and responsibility affects deeply the nature of revolutionary parties. Experience and common sense were perfectly justified in expecting that totalitarianism in power would gradually lose its revolutionary momentum and Utopian character, that the everyday business of government and the possession of real power would moderate the prc-power claims of the movements and gradually destroy the fictitious world of their organizations. It seems, after all, to be in the very nature of things, personal or public, that extreme demands and goals are checked by objective conditions; and reality, taken as a whole, is only to a very small extent determined by the inclination toward fiction of a mass society of atomized individuals. [Yfany of the errors of the nontotalitarian world in its diplomatic deal-gS with totalitarian governments (the most conspicuous ones being con-jence in the Munich pact with Hitler and the Yalta agreements with Stalin) $ clearly be traced to an experience and a common sense which suddenly ".0ved to have lost its grasp on reality. Contrary to al! expectations, im-.tftant concessions and greatly heightened international prestige did not . ,]n to reintegrate the totalitarian countries into the comity of nations or duce them to abandon their lying complaint that the whole world had ■- jjdly üned UP against them. And far from preventing this, diplomatic vieles clearly precipitated their recourse to the instruments of violence and suited in all instances in increased hostility against the powers that had 0wn themselves willing to compromise. These disappointments suffered by statesmen and diplomats find their irallel in the earlier disillusionment of benevolent observers and sympa-izers with the new revolutionary governments. What they had looked for-3fd to was the establishment of new institutions and the creation of a new ide of law which, no matter how revolutionary in content, would lead to a í jbilization of conditions and thus check the momentum of the totalitarian -nvements at least in the countries where they had seized power. What [opened instead was that terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi srinany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so at it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of rror (as liberal accusers of the regime were wont to assert) but the last ipediment to its full fury.8 Even more disturbing was the handling of the constitutional question by e totalitarian regimes. In the early years of their power the Nazis let loose ■ ■[ avalanche of laws and decrees, but they never bothered to abolish offi- e It is common knowledge that in Russia "the repression of socialists and anarchists nid grown in severity in the same ratio as the country became pacified" (Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 244). Deutscher, op. cit., p. 218, thinks that :he reason for the vanishing of the "libertarian spirit of the revolution" at the moment of victory could be found in a changed attitude of the peasants: they turned against Bolshevism "the more resolutely the more they became confident that the power of ;he landlords and the White generals had been broken." This explanation seems rather weak in view of the dimensions which terror was to assume after 1930. It also fails ;o take into account that full terror did not break loose in the twenties but in the ihirlies, when the opposition of the peasant classes was no longer an active factor in ^ -he situation.—Khrushchev, too {op. cit.), notes that "extreme repressive measures ■■mře not used" against the opposition during the fight against the Trotskyites and the ilukharinites, but that "the repression against them began" much later after they had. long been defeated. Terror by the Nazi regime reached its peak during the war, when the German na-lion was actually "united." Its preparation goes back to 1936 when all organized in-'urior resistance had vanished and Himmler proposed an expansion of the concentra-!iľn camps. Characteristic of this spirit of oppression regardless of resistance is Himm-lir's speech at Kharkov before the SS leaders in 1943: "We have only one task, . . . io carry on the racial struggle without mercy. . . . We will never let that excellent weapon, the dread and terrible reputation which preceded us in the battles for Kharkov, fade, but will constantly add new meaning to it" (Nazi Conxnimrv TV «7? ff \ 394 TOTALITARIANISM daily the Weimar constitution; they even left the civil services more or 1 intact—a fact which induced many native and foreign observers to hope ^ restraint of the party and for rapid normalization of the new regime R* when with the issuance of the Nuremberg Laws this development had com* to an end, it turned out that the Nazis themselves showed no concern v/hv soever about their own legislation. Rather, there was "only the constä t going ahead on the road toward ever-new fields," so that finally the "m, pose and scope of the secret state police" as well as of all other state n" party institutions created by the Nazis could "in no manner be covered h« the laws and regulations issued for them."9 In practice, this permanent state of lawlessness found expression in the fact that "a number of valid regulations [were] no .longer made public."10 Theoretically, it corresponded to Hitler's dictum that "the total state must not know any difference between law and ethics";11 because if it assumed that the valid law is identical with the ethics common to all and springing from their consciences, then there is indeed no further necessity for public decrees. The Soviet Union, where the prerevolutionary civil services had been exterminated in the revolution and the regime had paid scant attention to constitutional questions during the period of revolutionary change, even went to the trouble of issuing an entirely new and very elaborate constitution in 1936 ("a veil of liberal phrases and premises over the guillotine in the background"12), an event which was hailed in Russia and abroad as the conclusion of the revolutionary period. Yet the publication of the constitution turned out to be the beginning of the gigantic superpurge which in nearly two years liquidated the existing administration and erased all traces of normal life and economic recovery which had developed in the four years after the liquidation of kulaks and 0 See Theodor Maunz, op. cit., pp. 5 and 49.—How little the Nazis thought of the laws and regulations they themselves had issued, and which were regularly published by W. Hoche under the title of Die Gesetzgebung des Kabinetts Hitler (Berlin, 1933 ff.), may be gathered from a random remark made by one of their constitutional jurists. He felt that in spite of the absence of a comprehensive new legal order there nevertheless had occurred a "comprehensive reform" (see Ernst R. Huber, "Die deutsche Polizei," in Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Band 101, 1940/1, p. 273 ff.), 10 Maunz, op. cit., p. 49. To my knowledge, Maunz is the only one among Nazi authors who has mentioned this circumstance and sufficiently emphasized it. Only by going through the five volumes of Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, which were collected and printed during the war by the party chancellery on instructions of Martin Bormann, is it possible to obtain an insight into this secret legislation by which Germany in fact was governed. According to the preface, the volumes were "meant solely for internal party work and to be treated as confidential." Four of these evidently very rare volumes, compared to which the Hoche collection of the legislation of Hitler's cabinet is merely a facade, are in the Hoover Library. 11 This was the Fuehrer's "warning" to the jurists in 1933, quoted by Hans Frank, Nationalsozialistische Leitsätze für ein neues deutsches Straf recht, Zweiter Teil, 1936, p. 8. 12 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 381.—There were earlier attempts at establishing a constitution, in 1918 and 1924. The constitutional reform in 1944 under which some of the Soviet Republics were to have their own foreign representatives and their own armies, was a tactical maneuver designed to assure the Soviet Union of some additional votes TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 395 ^forced collectivization of the rural population.13 From then on, the con-"iitution of 1936 played exactly the same role the Weimar constitution played jnder the Nazi regime: it was completely disregarded but never abolished; j ji.« only difference was that Stalin could afford one more absurdity—with í [hi exception of Vishinsky, all those who had drafted the never-repudiated 1 institution were executed as traitors. - What strikes the observer of the totalitarian state is certainly not its mono-; ijihic structure. On the contrary, all serious students of the subject agree at ' ]east on the coexistence „(prthe conflict) of a dual authority, the party and jhe state. Many, moreover, have stressed the peculiar "shapelessness" of the _! ptalitarian government.14 Thomas Masaryk saw early that "the so-called golshevik system has never been anything but a complete absence of sys-.j. tem";15 and u is perfectly true that "even an expert would be driven mad : jf he tried to unravel the relationships between Party and State" in the Third '- Reich."1 It has also been frequently observed that the relationship between ."■ die two sources of authority, between state and party, is one of ostensible; and real authority, so that the government machine is usually pictured as j - the powerless facade which hides and protects the real power of the party.17 / i i See Deutscher, op. cit., p. 375.—Upon close reading of Stalin's speech concern- - jng the constitution (his report to the Extraordinary Eighth Soviet Congress of November 25, 1936) it becomes evident that it was never meant to be definitive. Stalin slated explicitly: "This is the framework of our constitution at the given historical moment. Thus the draft of the new constitution represents the sum total of the road already traveled, the sum total of achievements already existing." In other words, the constitution was already dated the moment it was announced, and was merely of historical interest. That this is not just an arbitrary interpretation is proved by Molo-lov, who in his speech about the constitution picks up Stalin's theme and underlines Ihe provisional nature of the whole matter: "We have realized only the first, the lower phase, of Communism. Even this first phase of Communism, Socialism, is by no means completed; only its skeletal structure has been erected" (see Die Verfassung des Sozialistischen Staates der Arbeiter und Bauern, Editions Prométhee, Strasbourg, 1937. pp. 42 and 84). 14 "German constitutional life is thus characterized by its utter shapelessness, in contrast to Italy" (Franz Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, Appendix, p. 521). 16 Quoted from Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York 1939, p. 695. '"Stephen H. Roberts, The House that Hitler Built, London, 1939, p. 72. "Justice Robert H. Jackson, in his opening speech at the Nuremberg Trials, based his description of the political structure of Nazi Germany consistently on the coexistence of "two governments in Germany—the real and the ostensible. The forms of the German Republic were maintained for a time and it was the outward and visible government. But the real authority in the State was outside of and above the law and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party" (Nazi Conspiracy, I, 125). See also the distinction of Roberts, op. cit., p. 101, between the party and a shadow state: "Hitler obviously leans toward increasing the duplication of functions." Students of Nazi Germany seem agreed that the state had only ostensible authority. For the only exception, see Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, New York and London, Í941, who claims the co-existence of a "normative and a prerogative state" living in constant friction as "competitive and not complementary parts of the German Reich." According to Fraenkel, the normative state was maintained by the Nazis for the protection of the capitalist order and private property and had full authority in all economic matters, while the prerogative state of the party ruled supreme in all Dolitical 396 TOTALITARIANISM All levels of the administrative machine in the Third Reich were si]1 to a curious duplication of offices. With a fantastic thoroughness, the \'?-| made sure that every function of the state administration would he dim]/ j!'1 / by some party organ:18 the Weimar division of Germany into states Í', provinces was duplicated by the Nazi division into Gaue whose border'». .V however, did not coincide, so that every given locality belonged, even ■" graphically, to two altogether different administrative units.1" Nor wa. il'" duplication of functions abandoned when, after 1933, outstanding \,,~ occupied the official ministries of the state; when Frick, for instance, be ■• ! Minister of the Interior or Guerthner Minister of Justice. These old "n*i trusted party members, once they had embarked upon official non:- ■■■" careers, lost their power and became as uninfluential as other civil sen vJ Both came under the factual authority of Himmler, the rising chief c' in-police, who normally would have been subordinate to the Minister ci >■■ Interior.20 Better known abroad has been the fate of the old German Fo./ n Affairs Office in the Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis left its personnel n., I untouched and of course never abolished it; yet at the same time they m. i,~. tained the prepower Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Party, headed by R .^,. berg;yi and since this office had specialized in maintaining contacts \|-j-Fascist organizations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, they set up an--J ,,■ 's"For those positions of state power which the National Socialists could n. ■ i cLipy with their own people, they created corresponding 'shadow offices' in ihci i party organization, in this way setting up a second state beside the statt- . . ." (K. -i i Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, p. 616). 1110. C. Giles, The Gestapo, Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs No. Vi. ■ , describes the constant overlapping of party and state departments. a" Characteristic is a memo of Minister of the Interior Frick, who lest-nlcd th ■ that Himmler, the leader of the SS, should have superior power. See husi f onspuuev III, 547.—Noteworthy in this respect also are Rosenberg's notes about a discussion with Hitler in 1942: Rosenberg had never before the war held a state position hut belonged to the intimate circle around Hitler. Now that he had become liciclisininiitcr for the Eastern Occupied Territories, he was constantly confronted with "direct actions" of other plenipotentiaries (chiefly SS-men) who overlooked him because he now belonged to the ostensible apparatus of the state. See ibid,, IV, řó ft. The same happened to Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland. There were only two cases in which the attainment of ministerial rank did not entail any loss of power and prestige: that of Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, and of Ministet of the Interior Himmler. As regards Himmler, we possess a memorandum, presumably from the year 1935, which illustrates the systematic singlemindedness of the Na/i.s in regulating the relations between party and state. This memorandum, which apparently originated in Hitler's immediate entourage and was found among the correspondence of the Reichsadjudantur of the Fuehrer and the Gestapo, contains a warning against making Himmler state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior becsu.se in th.it case he could "no longer be a political leader" and "would be alienated from the parly." Here, too, we find mention of the technical principle regulating the relations between party and state: "A Reichsleiter [a high party functionary] must not he suhoulinafed to a Reichsminister [a high state functionary]." (The undated, unsigned memorandum, entitled Die geheime Staatspolizei, can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, File P. Wiedemann.) 21 See the "Brief Report on Activities of Rosenberg's Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Party from 1933 to 1943," ibid., III. 27 ff. f TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 397 m to compete with the office in the Wilhelmstrasse, the so-called Ribben-jp Bureau, which handled foreign affairs in the West, and survived the parture of its chief as Ambassador to England, that is, his incorporation 0 the official apparatus of the Wilhelmstrasse. Finally, in addition to these fty institutions, the Foreign Office received another duplication in the TA of an SS Office, which was responsible "for negotiations with all racially jjnanic groups in Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands."22 iese examples prove that for the Nazis the duplication of offices was a ' titer of principle and not just an expedient for providing jobs for party inibers. The same division between a real and an ostensible government developed'/ 0i very different beginnings in Soviet Russia.23 The ostensible government' ginally sprang from the Ail-Russian Soviet Congress, which during the -y war lost its influence and power to the Bolshevik party. This process xted when the Red Army was made autonomous and the secret political lice re-established as an organ of the party, and not of the Soviet Con-;ss;-4 it was completed in 1923, during the first year of Stalin's General cretaryship.2r> From then on, the Soviets became the shadow government ; whose midst, through cells formed by Bolshevik party members, func- \ ned the representatives of real power who were appointed and responsible : the Central Committee in Moscow. The crucial point in the later de-: lopment was not the conquest of the Soviets by the party, but the fact it "although it would have presented no difficulties, the Bolsheviks did t abolish the Soviets and used them as the decorative outward symbol of ;ir authority."2" The co-existence of an ostensible and a real government therefore was |Wrtly the outcome of the revolution itself and preceded Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship. Yet while the Nazis simply retained the existing administration and deprived it of all power, Stalin had to revive his shadow government, which in the early thirties had lost all its functions and was half forgotten -Based on a Fuehrer decree of August 12, 1942, See Verfügungen, Anordnungen, hkaiintgaben, op. cit., Nr. A 54/42. -:i "Behind the ostensible government was a real government," which Victor Krav-Jicnko (/ Chose Freedom: The Personal Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946, p ill) saw in the "secret police system." ':See Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, London, 1934, chapter vi. There are in reality two political edifices in Russia that rise parallel to one another: ik shadow government of the Soviets and the de facto government of the Bolshevik ' 'Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 255-256, sums up Stalin's report to the Twelfth Party Con-jrsis about the work of the personnel department during his first year in the General Secietariat: "The year before only 27 per cent of the regional leaders of the trade nions were members of the party. At present 57 per cent of them were Communists. 'Ihr percentage of Communists in the management of co-operatives had risen from 5 to 50 per cent; and in the commanding staffs of the armed forces from 16 to 24. The ^me happened in all other institutions which Stalin described as the 'transmission delis' connecting the party with the people." '' Arthur Rosenberg, op. cit., loc. cit. 3476 398 TOTALITARIAN! -, in Russia; he introduced the Soviet constitution as the symbol of ' ence as well as the powerlessness of the Soviets. (None of its r i'VW" ever had the slightest practical significance for life and jurisdietio i ■ V''1 sia.) The ostensible Russian government, utterly lacking the í>lanľ "''" tradition so necessary for a facade, apparently needed the sacred h-1 "f written law. The totalitarian defiance of law and legality (which "in '! ' ^ of the greatest changes . . . still [remain] the expression of a permi -^ desired order") 27 found in the written Soviet constitution, as in thcV'" *'" repudiated Weimar constitution, a permanent background for jts ow 'f'\r' lessness, the permanent challenge to the non totalitarian world and its v '*" ards whose helplessness and impotence could be demonstrated daily;- ' Duplication of offices and division of authority, the co-existence of i and ostensible power, are sufficient to create confusion but not to e>ii!" '. the "shapelessness" of the whole structure. One should not forget that .i- ■ a building can have a structure, but that a movement—if the word is ■ ■ ■.*. taken as seriously and as literally as the Nazis meant it—can, have cr! direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can be %'*{ "ä handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing ,- ., * in a certain direction. Even in the prepower stage the totalitarian niovejn.i i i represented those masses that were no longer willing to live in any ki-i'. ,.■■ structure, regardless of its nature; masses that had started to move in ..r<' , to flood the legal and geographical borders securely determined by the . ■„. ernment. Therefore, judged by our conceptions of government and ■ ,■ structure, these movements, so long as they find themselves physical!- - |i limited to a specific territory, necessarily must try to destroy all stru„ ■!■.-. and for this willful destruction a mere duplication of all offices into ľ ■■„ and state institutions would not be sufficient. Since duplication inu)|,„, a relationship between the facade of the state and the inner core of the party, t it, too, would eventually result in some kind of structure, where the relationship between party and state would automatically end in a legal regulation which restricts and stabilizes their respective authority.29 37 Maunz, op. cit., p. 12. 28 The jurist and Obersturm bann fuehrer, Professor R. Hoehn, has expressed tins in the following words: "And there was still another thing which foreigner, lint Germans, too, had to get used to: namely, that the task of the secret state ['dine . . . was taken over by a community of persons who originated within the movement, gnd j continue to be rooted in it. That the term state police actually makes no allowínicc j for this fact shall be mentioned here only in passing" {Grundfragen dt r ilrtil*cken f Polizei, Report on the Constitutive Session of the Committee on Police Lnw ot ihr Academy for German Law, October II, 1936. Hamburg, 1937, with contributions by Frank, Himmler and Hoehn). 20 For example, such an attempt to circumscribe the separate responsibiliiic and to counter the "anarchy of authority" was made by Hans Frank in Recht und ľťrv.-dltuns, 1939, and again in an address titled Technik des Staates, in 1941. He expired the opinion that "legal guarantees" were not the "prerogative of liberal system-* of government" and that the administration should continue to be governed, as before, by the laws of the Reich, which now were inspired and guided by the program of llw National Socialist party. It was precisely because he wanted to prevent siiľh a new legal order at any price that Hitler never acknowledged the program of the Nazi 3TALITARIANISM IN POWER 399 matter of fact, duplication of offices, seemingly the result of the ate problem in all one-party dictatorships, is only the most conspicu- T of a more complicated phenomenon that is better defined as multi- *i(jon of offices than duplication. The Nazis were not content to establish '■■j in addition to the old provinces, but also introduced a great many .-r geographical divisions in accordance with the different party organ- the territorial units of the SA were neither co-extensive with the lion* .,(,' nor with the provinces; they differed, moreover, from those of the SS i none of them corresponded to the zones dividing the Hitler Youth.30 tiii-' geographical confusion must be added the fact that the original lIK,iiship between real and ostensible power repeated itself throughout, ,,[[ in an ever-changing way. The inhabitant of Hitler's Third Reich ,j not only under the simultaneous and often conflicting authorities of meting powers, such as the civil services, the party, the SA, and the \\c could never be sure and was never explicitly told whose authority fta-» supposed, to place above all others. He had to develop a kind of/ ]i sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard í [hose, on the other hand, who had to execute the orders which the leader- ;, in the interest of the movement, regarded as genuinely necessary—in (^distinction to governmental measures, such orders were of course en- / .ted only to the party's elite formations—were not much better off. j silv such orders were "intentionally vague, and given in the expectation! : their recipient would recognize the intent of the order giver, and/ accordingly";m for the elite formations were by no means merely obli- j. Ol party members who made such proposals he was wont to speak with con-pi. describing them as "eternally tied to the past," as persons "who are unable :i :;jp ncross their own shadow" (Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue, Hamburg). -The 32 Gaue ... do not coincide with the administrative or military regions, jr even ihe 21 divisions of the SA, or the 10 regions of the SS, or the 23 zones of ■I:j Hitler Youth. . . . Such discrepancies are the more remarkable because there is :■ re.i-on for them" (Roberts, op. cit., p. 98). ■'Miicmberg Documents, PS 3063 in the Centre de Documentation Juive in Paris. Jí.ľ dik uměn t is a report of the supreme party court about "events and party court rnXľeďngs connected with the antisemitic demonstrations of November 9, 1938." On 'he basi«, of investigations by the police and the office of the Attorney General the '.pivme court came to the conclusion that "the verbal instructions of the Reichs-ľľOpaMíiiidaleiter must have been understood by ail party leaders to mean that, to ,-c oiK-ide, the party did not wish to appear as the instigator of the demonstration, "mi mi reality was to organize and carry it through. . . . The re-examination of the cü.nni;.!id echelons has shown . . . that the active National Socialist molded in the prjpuwei struggle [Kampfzeit] takes it for granted that actions in which the party ■Inc inn wish to appear in the role of organizer are not ordered with unequivocal clar-uy and down to the last detail. Hence he is accustomed to understand that an order niiiV mean more than its verbal content, just as it has more or less become routine UMÍ! the order giver, in the interests of the party . . . not to say everything and only v iiiimi.ite what he wants to achieve by the order. . . . Thus, the . . . orders— i>i" Iniiiiiice, not the Jew Grünspan but all Jewry must be blamed for the death of Pi-'iv Comrade vom Rath, . . . pistols should be brought along, . . . every M-man now ought to know what he had to do—were understood by a number of Minlo:uk'ľs to mean that Jewish blood would now have to be shed for the blood of 400 TOTALITARIANISM /gated to obey the orders of the Fuehrer (this was mandatory for all exist' ^organizations anyway), but "to execute the will of the leadership." »a a j* as can be gathered from the lengthy proceedings concerning "excesses" h fore the party courts, this was by no means one and the same thiri^ Th" ■ only difference was that the elite formations, thanks to their special tndo & trination for such purposes, had been trained to understand that certa^' "hints meant more than their mere verbal contents."33 ,n Technically speaking, the movement within the apparatus of tof alitaria domination derives its mobility from the fact that the leadership constant] shifts the actual center of power, often to other organizations, but without dissolving or even publicly exposing the groups that have thus been ilcprived of their power. In the early period of the Nazi regime, immediately after the Reichstag fire, the SA was the real authority and the party the ostensible one-power then shifted from the SA to the SS and finally from the SS to the Security Service/14 The point is that none of the organs of power was ever deprived of its right to pretend that it embodied the will of the Leader/1"1 But not only was the will of the Leader so unstable that compared with it the whims of Oriental despots are a shining example of steadfastness; the consistent and ever-changing division between real secret authority and ostensible open rep. resentation made the actual seat of power a mystery by definition, and this to such an extent that the members of the ruling clique themselves could never be absolutely sure of their own position in the secret power hierarchy Alfred Rosenberg, for instance, despite his long career in the parly and his impressive accumulation of ostensible power and offices in the partv hierarchy, still talked about the creation of a series of Eastern European States Party Comrade vom Rath. . . ." Particularly significant is the end of the ícport. in which the supreme party court quite openly takes exception to these methods: "It is another question whether, in the interest of discipline, the order that is inlcnfionally vague, and given in the expectation that its recipient will recognize the inieiu of the order giver and act accordingly, must not be relegated to the past." Here, ion. *' were persons who, in Hitler's words, "were unable to leap across their own shadow insisted upon legislative measures, because they did not understand that nut the but the will of the Fuehrer was the supreme law. Here, the difference hi.-rwoc mentality of the elite formations and the party agencies is particularly cleai. :'2 Best (op. cit.) puts it this way: "So long as the police execute this will c leadership, they are acting within the law; if the will of the leadership is 1r,uisgr then not the police, but a member of the police, has committed a violation." :,:!See footnote 31. :'4 In 1933, after the Reichstag fire, "SA leaders were more powerful than fiaii They also refused obedience to Goring." See Rudolf Diels's sworn affidavit in Conspiracy, V, 224; Diels was chief of the political police under Goring. ;iCThe SA obviously resented its loss of rank and power in the Nazi hierarch tried desperately to keep up appearances. In their magazines—Der SA-\1tinn Archiv, etc.—many indications, veiled and unveiled, of this impotent rivahv wi' SS can be found. More interesting is that Hitler still in 1936, when the S\ h. ready lost its power, would assure them in a speech: "All that you are. yo through me; and all that 1 am, I am through you alone." See Ernst Bajer, Di Berlin, 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 782. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 401 í security wall against Moscow at a time when those invested with real ■er had already decided that no state structure would succeed the defeat ie Soviet Union and that the population of the Eastern occupied territories become definitely stateless and could therefore be exterminated.30 In fti.tr words, since knowledge of whom to obey and a comparatively permanent settlement of hierarchy would introduce an element of stability which ■; essentially absent from totalitarian rule, the Nazis constantly disavowed ^j authority whenever it had come into the open and created new instances |.f government compared with which the former became a shadow government—a game which obviously could go indefinitely. One of the most important technical differences between the Soviet and the National Socialist iiswm is that Stalin, whenever he shifted the power emphasis within his own Movement from one apparatus to another, had the tendency to liquidate the jpoanitus together with its staff, while Hitler, in spite of his contemptuous continents on people who "are unable to leap across their own shadows,"37 Aas perfectly willing to continue using these shadows even though in another function. The multiplication of offices was extremely useful for the constant shift-ins: of power; the longer, moreover, a totalitarian regime stays in power, the rreater becomes the number of offices and the possibility of jobs exclusively jspiindent upon the movement, since no office is abolished when its author-ii\ is liquidated. The Nazi regime started this multiplication with an initial co-ordination of all existing associations, societies, and institutions. The Interesting thing in this nation-wide manipulation was that co-ordination Jiil not signify incorporation into the already existing respective party organizations. The result was that up to the end of the regime, there were not one. but two National Socialist student organizations, two Nazi women's organizations, two Nazi organizations for university professors, lawyers, pin^icians, and so forth.38 It was by no means sure, however, that in all cases the original party organization would be more powerful than its co- '■ Compare Rosenberg's speech of June, 1941: "I believe that our political task will ..an^i of . . . organizing these peoples in certain types of political bodies . . . and -■.iiklmg them up against Moscow" with the "Undated Memorandum for the Adminis-Tuiion in the Occupied Eastern Territories": "With the dissolution of the USSR after he; defeat, no body politic is left in the Eastern territories and therefore ... no cti/Ľiľ-hip for their population" (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, ľ)47. XXVI, p. 616 and 604, respectively). "'Hitlers Tischgespräche, Bonn, 1951, p. 213. Usually, Hitler meant some high-..nkiMi. Nazi functionaries who had their reservations about murdering all those with-ii.i; compunctions, whem he described as "human junk. [Gesox]" (see p. 248 ff. and ronili. l-ur the variety of overlapping party organizations, see Rang-und Organisations-:hu tit r NSDAP, Stuttgart, 1947, and Nazi Conspiracy, I, 178, which distinguishes four nvnn i_ategories: 1. Gliederungen der NSDAP, which had existed before its rise to rower. 2. Angeschlossene Verbände der NSDAP, which comprise those societies which tad hucn co-ordinated; 3. Betreute Organisationen der NSDAP; and 4. Weitere national-'^:i',!i\tische Organisationen. In nearly every category, one finds a different students', Minion's, teachers', and workers' organization. 402 TOTALITARíANIS ordinated counterpart.39 Nor could anybody predict with any ; which party organ would rise in the ranks of the internal party hierarc" A classical instance of this planned shapelessness occurred in the n " ization of scientific antisemitism. In 1933, an institute for study of '''" Jewish question (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) was foundc -Munich which, since the Jewish question presumably had determin.ee '■ " whole of German history, quickly enlarged into a research institute for .,.* ern German history. Headed by the well-known historian Walter p,.»'" it transformed the traditional universities into seats of ostensible ]Cai ," or facades. In 1940, another institute for the study of the Jewish qiie-i.' was founded in Frankfurt, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, whose standin a party member was considerably higher. The Munich institute conscquvn:-was relegated to a shadowy existence; the Frankfurt, not the Munich j w:. tution was supposed to receive the treasures from looted European Je . collections and become the seat of a comprehensive library on Judi - i' Yet, when these collections actually arrived in Germany a few years 1 -, their most precious parts went not to Frankfurt, but to Berlin, where i.. were received by Himmler's special Gestapo department for the liquid; ■ -(not merely the study) of the Jewish question, which was headed by \ \ mann. None of the older institutions was ever abolished, so that in ll)4i ■".. situation was this: behind the facade of the universities' history departir ■■ stood threateningly the more real power of the Munich institute, be!-:.-which rose Rosenberg's institute in Frankfurt, and only behind these t .-. facades, hidden and protected by them, lay the real center of authority I .■ Reichssicherheitshauptamt, a special division of the Gestapo. The facade of the Soviet government, despite its written constitution • even less impressive, erected even more exclusively for foreign observi ■■ -i than the state administration which the Nazis inherited and retained I . i i the Weimar Republic. Lacking the Nazis' original accumulation of office -n the period of co-ordination, the Soviet regime relies even more on conn -i creation of new offices to put the former centers of power in the shut'--. The gigantic increase of the bureaucratic apparatus, inherent in this met ■ is checked by repeated liquidation through purges. Nevertheless,, in Ru too, we can distinguish at least three strictly separate organizations: !„■ Soviet or state apparatus, the party apparatus, and the NKVD appari'i*. each of which has its own independent department of economy, a poJii- M The gigantic organization for public works, headed by Todt and laíer le ■ Albert Speer, was created by Hitler outside of all party hierarchies and ufliliai ■ This organization might have been used against the authority of party or even r organizations. It is noteworthy that Speer could risk pointing out to Hitler (dur conference in 1942) the impossibility of organizing production under Himtii1 regime, and even demand jurisdiction over slave labor and concentration camps '■ Nazi Conspiracy, I, 916-917. 40 Such an innocuous and unimportant society, for instance, as the NSKK (ihc ^ tional Socialist corps of automobilists founded in 1930) was suddenly elevated, in ' ■ to the status of an elite formation, sharing with the SA and the SS the privilege t independent affiliated unit of the party. Nothing followed this rise in the rank-, o Nazi hierarchy; retrospectively, it looks like an idle threat to the SA and SS. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER ,;i!-tment, a ministry of education and culture, a ]n Russia, the ostensible power of the party katary dec n-, i[ power of the secret police corresponds to tK reaucraov "* • u :L,tv and state as known in Nazi Germany, and fľ *titiJ f f"nst toef í dčnt only in the secret police itself, with its e> ifij^ °f rifled network of agents, in which one depaJNefy 2 ^beC°ľf ^vising and spying on another. Every enteľ>t i^«^ widely special department of the secret police, whS6 * fe^ ,mI ordinary personnel alike. Co-existent with tv^es on „ u Šli« division of the party itself, which again J* dep^?. ^ff8 t agents of the NKVD, and whose members >s ewy *■ T^* >; Added to these two espionage organize e ** SSI' T i ],e 'factories, which must see to it that the wor]^ ^Ust be Hi * ' n,otJS. Far more important than these apparatus fulfill tw umon! !? Lrcment" of the NKVD which represents ^n ^ Wev ^^r^ i ',.. a secret police within the secret police.« All rKVt> witi h wvn" ,.,licc agencies ultimately end up in the MoscoT^rts nf th\ e NKViY' ■^ Politburo. Here it is decided which of the re* ^ T" comPetmf i the police divisions shall be entitled to c,^kL^mmJe $* „■asures. Neither the average inhabitant of the* °<* CT 'ľ? ^ nolicc departments knows, of course, what deck Ut)try nnrTectlve P0,Ife „,, be the special division of the NKVD, tomo> Ä *V™ ? *S ,enls; the day after, it may be the local coffl]n> the Irfľ \ ľ ' ,rfi*. Among all these departments there exists^ °r SZ ? í }f nower or authority; the only certainty is that P?