Always interesting to note the way that some people (like, you know, Arendt) insist on running together Nazism and Communism(/Bolshevism). People are