° legal]v rrl "e regional chosen to embody "the will of the leader ^>a Iy ™'f ^ I Ihc only rule of which everybody in a tot^ . * 0ne °f them Wl11 !:;.i the more visible government agencies are, J^*1 state m h ncl the less is known of the existence of an imt:, kss *,„„, ^ , e SUre 1S - will ultimately turn out to be. According to >H the * 'Tí ]izjd by a written constitution as the highest J* ^ the ™re Powertul :* power than the Bolshevik party; the Bolshev?0% of thľs'tl'hľvé nembers openly and is recognized as the ruling c, Party, Which t 't he secret police. Real power begins where secreCv >> hás less nnwľ^than 1w and the Bolshevik states were very mucl/^VtS^cuS hieflv in the monopolization and centralization 3* their dSee hw limmler on one hand, and the maze of appare seCref > ucied police activities in Russia on the other y Wa»ľT sefvices in f er. ueiated and uncon- ■ I . Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the p 151. -^«cfio '-IHd., p. 159 ff.—According to other reports, ther= ^ Confession' 1951, "iict'Ciing multiplication of the Soviet police aPParath are di^e ion.il associations of the NKVD, which work ind "s> Primg^.6111 examples of the •1-iiiU have their counterparts in the local and region^ ^ntly r the íocaí and re" ; in ihe nature of things that we know considerably ]e ' netw0r); °m anotner an<^ ■c Jo about those in Nazi Germany, especially as f„ a^Utt>,S ?* Partľ agents. It oruaned. r äs 0r„ s.Sl^n conditions than ^nizational Hpfails are-. 404 TOTALITA» (At If we consider the totalitarian state solely as an instrument of pow leave aside questions of administrative efficiency, industrial capaejh economic productivity, then its shapelessness turns out to be an '• suited instrument for the realization of the so-called Leader princir continuous competition between offices, whose functions not only n but which are charged with identical tasks,43 gives opposition or si! almost no chance to become effective; a swift change of emphasis relegates one office to the shadow and elevates another to aulhorii solve all problems without anybody's becoming aware of the change the fact that opposition had existed, the additional advantage of th tern being that the opposing office is likely never to learn of its defeat it is either not abolished at all (as in the case of'the Nazi regime) o- liquidated much later and without any apparent connection with the si matter. This can be done all the more easily since nobody, except thos ■ i initiated, knows the exact relationship between the authorities. Only 0[44. a while does the nontotalitarian world catch a glimpse of these conditio ,» when a high official abroad confesses that an obscure clerk in the lZn i- -> had been his immediate superior. In retrospect it is often possit „■ i - determine why such a sudden loss of power occurred, or, ratiier, t. :■ ■• occurred at all. For instance, it is not hard to understand today w . t, the outbreak of war people like Alfred Rosenberg or Hans Frank ■.-.• removed to state positions and thus eliminated from the real center of power, namely, the Fuehrer's inner circle.44 The important thing is that they not only did not know the reasons for these moves, but presumably not even suspected that such apparently exalted positions as Governor General of Poland or Reichsminister for all Eastern territories did not signify the climax but the end of their National Socialist careers. The Leader principle does not establish a hierarchy in the totalitarian state any more than it does in the totalitarian movement; authority is not filtered down from the top through all intervening layers to the bottom of the body politic as is the case in authoritarian regimes. The factual reason is that there is no hierarchy without authority and that, in spite of the numerous misunderstandings concerning the so-called "authoritarian personality," the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination. Quite apart from its origin 4:1 According to the testimony of one of his former employees (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 461), it was "a specialty of Himmler to give one task to two different penple." 44 In the aforementioned address (see footnote 29) Hans Frank showed that at «orne point he wanted to stabilize the movement, and his numerous complaints a-» Governor General of Poland testify to a total lack of understanding of the deliberate!} ami-utilitarían tendencies of Nazi policy. He cannot understand why the subjected peoples are not exploited but exterminated. Rosenberg, in the eyes of Hitler, w;ii racially unreliable because he meant to establish satellite states in the conquered Lastern territories and did not understand that Hitler's population policy aimed at depopulating these territories. í TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 405 Roman history, authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to riet or limit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination, /ever, aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spon- ;ity in general, and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter j tyrannical. Technically, this absence of any authority or hierarchy he totalitarian system is shown by the fact that between the supreme /er (the Fuehrer) and the ruled there are no reliable intervening levels, h of which would receive its due share of authority and obedience. The of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he [self is not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might have estab- sd himself. Therefore, it is not accurate to say that the movement, nfier its seizure of power, founds a multiplicity of principalities in whose ' ,;il]m each little leader is free to do as he pleases and to imitate the big ; jjjiler at the top.45 The Nazi claim that "the party is the order of ■ fuehrers"40 was an ordinary lie. Just as the infinite multiplication of offices aI-,d confusion of authority leads to a state of affairs in which every citizen feels himself directly confronted with the will of the Leader, who arbitrarily chooses the executing organ of his decisions, so the one and a half million ■'fuehrers" throughout the Third Reich 47 knew very well that their authority derived directly from Hitler without the intervening levels of a functioning hierarchy.48 The direct dependence was real and the intervening hierarchy, certainly of social importance, was an ostensible, spurious imitation of an í authoritarian state. The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most conspicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police, who in a totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position. Yet despite the enormous material and organizational power at his disposal as the head of a veritable police army and of the elite formations, the chief of police apparently is in no position ever to seize power and himself become the ruler of the country. Thus prior to Hitler's fall, Himmler never dreamed of touching Hitler's claim to leadership49 and was never proposed '"' The notion of a division into "little principalities" which formed "a pyramid of power outside the law with the Fuehrer at its apex" is Robert H. Jackson's. See chapter xii of Nazi Conspiracy, II, I ff. Tn order to avoid the establishment of such an .iiiilioritarian state, Hitler, as early as 1934, issued the following party decree: "The fiirm of address 'Mein Fuehrer' is reserved for the Fuehrer alone. I herewith forbid ill subleaders of the NSDAP to allow themselves to be addressed as 'Mein Reichs-brler,' etc., either in words or in writing. Rather, the form of address has to be Pg. [Party Comrade] ... or Gauleiter, etc." See Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben, up. cit., decree of August 20, 1934. "'See the Organisationsbttch der NSDAP. !"See Chart 14 in Vol. VIIÍ of Nazi Conspiracy. Ih All oaths in the party as well as the elite formations were taken on the person ot Adolf Hitler. '"The first step of Himmler in this direction occurred in the fall of 1944, when lie ordered on his own initiative that the gas installations in the extermination camps 406 TOTALITÄR!^ IUI AUTARK Nis v as Hitler's successor. Even more interesting in this context is B> i ■ ■ fated attempt at seizing power after Stalin's death. Although Stalin had' permitted any of his police chiefs to enjoy a position comparable to rs *' of Himmler during the last years of Nazi rule, Beria, too, dispose' -enough troops to challenge the rule of the party after Stalin's death si »'■ '■' by occupying the whole of Moscow and all accesses to the Krem' " nobody except the Red Army might have disrupted his claim to power ir ■ this would have led to a bloody civil war whose outcome would bv means have been assured. The point is that Beria voluntarily abandon-' all his positions only a few days later even though he must have krwi' that he would forfeit his life because for a matter of days he had dare.i *, play off the power of the police against the power of the party.-^ This lack of absolute power does of course not prevent the chiel ■" police from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with fo '. tarian power principles. Thus it is most remarkable to see how Him *' ■■ after his appointment began the reorganization of the German police ■■*. introducing into the hitherto centralized apparatus of the secret police -lj multiplication of offices—i.e., he apparently did what all experts of p( ■„ . who preceded the totalitarian regimes would have feared as decentraliz; ■ ■ n leading to a diminution of power. To the service of the Gestapo Him; \ first added the Security Service, originally a division of the SS and fomv„\' as an inner-party police body. While the main offices of the Gestapo m." the Security Service were eventually centralized in Berlin, the region, i branches of these two huge secret services retained their separate iden '■■„■. and each reported directly to Himmler's own office in Berlin.51 In the course of the war, Himmler added two more intelligence services: one consisted of so-called inspectors who were supposed to control and coordinate the Security Service with the police and who were subject to the jurisdiction of the SS; the second was a specifically military intelligence bureau which acted independently of the Reich's military forces and finally succeeded in absorbing the army's own military intelligence.52 The complete absence of successful or unsuccessful palace revolutions is ;■ one of the most remarkable characteristics of totalitarian dictatorships. be dismantled and the mass slaughter be stopped. This was his way of initiating peace negotiations with the Western powers. Interestingly enough, Hitler apparently was never informed of these preparations; it seems that no one dared tell him that one of his most important war aims had already been given up. See Léon Poliakov, Brévaire de la Hutne, 1951, p. 232. "'" For the events following Stalin's death, see Harrison E. Salisbury. American in Russia, New York, 1955. 31 See the excellent analysis of the structure of the Nazi police in Nazi Conspiracy, H, 250 if., esp. p. 256. 52 Ibid., p. 252. i TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 407 lii one exception no dissatisfied Nazis took part in the military con-..ijcy against Hitler of July, 1944.) On the surface, the Leader principle rflis to invite bloody changes of personal power without a change of fijnie. This is but one of many indications that the totalitarian form of ,'veinment has very little to do with lust for power or even the desire for oimer-generating machine, with the game of power for power's sake ijicJi has been characteristic of the last stages of imperialist rule. Tech-cally speaking, however, it is one of the most important indications that (jliuirian government, all appearances notwithstanding, is not rule by a jiiue or a gang.53 The evidence of Hitler's as well as Stalin's dictatorship jjnts clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not i]v the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very p of the whole structure. Stalin has shot almost everybody who could ,jm to belong to the ruling clique and has moved the members of the ilitburo back and forth whenever a clique was on the point of consolidating elf. Hitler destroyed cliques in Nazi Germany with less drastic means—the ]v bloody purge having been directed against the Röhm clique which jeed was firmly kept together through the homosexuality of its leading uiibers; he prevented their formation by constant shifts in power and thority, and frequent changes of intimates in his immediate surroundings, thai all former solidarity between those who had come into power with u quickly evaporated. It seems obvious, moreover, that the monstrous faithfulness which is reported in almost identical terms as the outstanding lit in both Hitler's and Stalin's characters did not allow them to preside over anything so lasting and durable as a clique. However that may be, the point is that there exists no interrelationship between those holding office; they are not bound together by equal status in a political hierarchy or the relationship between superiors and inferiors, or even the uncertain loyalties of gangsters. In Soviet Russia, everybody knows that the top manager of a big industrial concern can as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs be demoted any day to the lowest social and political status, and that a complete unknown may step into his place. The gangster complicity, on the other hand, which played some role in the early stages of the Nazi dictatorship, loses all cohesive force, for totalitarianism uses its power precisely ■"•■'Franz Neumann, op. cit., pp. 521 ff., is doubtful "whether Germany can be called a State. It is far more a gang where the leaders are perpetually compelled to agree afterdisagreements." Konrád Heiden's works on Nazi Germany are representative for the theory of government by a clique.—As regards the formation of cliques around Hitler, The Bormann Letters, published by Trevor-Roper, are quite enlightening. In the trial of the doctors (the United States vs. Karl Brandt et al., hearing of May 13, 1947), Victor Brack testified that as early as 1933 Bormann, acting no doubt on Hitler's orders, had begun to organize a group of persons who stood above state and party. 408 T0TALITARIA3 to spread this complicity through the population until it has orgarri- ■' * guilt of the whole people under its domination.-A '" "!t The absence of a ruling clique has made the question of a succe the totalitarian dictator especially baffling and troublesome. It is tni m U' this issue has plagued all usurpers, and it is quite characteristic truo\ '"' of the totalitarian dictators ever tried the old method of establishiim '^ dynasty and appointing their sons. Against Hitler's numerous and theief i° self-defeating appointments stands Stalin's method, which made the st ^ cession one of the most dangerous honors in the Soviet Union. Under tota^" tarian conditions, knowledge of the labyrinth of transmission belts equ-'l" supreme power, and every appointed successor who actually comes to knô^ what is going on is automatically removed after a certain time. A valid a«i' comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the exiM ence of a clique whose members would share the Leader's monopoly t.s knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all mean Hitler once explained this in his own terms to the supreme commanders 1.1 the Wehrmacht, who in the midst of the turmoil of war were presumably racking their brains over this problem: "As the ultimate factor I must, in all modesty, name my own person: irreplaceable. . . . The destiny of the Reich depends on me alone."55 There is no need to look for any irony in the word modesty; the totalitarian leader, in marked contrast to all former usurpers, despots and tyrants, seems to believe that the question of his succession is not overly important, that no special qualities or training are needed for the job, that the country will eventually obey anybody who happens to hold the appointment at the moment of his death, and that no power-thirsty rivals will dispute his legitimacy.56 As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and 04 Compare the author's contribution to the discussion of the problem of Cierman guilt: "Organized Guilt," in Jewish Frontier, January, 1945. E'" In a speech of November 23, 1939, quoted from Trial of Major War Criminals, Vol. 26, p. 332. That this pronouncement was more than a hysterical aberration dictated by chance is apparent from Himmler's speech (the stenographic transcript can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, Himmler File, Folder 332) at the conference of mayors at Posen in March, 1944. It says: "What values can we place onto the scales of history? The value of our own people. . . . The second, I would almost say, even greater value is the unique person of our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, . . . who for the first time after two thousand years . . . was sent to the Germanic race as a great leader. . . ." SB See Hitler's statements on this question in Hitlers Tischgespräche, pp. 253 f. and 222 f.: The new Fuehrer would have to be elected by a "senate"; the guiding principle for the Fuehrer's election must be that any discussion among the personalities participating in the election should cease for the duration of the proceedings. Within three hours Wehrmacht, party and all civil servants will have to be newly sworn in. "He had no illusions about the fact that in this election of the supreme head of the state there might not always be an outstanding Fuehrer personality at the helm of the Reich." But this entailed no dangers, "so long as the over-all machinery functions properly." ( TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 409 öjniously effective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly, Jt unparalleled certainty that all commands will always be carried out; the gltiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure „ dictator's complete independence of all his inferiors and make possible , swift and surprising changes in policy for which totalitarianism has be-,nc famous. The body politic of the country is shock-proof because of its apelessness. Xhe reasons why such extraordinary efficiency was never tried before are simple as the device itself. The multiplication of offices destroys all sense responsibility and competence; it is not merely a tremendously bürdende and unproductive increase of administration, but actually hinders proclivity because conflicting orders constantly delay real work until the order ifie Leader has decided the matter. The fanaticism of the elite cadres, ab-lutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systemati-Hy all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which ;s every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely dif-srent.r,r And this mentality is not confined to the elite but gradually pervades the entire population, the most intimate details of whose life and Jeath depend upon political decisions—that is, upon causes and ulterior ^olives which have nothing to do with performance. Constant removal, demotion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent [he development of experience. Economically speaking, slave labor is a luxury which Russia should not be able to afford; in a time of acute shortage of technical skill, the camps were filled with "highly qualified engineers [whol compete for the right to do plumbing jobs, repair clocks, electric lighting and telephone."58 But then, from a purely utilitarian point of view, Russia should not have been able to afford the purges in the thirties that interrupted a long-awaited economic recovery, or the physical destruction of the Red Army general staff, which led almost to a defeat in the Russian-Finnish war. Conditions in Germany were different in degree. In the beginning, the Nazis showed a certain tendency to retain technical and administrative skill, to allow profits in business, and to dominate economically without too much interference. At the outbreak of the war Germany was not yet completely totalitarianized, and if one accepts preparation for war as a rational motive, it must be conceded that until roughly 1942 her economy was allowed to s* One of the guiding principles for the SS formulated by Himmler himself reads: •"No task exists for its own sake." See Gunter d'Alquen, Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe und Organisation der Schutzstaffeln der NSDAP, 1939, in Schriften der Hochschule für Politik. r,B See David I. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Russia, 1947, who also report that during the war when mobilization had created an acute problem of manpower, the death rate in the labor camps was about 40 per cent during one year. In general, they estimate that the output of a worker in the camps is below 50 per cent of that of a free laborer. 410 TOTALITARIANISM function more or less rationally. The preparation for war in itself is anti-utilitarian, despite its prohibitive costs,59 for it may indeed be much "cheaper to seize the wealth and resources of other nations by conquest tin to buy them from foreign countries or produce them at home."60 Econom.;11 laws of investment and production, of stabilizing gains and profits, and of ex haustion do not apply if one intends in any event to replenish the depleted home economy with loot from other countries; it is quite true, and thp sympathizing German people were perfectly aware of it, that the famous Nazi slogan of "guns or butter" actually meant "butter through guns."«' jt was not until 1942 that the rules of totalitarian domination began to outweigh all other considerations. The radicahzation began immediately at the outbreak of war; one may even surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it enabled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been unthinkable in peacetime.02 The remarkable thing about this process, however, is that it was by no means checked by such a shattering defeat as Stalingrad, and that the danger of losing the war altogether was only another incitement to throw overboard all utilitarian considerations and make an all-out attempt to realize through ruthless total organization the goals of totalitarian racial ideology, no matter for how short a time.63 After Stalingrad, the elite formations which had been strictly separated from the people were greatly '"'Thomas Reveille, The Spoil of Europe, 1941, estimates that Germany during the first year of war was able to cover her entire preparatory war expenses of the years 1933 to 1939. ""William Ebenstein, The Nazi Stale, p. 257. 01 ibid., p. 270. fi2 This is supported by the fact that the decree to murder all incurably sick was issued on the day the war broke out, but even more so by Hitler's statements during the war, quoted by Goebbels {The Goebbels Diaries, ed. Louis P. Lochner, 1948) to the effect that "the war had made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times," and that, no matter how the war turned out, "the Jews will certainly be the losers" (p. 314). 63 The Wehrmacht of course tried time and again to explain to the various party organs the dangers of a war conduct in which commands were issued with utter disregard for all military, civilian and economic necessities (see, for instance, Poliakov, op. cit., p. 321). But even many high Nazi functionaries had difficulty understanding this neglect of all objective economic and military factors in the situation. They had to be told time and again that "economic considerations should fundamentally remain unconsidered in the settlement of the [Jewish] problem" {Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 402), but still would complain that the interruption of a big building program in Poland "would not have happened if the many thousands of Jews working at it had not been deported. Now the order is given that the Jews will have to be removed from the armament projects. I hope that this . . . order will soon be cancelled, for then the situation will be still worse." This hope of Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, was as little fulfilled as his later expectations of a militarily more sensible policy toward Poles and Ukrainians. His complaints are interesting (see his Diary in Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 902 ff.) because he is frightened exclusively by the anti-utilitarian aspect of Nazi policies during the war. "Once we have won the war, then for all I care, mince-meat can be made of the Poles and the Ukrainians and all the others who run around here. . . ." TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 411 \ ,\paflded; the ban on party membership for those in the armed forces was \ lifted and the military command was subordinated to SS commanders. The : Ijlously guarded crime monopoly of the SS was abandoned and soldiers '; iicre assigned at will to duties of mass murder.04 Neither military, nor eco- ■ noittic, nor political considerations were allowed to interfere with the costly .,fl(.[ troublesome program of mass exterminations and deportations. I ' if one considers these last years of Nazi rule and their version of a "five-. year plan," which they had no time to carry out but which aimed at the < extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, of 170 million Russians ras mentioned in one plan), the intelligentsia of Western Europe such as the putch and the people of Alsace and Lorraine, as well as of all those Germans who would be disqualified under the prospective Reich health bill or the planned "community alien law," the analogy to the Bolshevik five-year plan ■ 0f 1929, the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia, is almost inescapable. Vulgar eugenic slogans in one case, high-sounding economic phrases in the other, were the prelude to "a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned i upside down."Ii!i } To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the ] road to insanity. The point is rather that our bewilderment about the anti-utilitarian character of the totalitarian state structure springs from the mistaken notion that we are dealing with a normal state after all—a bureaucracy, a tyranny, a dictatorship—from our overlooking the emphatic assertions by totalitarian rulers that they consider the country where they happened to seize power only the temporary headquarters of the international movement on the road to world conquest, that they reckon victories and defeats in terms of centuries or millennia, and that the global interests always overrule * the local interests of their own territory.fifl The famous "Right is what is 01 Originally, only special units of the SS—the Death Head formations—were em-; ployed in the concentration camps. Later replacements came from the Armed SS divisions. From 1944 on, units of the regular armed forces were also employed but usually incorporated in the Armed SS. (See the Affidavit of a former SS official of the concentration camp of Neuengamme in Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 211.) How the active presence of the Wehrmacht made itself felt in the concentration camps has been described in Odd Nansen's concentration camp diary Day After Day, London, 1949. Unfortunately, it shows that these regular army troops were at least as brutal as the SS. B5 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 326. This quotation carries weight because it comes from the most benevolent of Stalin's non-Communist biographers. •""The Nazis were especially fond of reckoning in terms of millennia. Himmler's pronouncements that SS-men were solely interested in "ideological questions whose importance counted in terms of decades and centuries" and that they "served a cause which in two thousand years occurred only once" are repeated, with slight variations, throughout the entire indoctrination material issued by the SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt {Wesen und Aufgabe der SS und der Polizei, p. 160).—As for the Bolshevik version, the best reference is the program of the Communist International as formulated by Stalin as early as 1928 at the Sixth Congress in Moscow. Particularly interesting is the evaluation of the Soviet Union as "the bases for the world movement, the center of international revolution, the greatest factor in world history. In the USSR, the world proletariat for the first time acquires a country . . ." (quoted from 412 TOTALITARIANISM good for the German people" was meant only for mass propaganda- \ were told that "Right is what is good for the movement,"67 and the- i'.'!* interests did by no means always coincide. The Nazis did not think tl * ii Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that" th .'*' should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and thtt ttv'" race was only on the point of being born."" Not the Germans were the d-m-* of the master race, but the SS.69 The "Germanic world empire," as Hirriml ■' said, or the "Aryan" world empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in an event still centuries off.70 For the "movement" it was more important i". demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate a race by annihilating oth--"races" than to win a war with limited aims. What strikes the outside o** server as a "piece of prodigious insanity" is nothing but the consequent-of the absolute primacy of the movement not only over the stale, but aK ■ over the nation, the people and the positions of power held by the rulei-, themselves. The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, wi i their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a single man, were never tried out before, is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough to discard all limited and local interests—economic, national human, military—in favor of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite distant future. Since totalitarianism in power remains faithful to the original tenets of the movement, the striking similarities between the organizational devices of the movement and the so-called totalitarian state are hardly surprising. The division between party members and fellow-travelers organized in front W. H. Chamberlain, Blueprint for World Conquest, 1946, where the programs of the Third International are reprinted verbatim). C7 This change of the official motto can be found in the Organisationsbuch der NSDAP, p. 7. 68 See Heiden, op. cit., p. 722.—Hitler stated in a speech of November 23, 1937 before the future political leaders at the Ordensburg Sonthofen: Not "ridiculously small tribes, tiny countries, states or dynasties . . . but only races [can] function aa world conquerors. A race, however—at least in the conscious sense—we still have to become" (see Hitlers Tischgespräche, p. 445).—In complete harmony with this by no means accidental phrasing is a decree of August 9, 1941, in which Hitler prohibited the further use of the term "German race" because it would lead to the "sacrifice of the racial idea as such in favor of a mere nationality principle, and to the destruction of important conceptual preconditions of our whole racial and folk policy" (Verfügungen, Anordnungen, Bekanntgaben). It is obvious that the concept of a German race would have constituted an impediment to the progressive "selection" and extermination of undesirable parts among the German population which in those very years was being planned for the future. ** Himmler consequently "very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries" whom he told: "We do not expect you to become German out of opportunism. But we do expect you to subordinate your national ideal to the greater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich" (Heiden, op. cit.). Its future task would be to form through "the most copious breeding" a "racial superstratum" which in another twenty to thirty years would "present the whole of Europe with its leading class" (Himmler's speech at the meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen in 1943, in Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558 if.). 70 Himmler, ibid., p. 572. \ TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 413 ranizations, far from disappearing, leads to the "co-ordination" of the ole population, who are now organized as sympathizers. The tremendous rease in sympathizers is checked by limiting party strength to a privileged ■ass" of a few millions and creating a superparty of several hundred thou-.[d, the elite formations. Multiplication of offices, duplication of functions, j adaptation of the party-sympathizer relationship to the new conditions ,an simply that the peculiar onion-Jike structure of the movement, in ich every layer was the front of the next more militant formation, is 1 ained. The state machine is transformed into a front organization of sym-hizing bureaucrats whose function in domestic affairs is to spread con-:nce among the masses of merely co-ordinated citizens and whose foreign urs consist in fooling the outside, nontotalitarian world. The Leader, in dual capacity as chief of the state and leader of the movement, again nbines in his person the acme of militant ruthlessness and confidence-piring normality. One of the important differences between a totalitarian movement and a totalitarian state is that the totalitarian dictator can and must practice the totalitarian art of lying more consistently and on a larger scale than the leader 0f a movement. This is partly the automatic consequence of swelling the ranks of fellow-travelers, and is partly due to the fact that unpleasant state-"! ments by a statesman are not as easily revoked as those of a demagogic party leader. For this purpose, Hitler chose to fall back, without any detours, on the old-fashioned nationalism which he had denounced many times : before his ascent to power; by posing as a violent nationalist, claiming that National Socialism was not an "export commodity," he appeased Germans and non-Germans alike and implied that Nazi ambitions would be satisfied when the traditional demands of a nationalist German foreign policy—re-1 turn of territories ceded in the Versailles treaties, Anschluss of Austria, annexation of the German-speaking parts of Bohemia—were fulfilled. Stalin likewise reckoned with both Russian public opinion and the non-Russian world when he invented his theory of "socialism in one country" and threw the onus of world revolution on Trotsky.71 Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule, where the fictitious quality of everyday reality makes propaganda largely superfluous. In their prepower stage the movements can never afford to hide their true goals to the same degree —after all, they are meant to inspire mass organizations. But, given the possibility to exterminate Jews like bedbugs, namely, by poison gas, it is no longer necessary to propagate that Jews are bedbugs;72 given the power to teach a whole nation the history of the Russian Revolution without men- Tl Deutscher, op. cit., describes Stalin's remarkable "sensibility to all those psychological undercurrents ... of which he set himself up as a mouthpiece" (p. 292). "The very name of Trotsky's theory, 'permanent revolution,' sounded like an ominous warning to a tired generation. . . . Stalin appealed directly to the horror of risk and uncertainty that had taken possession of many Bolsheviks" (p. 291). 12 Thus Hitler could afford to use the favorite cliche "decent Jew" once he had beeun to exterminate them, namelv. in December. 1941. in the Tischsesnräche. r>. 346. 414 TOTALITARIANISM tioning the name of Trotsky, there is no further need for propaganda again .* Trotsky. But the use of the methods for carrying out the ideological g0a] can be "expected" only from those who are "ideologically utterly firm"-J whether they have acquired such firmness in the Comintern schools or tfT special Nazi indoctrination centers—even if these goals continue to h publicized. On such occasions it invariably turns out that the mere svm pathizers never realize what is happening.73 This leads to the paradox that "the secret society in broad daylight" is never more conspiratory in cfjň acter and methods than after it has been recognized as a full-fledged rrtem-ber of the comity of nations. It is only logical that Hitler, prior to his seizure of power, resisted all attempts to organize the party and even the elite formations on a conspiratory basis; yet after 1933 he was quite eager to heln transform the SS into a kind of secret society.74 Similarly, the Moscow-directed Communist parties, in marked contrast to their predecessors, show a curious tendency to prefer the conditions of conspiracy even where complete legality is possible.75 The more conspicuous the power of totalitarianism the more secret become its true goals. To know the ultimate aims of Hitler's rule in Germany, it was much wiser to rely on his propaganda speeches and Mein Kampf than on the oratory of the Chancellor of the Third Reich; just as it would have been wiser to distrust Stalin's words about "socialism in one country," invented for the passing purpose of seizing power after Lenin's death, and to take more seriously his repeated hostility to democratic countries. The totalitarian dictators have proved that they knew only too well the danger inherent in their pose of normality; that is, the danger of a true nationalist policy or of actually building socialism in one country. This they try to overcome through a permanent and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of 73 Hitler, therefore, speaking to members of the Genera! Staff (Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder) and high-ranking civilians (Neurath, Goring) in November, 1937, could permit himself to state openly that he needed depopiiiated space and reject the idea of conquering alien peoples. That this would automatically result in a policy of exterminating such peoples was evidently not realized by any one of his listeners. 74 This began with an order in July, 1934, by which the SS was elevated to the rank of an independent organization within the NSDAP, and completed by a top secret decree of August, 1938, which declared that the SS special formations, the Death Head Units and the Shock Troops (Verfiigitngstriippen) were neither part of the army nor of the police; the Death Head Units had "to clear up special tasks of police nature" and the Shock Troops were "a standing armed unit exclusively at my disposal" (Nazi Conspiracy, III, 459). Two subsequent decrees of October, 1939, and April, 1940, established special jurisdiction in general matters for ali SS members {ibid., II, 184). From then on all pamphlets issued by the SS indoctrination office carry such notations as "Solely for use of the police," "Not for publication," "Exclusively for leaders and those entrusted with ideological education." It would be worth while to compile a bibliography of the voluminous secret literature, which includes a great many legislative measures, that was printed during the Nazi era. Interestingly enough, there is not a single SA booklet among this type of literature, and this is probably the most conclusive proof that after 1934 the SA ceased to be an elite formation. 75 Compare Franz Borkenau, "Die neue Komintern," in Der Monat, Berlin, 1949, Heft 4. I * TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 415 \ fj[j, by consciously developing a method of always doing the opposite of i .."jut they say.70 Stalin has carried this art of balance, which demands more = jjil than the ordinary routine of diplomacy, to the point where a modera-j ,-on in foreign policy or the political line of the Comintern is almost invari-] \\y accompanied by radical purges in the Russian party. It was certainly , fl0re than coincidence that the Popular Front policy and the drafting of !,-,; comparatively liberal Soviet constitution were accompanied by the Moscow Trials. ■ evidence that totalitarian governments aspire to conquer the globe and 1 -.ring all countries on earth under their domination can be found repeatedly p! Nazi and Bolshevik literature. Yet these ideological programs, inherited from pretotalitarian movements (from the supranationalist antisemitic parlies and the Pan-German dreams of empire in the case of the Nazis, from - ihe international concept of revolutionary socialism in the case of the Bolsheviks) are not decisive. What is decisive is that totalitarian regimes really conduct their foreign policy on the consistent assumption that they will even- í jgally achieve this ultimate goal, and never lose sight of it no matter how jjstant it may appear or how seriously its "ideal" demands may conflict ' ujth, the necessities of the moment. They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential territory. Rise to power, the fact that in one country the fictitious world of the movement has become a tangible reality, creates a relationship to other nations which is similar to the situation of the totalitarian party under non-lotalitarian rule: the tangible reality of the fiction, backed by internationally recognized state power, can be exported the same way contempt for parliament could be imported into a nontotalitarian parliament. In this respect, ihe prewar "solution" of the Jewish question was the outstanding export commodity of Nazi Germany: expulsion of Jews carried an important portion of Nazism into other countries; by forcing Jews to leave the Reich pass-portless and penniless, the legend of the Wandering Jew was realized, and by forcing the Jews into uncompromising hostility against them, the Nazis had created the pretext for taking a passionate interest in all nations' domestic policies.77 How seriously the Nazis took their conspiratorial fiction, according to J which they were the future rulers of the world, came to light in 1940 when— despite necessity, and in the face of all their all-too-real chances of winning over the occupied peoples of Europe—they started their depopulation policies in the Eastern territories, regardless of loss of manpower and serious military consequences, and introduced legislation which with retroactive ™ Instances are too obvious and too numerous to be quoted. This tactic, however, should not be simply identified with the enormous lack of faithfulness and truthfulness which all biographers of Hitler and Stalin report as outstanding traits of their character. "See the Circular Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German au-iborities abroad of January, 1939, in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 87 ff. 416 TOTALITÄR [\ř force exported part of the Third Reich's penal code into the We pied countries.™ There was hardly a more effective way of pub Nazi claim to world rule than punishing as high treason eveiv u action against the Third Reich, no matter when, where, or by whom it been made. Nazi law treated the whole world as falling potentially m'i" its jurisdiction, so that the occupying army was no longer an instrun ■■■'' conquest that carried with it the new law of the conqueror, but an cxC ■•■' organ which enforced a law which already supposedly existed for eve . '-V The assumption that Nazi law was binding beyond the German l-.- >\ and the punishment of non-Germans were more than mere devices m| *."* pression. Totalitarian regimes are not afraid of the logical impljcatii- ' world conquest even if they work the other way around and are detii !■_■ ■■ to their own peoples' interests. Logically, it is indisputable that a pi ■ world conquest involves the abolition of differences between the cone, mother country and the conquered territories, as well as the diŕľcren..-tween foreign and domestic politics, upon which all existing nomotalu institutions and all international intercourse are based. If the total . i -, conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, h- j . same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.79 And it is perfectly true that the totalitarian movement seizes power in much the same sense as a foreign conqueror may occupy a country which he governs not for its own sake but for the benefit of something or somebody else. The Nazis behaved like foreign conquerors in Germany when, against all national interests, they tried and half succeeded in converting their defeat into a final catastrophe for the whole German people; similarly in case of victory, they intended to extend their extermination politics into the ranks of "racially unfit" Germans.80 A similar attitude seems to have inspired Soviet foreign policy after the war. The cost of its aggressiveness to the Russian people themselves is 78 In 1940, the Nazi government decreed that offenses ranging from high tien'on against the Reich to "malicious agitatorial utterances against leading persons of iho State or the Nazi Party" should be punished with retroactive force in .ill German occupied territories, no matter whether they had been committed by Germans or by natives of these countries. See Giles, op. cit.—For the disastrous consequents of the Nazi "Siedlungspolitik" in Poland and the Ukraine, see Trial, op. cit.. Vol-.. XXV] und XXIX. 79 The term is Kravchenko's, op. cit., p. 303, who, describing conditions in Russia after the superpurge of 1936-1938, remarks: "Had a foreign conqueror taken over the machinery of Soviet life . . . the change could hardly have been more thorough or more cruel." 80 Hitler contemplated during the war the introduction of a National Health Bill: "After national X-ray examination, the Fuehrer is to be given a list of sick persons, particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich Health Law . . . these families will no longer be able to remain among the public and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer." It does not need much imagination to guess what these further orders would have been. The number of people no longer allowed "to remain among the public" would have formed a considerable portion of the German population (Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 175). í TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 417 jibitive: it has foregone the great postwar loan from the United States ;h would have enabled Russia to reconstruct devastated areas and in-rialize the country in a rational, productive way. The extension of = A)i]iintern governments throughout the Balkans and the occupation of ). vt£ Eastern territories brought no tangible benefits, but on the contrary ■ drained Russian resources still further. But this policy certainly served : |f,e interests of the Bolshevik movement, which has spread over almost half ! \; the inhabited world. Iu i.ike a foreign conqueror, the totalitarian dictator regards the natural n3ci industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of j0ot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion. Since ,1,;, economy of systematic spoliation is carried out for the sake of the -cement and not of the nation, no people and no territory, as the poten-!j;!] beneficiary, can possibly set a saturation point to the process. The to-[;[jtarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and his looting is likely to benefit nobody. Distribution of the spoils is calculated not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporary i tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. The fat that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign con-'•■ nueror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency ■ivhich. is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings. Stalin's ■vsr against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the -rribly bloody German invasion and occupation.81 This is the reason why ■ loialttarianism prefers quisling governments to direct rule despite the ob-: views dangers of such regimes. ■ The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics ■ in ;in especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an en- ! tiriľly new and unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their Real- , I pvliiik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality. Supreme j / j disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utili-/' t,irian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; "idealism,"! j i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lustj/ J The total number of Russian dead in four years of war is estimated at between 12 nü 21 million. Stalin exterminated in a single year in the Ukraine alone about 8 million people (estimate). See Communism in Action. U. S. Government. Washington, 1ÍI4Í», House Document No. 754, pp. 140-141.—Unlike the Nazi regime which kept rather accurate accounts on the number of its victims, there are no reliable figures for lil millions of people who were killed in the Russian system. Nevertheless the following estimate, quoted by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, carries some weight insofar as il -terns from Walter Krivitsky, who had direct access to the information contained ir. llie GPU files. According to these figures the census of 1937 in the Soviet Union, which Soviet statisticians had expected to reach 171 million persons, showed that ihere were actually only 145 millions. This would point to a loss in population of 26 rr.illiuns, a figure which does not include the losses quoted above. 418 TOTALITÄR] | .. ! for power—these have all introduced into international politii , , more disturbing factor than mere aggressiveness would have been able i"' Power, as conceived by totalitarianism, lies exclusively in the forc*° '"' duced through organization. Just as Stalin saw every institution, indene '■ "" of its actual function, only as a "transmission belt connecting the partv ' "' the people"S2 and honestly believed that the most precious treasures ofV'" Soviet Union were not the riches of its soil or the productive capacity i" * huge manpower, but the "cadres" of the party m (i.e., the police), so Hi- ■-as early as 1929, saw the "great thing" of the movement in the fact "^ ■ sixty thousand men "have outwardly become almost a unit, that actu ■■ ■' these members are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial "."" pression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical V thusiasm and you will discover . . . how a hundred thousand men b movement become a single type."8* Whatever connection power had in ij * minds of Western man with earthly possessions, with wealth, treasures ,n"i riches, has been dissolved into a kind of dematerialized mechanism wli every move generates power as friction or galvanic currents generate eL -tricity. The totalitarian division of states into Have and Have-not counts * is more than a demagogic device; those who make it are actually Corwin.„■ 1 that the power of material possessions is negligible and only stands in ■' ■ way of the development of organizational power. To Stalin constant »ro ■-■ i and development of police cadres were incomparably more important t i the oil in Baku, the coal and ore in the Urals, the granaries in the 1.3kram, or the potential treasures of Siberia—in short the development of Rus; .. full power arsenal. The same mentality led Hitler to sacrifice all Germ v. to the cadres of the SS; he did not consider the war lost when Gen . i cities lay in rubble and industrial capacity was destroyed, but only when learned that the SS troops were no longer reliable.sr' To a man who believed in organizational omnipotence against all mere material factors, military or economic, and who, moreover, calculated the eventual victory of his enterprise in centuries, defeat was not military catastrophe or threatened starvation of the population, but only the destruction of the elite formations which were supposed to carry the conspiracy for world rule through a line of generations to its eventual end. The structurelessness of the totalitarian state, its neglect of material 82 Deutscher, op. cit., p. 256. 8:1 B. Souvarine, op. cit., p. 605, quotes Stalin as saying at the height of terror in 1937: "You must reach the understanding that of all the precious assets existing in the world, the most precious and decisive are the cadres." All reports show that in Soviet Russia the secret police must be regarded as the real elite formation of the party. Characteristic for this nature of the police is that since the early twenties NKVD agents were "not recruited on a voluntary basis," but drawn from the ranks of the party. Furthermore, "the NKVD could not be chosen as a career" (see Heck ami Godin, op. cií., p. 160). 84 Quoted from Heiden, op. cit., p. 311. a~' According to reports of the last meeting, Hitler decided to commit suicide after he had learned that the SS troops could no longer be trusted. See H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 1947, pp. 116 ff. Í TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 419 cstss its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian ...[Hides in general have more than anything else contributed to making J' temporary politics well-nigh unpredictable. The inability of the non-C-ilií'irian world to grasp a mentality which functions independently of all .^liable action in terms of men and material, and is completely indif-;;'nl to national interest and the well-being of its people, shows itself in a .'„nous dilemma of judgment: those who rightly understand the terrible fciciicy of totalitarian organization and police are likely to overestimate H material force of totalitarian countries, while those who understand the Itcťiil incompetence of totalitarian economics are likely to underestimate %-. no wer potential which can be created in disregard of all material factors. n: The Secret Police ., id now we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination: jK dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938, and the dictatorship of , j0[shcvism since 1930. These forms of domination differ basically from liter kinds of dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and even though they ave developed, with a certain continuity, from party dictatorships, their «snually totalitarian features are new and cannot be derived from one- .grt\ systems. The goal of one-party systems is not only to seize the gov- .rnment administration but, by filling all offices with party members, to idiieve a complete amalgamation of state and party, so that after the evil re of power the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for he government. This system is "total" only in a negative sense, namely, ,:i that the ruling party will tolerate no other parties, no opposition and 1 d) freedom of political opinion. Once a party dictatorship has come to I [vwjľ, it leaves the original power relationship between state and party ] niact; the government and the army exercise the same power as before, and the "revolution" consists only in the fact that all government positions ;:re now occupied by party members. In all these cases the power of the party rests on a monopoly guaranteed by the state and the party no longer íavc-íses its own power center. The revolution initiated by the totalitarian movements after they have yizeil power is of a considerably more radical nature. From the start, they 1 consciously strive to maintain the essential differences between state and movement and to prevent the "revolutionary" institutions of the movement from being absorbed by the government.80 The problem of seizing the state Hitler frequently commented on the relationship between state and party, and dv.iy* emphasized that not the state, but the race, or the "united folk community," v.\ of primary importance (cf. the afore-quoted speech, reprinted as annex to the Iwhaespmche). in his speech at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1935, he gave this now j its most succinct expression: "It is not the state that commands us, but we ■Ahn lommand the state." It is self-evident that, in practice, such powers of command :_ľ possible only if the institutions of the party remain independent from those of '•'•u Mate. 420 TOTALITARIAN machine without amalgamating with it is solved by permitting party members whose importance for the movement is secondary in the state hierarchy. All real power is vested in the institution- '* '" * movement, and outside the state and military apparatuses. It is jn ■<'' lm,< movement, which remains the center of action of the country, th>tSI""" ''l* ; cisions are made; the official civil services are often not even'infor'' i'°. what is going on, and party members with the ambition to rise to tlv- " of ministers have in all cases paid for such "bourgeois" wishes with th -i ^ of their influence on the movement and of the confidence of its ]P. i' " Totalitarianism in power uses the state as its outward facade to ■ ■ "* sent the country in the nontotalitarian world. As such, the totalitarian' ■ ^ is the logical heir of the totalitarian movement from which it borro '"■" organizational structure. Totalitarian rulers deal with nontotaIitarii»n '■ ".* ernments in the same way they dealt with parliamentary parties or in:'""" party factions before their rise to power and, though on an enlarged |." national scene, are again faced with the double problem of shieidir ■ ■"'" fictitious world of the movement (or the totalitarian country) from tr - * pact of factuality and of presenting a semblance of normality and coi* í ,'" sense to the normal outside world. ' Above the state and behind the facades of ostensible power, in a n1; ,■ .--multiplied offices, underlying all shifts of authority and in a chaos of inefficiency, lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and super" competent services of the secret police.SG" The emphasis on the police as the" sole organ of power, and the corresponding neglect of the seemingly si cater power arsenal of the army, which is characteristic of all totalitarian regimes can still be partially explained by the totalitarian aspiration to world rule and its conscious abolition of the distinction between a foreign countrv and a home country, between foreign and domestic affairs. The military forces trained to fight a foreign aggressor, have always been a dubious instrument for civil-war purposes; even under totalitarian conditions they find it difficult to regard their own people with the eyes of a foreign conqueror.'"7 M. i, important in this respect, however, is that their value becomes dubious ť..-i in time of war. Since the totalitarian ruler conducts his policies on th .. sumption of an eventual world government, he treats the victims o[ h -. ■- agression as though they were rebels, guilty of high treason, and conscqi.j-T. prefers to rule occupied territories with police, and not with military f ...■-Even before the movement seizes power, it possesses a secret polic- ■ i' spy service with branches in various countries. Later its agents receive m \ money and authority than the regular military intelligence service an-1 :. 8 Similarly, Stalin at almost the same moment half receded in convincing the old Bolshevik guard, whose "confessions" he ' iceded, of a war threat against the Soviet Union and, consequently, an J jineripncy in which the country must remain united even behind a despot. ^ The iiio^t striking aspect of these statements was that both were made after ,,|| political opposition had been extinguished, that the secret services were expanded when actually no opponents were left to be spied upon. When war came, Himmler neither needed nor used his SS troops in Germany itself, except for the running of concentration camps and policing of foreign ť ire labor; the bulk of the armed SS served at the Eastern front where they wen; Uhcd for "special assignments"—usually mass murder—and the enforcement of policy which frequently ran counter to the military as well as the Nazi civilian hierarchy. Like the secret police of the Soviet Union, the SS formations usually arrived after the military forces had pacified the conquered territory and had dealt with outright political opposition. ^ín the first stages of a totalitarian regime, however, the secret police and she party's elite formations still play a role similar to that in other forms of ,-dictatorship and the well-known terror regimes of the past; and the excessive ! cruelty of their methods is unparalleled only in the history of modern 'In llJi5, the Gestapo agents abroad received 20 million marks while the regular c;?ion«i»i* service of the Reichswehr had to get along with a budget of 8 million. See " ľuriĽ Heliillotte, Gestapo, Paris, 1940, p. 11. ; : 'See \azi Conspiracy, IV, 616 if. 422 TOTALITARIANISM Western countries. The first stage of ferreting out secret enemies and hunt j n ■ down former opponents is usually combined with drafting the entire popma tion into front organizations and re-educating old party members for volun tary espionage services, so that the rather dubious sympathies of the drafted sympathizers need not worry the specially trained cadres of the police. It» , during this stage that a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemv . to one who happens to harbor "dangerous thoughts" than are the official!« appointed police agents. The end of the first stage comes with the liquidation í of open and secret resistance in any organized form; it can be set at about : 1935 in Germany and approximately 1930 in Soviet Russia. ) Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the f hunt for "objective enemies" begun does terror become the actual content i of totalitarian regimes. Under the pretext of building socialism in one country, or using a given territory as a laboratory for a revolutionary experiment or realizing the Volksgemeinschaft, the second claim of totalitarianism' í the claim to total domination, is carried out. j And although theoretically total domination is possible only under the conditions of world rule, the totalitarian regimes have proved that this part of the totalitarian utopia can be realized almost to perfection, because it is temporarily independent of defeat or victoryT Thus Hitler could rejoice even in the midst of military setbacks over the extermination of Jews and the establishment of death factories; no matter what the final outcome, without the war it would never have been possible "to burn the bridges" and to realize some of the goals of the totalitarian movement.00 The elite formations of the Nazi movement and the "cadres" of the Bolshevik movement serve the goal of total domination rather than the security of the regime in power. Just as the totalitarian claim to world rule is onlv in appearance the same as imperialist expansion, so the claim to tot; ination only seems familiar to the student of despotism) If the chiel ence between totalitarian and imperialist expansion is that the recognizes no difference between a home and a foreign country, tl chief difference between a despotic and a totalitarian secret police is 1 latter does not hunt secret thoughts and does not use the old mel secret services, the method of provocation.91 Since the totalitarian secret police begins its career after the paci of the country, it always appears entirely superfluous to all outside of —or, on the contrary, misleads them into thinking that there is some '',, See note 62. '" Maurice Laporte, Histoire de l'Okhrana, Paris, 1935, rightly called the m provocation "the foundation stone" of ihc secret police (p. 19). In Soviet Russia, provocation, far from being the secret weapon of the sccrc has been used as the widely propagandized public method of the regime to !•■ temper of public opinion. The reluctance of the population to avail itself of the cally recurring invitations to criticize or react to "liberal" interludes in tfc regime shows that such gestures are understood as provocation on a mass scalt cation has indeed become the totalitarian version of public opinion polls. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 423 istance.93 The superfluousness of secret services is nothing new; they cave always been haunted by the need to prove their usefulness and keep ieir jobs after their original task had been completed. The methods used [of tWs Purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-jgvemment action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been Inspired by the police itself.93 Similarly, the role of secret agents in all revolutionary parties in Czarist Russia strongly suggests that without their "inspir-jijg' provocative actions the course of the Russian revolutionary movement ■ Lpuid have been far less successful.114 Provocation, in other words, helped as \ nich to maintain the continuity of tradition as it did to disrupt time and igin the organization of the revolution. 'This dubious role of provocation might have been one reason why the iotalitarian rulers discarded it. Provocation, moreover, is clearly necessary onJy on the assumption that suspicion is not sufficient for arrest and punishment. None of the totalitarian rulers, of course, ever dreamed of conditions ju which he would have to resort to provocation in order to trap somebody He thought to be an enemy. More important than these technical considerations is the fact that totalitarianism defined its enemies ideologically before jt seized power, so that categories of the "suspects" were not established through police information. Thus the Jews in Nazi Germany or the descendants of the former ruling classes in Soviet Russia were not really sus-1 pected of any hostile action; they had been declared "objective" enemies j of the regime in accordance with its ideology. The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police s in the difference between the j'suspeet" and the "objective enemy;" The ] latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to irow it.95 He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be iteresting in this respect are the attempts made by Nazi civil servants in Germany nee the competence and the personnel of the Gestapo on the ground that Nazíŕi- of the country had been achieved, so that Himmler, who on the contrary 1 to expand the secret services at this moment (around 1934), had to exaggerate nger coming from the "internal enemies." See Nazi Conspiracy, II, 259; V, 205; 7. 5e Gal Her-Boissiere, Mysteries of the French Secret Police, 1938, p. 234. seems, after all, no accident that the foundation of the Okhrana in 1880 d in a period of unsurpassed revolutionary activities in Russia. In order to prove fulness, it had occasionally to organize murders, and its agents "served despite ;lves the ideas of those whom they denounced. ... If a pamphlet was distrib-py a police agent or if the execution of a minister was organized by an Azev— >ult was the same" (M. Laporte, op. cit., p. 25). The more important executions ver seem to have been police jobs—Stolypin and von Plehve. Decisive for the tionary tradition was the fact that in times of calm the police agents had to ip anew the energies and stimulate the zeal" of the revolutionaries {ibid., p. 71). also Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made A Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, who calls this phenomenon "Police Socialism." [ans Frank, who later became Governor General of Poland, made a typical dif-lation between a person "dangerous to the State" and a person who is "hostile ; State." The former implies an objective quality which is independent of will 424 TOTALITARIAN]^ , provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tend« like the carrier of a disease.08 Practically speaking, the totalitarir-1"'^ proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until eve 'l"'^ knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibil>'^ and kill him in self-defense. This certainly is a little crude, but it w' "■" ^ as everybody will know who ever watched how certain successful car' * eliminate competitors. ' e*" '* The introduction of the notion of "objective enemy" is much nio \ cisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological dV* ; tion of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jeu 7 bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of on ■' ■ gantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and governs ■ "■" As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective entí"-1 outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new .'V jective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances- r:.i Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already i ■* ■'■' the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people v :■■ ! Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans'11" \" Bolsheviks, having started with descendants of the former rulin» cfi. directed their full terror against the kulaks (in the early thirties), wl.-.", turn were followed by Russians of Polish origin (between 1936 and is«.. the Tartars and the Volga Germans during the war, former prisoners oj * i and units of the occupational forces of the Red Army after the war, and !i \ sian Jewry after the establishment of a Jewish state. The choice of such * ■ _■-gories is never entirely arbitrary; since they are publicized and used ... propaganda purposes of the movement abroad, they must appear plain ■* as possible enemies; the choice of a particular category may even be ľ and behavior; the political police of the Nazis is concerned not just with actions r io the state but with "all attempts—no matter what their aim—which in their t endanger the State." See Deutsches Verwaltungsrecht, pp. 420-430. Translation q' from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 881 rf.—In the words of Maunz, op. cit., p. 44: "Ry . i. nating dangerous persons, the security measure . . . means to ward off a st: ■ danger to the national community, independently of any offense that may have committed by these persons. [It is a question of] warding off an objective dan ,JB R. Hoehn, á Nazi jurist and member of the SS, said in an obituary on ltd Heydrich, who prior to his rule of Czechoslovakia had been one oř the closest c I orators with Himmler: He regarded his opponents "not as individuals but as cü of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the na" community." In Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of lune 6, 1942; quoted from F,. Js. Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police, London, 1945. "7 As early as 1941, during a staff meeting in Hitler's headquarters, it was pro* ■ to impose upon the Polish population those regulations by which the Jews had ■-. prepared for the extermination camps: change of names if these were of (it si origin; death sentences for sexual intercourse between Germans and Poles (/ii schände); obligation to wear a P-sign in Germany similar to the Yellow Star for " -See Nazi Conspiracy, VIII, 237 ff., and Hans Frank's diary in Trial, op. cit., XXIX ' *: Naturally, the Poles themselves soon began to worry about what would liapp ! them when the Nazis had finished the extermination of the Jews (Nazi Con&pirai; ■"■ 9 f ft I.----For Hitler''; nlans reanrtWrw ihp ("iei-man npnnlp eon rnt» fif\ f TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 425 certain propaganda needs of the movement at large—as for instance the 0n entirely unprecedented emergence of governmental antisemitism in , Soviet Union, which may be calculated to win sympathies for the Soviet Jjon in the European satellite countries. The show trials which require bjective confessions of guilt from "objectively" identified enemies are •artt for these purposes; they can best be staged with those who have Jeived a totalitarian indoctrination that enables them "subjectively" to ^erstand their own "objective" harmfulness and to confess "for the sake 1 the cause."98 The concept of the ['objective opponent," whose identity jUges according to the prevailing circumstances—so that, as soon as one egory is liquidated, war may be declared on another—corresponds ex-iy to the factual situation reiterated time and again by totalitarian rulers:; pely, that their regime is not a government in any traditional sense, but: jiovement, whose advance constantly meets with new obstacles that have be eliminated. So far as one may speak at all of any legal thinking within . totalitarian system, the "objective opponent" is its central idea. Closely connected with this transformation of the suspect into the objec- t i enemy is the change of position of the secret police in the totalitarian te. The secret services have rightly been called a state within the state, and s not only in despotisms but also under constitutional or semiconstitu-nal governments. The mere possession of secret information has always en this branch a decisive superiority over all other branches of the civil vices and constituted an open threat to members of the government." The alitarian police, on the contrary, is totally subject to the will of the Leader, o alone can decide who the next potential enemy will be and who, as . lín did, can also single out cadres of the secret police for liquidation. ice the police are no longer permitted to use provocation, they have been * irived of the only available means of perpetuating themselves independ-ly of the government and have become entirely dependent on the higher horities for the safeguarding of their jobs. Like the army in a nontotali-ian state, the.police in totalitarian countries merely execute political policy d have lost all the prerogatives which they held under despotic bureauc-:ies.100 l8Betk and Godin, op. cit., p. 87, speak of the "objective characteristics" which ited arrest in the USSR; among them was membership in the NKVD (p. 153). ijective insight into the objective necessity of arrest and confession could most { ily be achieved with former members of the secret police. In the words of an ex-. \VD agent: "My superiors know me and my work well enough, and if the party , I the NKVD now require me to confess to such things they must have good reasons i what they are doing. My duty as a loyal Soviet citizen is not to withhold the con-! iion required of me" (ibid., p. 231). 'Well known is the situation in France where ministers lived in constant fear of secret "dossiers" of the police. For the situation in Czarist Russia, see Laporte, tit., pp. 22-23: "Eventually the Okhrana will wield a power far superior to the ver of the more regular authorities. . . . The Okhrana . . . will inform the Czar y of what it chooses to." ■ 00 "Unlike the Okhrana, which had been a state within a state, the GPU is a de- tment of the Soviet government; . . . and its activities are much less independent" Wer M RaMuiin "P«1Iti,-a1 PnliVo " in P«/w/niM^/i r,{ Vnrinl íníHriiií ™° TOTALITARIANISM The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but i, k hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the "' lation. Their chief political distinction is that they alone are in tfj*"1'" fidence of the highest authority and know which political line w"li ' enforced. This does not apply only to matters of high policy, such as theV "J dation of a whole class or ethnic group (only the cadres of the GPU lV'" the actual goal of the Soviet government in the early thirties and onlv'- ' SS formations knew that the Jews were to be exterminated in the e.■ forties); the point about everyday life under totalitarian conditions is ■'■'"! only the agents of the NKVD in an industrial enterprise are informed'1 '* what Moscow wants when it orders, for instance, a speed-up in the fahr '' tion of pipes—whether it simply wants more pipes, or to ruin the directo the factory, or to liquidate the whole management, or to abolish this p -ticular factory, or, finally, to have this order repeated all over the nation ■." that a new purge can begin. One of the reasons for the duplication of secret services whose wv ;are unknown to each other is that total domination needs the most extrc -■ flexibility: to use our example, Moscow may not yet know, when it gives'Ik order for pipes, whether it wants pipes—which are always needed__or a purge. Multiplication of secret services makes last-minute changes pos-sible, so that one branch may be preparing to bestow the Order of I,cnin on the director of the factory while another makes arrangements for his arrest. The efficiency of the police consists in the fact that such contradictorv assignments can be prepared simultaneously. Under totalitarian, as under other regimes, the secret police has u monopoly on certain vital information. But the kind of knowledge that c;m be possessed only by the police has undergone an important change: the police are no longer concerned with knowing what is going on in the heads of future victims (most of the time they ignore who these victims will be), and the police have become the trustees of the greatest state secrets. This automatically means a great improvement in prestige and position, even though it is accompanied by a definite loss of real power. The secret services no longer know anything that the Leader does not know better; in terms of power, they have sunk to the level of the executioner. From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from !the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the (suspected offense by the possible crime. The possible crime is no more subjective than the objective enemy. While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality (or his suspected personality),101 the totalitarian version of the 101 Typical of the concept of the suspect is the following story related by C. Pobye-donostzev in Ľ Autocratic Russe: Mémoires politiques, correspondance offifiele n documents inédits . . . 1881-1894, Paris, 1927: General Cherevin of the Okhrana is asked, because the opposing party has hired a Jewish lawyer, to intervene in tavor of a lady who is about to lose a lawsuit. Says the General: "The same night 1 ordered the arrest of this cursed Jew and held him as a so-called politically suspect purlin. . . . After all, could I treat in the same manner friends and a dirty Jew who may * TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 427 i|e crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments. Moscow Trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the chiefs of the Red were classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. Behind the tic, fabricated charges one can easily detect the following logical cal- jn: developments in the Soviet Union might lead to a crisis, a crisis lead to the overthrow of Stalin's dictatorship, this might weaken the [■y's military force and possibly bring about a situation in which the Fovernment would have to sign a truce or even conclude an alliance Ifitler. Whereupon Stalin proceeded to declare that a plot for the over- of the government and a conspiracy with Hitler existed.103 Against . "objective," though entirely improbable, possibilities stood only "sub- f" factors, such as the trustworthiness of the accused, their fatigue, . inability to understand what was going on, their firm conviction that at Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred of Fascism— ., a number of factual details which naturally lacked the consistency of ;titious, logical, possible crime. Totalitarianism's central assumption ... everything is possible thus leads through consistent elimination of all '.jiual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the - ;rr«. can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has \-cri committed. The possible crime, like the objective enemy, is of course \:u)rid the competence of the police, who can neither discover, invent, nor ;-.-£iioke it. Here again the secret services depend entirely upon the political /illiorities. Their independence as a state within the state is gone. - Only in one respect does the totalitarian secret police still resemble closely ■ x >ccret services of nontotalitarian countries. The secret police has tradi-' ".'.i.illy, i.e., since Fouché, profited from its victims and has augmented the (?lijal state-authorized budget from certain unorthodox sources simply by filing a position of partnership in activities it was supposed to suppress, I -..h as gambling and prostitution.103 These illegal methods of financing itself, nging from friendly acceptance of bribes to outright blackmail, were a ■■ I'he charges in the Moscow Trials "were based ... on a grotesquely-brutalized .-.J isistorting anticipation of possible developmenis. [Stalin's] reasoning probably .í-ŕioped along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis—I - ; charge them with having made the attempt. ... A change of government may joke:i Russia's righting capacity; and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign |'"us with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory. ... I shall ac- j-c iliem of having entered already into a treacherous alliance with Germany and >J;il Soviet territory." This is 1. Deutschere brilliant explanation of the Moscow "r.iK op. cit., p. 377. A good example of the Nazi version of the possible crime can be found in Hans -". .k. op. cit.: "A complete catalogue of attempts 'dangerous to the State' can never 'í Jr.iwn up because it can never be foreseen what may endanger the leadership and "5 people some time in the future." (Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, :'l i • The criminal methods of the secret police are of course no monopoly of the i "mi h tradition. In Austria, for example, the feared political police under Maria 1 s-rj-..! was organized by Kaunitz from the cadres of the so-called "chastity com-nKiľi" who used to live by blackmail. See Moritz Bermann, Maria Theresia und 428 TOTALITÄR^ prominent factor in freeing the secret services from the public and strengthened their position as a state within the state. It is see that the financing of police activities with income from ík survived all other changes. In Soviet Russia, the NKvn .-,. < OTALITARIANISM IN POWER ""«n t£?temí? f t0^aiian rešim^ for economic and financial rtu. so that methods which under normal conditions would be iE i ttould distinguish the s«*«* ™i;~, f.____.1.- e iiiegai, ™*«w wi me 1N3ZI secret police, through the confiscation of Jewi.su ;.>■,„, . he then concluded an agreement with Darré, the Minister of Agric \\\\\.. T" which Himmler received the several hundred million marks whu'i m * earned annually by buying agricultural commodities cheaply ab:i»,i' ""j selling them at fixed prices in Germany.105 This source of reguln ji/!'!" disappeared of course during the war; Albert Speer, the successor i.r V,"!* and the greatest employer of manpower in Germany after 1942, ■ i..ii.< .1 a similar deal to Himmler in 1942; if Himmler agreed to release I'm,» či authority the imported slave laborers whose work had been rfin.ui ,ii|. inefficient, the Speer organization would give him a certain perca,i ■■ ■' ."ŕ the profits for the SS.10(l To such more or less regular sources 01 tiv,.,*" Himmler added the old blackmail methods of secret services in ,iiill-„"'(*r financial crisis: in their communities SS units formed groups of I ,',ci\-Ü of the SS" who had to "volunteer" the necessary funds for the need 1; 1,l-. local SS men.107 (It is noteworthy that in its various financial oper 'i.-r. n-Nazi secret police did not exploit its prisoners. Except in the las. . ,..,, j the war, when the use of human material in the concentration c;--ii- a, no longer determined by Himmler alone, work in the camps "h ..I ».1 ,-.. tional purpose except that of increasing the burden and torluie uf the unfortunate prisoners."im) However, these financial irregularities are the sole, and not ver. lu-portant, traces of the secret police tradition. They are possible bcci'ii*? i.f iü4 That the huge police organization is paid with profits from sla\e lahoi 1 i„\ tain; surprising is that the police budget seems not even entirely covered by i. k .1 chenko, op. tit., mentions special taxes, imposed by the NKVD on convicted ■ ■■■: . who continue to live and work in freedom. 100 See Fritz Thyssen, / Paid Hitler, London, 1941. LOGSee Nazi Conspiracy, 1, 916-917.—The economic activity of the SS w . t-, solidated in a central office for economic and administrative affairs. To the !■• . r. and Internal Revenue, the SS declared its financial assets as "party propeny cai ■■ '►. í for special purposes" (letter of May 5, 1943, quoted from M. Wolfson. ŕVr ■ r der Gliederung verbrecherischer Nazi-Organisationen ft**"»— ri- 1U7 Sao ľ"1— " —.....-.k^ ia cieariy re . ______ uiu Lins mna ot tund-raising was always organized by local SS in the localities where they were stationed. See Der Weg der SS, issued by ti Hauptamt-Schidungsamt (undated), p. 14. iW Ibid., p. 124.—Certain compromises in this respect were made for those n ments pertaining to the maintenance of the camps and the personal needs of 1 See Wolfson, op. cit., letter of September 19, 1941, from Oswald Pohl, head WVH (Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungs-Hauptamt) to the Reichskommissar for control. It seems that all these economic activities in the concentration camps oped only during the war and under the pressure of acute labor shortage. ______ ...,-v.! uiiu^j uurmai conditions would be illegal, „ould distinguish the secret police from other more respectable de-. (.nts of the administration, no longer indicate that we are dealing here department which enjoys independence, is not controlled by other au-js. lives in an atmosphere of irregularity, nonrespectability, and inse-The position of the totalitarian secret police, on the contrary, hasl completely stabilized, and its services are wholly integrated in the ad-j « ration. Not only is the organization not beyond the pale of the law,! uher, it is the embodiment of the law, and its respectability is above • Jon. It no longer organizes murders on its own initiative, no longer .. ken offenses against state and society, and it sternly proceeds against . m s of bribery, blackmail and irregular financial gains. The moral lec-coupled with very tangible threats, that Himmler could permit himself .iver to his men in the middle of the war—"We had the moral right ,o wipe out this [Jewish] people bent on wiping us out, but we do ivĽ the right to enrich ourselves in any manner whatsoever, be it by j coal, a watch, a single mark, or a cigarette"1"0—strikes a note that mild look for in vain in the history of the secret police. If it still is med with "dangerous thoughts," they are hardly ones which the sus-. ..I persons know to be dangerous; the regimentation of all intellectual ■ TMÍC life demands a constant re-establishment and revision of stand-. .iiich naturally is accompanied by repeated eliminations of intellectuals "dangerous thoughts" usually consist in certain ideas that were still .'\ orthodox the day before. While, therefore, its police function in ■■W accepted meaning of the word has become superfluous, the economic nnciion of the secret police, sometimes thought to have replaced the first, ' 3\en more dubious. It is undeniable, to be sure, that the NKVD periodj-lv rounds up a percentage of the Soviet population and sends them into up«, which are known under the flattering misnomer of forced-labor nps:110 yet although it is quite possible that this is the Soviet Union's " llimmler's speech of October, 1943, at Posen, international Military Trials, riMihcrg, 1945-46, Vol. 29, p. 146. ""Hek Bulat (the pen name of a former Soviet professor) has been able to study -iimeiits of the North Caucasian NKVD. From these documents it was obvious l m lime, 1937, when the great purge was at its apex, the government prescribed i kuji NKVDs to have a certain percentage of the population arrested. . . . The coinage varied from one province to the other, reaching 5 per cent in the least ■J areas. The average for the whole of the Soviet Union was about 3 per cent." ■ tüiteil by David J. Dallin in The New Leader, January 8, 1949.—Beck and Godin, 11.'.. p. 239, arrive at a slightly divergent and quite plausible assumption, accord- 10 which "arrests were planned as follows: The NKVD files covered practically v-iiule population, and everyone was classified in a category. Thus statistics were ilahle in every town showing how many former Whites, members of opposing par- . , ek.. were living in them. All incriminating material collected , . . and gathered " t\ prisoners' confessions was also entered in the files, and each person's card was iked 10 show how dangerous he was considered; this depending on the amount of luious or incriminating material appearing in his file. As the statistics were n>on- 430 TOTALITÄR! \N way of solving its unemployment problem, it is also generally known the output in those camps is infinitely lower than that of ordinary s./ '" labor and hardly suffices to pay the expenses of the police app.uMUis" ''" Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the « police, the "best organized and the most efficient" of all government * /' [ partments,311 in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime/ It const :■ ■*." í the true executive branch of the government through which alt order .' transmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has er- \ ,-■ for himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinct« ■ the onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely se-. ■■ ■. and isolated from all other institutions.112 In this sense, the secret j j."' agents are the\pnly openly ruling class in totalitarian countries and „". standards and scale of values permeate the entire "texture of totalitarian ciety. From this viewpoint, it may not be too surprising that certain pec ■ r qualities of the secret police are general qualities of totalitarian society r ■ than peculiarities of the totalitarian secret police. The_category of the i pect thus embraces under totalitarian conditions the total population; i ■ ' thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently cl- -jng line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity i . curs. Simply because of., their ^capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind. Since, moreover, it is impossible ever to know beyond doubt another man's heart—torture in this context is only the desperate and eternally futile attempt to achieve what cannot be achieved—suspicion can no longer be allayed if neither a community of values nor the predictabilities of self-interest exist as social (as distinguished from merely psychological) realities. Mutual suspicion, therefore, permeates all social relationships in totalitarian countries and creates an all-pervasive atmosphere even outside the special purview of the secret police. in totalitarian regimes provocation, once only the specialty of the secret agent, becomes a method of dealing with his neighbor which everybody, willingly or unwillingly, is forced to follow. Everyone, in a way, is the agent larly reported to higher authorities, it was possible to arrange a purge at any moment, with full knowledge of the exact number of persons in each category." 1,1 Baldwin, op. cit. 112 The Russian secret-police cadres were as much at the "personal disposal" of Stalin as the SS Shock Troops (Verfiigungstruppen) were at the personal disposal of Hitler. Both, even if they are called to serve with the military forces in time of war, live under their own special jurisdiction. The special "marriage laws" which served to segregate the SS from the rest of the population, were the first and most fundamental regulations which Himmler introduced when he took over the reorganization of the SS. Even prior to Himmler's marriage laws, in 1927, the SS was instructed by official decree "never [to participate] in discussions at membership meetings" (Der Weg Jer SS, op. cit.). The same conduct is reported about the members of the NKVD, who kept deliberately to themselves and above all did not associate with other sections of the party aristocracy (Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 163). it \ TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 43} ,f(n-ocateur of everyone else; for obviously everybody will call himself an -'Hi provocateur if ever an ordinary friendly exchange of "dangerous ^()U[i]its" (or what in the meantime have become dangerous thoughts) /jj.j'jd come to the attention of the authorities. Collaboration of the popula- 0„ jn denouncing political opponents and volunteer service as stool pigeons \s certainly not unprecedented, but in totalitarian countries they are so well ,-.-;inized that the work of specialists is almost superfluous. In a system of ,h[ijiiitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each indi- idual feels himself under constant surveillance; under circumstances, more- ver, where careers are extremely insecure and where the most spectacular .Lents and falls have become everyday occurrences, every word becomes ,ui\ocal and subject to retrospective "interpretation." '"]lie most striking illustration of the permeation of totalitarian society jili secret police methods and standards can be found in the matter of ::ücr>. The double agent in nontotalitarian regimes served the cause he was jp|ic^ed to combat almost as much as, and sometimes more than, the au- ĽMiiics. Frequently he harbored a sort of double ambition: he wanted to. J (v> in the ranks of the revolutionary parties as well as in the ranks of the >r\ices. In order to win promotion in both fields, he had only to adopt cer- ji, methods which in a normal society belong to the secret daydreams of . .;,e small employee who depends on seniority for advancement: through his '. connections with the police, he could certainly eliminate his rivals and su- i iridis in the party, and through his connections with the revolutionaries he . ■i:ill ;ii least a chance to get rid of his chief in the police.113 If we consider the . ;.ircei conditions in present Russian society, the similarity to such methods is striking. Not only do almost all higher officials owe their positions to purges that removed their predecessors, but promotions in all walks of life are accelerated in this way. About every ten years, a nation-wide purge makes room for the jiew generation, freshly graduated and hungry for jobs. The government has itself established those conditions for advancement which the police agent formerly had to create. This regular violent turnover of the whole gigantic administrative machine, while it prevents the development of competence, has .many advantages: it assures the relative youth of officials and prevents a stabiliza-; tion of conditions which, at least in time of peace, are fraught with danger for totalitarian rule; by eliminating seniority and merit, it prevents the development of the loyalties that usually tie younger staff members to their elders, upon whose opinion and good will their advancement'depends; it eliminates once and for all the dangers of unemployment and assures everyone of a job compatible with his education. Thus, in 1939, after the gigantic purge in the Soviet Union had come to an end, Stalin could note with great satisfaction that "the Party was able to promote to leading posts in State or Party affairs more than 500,000 young Bolsheviks."114 The humiliation "s Typical is the splendid career of police agent Malinovský, who ended as deputy nt the Bolsheviks in parliament. See Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., chapter xxxi. 114 Quoted from Avtorkhanov, op. cit. 432 TOTALITARIANISM implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessi the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had the German professions; it makes every jobholder a conscious acco, in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual hi to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other word 'system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full in tibns and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes evei generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line Leader which started the job-creating purge. It also realizes the iden public and private interests, of which defenders of the Soviet TJnioi to be so proud (or, in the Nazi version, the abolition of the private spnere of life), insofar as every individual of any consequence owes his whole existence to the political interest of the regime; and when this factual identity of interest is broken and the next purge has swept him out of office, the regime makes sure that he disappears from the world of the living. In a not very different way, the double agent was identified with the cause of the revolution (without which he would lose his job), and not only with the secret police; in that sphere, too, a spectacular rise could end only in an anonymous death, since it was rather unlikely that the double game could be played forever. The totalitarian government, when it set such conditions for promotion in all careers as had previously prevailed only among social outcasts, has effected one of the most far-reaching changes in social psychology. The psychology of the double agent, who was willing to pay, the price of a short life for the exalted existence of a few years at the peak'has necessarily become the philosophy in personal matters of the whole post-revolutionary generation in Russia, and to a lesser but still very dangerous extent, in postwar Germany. This is the society, permeated by standards and living by methods which once had been the monopoly of the secret police, in which the totalitarian secret police functions. Only in the initial stages, when a struggle for power is still going on, are its victims those who can be suspected of opposition. It then embarks upon its totalitarian career with the persecution of the objective enemy, which may be the Jews or the Poles (as in the case of the Nazis) or so-called "counter-revolutionaries"—an accusation which "in Soviet Russia ... is established . . . before any question as to [the] behavior [of the accused] has arisen at all"-—who may be people who at any time owned a shop or a house or "had parents or grandparents who owned such things,"135 or who happened to belong to one of the Red Army occupational forces, or were Russians of Polish origin. I Only in its last and fully totalitarian stage are the concepts of the objective enemy and the logically possible crime abandoned, the victims chosen completely at random and, even without being accused, declared unfit to live. This new category of "undesirables" may consist, as in the case of the Nazis, of the mentally ill or persons with lung and heart disease, or in the Soviet Union, of 1,r' The Dark Side of the Moon, New York, 1947. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 433 people who happen to have been taken up in that percentage, varying from one province to another, which is ordered to be deported. This consistent arbitrariness negates human freedom more efficiently than any tyranny ever could. One had at least to be an enemy of tyranny in order to he punished by it. Freedom of opinion was not abolished for those who were brave enough to risk their necks. Theoretically, the choice of opposi-tj0n remains in totalitarian regimes too; but such freedom is almost invalidated if committing a voluntary act only assures a "punishment" that every-* one else may have to bear anyway. Freedom in this system has not only dwindled down to its last and apparently still indestructible guarantee', the possibility of suicide, but has lost its distinctive mark because the conse-I quences of its exercise are shared with completely innocent people. If Hit-] |er had had the time to realize his dream of a General German Health Bill, the man suffering from a lung disease would have been subject to the same fate as a Communist in the early and a Jew in the later years of the Nazi regime. Similarly, the opponent of the regime in Russia, suffering the same fate as millions of people who are chosen for concentration camps to make up certain quotas, only relieves the police of the burden of arbitrary choice. The innocent and the guilty are equally undesirable. The change in the concept of crime and criminals determines the new and terrible methods of the totalitarian secret police. Criminals are punished, undesirables disappear from the face of the earth; the only trace which they leave behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them, and one of the most difficult tasks of the secret police is to make sure that even such traces will disappear together with the condemned man. The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles.116 Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the Utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police. It has given up the traditional old police dream which the lie detector is still supposed to realize, and no longer tries to find out who is who, or who thinks what. (The lie detector is perhaps the most graphic example of the fascination that this dream apparently exerts over the mentality of all policemen; for obviously the complicated measuring equipment can hardly establish anything except the cold-blooded or nervous temperament of its victims. Actually, the feeble-minded reasoning underlying the use of this mechanism can only be explained by the irrational wish that some form of mind reading were possible after all.) This old dream 434 TOTALITARIANISM was terrible enough and since time immemorial has invariably led to to and the most abominable cruelties. There was only one thing in its fa v it asked for the impossible. The modern dream of the totalitarian noľ " with its modern techniques, is incomparably more terrible. Now the nnľ dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffi. at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in Wh' degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable though its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If tl' map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of tj-totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all If the reports of arrested NKVD agents 'can be trusted, the Russian secret police has come uncomfortably close to this ideal of totalitär!' ■ rule. The police has secret dossiers about each inhabitant of the va-i country, carefully listing the many relationships that exist between peopl from chance acquaintances to genuine friendship to family relations- h" it is only to discover these relationships that the defendants, whose "crime1 have anyway been established "objectively" prior to their arrest, are que -tioned so closely. Finally, as for the gift of memory so dangerous lo totalitarian rule, foreign observers feel that "if it is true that elephants never forget, Russians seem to us to be the very opposite of elephants. Soviet Russian psychology seems! to make,:forgetfuIness really possible."1« How important to the total-domination apparatus this complete disappearance of its victims is can be seen in those instances where, for one reason or another, the regime was confronted with the memory, of survivors. During the war, one SS commandant made the terrible mistake of informing a French woman of her husband's death in a German concentration camp; this slip caused a small avalanche of orders and instructions to all camp commandants, warning them that under no circumstances was information ever to be given to the outside world.118 The point is that, as far as the French widow was concerned, her husband had supposedly ceased to live at the moment of his arrest, or rather had ceased ever to have lived. Similarly, the Soviet police officers, accustomed to this system since their birth, could only stare in amazement at those people in occupied Poland who tried desperately to find out what had happened to their friends and relatives under arrest.113 In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and a grave. Compared with this newest invention for doing away with people, the old-fashioned method of murder, political or criminal, is inefficient indeed. The murderer leaves behind him a corpse, and although he tries to efface the traces of his own identity, he has no power to erase the 117 Beck and Godin, op. cit., pp. 234 and 127. 118 See Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 84 ff. The Dark Side of the Moon. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 435 identity of his victim from the memory of the surviving world. The operation 0f the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all. The!connection between secret police and secret societiesJs obvious. The I establishment of the former always needed and used the argument of dangers i arising from the existence of the latter. The totalitarian secret police is the i fjfst in history which neither needs nor uses these old-fashioned pretexts of all tyrants. The anonymity of its victims, who cannot be called enemies of the regime and whose identity is unknown to the persecutors until the arbitrary decision of the government eliminates them from the world of the living and exterminates their memory from the world of the dead, is beyond all secrecy, beyond the strictest silence, beyond the greatest mastery of double life that the discipline of conspiratory societies used to impose upon their members. The totalitarian movements which, during their rise to power, imitate certain organizational features of secret societies and yet establish themselves in broad daylight, create a true secret society only after their ascendancy to rule. The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police; the only strictly guarded secret in a totalitarian country, the only esoteric knowledge that exists, concerns the operations of the police and the conditions in the concentration camps.120 Of course the population at large and the party members specifically know all the general facts—that concentration camps exist, that people disappear, that innocent persons are arrested; at the same time, every person in a totalitarian country knows also that it is the greatest crime ever to talk about these "secrets." Inasmuch as man depends for his knowledge upon the affirmation and comprehension of his fellow-men, this generally shared but individually guarded, this never-communicated information loses its quality of reality and assumes the nature of a mere nightmare. Only those who are in possession of the strictly esoteric knowledge concerning the eventual new categories of undesirables and the operational methods of the cadres are in a position to communicate with each other about what actually constitutes the reality for all. They alone are in a position to believe in what they know to be true. This is their secret, and in order to guard this secret they are established as a secret organization. They remain members even if this secret organization arrests them, forces them to make confessions, and finally liquidates them. So long as they guard the secret they belong to the elite, and as a rule they do not betray it even when they are in the prisons and concentration camps.l2r "We already have noted that one of the many paradoxes that offend the 120 "There was little in the SS that was not secret. The greatest secret was the practices in the concentration camps. Not even members of the Gestapo were admitted . . . to the camps without a special permit" (Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat, Munich, 1946, p. 297). 121 Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 169, report how the arrested NKVD officials "took the greatest care never to reveal any NKVD secrets." 436 TOTALITARIANISM common sense of the nontotalitarian world is the seemingly irrational which totalitarianism makes of conspiratory methods. The totalitarian moments, apparently persecuted by the police, very sparingly use methods „t conspiracy for the overthrow of the government in their struggle for poy whereas totalitarianism in power, after it has been recognized by all goven. ments and seemingly outgrown its revolutionary stage, develops a true cret police as the nucleus of its government and power. Xt seems that r ■ cial recognition is felt to be a greater menace to the conspiracy content the totalitarian movement, a menace of interior disintegration, than the h hearted police measures of nontotalitarian regimes. The truth of the matter is that totalitarian leaders, though they are c n vinced that they must follow consistently the fiction and the rules of the &■■_ tious world which were laid down during their struggle for power, disco „-only gradually the full implications of this fictitious world and its rules. Tli ■"-faith in human omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done through organization, carries them into experiments which human imaginations may have outlined but human activity certainly never realized. Their hideous discoveries in the realm of the possible are inspired by an ideological scientificality which has proved to be less controlled by reason and less willing to recognize factuality than the wildest fantasies of prescientific and prephilosophical speculation. They establish the secret society which now no longer operates in broad daylight, the society of the secret police or the political soldier or the ideologically trained fighter, in order to be able to carry out the indecent experimental inquiry into what is possible. The totalitarian conspiracy against the nontotalitarian world, on the other hand, its claim to world domination, remains as open and unguarded under conditions of totalitarian rule as in the totalitarian movements. It is practically impressed upon the co-ordinated population of "sympathizers" in the form of a supposed conspiracy of the whole world against their own country./The totahtarian dichotomy is propagated by making it a duty for every national abroad to report home as though he were a secret agent, and by treating every foreigner as a spy for his home government,122 It is for the practical realization of this dochotomy rather than because of specific secrets, military and other, that iron curtains separate the inhabitants of a totalitarian country from the rest of the world. Their real secret, the concentration camps, those laboratories in the experiment of total domination, is shielded by the totalitarian regimes from the eyes of their own people as well as from all others. For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. "Normal men don't know that everything is possible,"ias refuse to believe 123 Typical is the following dialogue reported in Dark Side of the Moon: "To an admission that one had ever been outside Poland the next question invariably was: 'And for whom were you spying? . . . One man . . . asked: 'But you too have foreign visitors. Do you suppose they are all spies?' The answer was: 'What do you think? Do you imagine we are so nai've as not to be perfectly aware of it?'" ia'! David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, New York, 1947. * TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 437 jCir eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did ijt trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left i,r them.124 The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward -alizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian uorid, which always comprises a great part of the population of the total-tfian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality ., £he face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the 3rmal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is í )HStantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure ,at no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever pub-ihed, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead. Because of this policy, the results of the totalitarian experiment are only , L>j.riially known. Although we have enough reports from concentration camps to assess the possibilities of total domination and to catch a glimpse into the abyss of the "possible," we do not know the extent of character transformation under a totalitarian regime. We know even less how many of the normal people around us would be willing to accept the totalitarian way of life;—that is, to pay the price of a considerably shorter life for the assured fulfillment of all their career dreams. It is easy to realize the extent to which totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the needs of the new homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know how many of them, if they are further exposed to a constant threat of unemployment, will gladly acquiesce to a "population policy" that consists of regular elimination of surplus people, and how many, once they have fully grasped their growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly conform to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility. In other words, while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the "secret" of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time. hi: Total Domination the concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified. Compared with this, all other experiments are secondary in importance—including those in the field of 124 The Nazis were well aware of the protective wall of incredulity which surrounded their enterprise. A secret report to Rosenberg about the massacre of 5,000 Jews in 1943 states explicitly: "Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it" (Nav! rvi»™»-«™ i in«'* 438 TOTALITARIAN! ■; medicine whose horrors are recorded in detail in the trials a.1 i physicians of the Third Reich—although it is characteristic that the*,e labor tories were used for experiments of every kind. iTotal domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality ln i differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions car Jbe exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling othe animal species whose only "freedom" would consist in "preserving the species."1-5 Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal bot]-through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through ab solute terror in the camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formation-are ruthlessly used become, as it were, the practical application of th. ideological indoctrination—the testing ground in which the latter mus! prove itself—while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is sup posed to furnish the "theoretical" verification of the ideology. The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov's dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal. Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment is at all possible, and therefore they are not only "la société la plus totalitaire encore réalisée" (David Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total domination in general. Just as the stability of the totalitarian regime depends on the isolation of the fictitious world.of the movement from the outside, world, so the experiment of total domination in the concentration camps depends on sealing off the latter against the world of all others, the world of the living in general, even against the outside world of a country under totalitarian rule. This isolation explains the peculiar unreality and lack of credibility that characterize all reports from the concentration camps and constitute one of the main difficulties for the true understanding of totalitarian domination, which stands or falls with the existence of these concen-' tration and extermination camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power. ,ar'In the Tischgespriiche, Hitler mentions several times that he "[strives] for a condition in which each individual knows that he lives and dies for the preservation of his species" (p. 349). See also p. 347: "A fly lays millions of eggs, all of which perish. But the flies remain." TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 439 There are numerous reports by survivors.12,i The more authentic they are, jhe less they attempt to communicate things that evade human understanding and human experience—sufferings, that is, that transform men into "uncomplaining animals."127 None of these reports inspires those passions of outrage and sympathy through which men have always been mobilized for justice. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with re-: gard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for \ reality.138 This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known: that men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because this renders all punishments provided by the legal system inadequate and absurd; but because the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth. The Nazis did not even consider it necessary to keep this discovery to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enormous— which did not prevent people from believing him as, similarly, the Nazis' proclamations, repeated ad nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated ' like bedbugs (i.e., with poison gas), prevented anybody from not believing them. There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible iaGThe best reports on Nazi concentration camps are David Rousset, Les Jours de Notre Mori, Paris, 1947; Eugen Kogon, op. cit.; Bruno Bettelheim, "On Dachau and Buchenwald" (from May, 1938, to April, 1939), in Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 824 if. For Soviet concentration camps, see the excellent collection of reports by Polish survivors published under the title The Dark Side of the Moon; also David J. Dallin, op. cit., though his reports are sometimes less convincing because they come from "prominent" personalities who are intent on drawing up manifestos and indictments. 121 The Dark Side of the Moon; the introduction also stresses this peculiar lack of communication: "They record but do not communicate." 128 See especially Bruno Bettelheim, op. cit. "U seemed as if í had become convinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to 'me' as subject but to 'me' as an object. This experience was corroborated by the statements of other prisoners. ... It was as if I watched things happening in which I only vaguely participated. . . . 'This cannot be true, such things just do not happen.' . . . The prisoners had to convince themselves that this was real, was really happening and not just a nightmare. They were never wholly successful." See also Rousset, op. cit., p. 213. ". . . Those who haven't seen it with their own eyes can't believe it. Did you yourself, before you came here, take the rumors about the gas chambers seriously? "No, I said. . . You see? Well, they're all like you. The lot of them in Paris, London, New York, even at Birkenau, right outside the crematoriums . . . still incredulous, five minutes before they were sent down into the cellar of the crematorium. . . ." 440 TOTALITARIANISM by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks sue i . liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to toi ilh tarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we «_lUl find numerous analogies and precedents. The extraordinarily bloody terror during the'initial stage of totalitarian rule serves indeed the exclusive purpose of defeating the opponent and rendering all further opposition impossible; but total terror is launched only after this initial stage has been overcome and the regime no longer has anything to fear from the opposition In this context it has been frequently remarked that in such a case the means have become the end, but this is after all only an admission, in paradoxical disguise, that the category "the end justifies the means" no longer applics that terror has lost its "purpose," that it is no longer the means to frighten people. Nor does the explanation suffice that the revolution, as in the case of the French Revolution, was devouring its own children, for the terror continues even after everybody who might be described as a child of the revolution in one capacity or another—the Russian factions, the power centers of party, the army, the bureaucracy—has long since been devoured. -Many things that nowadays have become the specialty of totalitarian government are only too well known from the study of history. There have almost always been wars of aggression; the massacre of hostile populations after a victory went unchecked until the Romans mitigated it by introducing the parcere subjectis; through centuries the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and Africa; slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind and all empires of antiquity were based on the labor of state-owned slaves who erected their ■ public buildings. Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for "undesirable elements"; here, too, we first find the term "protective custody" which was later adopted by the Third Reich. These camps correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule; they were used for "suspects" whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law. All this clearly points to totalitarian methods of domination; all these are elements they utilize, develop and crystallize on the basis of the nihilistic principle that "everything is permitted," which they inherited and already take for granted. But wherever these new forms of domination assume their authentically totalitarian structure they transcend this principle, which is still tied to the utilitarian motives and se.lfrinterest of the rulers, and try their hand in a realm that up to now has been completely unknown tojts^ the realm where "everything is possible.'' And, characteristically enough, this is precisely the realm that cannot be limited by either utilitarian motives or self-interest, regardless of the latter's content. What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that "everything is permitted," which was already contained in the nineteenth-century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 441 "normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible.129 We attempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply sllrpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal a tfiing which, as we all feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the niass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of concentration-camp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without the destruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche, character, and individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate.130 The end result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychologically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise in-ieOigibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All Statements of common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature, serve only to encourage those who think it "superficial" to "dwell on horrors."131 If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, "dwelling on horrors" would seem to be indispensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. In both these genres there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience; instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much aware of the terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead, that they cannot supply anything more than a series of remembered occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their audience. Only the fearful imagination of those who have been amused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own tlc-h, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors. Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions. A change of personality of any sort whatever can no more be induced by thinking about horrors than by the real experience of horror. The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is personality or character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it. Just as the horror, or the dwelling on it, cannot affect a change of character in him, cannot make men better or worse, thus it cannot become the basis of a political community or party in a narrower sense. The attempts to build up a European elite with a program of intra-European understanding based on the common European experience of the concentration camps have 129 The first to understand this was Rousset in his Univers Concentrationnaire, 1947. 130 Rousset, op, cit., p. 587. 131 See Georges Bataille in Critiaue. Janimrv 1Q48 n -n w nre sentenced for limited periods. Secondly, there are the concentration ■ * camps in which the human material is ruthlessly exploited and the mortality / I rate is extremely high, but which are essentially organized for labor purposes. / I Juid, thirdly, there are the annihilation camps in which the inmates are sys-/ ; tfmatically wiped out through starvation and neglect. ; The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the ; fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively ; cljt off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror j enforces oblivion. Here, murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat, i someone may die as the result of systematic torture or starvation, or because ! the camp is overcrowded and superfluous human material must be liqui-I dated. Conversely, it may happen that due to a shortage of new human shipments the danger arises that the camps become depopulated and that the order is now given to reduce the death rate at any price.134 David Rousset called his report on the period in a German concentration camp "Les Jours de Notre Mort," and it is indeed as if there were a possibility to give permanence to the process of dying itself and to enforce a condition in which both death and life are obstructed equally effectively. [t is the appearance of some radical evil, previously unknown to us, that puts an end to the notion of developments and transformations of qualities. Here, there are neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards but, at the most, the realization that something seems to be involved in modern politics that actually should never be involved in politics as we used to understand it, namely all or nothing—all, and that is an undetermined infinity of forms of human living-together, or nothing, for a victory of the concentration-camp system would mean the same inexorable doom for human beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would mean the doom of the human race. ''"This happened in Germany toward the end of 1942, whereupon Himmler served notice to all camp commandants "to reduce the death rate at all costs." For it had turned out that of the 136,000 new arrivals, 70,000 were already dead on reaching the camp or died immediately thereafter. See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, Annex II.—Later reports from Soviet Russian camps unanimously confirm that after 1949—that is, when Stalin was still alive—the death rate in the concentration camps, which previously had reached up to 60 per cent of the inmates, was systematically lowered, presumably due to a general and acute labor shortage in the Soviet Union. This improvement in living conditions should not be confused with the crisis of the regime after Stalin's death which, characteristically enough, first made itself felt in the concentration canms. C'f Wilhelm Starlinßer. Grp^pr, ,!o* f „„.:——- -> ■ 444 TOTALITARIANISM TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 445 There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its hi can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason tr stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes :t impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in ftp world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive o dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere. Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolutely tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous, although in times of acute labor shortage, as in Russia and in Germany during the war, he is used for work. The concentration camp as an institution was not established for the sake of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economic function of the camps has been the financing of their own supervisory apparatus; thus from the economic point of view the concentration camps exist mostly for their own sake. Any work that has been performed could have been done much better and more cheaply under different conditions.135 Especially Russia, whose concentration camps are mostly described as forced-labor camps because Soviet bureaucracy has chosen to dignify them with this name, reveals most clearly that forced labor is not the primary issue; forced labor is the normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedom of movement and can be arbitrarily drafted for work to any place at any time. 135 See Kogon, op. cit., p. 58: "A large part of the work exacted in the concentration camps was useless, either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned that it had to be done over two or three times." Also Bettelheim, op. cit., pp. 831-32: "New prisoners particularly were forced to perform nonsensical tasks. . . . They felt debased . . . and preferred even harder work when it produced something useful. . . ." Even Dallin, who has built his whole book on the thesis that the purpose of Russian camps is to provide cheap labor, is forced to admit the inefficiency of camp labor, op. cit-, p. 105.—The current theories about the Russian camp system as an economic measure for providing a cheap labor supply would stand clearly refuted if recent reports on mass amnesties and the abolition of concentration camps should prove to be true. For if the camps had served an important economic purpose, the regime certainly could not have afforded their rapid liquidation without grave consequences for ; incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic useless. The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility ien in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and foiling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth.136 In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military ex-i pediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality. This atmosphere of madness and unreality, created by an apparent lack ■ of purpose, is the real iron curtain which hides all forms of concentration camps from the eyes of the world. Seen from outside, they and the things that happen in them can be described only in images drawn from a life after \ death, that is, a life removed from earthly purposes. Concentration camps can very aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of a life after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell. To Hades correspond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in non-: totalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements of all sorts—refugees, stateless persons, the asocial and the unemployed—out of the way; as DP j camps, which are nothing other than camps for persons who have become superfluous and bothersome, they have survived the war. Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible ; torment. All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them : were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and i some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death before admitting them to eternal peace. It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure. Everything that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse, malignant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, however, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sen-, sual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of 130 Apart from the millions of people whom the Nazis transported to the extermination camps, they constantly attempted new colonization plans—transported Germans from Germany or the occupied territories to the Bast for colonization purposes. This was of course a serious handicap for military actions and economic exploitation. For the numerous discussions on these subjects and the constant conflict between the Nazi civilian hierarchy in the Eastern occupied territories and the SS hierarchy see especially Vol. XXIX of Trial of the Major War Criminals. Nuremberg. 446 TOTALITARIANISM all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more tl a cruel game or an absurd dream.137 The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere a the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures just about as convincing as snapshots of mysterious substances taken at s itualist seances.138 Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald Auschwitz with the plausible argument: "What crime must these pec have committed that such things were done to them!"; or, in Germany and Austria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation, and general hatred; "Too bad that they've stopped gassing the Jews"; and everywhere with the sken-tical shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda. If the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average person because it is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those who know from their own imaginings what they themselves are capable of doing and who are therefore perfectly willing to believe in the reality of what they have seen Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open. These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying,138 seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and of the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of Marx's classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messi- 137 Bettefheim, op. eh., notes that the guards in the camps embraced an attitude toward the atmosphere of unreality similar to that of the prisoners themselves. '■iH It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. On the other kind, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their special horror—namely, the sight of the human skeletons—was not at all typical for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not b\ starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the Last. the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany. 139 That life in a concentration camp was simply a dragged-out process of dying it stressed by Rousset, op. cit., passim. TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 447 c Age, so the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much medieval pictures of Hell. The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional iceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an ;olute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. r in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable h the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common ise, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order «, suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: n0 man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with «flieh concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such "punishment" can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone. In comparison with the insane end-result—concentration-camp society— the process by which men are prepared for this end, and the methods by which individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent and logical. The Insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and ] what is more important, the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the products of those events which in a period of political disintegration suddenly and unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings homeless, stateless, outlawed and unwanted, while millions of human beings were made economically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemployment. This in turn could only happen because the Rights of Man, which had never been philosophically established but merely formulated, which had never been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their traditional form, lost all validity. The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the ŕ juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting cer-"tain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotali-tarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty. Thus criminals, who for other reasons are an essential element in concentration-camp society, are ordinarily sent to a camp only on completion of their prison sentence. Under all circumstances totalitarian domination sees to it that the categories gathered in the camps—Jews, carriers of diseases, representatives of dying classes— have already lost their capacity for both normal or criminal action. Propa-gandistically this means that the "protective custody" is handled as a "preventive police measure,"J4n that is, a measure that deprives people of the ability to act. Deviations from this rule in Russia must be attributed to the calastrophic shortage of prisons and to a desire, so far unrealized, to trans- '" Maunz, op. cit., p. 50, insists that criminals should never be sent to the camps f0! the time, nf their rponlar c»ni»nc^ 448 TOTALITARlAř _.., form the whole penal system into a system of concentration The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plausiŕ propagandistic claim of the movement that the institution exists for elements.14- Criminals do not properly belong in the concentration if only because it is harder to kill the juridical person in a man who is *t of some crime than in a totally innocent person. If they constrtutelTü^1 "' iiěnť category among the inmates, it is a concession of the totalitarian T' to the prejudices of society, which can in this way most readily be ace*1" tomed to the existence of the camps. In order, on the other hand to k" ~ the camp system itself intact, it is essential as long as there is a penal T'' tem in the country that criminals should be sent to the camps only on ca " pletion of their sentence, that is when they are actually entitled to &*' freedom. Under no circumstances must the concentration camp become "■ calculable punishment for definite offenses. The amalgamation of criminals with all other categories has moreover tl ■ advantage of making it shockingly evident to all other arrivals that they hai" landed on the lowest level of society. It soon turns out, to be sure th ^ they have every reason to envy the lowest thief and murderer; but meai,-while the lowest level is a good beginning. Moreover it is an effective mean's of camouflage: this happens only to criminals and nothing worse is happening than that what deservedly happens to criminals. The criminals everywhere constitute the aristocracy of the camps. (In Germany, during the war, they were replaced in the leadership by the Communists, because not even a minimum of rational work could be performed under the chaotic conditions created by a criminal administration. This was merely a temporary transformation of concentration camps into forced-labor camps, a thoroughly atypical phenomenon of limited duration.)143 What places the criminals in the leadership is not so much the affinity between supervisory personnel and criminal elements—in the Soviet Union apparently the supervisors are not, like the SS, a special elite trained to commit crimes144—as the fact that only criminals have been sent to the camp in 141 The shortage of prison space in Russia has been such that in the year 1925-26, only 36 per cent of all court sentences could be carried out. See Dailin, op cit n' !58 ff. " ť' 142 "Gestapo and SS have always attached great importance to mixing the categories of inmates in the camps. In no camp have the inmates belonged exclusively to one category" (Kogon, op. cil., p. 19). In Russia, it has also been customary from the beginning to mix political prisoners and criminals. During the first ten years of Soviet power, the Left political groups enjoyed certain privileges; only with the full development of the totalitarian character of the regime "after the end of the twenties, the politicals were even officially treated as inferior to the common criminals" (Dailin, op. cit., p. 177 ff.). 143 Rousset's book, suffers from his overesiimation of the influence of the German Communists, who dominated the internal administration of Buchenwald during the war. 144 See for instance the testimony of Mrs. Buber-Neumann (former wife of the German Communist Heinz Neumann), who survived Soviet and German concentration camps: "The Russians never . . . evinced the sadistic streak of the Nazis. ... Our Russian guards were decent men and not sadists, but thev faithfullv fulfilled the re- f TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 449 [irtection with some definite activity. They at least know why they are in ;oncentration camp and therefore have kept a remnant of their juridical ŕson. For the politicals this is only subjectively true; their actions, insofar they were actions and not mere opinions or someone else's vague suspi->ns, or accidental membership in a politically disapproved group, are as ■ule not covered by the normal legal system of the country and not juridi-Hy defined.145 To the amalgam of politicals and criminals with which concentration l jrups in Russia and Germany started out, was added at an early date a ird element which was soon to constitute the majority of all concentration-mp inmates. This largest group has consisted ever since of people who had ,ne nothing whatsoever that, either in their own consciousness or the con-iousness of their tormenters, had any rational connection with their arrest. ,- Germany, after 1938, this element was represented by masses of Jews, Russia by any groups which, for any reason having nothing to do with ;ir actions, had incurred the disfavor of the authorities. These groups, locent in every sense, are the most suitable for thorough experimentation disfranchisement and destruction of the juridical person, and therefore they are both qualitatively and quantitatively the most essential category of the camp population. This principle was most fully realized in the gas chambers which, if only because of their enormous capacity, could not be intended for individual cases but only for people in general. In this connection, the following dialogue sums up the situation of the individual: "For what purpose, may I ask, do the gas chambers exist?"—"For what purpose were you born?"14(l It is this third group of the totally innocent who in every case fare the worst in the camps. Criminals and politicals are assimilated to this category; thus deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their having done something, they are utterly exposed to the arbitrary. The ultimate goal, partly achieved in the Soviet Union and clearly indicated in the last phases of Nazi terror, is to have the whole camp population composed of this category of innocent people. Contrasting with the complete haphazardness with which the inmates are selected are the categories, meaningless in themselves but useful from the standpoint of organization, into which they are usually divided on their arrival. In the German camps there were criminals, politicals, asocial elements, religious offenders, and Jews, all distinguished by insignia. When the French set up concentration camps after the Spanish Civil War, they immediately introduced the typical totalitarian amalgam of politicals with criminals and the innocent (in this case the stateless), and despite their inexperience proved remarkably inventive in creating meaningless categories of inmates.147 ""' Bruno Bettelheim, '"Behavior in Extreme Situations," in Journal of Abnormal and Soual Psychology, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, 1943, describes the self-esteem of the criminals and the political prisoners as compared with those who have not done anything. The latter "were least able to withstand the initial shock," the first to disintegrate. Bettelheim blames this on their middle-class origin. "°Rousset, op. cit., p. 71. m For conditions in French concentration camps, see Arthur Koestler. Scum of the 450 TOTALITARIANISM Originally devised in order to prevent any growth of solidarity among the inmates, this technique proved particularly valuable because no one could know whether his own category was better or worse than someone else's In Germany this eternally shifting though pedantically organized edifice was given an appearance of solidity by the fact that under any and all circumstances the Jews were the lowest category. The gruesome and grotesque part of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these categories as though they represented a last authentic remnant of their juridical"persöif Even if we disregard all other circumstances, it is no wonder that a Com-~ munist of 1933 should have come out of the camps more Communistic than he went in, a Jew more Jewish, and, in France, the wife of a Foreign Legionary more convinced of the value of the Foreign Legion; it would seem as though these categories promised some last shred of predictable treatment, as though they embodied some last and hence most fundamental juridical identity. While the classification of inmates by categories is only a tactical, organizational measure, the arbitrary selection of victims indicates the essential principle of the institution. If the concentration camps had been dependent on the existence of political adversaries, they would scarcely have survived the first years of the totalitarian regimes. One only has to take a look at the number of inmates at Buchenwald in the years after 1936 in order to understand how absolutely necessary the element of the innocent was for the continued existence of the camps. "The camps would have died out if in making its arrests the Gestapo had considered only the principle of opposition,"148 and toward the end of 1937 Buchenwald, with less than 1,000 inmates, was close to dying out until the November pogroms brought more than 20,000 new arrivals.140 In Germany, this element of the innocent was furnished in vast numbers by the Jews since 3938; in Russia, it consisted of random groups of the population which for some reason entirely unconnected with their actions had fallen into disgrace.10" But if in Germany the really totalitarian type of concentration camp with its enormous majority of completely "innocent" inmates was not established until 1938, in Russia it goes back to the early thirties, since up to 1930 the majority of the concentration-camp population still consisted of criminals, counterrevolutionaries and "politicals'" (meaning, in this case, members of deviationist factions). Since then there have been so many innocent people in the camps that it is difficult to classify them—persons who had some sort of conl;ict with a foreign country, Russians of Polish origin (particularly in the years 1936 to 1938), peasants whose villages for some economic reason weie liquidated, deported nationalities, demobilized soldiers of the Red Army who happened to belong to regiments that stayed too long abroad as occupation forces or had become prisoners of war in Germany, etc. But the 140 Kogon, op. cit., p. 6. 149 See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 800 ff. ino Beck and Godin, op. cit., state explicitly that "opponents constituted onl> a relatively small proportion of the [Russian] prison population" (p. 87), and that there was no connection whatever between "a man's imprisonment and any offense" (p. 95). TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 451 existence of a political opposition is for a concentration-camp system only a pretext, and the purpose of the system is not achieved even when, under ihe most monstrous terror, the population becomes more or less voluntarily co-ordinated, i.e., relinquishes its political rights. The aim of an arbitrary system is to destroy the civil rights of the whole population, who ultimately become just as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and homeless. The destruction of a man's rights, the killing of the juridical person in him, is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely. And this applies not only to special categories such as criminals, political opponents, Jews, homosexuals, on whom the early experiments were made, but to every inhabitant of a totalitarian state. Free consent is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition.151 The arbitrary arrest which chooses among innocent people destroys the validity of free consent, just as torture—as distinguished from death—destroys the possibility of opposition. Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented "crimes," would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination. The so-called "Volksnutzen" of the Nazis, constantly fluctuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow) and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being retroactive, almost daily makes new groups of people available for the concentration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued existence of the concentration camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of man. The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom,^ "for the first time in history, impossible: "How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. (They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one's own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens."152 151 Bruno Bettelheim, "On Dachau and Buchenwald," when discussing the fact that most prisoners "made their peace with the values of the Gestapo," emphasizes that "this was not the result of propaganda ... the Gestapo insisted that it would prevent them from expressing their feelings anyway" (pp. 834-35). Himmler explicitly prohibited propaganda of any kind in the camps. "Education consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis." "On Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police," in National-politischer Lehrgang fellow now." * 133 Kogon, op. cit., p. 6, speaks of the possibility that the camps will be maintained as training and experimental grounds for the SS. He also gives a good report on the difference between the early camps administered by the SA and the later ones under the SS. "None of these first camps had more than a thousand inmates. . . . Life in them beggared all description. The accounts of the few old prisoners who survived those years agree that there was scarcely any form of sadistic perversion that was not practiced by the SA men. But they were all acts of individual bestiality, there was still no fully organized cold system, embracing masses of men. This was the accom plishment of the SS" (p. 7). This new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian prisoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. (See Ernest Feder, "Essai sur la Psychologie de la Terreur," in Syntheses, Brussels, 1946.) On the other hand, perversion was artificially produced in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: "Usually I keep on hitting until í ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. 1 used to be perfectly normal. That's what they've made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don't go home. I don't dare look my wife in the face" (p. 273). —The documents from the Hitler era contain numerous testimonials for the average normality of those entrusted with carrying out Hitter's program of extermination. A good collection is found in Léon Poliakov's "The Weapon of Antisemitism," published by UNESCO in The Third Reich, London, 1955. Most of the men in the units used for these purposes were not volunteers but had been drafted from the ordinary police for these special assignments. But even trained SS-men found this kind of duty worse than front-line fighting. In his report of a mass execution by the SS, an eyewitness gives high praise to this troop which had been so "idealistic" that it was able to bear "the entire extermination without the help of liquor." That one wanted to eliminate all personal motives and passions during the "exterminations" and hence keep the cruelties to a minimum is revealed by the fact that a group of doctors and engineers entrusted with handling the gas installations were making constant improvements that were not only designed to raise the productive capacity of the corpse factories but also to accelerate and ease the agony of death. í TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER > '"' 455 ic nihilistic generalizations which maintain plausibly enough that essen-. ny all men alike are beasts.1"0 Actually the experience of the concen-Ltion camps does show that human beings can be transformed into species of the human animal, and that man's "nature" is only "human" tc0tat as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man. ' After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the juridical person, AP destruction of the individuality is almost always successful. Conceivably ''Sine laws of mass psychology may be found to explain why millions of human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas chambers, although these laws would explain nothing else but the destruction of individuality. It is more significant that those individually condemned p death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them, that there were scarcely any serious revolts, and that even in the moment 0f liberation there were very few spontaneous massacres of SS men. For to 1 destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man's power to begin, some-,, í Ijjjiígnewout of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on 1 the basis of reactions to environment and events.101 Nothing then remains | hUt ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog jn Pavlov's experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react. This is the real triumph of the system: "The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold ... is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their : death. The man who sees this says to himself: 'For them to be thus.reduced, what power must be concealed in the hands of the masters,' and he turns "away, full of bitterness but defeated."1G2 "If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the 180 This is- very prominent in Rousset's work. "The social conditions of life in the camps have transformed the great mass of inmates, both the Germans and the deportees, regardless of their previous social position and education . . . into a degenerate rabble, entirely submissive to the primitive reflexes of the animal instinct" (p. 183). 1fi' In this context also belongs the astonishing rarety of suicides in the camps. Suicide occurred far more often before arrest and deportation than in the camp itself, which is of course partly explained by the fact that every attempt was made to prevent suicides which are, after all, spontaneous acts. From the statistical material for Buchenwald (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 800 ff.) it is evident that scarcely more than one-half per cent of the deaths could be traced to suicide, that frequently there were only two suicides per year, although in the same year the total number of deaths reached 3,516. The reports from Russian camps mention the same phenomenon. Ct.. for instance, Slailinger, op. cit., p. 57. ,oa Rousset, op. tit., p. 525. II- 456 TOTALITARIA ,-, common-sense assertion that they are Utopian and unrealizable ,| that the society of the dying established in the camps is the only f.. society in which it is possible tq dominate man entirely. Those whc to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere e> of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most ■ forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem p i, dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactioi i * bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced h* ,"■'*' bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is thc" ,,,', i', "citizen" of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be product ■' .,'".' imperfectly outside of the camps. The uselessness of the camps, their cynically admitted anti-utilitv. i ,,■. apparent. In reality they are most essential to the preservation of the r- ■ '. power than any of its other institutions. Without concentration camp ■ ^ out the undefined fear they inspire and the very well-defined trainiľ ľ offer in totalitarian domination, which can nowhere else be fully tesť ■" 11"' all of its most radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither i ■ its nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in c< i apathy. The dominating and the dominated would only too quickiv sink back into the "old bourgeois routine"; after early "excesses," they would succumb to everyday life with its human laws; in short, they would develop in the direction which all observers counseled by common sense were so prone to predict. The tragic fallacy of all these prophecies, originatim» in a world that was still safe, was to suppose that there was such a thing ns one human nature established for all time, to identify this human nature with history, and thus to declare that the idea of total domination was not only inhuman but also unrealistic. Meanwhile we have learned that the power of man is so great that he really can be what he wishes to be. It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single exception, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life. In the realm of foreign affairs new neutral territories must constantly be subjugated, while at home ever-new human groups must be mastered in expanding concentration camps, or, when circumstances require liquidated to make room for others. The question of opposition is unimportant both in foreign and domestic affairs. Any neutrality, indeed any spontaneously given friendship, is from the standpoint of totalitarian domination just as dangerous as open hostility, precisely because spontaneity as such, with its incalculabiliiy, is the greatest of all obstacles to total domination over man. The Communists of non-Communist countries, who fled or were called to Moscow, learned by bitter experience that they constituted a menace to the Soviet Union. Convinced Communists are in this sense, which alone has any reality today, just as ridiculous and just as menacing to the regime in Russia, ;ts. for „example, the convinced Nazis of the Röhm faction were to the Nazis. What makes conviction and opinion of any sort so ridiculous and dangerous under totalitarian conditions is that totalitarian regimes take the ŕ TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 457 jst pride in having no need of them, or of any human help of any kind. . Ě insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of fuiic-. are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism „strives toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are jfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world Onditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spon-{ty. Precisely because man's resources are so great, he can be fully mated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man. ! jjerefore character is a threat and even the most unjust legal rules are ,bstacle; but individuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man i another, is intolerable. As long as all men have not been made equally rfluous—and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps e ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved. Totalitarian s strive constantly, though never with complete success, to establish ,uperfluity of man—by the arbitrary selection of various groups for con-ration camps, by constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass dations. Common sense protests desperately that the masses are sub-ive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous; •iĽsy were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: 'lie apparatus seems superfluous to you only because it serves to make men ;ijp;rfiuou.s..._. The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience : ;,f modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world :,:? the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way JiiJife in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in ; ■hieh exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed ■ sj./iout product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, r -jtitŕitn the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more : sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should hs killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed !o contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them. Seen through the eyes of the ideology, the trouble with the camps is almost that they make I :i)i> much sense, that the execution of the doctrine is too consistent. I While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying :;ii world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations ■': common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of super- :ci:í-íí which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to 'iiW found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the :iciculous supersense of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in eriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the | r.ujlei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, every- | ::.lng follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise 458 TOTALITARIANISÍ TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 459 is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first preQ.. but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious \t ■ cality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of st" born devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harb." " the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality. Common sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless against this id . logical supersense, since totalitarian regimes establish a functioning wc of no-sense. The ideological contempt for factuality still contained the pr<.'. assumption of human mastery over the world; it is, after all, contempt t0r reality which makes possible changing the world, the erection of the human artifice. What destroys the element of pride in the totalitarian contempt for reality (and thereby distinguishes it radically from revolutionary theories and attitudes) is the supersense which gives the contempt for reality fo cogency, logicality, and consistency. What makes a truly totalitarian device out of the Bolshevik claim that the present Russian system is superior to all others is the fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the logically impeccable conclusion that without this system people never could have built such a wonderful thing as, let us say, a subway; from this, he again draws the logical conclusion that anyone who knows of the existence of the Paris subway is a suspect because he may cause people to doubt that one can do things only in the Bolshevik way. This leads to the final conclusion that in order to remain a loyal Bolshevik, you have to destroy the Paris subway. Nothing matters but consistency, i With these new structures, built on the strength of supersense and driven ■ by the motor of logicality, we are indeed at the end of the bourgeois era of I profits and power, as well as at the end of imperialism and expansion. The , aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from lust for power, and if it ! feverishly seeks to expand, it does so neither for expansion's sake nor for : profit, but only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to ■ prove that its respective supersense has been right. It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it. What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shame-fulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly "scientific" standards; it is the concern of all men. Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake, I even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing n but only in destroying him, by creating a society in which the nihilistic tality of homo homini lupus is consistently realized, one should bear in jd the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global con-in order to show conclusive results. Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have ved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove 'jliat everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without ijgiowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. ;jflhen the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained -^j,y the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for Ipower, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love jcould not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the ídeaťh factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes j 0f their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale , even of solidarity in human sinfulness. It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive 0f a "radical evil," and this is true both for Christian theology, which conceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the only philosopher who, in the word he coined for it, at least must have suspected the existence of this evil even though he immediately rationalized it m the concept of a "perverted ill will" that could be explained by comprehensible motives. Therefore, we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know. There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own super-luousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpses factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and home-1, bsness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously ren-; dered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The implied temptation is well understood by the utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most countries are too desperate to retain much fear of death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of ] annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of over- / population, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, i are as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well; survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations \ which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, ; or economic misery in a manner worthy of man. chaptch ruiiTCLN: Ideology and Terror; A Novel Form of Government In the preceding chapers we emphasized repeatedly that the mc total domination are not only more drastic but that totalitarianism essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us si despotism, tyranny and dictatorship. Wherever it rose to power, it oped entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, leg; political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically n£ tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideolog,!totalitarian g ment always transformed classes into masses, supplanteoTthe party s-not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy < directed toward world domination^ Present totalitarian governments developed from one-party systems;~whenever these became truly totalis they started to operate according to a system of values so radically di: from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms wi judge, or predict their course of action. If it is true that the elements of totalitarianism can be found by ret the history and analyzing the political implications of what we usually the crisis of our century, then the conclusion is unavoidable that this ( is no mere threat from the outside, no mere result of some aggressive foj policy of either Germany or Russia, and that it will no more disappear ... the death of Stalin than it disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It m,. even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their au t hi :i u form—though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism ' become a thing of the past. It is in the line of such reflections to raise the question whether totalit;. ■ ■ government, born of this crisis and at the same time its clearest and ->il unequivocal symptom, is merely a makeshift arrangement, which bon- -its methods of intimidation, its means of organization and its instruir. -of violence from the well-known political arsenal of tyranny, despotism ■'■ dictatorships, and owes its existence only to the deplorable, but per!. ,*-accidental failure of the traditional political forces—liberal or conscrva ■.. national or socialist, republican or monarchist, authoritarian or democi. <. Or whether, on the contrary, there is such a thing as the nature of to '■ \ DEOLOGY AND TERROR 461 overnment, whether it has its own essence and can be compared with ined like other forms of government such as Western thought has 0wn and recognized since the times of ancient philosophy. If this is true, >n the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totalitarian organization j course of action must rest on one of the few basic experiences which sn can have whenever they live together, and are concerned with public fairs. If there is a basic experience which finds its political expression in lalitarian domination, then, in view of the novelty of the totalitarian form government, this must be an experience which, for whatever reason, has ver before served as the foundation of a body politic and whose general jod—although it may be familiar in every other respect—never before s pervaded, and directed the handling of, public affairs, jf we consider this in terms of the history of ideas, it seems extremely likely. For the forms of government under which men live have been cy few; they were discovered early, classified by the Greeks and have 3ved extraordinarily long-lived. If we apply these findings, whose funda-jjxtal idea, despite many variations, did not change in the two and a half nisand years that separate Plato from Kant, we are tempted at once to erpret totalitarianism as some modern form of tyranny, that is a lawless pernmént where power is wielded by one man. Arbitrary power, unre-icted by law, yielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other— :se have been the hallmarks of tyranny throughout our tradition. Instead of saying that totalitarian government is unprecedented, we could o say that it has exploded the very alternative on which all definitions the essence of governments have been based in political philosophy, that he alternative between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary i legitimate power. That lawful government and legitimate power, on one ě, lawlessness and arbitrary power on the other, belonged together and ;re inseparable has never been questioned. Yet, totalitarian rule confronts with a totally different kind of government. It defies, it is true, all positive WS, even to the extreme of defying those which it has itself established (as the case of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, to quote only the most out-Hiding example) or which it did not care to abolish (as in the case of 3 Weimar Constitution which the Nazi government never revoked). But operates neither without guidance of law nor is it arbitrary, for it claims obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or of History from tich all positive laws always have been supposed to spring. It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule it, far from being "lawless," it goes to the sources of authority from which 'sitive laws received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbi-iry it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government it was before, and that far from wielding its power in the interest of one in, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody's vital immediate interests the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of 462 TOTALITARIANISM IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 463 Nature. Its defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitim which, since it is inspired by the sources themselves, can do away v ■' petty legality. Totalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way establish the rule of justice on earth—something which the legality ,! positive law admittedly could never attain. The discrepancy between lega' and justice could never be bridged because the standards of right and wrw ' into which positive law translates its own source of authority__"nati ! law" governing the whole universe, or divine law revealed in human hist< ■ or customs and traditions expressing the law common to the sentiments" ■" all men—are necessarily general and must be valid for a countless and- -| predictable number of cases, so that each concrete individual case with ■ unrepeatable set of circumstances somehow escapes it. /Totalitarian lawfulness,:' defying legality and pretending to establish ■ ' direct reign of justice oh earth, executes the law öf History or~of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual be-_ havior.. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the .behavior of men. The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly^ executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected. If it is true that the link between totalitarian countries and the civilized world was broken through the monstrous crimes of totalitarian regimes, it is also true that this criminality was not due to simple aggressiveness, ruthlessness, warfare and treachery, but to a conscious break of that consensus iuris which, according to Cicero, constitutes a "people," and which, as international law, in modern times has constituted the civilized world insofar as it remains the foundation-stone of international relations even under the conditions of war. Both moral judgment and legal punishment presuppose this basic consent; the criminal can be judged justly only because he takes part in the consensus iuris, and even the revealed law of God can function among men only when they listen and consent to it. At this point the fundamental difference between the totalitarian and all other concepts of law comes to light. Totalitarian policy does not replace one set of laws with another, does nót establish its own consensus iuris, does not create, by one revolution, a new form of legality! Its defiance of all, even its own positive laws implies that it believes ifcan do without any cowjensui.ijHni_whate.ver, and still not resign itself to" the Tyrannical state of lawlessness, arbitrariness and fear. It can do without the consensus iuris because it promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and will of man; and it promises justice on! earth because it claims ■.to make mankind itself the embodiment of the law,J L This identification of man and law, which seems to cancel the discrepancy between legality and justice that has plagued legal thought since ancient times, has nothing in common with the lumen naturale or the voice of con- ;nce, by which Nature or Divinity as the sources of authority for the ius lit ale or the historically revealed commands of God, are supposed to jounce their authority in man himself. This never made man a walking bodiment of the law, but on the contrary remained distinct from him as authority which demanded consent and obedience. Nature or Divinity the source of authority for positive laws were thought of as permanent and rnal, positive laws were changing and changeable according to circum-nces, but they possessed a relative permanence as compared with the * ch more rapidly changing actions of men; and they derived this perma-ice from the eternal presence of their source of authority. Positive laws, refore, are primarily designed to function as stabilizing factors for the r changing movements of men. ,n the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement. When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the . golsheviks talk about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men; they are movements in themselves. Underlying the Nazis' belief in race j ]aws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin's idea of l^an as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily . stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks' belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx's notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself. The difference between Marx's historical and Darwin's naturalistic approach has frequently been pointed out, usually and rightly in favor of Marx. This has led us to forget the great and positive interest Marx took ' in Darwin's theories; Engels could not think "of a greater compliment to Marx's scholarly achievements than to call him the "Darwin of history."T If one considers, not the actual achievement, but the basic philosophies of both men, it turns out that ultimately the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same. Darwin's introduction of the concept of development into nature, his insistence that, at least in the field of biology, natural movement is not circular but unilinear, moving in an infinitely progressing direction, means in fact that nature is, as it were, being swept into history, that natural life is considered to be historical. The , "natural" law of the survival of the fittest is just as much a historical law and could be used as such by racism as Marx's law of the survival of the most progressive class. Marx's class struggle, on the other ha'nd, as the driving force of history is only the outward expression of the development 1 In his funeral speech on Marx, Engels said: "just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic life, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history." A similar comment is found in Engels' introduction to the edition of the í Communist Manifesto in 1890, and in his introduction to the Ursprung der Familie, he once more mentions "Darwin's theory of evolution" and "Marx's theory of surplus value" side by side. 464 TOTALITÄR of productive forces which in turn have their origin in the ' of men. Labor, according to Marx, is not a historical bi biological force—released through man's "metabolism witf which he conserves his individual life and reproduces the sp saw the affinity between the basic convictions of the two mei because he understood the decisive role which the concept of played in both theories. The tremendous intellectual changi place in the middle of the last century consisted in the refus accept anything "as it is" and in the consistent interpretation as being only a stage of some further development. Whether the of this development was called nature or history is relative In these ideologies, the term "law" itself changed its meani pressing the framework of stability within which human actions and can take place, it became the expression of the motion itself. Totalitarian politics which proceeded to follow the recipes of id has unmasked the true nature of these movements insofar its it showed that there could be no end to this process. If it is the law o to eliminate everything that is harmful and unfit to live, it would me-in the end, of „nature jtself if new categories of the harmful anil uniit-to-live could not be found; if it is the law of history that in a class struggle certain classes "wither away," it would mean the end of human histoiy itself if rudimentary new classes did not form, so" "that they in túrrPcouId "wither away" under the hands of totalitarian rulers. In other words, the law of killing by which totalitarian movements seize and exercise power would remain a law of the movement even if they ever succeeded in makin° all of humanity subject to their rule. By lawful government we understand a body politic in which positive laws are needed to translate and realize the immutable ins naturale or the ' eternal commandments of God into standards of right and wrong. Only in these standards, in the body of positive laws of each country, do the ius naturale or the Commandments of God achieve their political reality. In the body politic of totalitarian government, this place of positive Jaws is taken by total terror, which is designed to translate into reality the law of movement of history or nature. Just as positive laws, though they define transgressions, are independent of them—the absence of crimes in any society does not render laws superfluous but, on the contrai\. signifies their most perfect rule—so terror in totalitarian government has ceased to be a mere means for the suppression of opposition, though it is also used for such purposes. Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its wayLIf lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination; 2 For Marx's labor concept as "an eternal nature-imposed necessity, uitlioul which there can be no metabolism between man and nature, and therefore w hie," .see Capital, Vol. I, Part I, ch. 1 and 5. The quoted passage is from ch. I, -.^tioji 1. f IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 465 rror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through ind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. As such, terror to "stabilize" men in order to liberate the forces of nature or history. this movement which singles out the foes of mankind against whom - is let loose, and no free action of either opposition or sympathy can rmitted to interfere with the elimination of the "objective enemy" of ty or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become less notions; "guilty" is he who stands in the way of the natural or ical process which has passed judgment over "inferior races,", over duals "unfit to live," over "dying classes and decadent peoples." ir executes these judgments, and before its court, all concerned are -ui,icctively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the ^ýnij and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute .'ifcath sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal. The rulers them- ;'ejviľs do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or latunil laws; they do not apply laws, but execute a movement in accordance , ,vlth its inherent law. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the move- ment of some suprahuman force, Nature or History. ■ ['error as the execution of a law of movement whose ultimate goal is not lis; welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the "parts" for the sake of the "whole." The suprahuman force of Nature or History has its own beginning and its own end, so that it can be hindered only by the new beginning and the individual end which the life of each man actually is. Positive laws in constitutional government are designed to erect boundaries jid establish channels of communication between men whose community i-, continually endangered by the new men born into it. With each new birth, :1 new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being. The stability of the laws corresponds to the constant motion of ,<|] human affairs, a motion which can never end as long as men are born and tlie. The laws hedge in each new beginning and at the same time assure its freedom of movement, the potentiality of something entirely new und unpredictable; the boundaries of positive laws are for the political existence of man what memory is for his historical existence: they guarantee the pre-existence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which transcends the individual life span of each generation, absorbs all new origins and is nourished by them. Total terror is so easily mistaken for a symptom of tyrannical government because totalitarian government in its initial stages must behave like a tyranny and raze the boundaries of man-made law. But total terror leaves no arbitrary lawlessness behind it and does not rage for the sake of some arbitrary will or for the sake of despotic power of one man against all, least of all for the sake of a war of all against all. It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality 466 TOTALITAKIANIS had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions. To abolish the fenĽ of laws between men—as tyranny does—means to take away man's lifo and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom. Total terror this old instrument of tyranny but destroys at the same time also **-less, fenceless wilderness of fear wi o—------ TIT ' IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 467 ^ ___. ,„w.—as tyranny does—means to take away man's üben' and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between m S as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom. Total terror u ° this old instrument of tyranny but destroys at the same time also the h & less, fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion which tyranny leaves beřiinít" This desert, to be sure, is no longer a living space of freedom i~ provides some room fir- *•"* ■c-- ------„ tfuüHiwuu wnicn tyranny leaves behind mis aesert, to be sure, is no longer a living space of freedom, but it smÜ provides some room for the fear-guided movements and suspicíon-ridde actions of its inhabitants. By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space fa? tween them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the déseři' of tyranny, insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of freedom. Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed 5 in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the ione essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of" [motion which cannot exist without space. ■ Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of nature or history with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered; eventually its force will always prove more powerful than the most powerful forces engendered by the actions and the will of men. But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom—irrelevant and arbitrary as they may deem it—is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins in a sense, the world anew. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and die can be only regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces./Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning, jln the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of many the One who unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of the course of history or nature, a device has been found not only to liberate the historical and natural forces, but to accelerate them to a speed they never would reach if left to themselves. Practically speaking, this means that terror executes on the spot the death sentences which Nature is supposed to have pronounced on races or individuals who are "unfit to live," or History on "dying classes," without waiting for the slower and less efficient processes of nature or history themselves. In this concept, where the essence of government itself has become motion, a very old problem of political thought seems to have found a solution similar to the one already noted for the discrepancy between legality and justice. If the essence of government is defined as lawfulness, and if it is -stood that laws are the stabilizing forces in the public affairs of men udeed it always has been since Plato invoked Zeus, the god of the bounties, in his Laws), then the problem of movement of the body politic "nj the actions of its citizens arises. Lawfulness sets limitations to actions, „u[ does not inspire them; the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in t$* societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one -jjouid do. The necessary movement of a body politic can never be found ij[j its essence if only because this essence—again since Plato—has always 'been defined with a view to its permanence. Duration seemed one of the 1 surest yardsticks for the goodness of a government. It is still for Montes-\ ouieu the supreme proof for the badness of tyranny that only tyrannies are í liable to be destroyed from within, to decline by themselves, whereas all í other governments are destroyed through exterior circumstances. Therefore * what the definition of governments always needed was what Montesquieu ' called a "principle of action" which, different in each form of government, | would inspire government and citizens alike in their public activity and jerve as a criterion, beyond the merely negative yardstick of lawfulness, for judging all action in public affairs. Such guiding principles and criteria of action are, according to Montesquieu, honor in a monarchy, virtue in a republic and fear in a tyranny.. In a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have become One : Man, where all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature ; or history, where every single act is the execution of a death sentence which ; nature or History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at all. Yet as long as totalitarian rule has not conquered the earth and with ! the iron band of terror made each single man a part of one mankind, terror | in its double function as essence of government and principle, not of action, but of motion, cannot be fully realized. Just as lawfulness in constitutional government is insufficient to inspire and guide men's actions, so terror in totalitarian government is not sufficient to inspire and guide human behavior. While under present conditions totalitarian domination still shares with other forms of government the need for a guide for the behavior of its citizens in public affairs, it does not need and could not even use a principle of action strictly speaking, since it will eliminate precisely the capacity of man to act. Under conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy or support of the regime; for total terror not only selects its victims according to objective standards; it chooses its executioners with as complete a disregard as possible for the candidate's conviction and sympathies. The TOTALITARIANISM consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has becoi matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the sal countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill victions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was HimmlerC" great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was" to be eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner"" No guiding principle of behavior, taken itself from the realm of human action, such as virtue, honor, fear, is necessary or can be useful to set into motion a body politic which no longer uses terror as a means of intimidation, but whose essence is terror. In its stead, it has introduced an entirely new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action altogether and appeals to the craving need for some insight into the law of movement according to which the terror functions and upon which, therefore, all private destinies depend. The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into and caught in the process of nature or history for the sake of accelerating its movement-as such, they can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law. The process may decide that those who today eliminate races and individuals or the members of dying classes and decadent peoples are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology. Ideologies—isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise—are a very recent phenomenon and, for many decades, played a negligible role in political life. Only with the wisdom of hindsight can we discover in them certain elements which have made them so disturbingly useful for totalitarian rule. Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered. Ideologies are known for their scientific character: they combine the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy. The word "ideology" seems to imply that an idea can become the subject matter of a science just as animals are the subject matter of zoology, and that the suffix -logy in ideology, as in zoology, indicates nothing but the logoi, the scientific statements made on it. If this were true, an ideology would indeed be a pseudo-science and a pseudo-philosophy, transgressing at the same time the limitations of science and the limitations of philosophy. Deism, for example, would then be the ideology which treats the idea of God, with which philosophy is concerned, in the scientific manner of theology for which God is a revealed reality. (A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 469 legible existence of animals.) Yet we know that this is only part of the .filth. Deism, though it denies divine revelation, does not simply make "scientific" statements on a God which is only an "idea," but uses the idea of '(Jod in order to explain the course of the world. The "ideas" of isms—race \ 1,5 racism, God in deism, etc.—never form the subject matter of the ideologies r^jid the suffix -logy never indicates simply a body of "scientific" statements. -3 An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of : tfi idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the "idea" is applied; the I result of this application is not a body of statements about something that , jS< but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology . {feats the course of events as though it followed the same "law" as the : logical exposition of its "idea." Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries \ ; 0f the whole historical process—the secrets of the past, the intricacies of i \ the present, the uncertainties of the future—because of the logic inherent ■ ja their respective ideas. j Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, i concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures, j even if they try to explain history by some "law of nature." The word 1 "race" in racism does not signify any genuine curiosity about the human races as a field for scientific exploration, but is the "idea" by which the j movement of history is explained as one consistent process. The "idea" of an ideology is neither Plato's eternal essence grasped by the eyes of the mind nor Kant's regulative principle of reason but has become an instrument of explanation. To an ideology, history does not appear in the light of an idea (which would imply that history is seen sub specie of some ideal eternity which itself is beyond historical mo-í tion) but as something which can be calculated by it. What fits the "idea" i into this new role is its own "logic," that is a movement which is the con-I sequence of the "idea" itself and needs no outside factor to set it into motion. Racism is the belief that there is a motion inherent in the very idea of race, just as deism is the belief that a motion is inherent in the very notion of God. The movement of history and the logical process of this notion are supposed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one "idea." However, the only possible movement in the realm of logic is the process of deduction from a premise. Dialectical logic, with its process from thesis through antithesis to synthesis which in turn becomes the thesis of the next dialectical movement, is not different in principle, once an ideology gets hold of it; the first thesis becomes the premise and its advantage for ideological explanation is that this dialectical device can explain away factual contradictions as stages of one identical, consistent movement. As soon as logic as a movement of thought—and not as a necessary control of thinking—is applied to an idea, this idea is transformed into a premise. Ideological world explanations performed this operation long before it became so eminently fruitful for totalitarian reasoning. The purely nega- 470 TOTALITARIANISM tive coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradictions, became "produ tive" so that a whole line of thought could be initiated, and forced upon th~ mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. Th'-argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (whic! would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) no by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experi, ence can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschauung, is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the straight] acket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power. The Weltanschauungen and ideologies of the nineteenth century are not in themselves totalitarian, and although racism and communism have become the decisive ideologies of the twentieth century they were not, in principle, any "more totalitarian" than the others; it happened because the elements of experience on which they were originally based—the struggle between the races for world domination, and the struggle between the classes for political power in the respective countries—turned out to be politically more important than those of other ideologies. In this sense the ideological victory of racism and communism over all other isms was decided before the totalitarian movements took hold of precisely these ideologies. On the other hand, all ideologies contain totalitarian elements, but these are fully developed only by totalitarian movements, and this creates the deceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character. The truth is, rather, that the real nature of all ideologies was revealed only in the role that the ideology plays in the apparatus of totalitarian domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking. First, in their claim to total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They are in all cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that is, with history in the customary sense of the word. Ideologies are always oriented toward history, even when, as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed from the premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain historical matters and reduce them to matters of nature. The claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future. Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a' question of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a "truer" reality concealed behind all perceptible IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 471 tilings, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it. The sixth sense is pro-uded by precisely the ideology, that particular ideological indoctrination uhich is taught by the educational institutions, established exclusively for ^iiis purpose, to train the "political soldiers" in the Ordensburgen of the t^azis or the schools of the Comintern and the Cominform. The propaganda of the totalitarian movement also serves to emancipate thought from experience and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning into every public, tangible event and to suspect a secret intent behind every public political act. Once the movements have come to power, they proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in which reality—real enmity or real friendship—is no longer experienced and understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify something else. Thirdly, since the ideologies have no jjpwer to transform reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain methods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent process of argumentation which, because it thinks in terms of a process, is supposed to be able to comprehend the movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical processes. Comprehension is achieved by the mind's imitating, either logically or dialectically, the laws of "scientifically" established movements with which through the process of imitation it becomes integrated. Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two aforementioned elements of the ideologies—-the element of movement and of emancipation from reality and experience—first, because its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and, secondly, because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further experience. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality. The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform their respective ideologies into weapons with which each of their subjects could force himself into step with the terror movement was deceptively simple and inconspicuous: they took them dead seriously, took pride the one in his supreme gift for "ice cold reasoning" (Hitler) and the other in the "mercilessness of his dialectics," and proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously "primitive" and absurd: a "dying class" consisted of people condemned to death; races that are "unfit to live" were to be exterminated. Whoever agreed that 472 TOTALITARIANISM there are such things as "dying classes" and did not draw the co quence of killing their members, or that the right to live had somethin118 do with race and did not draw the consequence of killing "unfit races " % plainly either stupid or a coward. This stringent logicality as a guide action permeates the whole structure of totalitarian movements and gover ments. It is exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin who, although th did not add a single new thought to the ideas and propaganda slogan« their movements, for this reason alone must be considered ideologists of "tí greatest importance. What distinguished these new totalitarian ideologists from their pred cessors was that it was no longer primarily the "idea" of the ideology__tl struggle of classes and the exploitation of the workers or the struggle races and the care for Germanic peoples—which appealed to them, but tl logical process which could be developed from it,; According to Stalin neither the idea nor the oratory but "the irresistible force of logic thoroughly overpowered [Lenin's] audience." The power, which Marx thought was born when the idea seized the masses, was discovered to reside, not in the idea itself, but in its logical process which "like a mighty tentacle seizes you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat."3 Only when the realization of the ideological aims, the classless society or the master race, was at stake, could this force show itself. In the process of realization, the original substance upon which the ideologies based themselves as long as they had to appeal to the masses—the exploitation of the workers or the national aspirations of Germany—is gradually lost, devoured as it were by the process itself: in perfect accordance with "ice cold reasoning" and the "irresistible force of logic," the workers lost under Bolshevik rule even those rights they had been granted under Tsarist oppression and the German people suffered a kind of warfare which did not pay the slightest regard to the minimum requirements for survival of the German nation. It is in the nature of ideological politics—and is not simply a betrayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power—that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the "idea" (the struggle of classes as the law of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the logic with which the "idea" is carried out. The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu's principle of action is not the ideology itself— racism or dialectical materialism—but. its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can't say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality :( Stalin's speech of January 28, 1924; quoted from Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 33, Moscow, i 947.—It is interesting to note that Stalin's "logic" is among the few qualities that Khrushchev praises in his devastating speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. I IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 473 seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves. To the extent that the Bolshevik purge succeeds in making its victims confess to crimes they never committed, it relies chiefly on this basic fear and argues as follows: We are all agreed on the premise that history is a struggle of classes and on the role of the Party in its conduct. You know therefore that, historically speaking, the Party is always right (in the words of Trotsky: "We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right."). At this historical moment, that is in " accordance with the law of history, certain crimes are due to be committed which the Party, knowing the law of history, must punish. For these crimes, the Party needs criminals; it may be that the Party, though knowing the crimes, does not quite know the criminals; more important than to be sure about the criminals is to punish the crimes, because without such , punishment, History will not be advanced but may even be hindered in its ; course. You, therefore, either have committed the crimes or have been I called by the Party to play the role of the criminal—in either case, you have ; objectively become an enemy of the Party. If you don't confess, you cease J to help History through the Party, and have become a real enemy.—The ■ coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, ! through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which | you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C ] which it logically engenders. ' Totalitarian rulers rely on the compulsion with which we can compel our-j selves, for the limited mobilization of people which even they still need; ' "this inner compulsion is the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind's submission to logic as a never-ending proc-1 ess, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men. Over the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning. As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction. Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it j can mobilize man's own will power in order to force him into that gigantic i movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its ; material and knows neither birth nor death. The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band,'; presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which; has become a wilderness for them, and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isola- 474 TOTALITARIANISM t tion against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in \ order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving. Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationshins . between men, so.the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people haveľôŠf contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction {i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. The question we raised at the start of these considerations and to which we now return is what kind of basic experience in the living-together of men permeates a form of government whose essence is terror and whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking. That such a combination was never used before in the varied forms of political domination is obvious. Still, the basic experience on which it rests must be human and known to men, insofar as even this most "original" of all political bodies has been devised by, and is somehow answering the needs of, men. It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, "acting in concert" (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition. Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all, , have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men , are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action ; and power are frustrated! But not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact. We know that the iron band of total terror leaves no space for such private life and/that the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man's capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action.! What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isolation and loneliness are not the. same... I can be isolated—that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me—without being lonely; and I can be lonely —that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship—without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed. Yet isolation, though destructive of power and the capacity for action, not only leaves intact but is required for all so-called productive activities of men. IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 475 ^an insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work that is to leave temporarily the realm of politics. Fabrication (poiesis, the making of things), as distinguished from action (praxis) on one hand and sheer labor on the other, is always performed in a certain isolation from common concerns, no matter whether the result is a piece of craftsmanship or of art. In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a world whose chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness. Tyranny based on isolation generally leaves the productive capacities of man intact; a tyranny over "laborers," however, as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian. While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superflu-ousnessi which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all. Uprootedness can be the preliminary condition for supcrfluousness, just as isolation can (but must not) be the preliminary condition for loneliness. Taken in itself, without consideration of its recent historical causes and its new role in politics, loneliness is at the same time contrary to the basic requirements of the human condition and one of the fundamental experiences of every human life. Even the experience of the materially and sensually given world depends upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense which regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would 476 TOTALITARIANISM be enclosed in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are unreliable and treacherous. Only because we have common sense, that k only because not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth can we trust our immediate sensual experience. Yet, we have only to remind our selves that one day we shall have to leave this common world which will go on as before and for whose continuity we are superfluous in order to realize loneliness, the experience of being abandoned by everything and everybody. '." Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others. Apart from a few stray remarks—usually framed in a paradoxical mood like Cato's statement (reported by Cicero, De Re Publica, I, 17): numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset, "never was he less alone than when he was alone " or, rather, "never was he less lonely than when he was in solitude"—it seems that Epictetus, the emancipated slave philosopher of Greek origin, was the first to distinguish between loneliness and solitude. His discovery, in a way was accidental, his chief interest being neither solitude nor loneliness but being alone (monos) in the sense of absolute independence. As Epictetus sees it (Dissertationes, Book 3, ch. 13) the lonely man (eremos) finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed. The solitary man, on the contrary, is alone and therefore "can be together with himself" since men have the capacity of "talking with themselves." In solitude, in other words, I am "by myself," together with my self, and therefore two-in-one, whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others. All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought. The problem of solitude is that this two-in-one needs the others in order to become one again: one unchangeable individual whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other. For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them "whole" again, saves them from the dialogue of thought in which one remains always equivocal, restores the identity which makes them speak with the single voice of one unexchangeable person. Solitude can become loneliness; this happens when all by myself I am deserted by my own self. Solitary men have always been in danger of loneliness, when they can no longer find the redeeming grace of companionship to save them from duality and equivocality and doubt. Historically, it seems as though this danger became sufficiently great to be noticed by others and recorded by history only in the nineteenth century. It showed itself clearly when philosophers, for whom alone solitude is a way of life and a condition of work, were no longer content with the fact that "philosophy is only for the few" and began to insist that nobody "understands" them. Character- IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 477 lStic in this respect is the anecdote reported from Hegel's deathbed which hardly could have been told of any great philosopher before him: "Nobody has understood me except one; and he also misunderstood." Conversely, there is always the chance that a lonely man finds himself and starts the thinking dialogue of solitude. This seems to have happened to Nietzsche in Sils Maria when he conceived Zarathustra. In two poems ("Sils Maria" and "Aus hohen Bergen") he tells of the empty expectation and the yearning waiting of the lonely until suddenly "um Mittag wars, da wurde Eins zu Zwei . ./ Nun feiern wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss,/ das Fest der Feste;/ freund Zarathustra kam, der Gast der Gäste!" ("Noon was, when One became Two . . . Certain of united victory we celebrate the feast of feasts; friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests.") What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trust- ' -jng and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses i trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence I in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, j capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time. 1 The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor i the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independ- l ent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose - premise is the self-evident. The elementary rules of cogent evidence, the ; truism that two and two equals four cannot be perverted even under the conditions of absolute loneliness. It is the only reliable "truth" human be- . ings can fall back upon once they have lost the mutual guarantee, the com- '■■ mon sense, men need in order to experience and live and know their way in a common world. But this "truth" is empty or rather no truth at all, ■ because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth.) Under the conditions of loneliness, therefore, the self-evident is no longer just a means of the intellect and begins to be productive, to develop its own lines of ■ "thought." That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logi-! cality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phenomena of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one's and who once dared to say that "there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust") in a little-known remark on the Bible text "it ': is not good that man should be alone": A lonely man, says Luther, "always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst."4 i The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having any-, \ thing to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this "thinking everything to the worst," in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions. 4 "Ein solcher (sc. einsamer) Mensch folgert immer eins aus dem andern und denkt olles zum Ärgsten." In Erbauliche Schriften, "Warum die Einsamkeit zu fliehen?" 478 TOTALITARIANISM What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is _the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suf fered in certain marginal social conditions like oid age, has become an everv day experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The "ice-cold reasoning" and the "mighty tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise" appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon, lit is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the' extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and lo»ic into thought are obliterated. If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand,storms. Their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world. [Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction.! Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are antipolitical principles and throw men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and die logical-ideological deducing the worst that comes from it represent an antisocial situation and harbor a principle destructive for all human living-together,/Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end—before a new beginning rising from this end has had time lo assert itself, \ Apart from such considerations—which as predictions are of little avail and less consolation—there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on, just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats— monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily eon-tains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only "message" IDEOLOGY AND TERROR *7" which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with mans freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus erf—"that a beginning be made toga was created" said Augustine.5 This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man. ■• De Civitate Dei, Book ]2, chapter 20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Epilogue: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution s i write this, more than one year has passed since the flames of the Hungarian revolution illuminated the immense landscape of postwar totalitarianism for twelve long days. This was a true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat; its greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted. For who can forget the silent procession of black-clad women in the streets of Russian-occupied Budapest, mourning their dead in public the last political gesture of the revolution? And who can doubt the solidity of this remembrance when one year after the revolution the defeated and terrorized people have still enough strength of action left to commemorate once more in public the death of their freedom by shunning spontaneously and unanimously all places of public entertainment, theaters, movies, coffee houses and restaurants? The context of circumstances within which the revolution happened was of great significance, but it was not compelling enough to release one of those automatic processes that seem almost always to imprison history and which actually are not even historical, if we understand by historical whatever is worthy of being remembered. What happened in Hungary happened nowhere else, and the twelve days of the revolution contained more history than the twelve years since the Red Army had "liberated" the country fro™ Nazi domination. For twelve years everything had happened according to expectatinns-the long dreary story of deceit and broken promises, of hopes against ho; and final disillusionment: from the beginning with popular front tacti and a sham parliamentary system to the open establishment of a one-par dictatorship which quickly liquidated the leaders and members of the fr merly tolerated parties, until the last stage was set when the native comm nist leaders, whom Moscow rightly or wrongly mistrusted, were no le brutally framed, humiliated in show trials, tortured and killed while t! most despicable and most corrupt elements in the party, not communi; but Moscow agents, ruled the country. All this and much more was pr dictable, not because there were any social or historical forces pressing one direction, but because this was the automatic result of Russian hegemon It was as though the Russian rulers repeated in great haste all the stag EPILOGUE 481 of the October revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship; _ the story, therefore, while unspeakably terrible, is without much interest of its own and varies very little; what happened in one satellite country hap-■ pened at almost the same moment in all others from the Baltic Sea down - to the Adriatic. . The only exceptions to this rule were the Baltic States on the one hand, \ and Eastern Germany on the other. The former were unhappy enough to be directly incorporated into the Soviet Union, with the consequence that \ the ceremonious repetition of the whole development had to be dispensed with and their status immediately assimilated to that enjoyed by other . Soviet nationalities. When up to fifty per cent of the population was'de-I ported and the loss made good by forced random immigration, it became , clear that they had been assimilated to the status of the Tartars, the Kalmyks * or the Volga Germans, that is, to those who had been found untrustworthy i during the war against Hitler. The case of Eastern Germany is an excep-\ tion in the opposite direction. It never became even a satellite country but \ remained occupied territory with a Quisling government despite the zeal of í German Moscow agents, with the result that the country, though still miser- * able enough when compared with the Bundesrepublik, fared much better ] economically as well as politically than the satellites. But these regions are I exceptions only because they, too, fall into the orbit of Russian power; they ] are not exceptions to the satellite system because they did not belong to it. Not even the difficulties which began shortly after Stalin's death can be called unexpected, because they reflected so faithfully the difficulties, or rather the controversies, within the top Russian leadership. Here, too, there seemed to be a repetition of conditions in the Twenties, before the streamlining of 1 the international communist movement into its eventual totalitarian shape had been completed, when every Communist party split into factions which faithfully mirrored the faction-ridden Russian party and each splinter looked up to its respective Russian protector as to a patron saint—which indeed he was since the destinies of his proteges all over the world depended utterly upon his own fate. It certainly was interesting, and gave food for thought about certain unchanging structures of this movement, that Stalin's death was not only followed by the same succession crisis as Lenin's thirty years ago (which, after all, in the absence of any law of succession is rather a matter of course), but that the crisis was met again by the temporary solution of "collective leadership," a term coined by Stalin in 1925, and that the result in the Communist Parties abroad was again a desperate struggle to line up with one of the leaders and form a faction around him. Thus, Kadar is as much a protege of Khrushchev as Nagy was a protege of Malen-kov. Even in the atmosphere of stark and sometimes sublime tragedy which the Hungarian revolution created, this repetitiveness frequently bordered upon the comical, as when one of the last broadcasts of the Communist Free Radio Rajk from Hungary urged "the comrades to join the pseudo-Communist Party of Kadar" and turn it into a "true Hungarian Communist 482 TOTALITARIANISM party." For in the same vein the early opposition to Stalin had urged the comrades not to leave the party but to use the Trojan-horse tactic, until Stalin himself ordered the same tactics for the German Communists with respect to the Nazi movement. Each time the result was the same: the joiners became true and good Stalinists and Nazis for all practical purposes. The Hungarian revolution interrupted these types of automatic occurrences and conscious or unconscious repetitions just when the student of totalitarianism had grown accustomed to them, and public opinion apathetic. This event was not prepared at all by developments in Poland. It was totally unexpected and took everybody by surprise—those who did and suffered, no less than those who watched in furious impotence from the outside, or those in Moscow who prepared to invade and conquer the country like enemy territory.1 For what happened here was something in which nobody any longer believed, if he ever had believed in it—neither the communists nor the anti-communists, and least of all those who, either without knowing or without caring about the price other people would have to pay, were talking about possibilities and duties of people to rebel against totalitarian terror. If there was ever such a thing as Rosa Luxemburg's "spontaneous revolution"—this sudden uprising of an oppressed people for the sake of freedom and hardly anything else, without the demoralizing chaos of military defeat preceding it, without coup d'etat techniques, without a closely knit apparatus of organizers and conspirators, without the undermining propaganda of a revolutionary party, something, that is, which everybody, conservatives and liberals, radicals and revolutionists, had discarded as a noble dream—then we had the privilege to witness it. Perhaps the Hungarian professor was right when he told the United Nations Commission: "It was unique in history, that the Hungarian revolution had no leaders. It was not organized; it was not centrally directed. The will for freedom was the moving force in every action." Events, past and present,—not social forces and historical trends, nor questionnaires and motivation research, nor any other gadgets in the arsenal of the social sciences—are the true, the only reliable teachers of political scientists, as they are the most trustworthy source of information for those engaged in politics. Once such an event as the spontaneous uprising in Hungary has happened, every policy, theory and forecast of future potentialities needs re-examination. In its light we must check and enlarge our understanding of the totalitarian form of government as well as of the nature of the totalitarian version of imperialism. 1 Boris I. NJcoIaevsky, whose "Battle in the Kremlin"—a series of six articles published by The New Leader, XL (July 29-September 2, 1957)—is the most comprehensive and the soundest analysis of developments in Russia after Stalin's death, find> "that the United Nations' report on the Hungarian Revolution has established that the outbreak of violence in Budapest was the result of deliberate provocation." I am no[ convinced; but even if he is right, the result of the Russian provocation was certainly unexpected and went far beyond the original intentions. EPILOGUE 483 i: Russia after Stalin s Death spontaneous as the Hungarian revolution was, it cannot be understood outside the context of developments after Stalin's death. As we know today, this death occurred on the eve of a gigantic new purge, so that whether he died a natural death or was killed, the atmosphere in the party's higher echelons must have been one of intense fear. Since no successor existed, no one appointed by Stalin and no one quick enough or who felt up to the task, a struggle for succession among the top leadership followed immediately and caused the crisis in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. Its outcome even now, five years after the death of Stalin, may not yet be decided. But one thing is sure: one of the most serious flaws in totalitarian dictatorship is its apparent inability to find a solution to this problem. The attitude of totalitarian dictators in this matter we knew before: Stalin's carelessness in occasionally appointing his successor only to kill or demote him a few years later was matched and supplemented by a few scattered remarks of Hitler on the subject; everything we knew suggested strongly that they were convinced that the question was of minor importance because almost anybody would do as long as the apparatus remained intact. To understand this carelessness, one must bear in mind that the choice obviously was limited to a small circle of people who by the very fact that they were on top and alive had proven their superiority under totalitarian conditions, with everything that such superiority implies. From the totalitarian viewpoint, moreover, a binding regulation of succession would introduce an element of stability, alien to and possibly in the way of the needs of (he "movement" and its extreme flexibility. If a succession law existed, it would indeed be the only stable, unalterable law in the whole structure and therefore possibly a first step in the direction of some kind of legality. Whatever we may have known, we could not possibly know what would happen in the case of the dictator's death. Only Stalin's death disclosed that succession is an unsolved problem and causes a serious crisis in which the relations among the potential successors themselves, between them and the masses, and the relationship among the various apparatuses on whose support they can count are involved. Totalitarian leaders, being mass leaders, need popularity, which is no less effective if, under totalitarian conditions, it is fabricated by propaganda and supported by terror. The first stage in the succession struggle was a competition for popularity, because none of the competitors was well known, let alone popular—with the exception, perhaps, of Zhukov, who, being an army man, was the least likely to succeed in rising to power. Khrushchev borrowed tested American devices, travelled around, shook hands and even learned how to kiss babies. Beria engaged in an anti-war, appeasement policy whose very extremes were oddly reminiscent of Himmler's efforts during the last months of the war to succeed Hitler by 484 TOTALITARIANISM becoming the man the Allied powers would trust enough to conclude peace with. Malenkov preached a greater emphasis on consumer goods and promised to raise the standard of living. AH of them together eventually liqui-dated Beria, not only because his foreign policy had become dangerous but also because he was of course the very symbol of popular hatred in Russia as well as abroad—which, again as in the case of Himmler, apparently everybody knew except himself. This competition for mass popularity should not be mistaken for a genuine fear of the masses. Fear, to be sure, was a potent motive for the establishment of the collective leadership but unlike the triumvirate after Lenin's death, which was indeed a mutual security pact against the "counter-revolution," the collective leadership after Stalin's death was a mutual security pact of the concerned gentlemen against each other. And anyone who trou-, bles to look up their past—all of them staunch Stalinists, educated and tested only in the Stalin era—will have to admit that their fear of each other was entirely justified. Fear of the masses, on the other hand, would hardly have been justified. At the moment of Stalin's death, the police apparatus was still intact and later developments proved that one could even afford to break up the police empire and loosen the terror. For while there was some evidence of boomerang effects from the unrest in the satellite countries—a few student disturbances, one strike in a Moscow plant, some very cautious demands for more leeway in "self-criticism," though hardly any demands for freedom among the intellectuals2—there has never been any evidence of open revolt or of the regime's being afraid of it. Moreover, the little show of opposition among intellectuals was highly encouraged from above, and such an encouragement, far from being a genuine concession, was one of Stalin's tested devices of domination. Appeals for "self-criticism" have served for decades as deliberate provocation by which to bring opponents into the open and test public opinion, whereupon the situation is dealt with appropriately. As far as Russia proper is concerned, Khrushchev's speech in 1957 informing the intellectuals that they had indulged in "incorrect understanding of the essence of the party's criticism of the Stalin personality cult," underestimated "the positive role of Stalin" and should go back to "Socialism realism . . , [with its] unlimited opportunities" in developing "their talents to glorify," was not much more than a routine performance. Another aspect of the same speech is more interesting. For in it Khrushchev announces the establishment of "creative unions" through which "the creative growth of every writer, artist, sculptor, etc." would be subject "to constant comradely concern." Here we find a clue to how he intends to replace the restriction of police terror and to the meaning of his insistence on 2 Those who harbor illusions in this matter should read the exchange of letters between Ivan Anissimov, editor of the Soviet magazine Foreign Literature, and Ignazio , Silone, which took place during the iast months of i 956 and has been published by -': Tempo Presente in Italy and The New Leader, XL (July 15, 1957), under the title ,'; "A Troubled Dialogue." I EPILOGUE 485 - decentralization. He seems to plan a surveillance exerted not by an outside (police) body but recruited from the midst of the people, in this case the ■ writers and artists themselves. This would be an institutionalization of, possibly an improvement upon, the mutual spying principle which permeates all totalitarian societies, and whose effectiveness Stalin had achieved by making information and denunciation of others the only test of loyalty. Another innovation points in the same direction. This is Khrushchev's new decree about "social parasites," who will also be selected for punishment in concentration camps by the populace itself. In other words, Khrushchev proposes to replace certain functions of the secret police with a highly organized mob rule, as though he thought the people by now can be trusted to be their own policemen and to take the initiative in the selection of victims. Similar new developments in the techniques of domination can be discovered in the much discussed decentralization projects. For, far from indicating a democratization of Soviet society or a rationalization of Soviet economy, they were obviously aimed at breaking the power of the managerial class through the establishment of new economic regions with new men to run them.^ The redeployment of Moscow-centralized personnel to the provinces assured above all their atomization; they were now subject to the surveillance of local party authorities, who surely will not fail to exert the same "constant comradely concern with the creative growth" of every plant and every branch of production. This aim is not new; Khrushchev learned from Stalin that every group of people who begin to show signs of class identity and solidarity must be broken up, ideologically for the sake of the classless society and practically for the sake of an atomized society which alone can be totally dominated.4 But what Stalin achieved by means of a permanent revolution and periodic gigantic purges, Khrushchev hopes to achieve by new devices, built into, so to speak, the social structure itself and meant to assure atomization from within. This difference in method and approach is important enough, especially as it is not restricted to the period of the "thaw." It was quite striking, though it has been hardly noticed, that the bloody crushing of the Hungarian revolution, terrible and effective as it was, did not represent a typically Stalinist :' Nicolaevsky, he. cit., brings valuable material for "Khrushchev's fight against the Soviet managerial class . . . (which) goes far back into the past." Compare also the article by Richard Lowenthal in Problems of Communism, September-October, 1957, "New Purge in the Kremlin," which comes to the conclusion: "What had started as a drive for more economical rationality had turned into a drive for more direct party rule in the economic field." 4 Milován Djilas, like many former communists, is less outraged by the loss of freedom under a communist dictatorship than by the loss of equality. High salaries, the possession of mink coats, automobiles and villas by the ruling bureaucracy must of course be very annoying to those who joined the movement for the sake of social justice. But they are not the sign of a "new class." If, on the other hand, it should be true that such a new class is forming in Yugoslavia, this alone would demonstrate that Tito's dictatorship is not totalitarian, which, indeed, it is not. See Djilas' The New Class (New York, 1957). 486 TOTALITARIANISM EPILOGUE 487 solution. Stalin most probably would have preferred a police action to military operation, and he would certainly have carried it through, not merel by execution of leaders and imprisonment of thousands, but by wholesalp deportation and by consciously depopulating the country. Nothing finallv would have been further from his mind than to send enough aid to prevent a complete collapse of the Hungarian economy and to stave off mass starvation, as the Soviet Union has done in the year following the revolution. It may be too early to tell how permanent this change in methods will turn out to be. It may be a temporary phenomenon, a hangover, as it were from the time of collective leadership, of unsolved conflicts within the inner circle of the regime with the concomitant relaxation of terror and ideological rigidity. Moreover, these methods are as yet untried and their effects could be quite different from those expected. Yet, as it is certain that the relative relaxation of the post-Stalin era was not caused by pressure from below it seems plausible that certain objective factors strongly favor an abandonment of some features and devices which we have come to identify with totalitarian rule. First among them is the fact that the Soviet Union for the first time suffers from a very real shortage of labor. In this situation, chiefly due to severe losses during the war but also to the country's progressing industrialization, the institution of slave labor, concentration—and extermination—camps which, among their other functions, also had to solve the acute unemployment problem of the thirties, caused partly by the enforced collectivization of the peasants, are not only obsolete but positively dangerous. It is quite possible that the younger generation objected to Stalin's plans for a new super-purge not only on the grounds of personal security, but because they felt that Russia was no longer in a position to afford the prohibitively high cost in "human material" involved. This seems to be the most plausible explanation of why the liquidation of Beria and his clique was followed by an apparently serious and successful liquidation of the police slave-empire, the transformation of some camps into forced settlements, and the release of a probably considerable number of inmates. A second factor, closely connected with the first, is the emergence of Communist China, which because of its threefold superiority in population —600 against 200 million—puts Russia at a serious disadvantage in the half-hidden, but very real struggle for ultimate supremacy. Even more important, China, its adherence to the Soviet bloc notwithstanding, has thus far refused to follow the Russian depopulation policy; for great as the number of victims in the first years of dictatorial rule may appear—15 million seems a plausible guess—it is insignificant in proportion to the population when compared with the losses Stalin used to inflict on his subjects.5 These " The best proof of the difference between Mao's and Stalin's rule may be found in a comparison of the population censuses in China and Russia. The last Chinese census, counting close to 600 million people, was higher than statistical expectations, while Russian censuses for decades have been considerably lower than what statistically was expected. In the absence of reliable figures for population losses through extermination, one could guess the figure of those who were murdered in Russia from these mil- ' considerations of sheer numerical force, while they do not preclude the - establishment of a police state or necessitate the abolition of rule through terror, definitely stand in the way of the type of mass liquidation of "innocents" or "objective enemies" which was so highly characteristic of both ", [he Hitler and the Stalin regimes. These factors seem to impel Russia herself to the inner-communist heresy 0f national communism which obviously has become the ruling regime in . Yugoslavia and in China. It is not surprising that communists of smaller countries like Gomulka, Rajk and Nagy, and Tito himself, should incline i to this deviation. Communists who were more than simple agents of Mos- ' cow—willing to become ruling bureaucrats anywhere in the world when, for some higher reason of world revolutionary strategy, the country of their birth should cease to exist—had no other choice. The case is different in ! China, which could have afforded the price of totalitarian terror even more easily than Russia. The fact, however, is that Mao has deliberately chosen I the national alternative and formulated a number of theories in his famous , speech in 1957 which are in accordance with it and in flagrant contradic- i tion to the official Russian ideology. No doubt, the text of "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People" constitutes the first piece of serious writing which has come out of the communist orbit since Lenin's death," and with it the ideological initiative has shifted from Moscow to peiping. This, it is true, may harbor momentous consequences for the future; it may even change the totalitarian nature of the Russian regime. But at this moment all such hopes are, to say the least, premature. By now Zhukov's demotion should have convinced those who had any doubts in this matter, ■ for one reason for his dismissal is certainly that he was guilty of "nationalist i deviations," that, in other words, he started to speak about the "Soviet \ people" in much the same sense in which Mao tries to reintroduce le peuple, \ word and concept, into communist ideology. \ Still, it may be that fear of Chinese competition constituted an important factor in the liquidation of the police empire, and in this case it would indeed be more than a mere maneuver or temporary concession; but in view of the fact that no similar change in ideology has taken place, so that the ultimate goal of world domination through war and revolution has remained unchanged, it is considerably less than a strategic change. It is a tactical retreat, and there are indications that Khrushchev quite deliberately , has left the door wide open for the reestablishment of fullfledged terror as well as the recurrence of super-purges. üThe complete text was published by The New Leader, XL (September 9, 1957; Section 2), in a supplementary pamphlet with a valuable commentary by G. F. Hudson. Reading the speech, one quickly realizes that the usual title "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom"' is quite misleading. The chief new theoretical elements are the recognition of contradictions between classes, on the one hand, and between the people and the government on the other, even under a Communist dictatorship. Of even greater importance is the strong populist note in the speech. On the matter of . freedom, on the other hand, Mao is quite orthodox. Freedom to him is a means to an end as is democracy; both "are relative, not absolute, they come into being and develop 488 TOTALITARIANISM One of these indications I have mentioned already. It is the law ii«aimt "social parasites" (a term only too familiar to the student of Nazi tötali tarianism) by which at any moment any number of people can again din class interests on the one hand and ideology, or Weltanschauung, on the other. But while the historical origin of the party system lies in Parliament with its factions, the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and spontaneous demands of the people, and they were not deduced from an ideology nor foreseen, let alone preconceived, by any theory about the best form of government. Wherever they appeared, they were met with utmost iiostility from the party-bureaucracies and their leaders from right to left ind with the unanimous neglect of political theorists and political scien-{ tists. The point is that the councils have always been undoubtedly democratic, but in a sense never seen before and never thought about. And since nobody, neither statesman nor political scientists nor parties, has ever paid , any serious attention to this new and wholly untried form of organization, its stubborn re-emergence for more than a century could not be more spontaneous and less influenced by outside interest or theory. 1 Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alternative we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are r based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many respects. Thus, the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom, ^ and not selected by the party machinery and proposed to the electorate either as individuals with alternate choices or as a slate of candidates. The ; choice, moreover, of the voter is not prompted by a program or a platform i or an ideology, but exclusively by his estimation of a man, in whose per-A sonal integrity, courage and judgment he is supposed to have enough confidence to entrust him with his representation. The elected, therefore, is not , bound by anyhing except trust in his personal qualities, and his pride is "to ! have been elected by the workers, and not by the government"lfi or a party, ' that is, by his peers and from neither above nor below. Once such a body of trusted men is elected, it will of course again de-■ velop differences of opinion which in turn may lead into the formation of i "parties." But these groups of men holding the same opinion within the J councils would not be parties, strictly speaking; they would constitute those ! factions from which the parliamentary parties originally developed. The n election of a candidate would not depend upon his adherence to a given faction, but still on his personal power of persuasion with which he could i i 16See The Revolt in Hungary; A Documentary Chronology of Events, which records the story of the Hungarian revolution in a compilation of the broadcasts of the Hungarian radio stations, official and unofficial. Published by the Free Europe Com- 500 TOTALITARIANISJ present his point of view. In other words, the councils would control parties, they would not be their representatives. The strength of any ei-"-faction would not depend upon its bureaucratic apparatus and not even u " •-' the appeal of its program or Weltanschauung, but on the number of truo' i and trustworthy men it holds in its ranks. This development manifester* 7 self clearly in the initial stages of the Russian revolution, and the c. r reason why Lenin felt he had to emasculate the Soviets was that the So Vi Revolutionaries counted more men trusted by the people than the Bolshe\i" ■ the power of the Communist Party, which had been responsible for the rr ■■ lution, was endangered by the council system which had grown out of M« ■ revolution. Remarkable, finally, is the great inherent flexibility of the system, wkv seems to need no special conditions for its establishment except the coni.-i-together and acting together of a certain number of people on a nMi-temporary basis. In Hungary, we have seen the simultaneous setting-up ui all kinds of councils, each of them corresponding to a previously existing group in which people habitually lived together or met regularly and knew each other. Thus neighborhood councils emerged from sheer living together and grew into county and other territorial councils; revolutionary councils grew out of fighting together; councils of writers and artists, one is tempted to think, were born in the cafes, students' and youths' councils at the university, military councils in the army, councils of civil servants in the ministries, workers' councils in the factories, and so on. The formation of a council in each disparate group turned a merely haphazard togetherness into a political institution. The men elected were communists and non-communists; party lines seem to have played no role whatsoever, the criterion, in the words of a newspaper, being solely that there is "none among them who would misuse his power or think only of his personal position." And this is more a criterion of qualification than of morality. Whoever misuses power or perverts it into violence, or is only interested in his private affairs and without concern for the common world, is simply not fit to play a role in political life. The same principles were observed in the further stages of election; for the councils, elected directly at the base, were urged to elect representatives for the higher bodies "without regard for Party affiliation and with due regard to the confidence of the working people."17 One of the most striking aspects of the Hungarian revolution is that this principle of the council system not only reemerged, but that in twelve short days a good deal of its range of potentialities could emerge with it. The council-men were hardly elected in direct vote when these new councils began freely to coordinate among themselves to choose from their own midst the representatives for the higher councils up to the Supreme National Council, the counterpart of normal government,—and the initiative for this came from the just revived National Peasant Party, certainly the last group to be suspected of extreme ideas. While this Supreme Council remained in preparation, the necessary preliminary steps had been taken everywhere: work- EPILOGUE 501 V councils had set up coordinating committees and Central Workers' (iiincils were already functioning in many areas; revolutionary councils in |Ě. provinces were coordinated and planning to set up a National Revolu-niary Committee with*which to replace the National Assembly. Here, as .ill other instances, when for the shortest historical moment the voice ■ the people has been heard, unaltered by the shouts of the mob and un-ilied by the bureaucracies of the parties, we can do no more than draw a .,v sketchy picture of the potentialities and physiognomy of the only demonic system which in Europe, where the party system was discredited al-(jst as soon as it was born, was ever really popular. (We discussed in 'upier VIII, Section 3, the decisive difference between the Continental ulti-party system and the Anglo-American two-party system which one ust always keep in mind for a proper understanding of European events id revolutions.) The rise of the councils, not the restoration of parties, „as the clear sign of a true upsurge of democracy against dictatorship, of \ freedom against tyranny. When we ponder the lesson of the Hungarian revolution, it may be well 1 to consider how the restored regime proceeded in crushing the uprising. The , Russian army in a full-fledged invasion needed three whole weeks to pacify ' the country—which indeed speaks well for the solidity of the organizational \ power of the councils. The people's demands for freedom and truth were, of course, denied, but in one respect the government did make a concession. The peasants, who in Hungary as in Poland had spontaneously left the col-I Sectives, were not forced back, with the result that the whole experiment of j collective farming practically collapsed in both countries and the agricultural output of these regions fell far below the requirements for the national i economy. The concession to the peasants, therefore, the only class which ' at least up to now has derived certain profits from the rebellions, was important materially as well as ideologically. The first blow of bloody oppression was directed against the Revolutionary Councils, the organ of action and representative for the people as a whole. After the nation had been once more reduced to impotence, freedom of thought was adamantly and without the slightest concession stamped out. Only then followed the dissolution of the Workers' Councils, which the regime regarded as a substitute for party and government-directed trade unions rather than as a political body. j It certainly is noteworthy that the same order in the restoration of total ' domination has been followed in Poland where the Russian rulers did not have to crush a revolution but had only to withdraw certain concessions, won in the upheaval of 1956. Here too the new workers' councils, that is, trade unions independent of party control, were the last to go; they had been able to survive for eighteen months, until April 1958, and their liquidation followed upon and was accompanied by ever more severe restrictions on intellectual liberties. If we translate into theory the order of these measures, we see that first priority is given to freedom of action, embodied in the Revolutionary Councils in Hungary; they were crushed first and their mem- 502 TOTALITARIANISM almost equally dangerous, and the persecution of intellectuals followed im mediately upon the liquidation of the councils. Interest representation, which the workers had established in their own trade unions, apparently contained too great an element of action to be tolerated; still, it was suppressed more slowly and less violently than the other two. Finally, and most interesting all Marxist talk about the absolute priority of the economic system notwithstanding, the only sphere where temporary concessions were deemed possible and wise was precisely the economic, where nothing more was at stake than the organization of labor and the mode of consumption and appropriation of consumer goods. Clearly, these measures were not dictated by materialist ideology. Thev were guided by the very realistic understanding that freedom resides in the human capacities of action and thought, and not in labor and earning a living. Since labor and earning a living, like all strictly economic activities are subject to necessity anyhow, bound to the necessities of life, it was not thought likely that demands for more liberties in this sphere would ever lead by themselves to the claim of freedom. Whatever the free world may think of the issue at stake in its conflict with totalitarianism, the totalitarian dictators themselves have shown in practice that they know very well that the difference in economic systems, far from constituting the hard core of final disagreement, is even the only one where concessions are possible. ni: The Satellite System the last words to come out of free Hungary were spoken over the Radio Station Kossuth and ended with the following sentence: "Today it is Hungary and tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it will be the turn of other countries because the imperialism of Moscow does not know borders, and is only trying to play for time." A few days earlier, the Communist Free Radio (Rajk) had already declared that "it was not only Stalin who used Communism as a pretext to expand Russian imperialism" and that it had been among the goals of the Hungarian revolution "to present a clear picture of Russia's brutal colonial rule," We said in the beginning that the development and expansion of post-war Soviet totalitarianism must be seen in the flaming light of the Hungarian revolution. This light—who would deny it?—is not steady, it flares and flickers; yet it is the only authentic light we have. The words spoken during the event by men acting in freedom and fighting for it carry more weight and, so we hope, are heard by more people than theoretical reflections, precisely because they are spoken on the spur and in the excitement of the moment.11* If these people said that what they were fighting against was im- ia To avoid misunderstandings: 1 do not mean to attribute the same high significance to reports or theories by victims or eye-witnesses. The presence of terror paralyzes and sterilizes thought even more effectively than action. If one does not mind risking one's EPILOGUE 503 ľ perialism, political science must accept the term, although we might have preferred, for conceptual as well as historical reasons, to reserve the word - "imperialism" for the colonial expansion of Europe which began in the last third of the nineteenth century and ended with the liquidation of British rule over India. Our task then can only be to analyze what kind of imperialism developed out of the totalitarian form of government. As we saw before, imperialism, both word and phenomenon, was un-joiown until the ever-quickening pace of industrial production forced open ' the territorial limitations of the nation-state.10 Its outstanding feature was expressed in the slogan of the time: expansion for expansion's sake, which meant expansion without regard to what traditionally had been regarded as ■ national interests such as the defense of the territory and its limited aggrandizement through annexation of neighboring lands. Imperialist expansion was prompted not by political, but economic motives, and it followed ' the expanding economy wherever it happened to lead in the form of invest- I ment of capital, surplus money within the national economy, and of the , emigration of unemployable people, who had also become superfluous to I the life of the nation. Imperialism thus was the result of the nation-state's attempt to survive under the circumstances of a new economy and in the presence of an emerging world market. Its dilemma was that economic interests of the nationals demanded an expansion which could not be justified on the grounds of traditional nationalism with its insistence on historical identity of people, state and territory. From beginning to end and for better and worse, the destinies of imperialism, the fate that befell the ruling nations no less than the lot suffered by their "subject races," were determined by this origin. National consciousness was perverted into race consciousness, prompted by the natural solidarity of "white men" in alien lands, which, in turn, made the subject races color conscious. But together with racism, nationalism made its inroads into the ancient cultures of Asia and the tribal wilderness of Africa, and if the imperialist-minded colonial bureaucracy could turn a deaf ear to the national aspirations which they themselves had aroused, the nation-state could not without denying the very principle of its own existence. The colonial bureaucracies lived in a perennial conflict with their home governments, and while imperialism undermined nationalism by shifting the loyalties from the nation to the race, the nation-state with its still intact legal and political institutions always prevailed in preventing the worst excesses. The fear of boomerang effects of imperialism upon the mother country remained strong enough to make the national parliaments a bulwark of justice for the oppressed people and against the colonial administration. Imperialism on the whole was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other life, it is easier to act than to think under conditions of terror. And the spell cast by terror over man's mind can be broken only by freedom, not by mere thought. i!' A good summary of the historical background is now avaifabfe in R. Koebner, "The Emergence of the Concept of Imperialism," in the Cambridge Journal, 1952. 504 TOTALITARIANISM EPILOGUE 505 people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that "administrative massacres" could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire. Such recollections of the past may serve to remind us of how much greater the chances of success are for an imperialism directed by a totalitarian government. Moreover, Russia was never a nation-state, strictly speaking; even the Czars ruled a multi-national empire from the power center in Moscow The principle of national self-determination, this nightmare of the old imperialists who had to deny to the subject people the very principle of their own political existence, poses not even a problem to the Moscow rulers today. They rule the satellites with essentially the same device they use for their empire at home; they make concessions to national culture on the folklore and linguistic level, imposing at the same time not only the Moscow-conceived and directed policy, but also Russian as the official language for all nationalities. Introduction of obligatory study of Russian was one of the first demands by Moscow in the process of bolshevization, as the demand for its abolition figured prominently in all manifestos in Hungary and Poland. No dichotomy of principle, therefore, between home rule and colonial rule will impose restraint on totalitarian imperialism, and if it, too, has to fear certain boomerang effects from its imperialist adventures, they have> other causes. Thus, the fact that the Russian army had to be called in to crush the Hungarian uprising may have been one of the reasons why Zhukov could nourish certain hopes of winning an ascendancy over the party at home and, at any rate, for consolidating his newly-won ascendancy over the police. For the Hungarian events seemed to prove that police troops, though modelled after the Russian NKVD, were not sufficient to deal with a full-fledged rebellion. Of even greater importance, the swift disintegration of the Hungarian army, which alone had enabled an annoying but harmless show of dissatisfaction to grow into an armed uprising, demonstrated to what an extent the regime everywhere depended upon the loyalty of its soldiers and officers' corps. Khrushchev's quick reaction against such hopes and aspirations shows a concern with boomerang effects upon the home government similar to the concern of the older type of imperialism. But here the danger of boomerangs is temporary, because of the inevitable time lag in bolshevization between mother country and colony. Thus, the disaffection of satellite armies, their doubtful reliability in case of war, proves only that in these regions national military traditions are still intact and that bolshevization was slower in an institution which, after all, was inherited from the former regime and had not, like the political police, been built up from scratch. Boomerang effects in totalitarian imperialism, naturally, are distinguished from those of national imperialism in that they work in the opposite direction—the few, faint-hearted stirrings of unrest in Russia probably were caused by events in Poland and Hungary—and so do the measures the government is forced to take to combat them. For just as European imperialism could never transgress certain limits of oppression even when the effectiveness of extreme measures was beyond doubt, because public opinion at home would not have supported them and a legal government could not have survived them, so Russian totalitarianism is forced to crush opposition and withhold all concessions, even when they may pacify the oppressed countries for the time being and make them more reliable in case of war, because such "mildness" would endanger the government at home and place the conquered territories in a privileged position. This last point was, indeed, of considerable importance in the initial stages of the satellite system, when the main concern of the ruling imperialist power was not how to maintain a distinction between national and colonial areas, but on the contrary how to equalize conditions in the newly con-j quered territories down to the level of Soviet Russia herself. Russia's post-', war expansion was not caused, and her rule of the conquered territories is i not determined, by economic considerations; the profit motive, so conspicuous in Europe's overseas imperialism, is replaced here by sheer power considerations. But these are not of a national character and not led by the interest of Russia herself, although it is true that for almost a decade the Moscow rulers seemed interested in nothing more than robbing their satellites of their industrial and other possessions and forcing them into grossly unfair trade agreements. Yet the very neglect with which the Russians used to treat their spoils from dismantled industries, which were frequently ruined even before shipped to Russia, indicates that their true aim was much rather 1 to force the satellite standard of life down than to raise their own. This trend has now been reversed and large quantities of coal, iron ore, oil as well as agricultural products are shipped back into the subject regions whose needs have become a serious drain on Russian resources and have caused severe shortages in the USSR. The goal is again equalization of conditions. However, these and other distinctions between Western national and Russian totalitarian imperialism do not go to the heart of the matter. For the immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British, Dutch or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually succeeded, and therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in the form of the so-called pan-movements—pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism —was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only does totalitarianism, nazism no less than bolshevism, owe a heavy debt to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism in matters of ideology and organization; their expansion program, though global in scope and thereby distinguished from those of the pan-movements, follows the aims of continental imperialism. The main point here is that the strategy of expansion follows geographic continuity and extends from a power center to a widening periphery 506 TOTALITARIANISM which then is supposed to gravitate "naturally" toward its center. This co hesive extension could of course never have tolerated a dichotomy betweei. home government and colonial rule; and since continental imperialism intended to found its "empire" in Europe itself, it did not depend upon a color line to distinguish between "higher and lower breeds"; instead it proposed to treat European peoples as colonials under the rule of a master race of Germanic or Slavic origin. The word "satellite" is indeed a very appropriate metaphor for the Russian version of totalitarian imperialism. Cohesive extension, and neither far-flung possessions nor the engineering of communist revolutions in distant countries, spells the present bolshevist strategy for global conquest. (It is indeed quite likely that Russia would be almost as unhappy as America if, through some queer accident of chaotic conditions, the Communist Party should be able to seize power legally in France.) Since the expansion is continuous and starts from the national frontier, it can easily hide its ultimate aims behind traditional nationalist claims; thus, Stalin's demands at Yalta would hardly have been granted so easily if the allied statesmen had not felt that he demanded no more than what Russian foreign policy had traditionally aimed at. It was the same misunderstanding Hitler profited from at Munich when he claimed he wanted no more than the annexation of German territory in Austria and Czechoslovakia and the liberation of German minorities. The satellite system itself, however, is neither the only nor the most natural version of totalitarian imperialism. It must be seen against the background of Nazi imperialism, with which the Russian model has only one thing in common, the insistence on cohesive expansion; Hitler's lack of interest in acquiring overseas possessions or pressing the nationalist German claim for restitution of former German colonies was notorious. Nazi Germany ruled Western Europe through Quislings, corrupt native politicians and collaborators, and carried out a policy of depopulation and extermination in the East with the aim of having these emptied lands colonized by elite troops after the war. Moscow's agents in the satellite countries are no Quislings, but old and tested members of the communist movement, and as such they are in no worse a position in the face of their Moscow masters than any Ukrainian or White Russian bureaucrat, who, also, is supposed to sacrifice the national interests of his people to the demands of the international movement or Moscow. And not even Stalin, it seems, wanted to exterminate the populations of the satellite countries and to recolonize the territory. Another alternative for Russian imperialism would have been to rule this whole region like the Baltic countries, without the intermediary of local authorities, that is, to incorporate them directly into the Soviet Empire which claims to be the Union of federal republics. The satellite system is clearly a compromise and perhaps a temporary one. It was born in the post-war constellation of two great powers agreeing between themselves about their spheres of influence, albeit in a hostile manner. As such, the satellite system is the Russian answer to the American system of alliances, and their sham independence is important to Russia as EPILOGUE 507 the reflection of the intact national sovereignty of America's allies. The metaphor, unfortunately, is again only too appropriate; for it corresponds to the fears every country must feel when it goes into an alliance with one of the super-powers, -a fear, that is, not so much of losing its identity altogether as of becoming a "satellite" country gravitating in the orbit, and kept alive only by the force of attraction, of the central power. And certainly the danger of the coexistence of two hostile super-powers is that every system of alliances initiated by either will automatically degenerate into a satellite system until the whole world is sucked into their power orbits. It has been American policy to divide the world into communist, allied and neutral countries with the aim of preserving the balance between the two super-powers by recognizing in fact, if not de jure, the respective spheres of influence and by insisting on the neutrality of the rest.20 No matter how uneasy this balance of power may be, the image of American foreign policy is essentially that of a stable structure. But Russian foreign policy is guided by a different image in which there are no neutral countries. Disregarding as irrelevant the small European neutrals like Switzerland, and focussing their attention chiefly on Asia and Africa, the Russians, as Khrushchev recently pointed out, reckon with a force of revolutionary nationalism in addition to American "imperialism" and Russian-Chinese communism, so that the important third part of the world consists of areas where, according to communism, the national revolution is on the agenda of history and with it an automatic increase of Russia's sphere of influence. Insofar as Russian utterances about the possibilities of peaceful competition between the two super-powers are more than propaganda talk, it is not a competition in the production of cars, refrigerators and butter, but a competition in the gradual enlargement of the two respective spheres of influence that is at stake. Although the satellite system may have been born as a compromise between the inherent tendencies of totalitarian domination and the need to maintain a facsimile of normal foreign policy with regard to the free world, the devices of rulership developed by Russian imperialism were quite in agreement with it. In every instance, the conquest by the might of the Soviet empire was enacted as though a seizure of power by a native party had taken place. The elaborate preparatory game in the forties when first, prior to full bolshevization, several parties were tolerated and then liquidated in favor of a one-party dictatorship, served to fortify the illusion of independent domestic developments. What Moscow did was to create exact replicas not only of its own form of government but of the developments which had led up to it. In order to make sure that the development would not lead in an "incorrect" direction, it took care even at the time of Popular Front tactics to reserve the Ministry of Interior for Communists, thus remaining in control of the police, which had been set up in nucleo by Soviet police units accompanying the occupation army. The police was organized 20 The sorry spectacle of the free world's strict non-intervention in Hungarian affairs and even toleration of a military invasion by Russian troops has shown to what a degree this recognition is a fait accompli. 508 TOTALITARIANISM in orthodox totalitarian fashion, an elite spy group within the police charged with informing on the ordinary members of the police who in turn informed on the party members and the population at large. The bolshevization of the country was introduced through the same show trials of prominent partv members we know from Russia, while here, too, the less prominent ones were deported to concentration camps, presumably in Russia. From the beginning, moreover, this police spy net was duplicated by a similar organization established by the Russian army, and the only distinction between the two competing bodies was "that they served different masters within one Soviet oligarchy." This duplication and multiplication of offices is also in line with orthodox totalitarian institutions. And like its model in Russia the police in the satellite countries kept "cadre-cards" for every citizen in the country, on which presumably not only compromising information was recorded, but information on associations, friends, family, and acquaintances which is much more valuable for totalitarian terror. Yet, while the police was set up in strict accordance with the Russian model, the device of creating replicas and staffing them with native personnel was not followed. This was the only institution in which Russian advisers did not stay in the background but openly supervised the natives and even ran the show trials. Something similar seems to have happened to the satellite armies, which after the Hungarian uprising were put under the command of Russian officers, but while this military control was clearly a reaction against unforeseen developments, the control of the police was planned as though the Russian rulers thought that everything would follow automatically once this most important device of total domination had set the mechanism into motion. There is, however, another rather inconspicuous but not uninteresting difference between the Russian and the satellite system, which concerns the method of selecting rank and file members of the police. Here, too, the Russians had to fall back upon experiences in the early stages of totalitarian rule and rely upon criminal and otherwise compromised elements in the population. This stands in stark contrast to the system the Russians have been practicing for more than twenty-five years now, in which the police appoints its new members from the rank and file of the party and even from the population at large. The point is that members of the NKVD are drafted into police service in almost the same way as all citizens are drafted into military service. This flaw in reproduction obviously is caused by the time lag in totalitarian development we mentioned above; in the satellite countries the police is still an "elite" body in the original sense of the word, whose members are chosen according to characteristics which distinguish them not only from the ordinary citizen but also from the ordinary party member. Up to now, this time element has thwarted Moscow's attempts to create exact replicas of the Russian government in the satellite countries. We do not know whether this time lag would have become so dangerously notice- EPILOGUE 509 tnents in uncalculated directions. At any event, it was at that moment that the facsimile character of the satellite governments, with its slavish imitation of the Moscow masters, took its revenge. For the destalinization period and the succession crisis, which did not create major disturbances in Russia proper, had their most dangerous consequences in those countries, Poland and Hungary, which followed Russia most obediently in destalinization, while Rumania and Albania and even Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, where the Stalinists had succeeded in keeping power against the Moscow trend, remained quiet and loyal. No doubt, from the viewpoint of totalitarian imperialism, destalinization was a major mistake. It is chiefly this difference in reaction to developments in Russia which explains certain diversities of present conditions in the satellite countries, and this diversity is due to certain failures of totalitarian imperialism; it does not indicate a new, more promising stage in its development. The seriousness of these failures is best gauged by the number of Soviet divisions stationed in the satellite countries—28 garrisons are still needed to occupy Hungary while Hungarian soldiers, now commanded directly by Russian officers, can still not be trusted with weapons, and the situation is hardly much better elsewhere. The presence of Russian troops, though legalized by the Warsaw pact which could conveniently be modelled on NATO, may help to destroy the illusion of independence for the sake of which the whole system was devised and which in itself, even disregarding all other atrocities, constitutes a worse hypocrisy than any committed by imperialist Europe in its colonial rule. Sitting on bayonets is not only an old-fashioned and rather uncomfortable device of domination, it is a serious setback to totalitarian aspirations which had hoped to be able to keep the satellites in the Moscow orbit by the sheer force of ideology and terror. But until now these setbacks have not been able to break the spell of attraction this system exerts in Asia and Africa, that is, in all regions whose political and emotional life is still tuned to the reaction against an older imperialism where foreigners openly assumed power. Unfortunately, these people, without much experience in politics in general and in modern politics in particular, are only too easy to fool; they are apt to conclude that whatever this is, it is not imperialism as they knew it, and whatever the faults of the regime may be, the principle of racial equality is not violated. This is not likely to change so long as the former colonial people are color conscious instead of freedom minded. The failures of totalitarian imperialism should be taken no less seriously than the successes of Soviet technicians and engineers. But neither the failures of 1956 nor the successes of 1957 indicate a new development of this form of government from within, either in the direction of enlightened despotism or some other form of dictatorship. If the dramatic events of the Hungarian revolution demonstrate anything, it is at best the dangers which may grow out of the lawlessness and formlessness inherent in the very dynamics of this regime and so glaringly apparent in its inability to solve the succession problem. At present, this danger is past; Khrushchev seized power through a careful repetition of all the methods Stalin used in his rise to power, and we 510 TOTALITARIANISM will again be followed by a full-fledged terror like that of the thirties. More important, we cannot even tell whether the succession crisis would have become dangerous if it had not been for the presence of the satellites and their insufficient training in totalitarianism. One may suspect that only the coincidence of the succession crisis with recent expansion brought about actual danger to the regime. Still, the danger signs of 1956 were real enough, and although today they are overshadowed by the successes of 1957 and the fact that the system was able to survive, it would not be wise to forget them. If they promise anything at all, it is much rather a sudden and dramatic collapse of the whole regime than a gradual normalization. Such a catastrophic development, as we learned from the Hungarian revolution, need not necessarily entail chaos—though it certainly would be rather unwise to expect from the Russian people, after forty years of tyranny and thirty years of totalitarianism, the same spirit and the same political productivity which the Hungarian people showed in their most glorious hour. Index Abetz, Otto, 338 Africa,-78, 79, 130-31, 147, 186-207, 213, 440, 507, 509. See also South Africa Ahlwardt, Hermann, 108 Aksakov, K. S„ 226, 233 Albania, 509 Alexander II, 239 Alexander the Great, 132 Algeria, 50, 102, 111-12, 118, 127, 129, 134,207 Alsace, 47, 103, 125,411 Alter, William, 164 America, 186, 440, 506-507. See also United States Anissimov, Ivan, 484, 492 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 166, 167 Asia, 182, 186, 206, 313, 507, 509 Assemblée Nationale, 18, 33 Augustine, St., 301, 479 Auschwitz, 446 Australia, 128, 132, 150, 182, 186, 197, 199, 204, 440 Austria, 44, 79, 86, 224, 253, 260 f., 279, 315, 413, 427, 446, 497, 506 Austria-Hungary, 5, 16, 37, 42 ff., 45, 64-65, 101 f., 155, 222, 224, 227- 43, 245, 259 f., 265,268,277 Avtorkhanov, A., 390, 431 Bagdad Railroad, 136 Bakunin, Michael, 328, 330 Baltic States, 277, 309, 417, 481, 506 Balzac, Honoré de, 91, 141, 155, 336 Bank of England, 26 Banque de France, 19 Bantu tribes, 187, 194, 204 Barnato, Barney, 199, 200, 202, 203 Barnato Diamond Trust, 203 Barrěs, Maurice, 93, 94, 96, 110, 112, 116, 179, 226 Basch, Victor, 102, 111 Bassermann, Ernst, 250 Bataille, Georges, 330, 441 Baudelaire, Charles, 171 Bauer, Otto, 231 f., 239 Bavaria, 16, 17 Bayer, Ernst, 325, 326, 400 Beaconsfield, Lady, 69 Beaconsfield, Earl of, see Disraeli, Benjamin Beck, F., 403, 418, 425, 429-30, 434, 435, 450 Beit, Afred, 200, 202, 203 Belgian Congo, 130, 185 Belgium, 130, 133, 279, 397 Bell, Sir Hesketh, 130, 154 Benda, Julien, 334 Beneš, Eduard, 273, 276 Benjamin, Walter, 79, 143 Berdyaev, Nicolai, 336-37 Beria, L. P., 406, 483, 484, 486 Berlin, 57-62, 85, 265, 402, 406 Bernanos, Georges, 50, 93, 101, 104, 107 Best, Werner, 338, 369, 383, 389, 400 Bettelheim, Bruno, 439, 444, 445, 449, 451, 453 Binding, Rudolf, 328 Birkenau, 439 Bismarck, Otto von, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, 35,45,65, 124, 125,228 Bleichroeder, Gerson, 18, 20, 21, 32, 35, 97, 136 Blok, Alexander, 328 Blomberg, 414 Bloy, Leon, 242 Blum, Leon, 289 Bluntschli, Johann Casper, 253 Bodin, Jean, 230 Boeckel, Otto, 38 Boerne, Ludwig, 47, 63, 64, 65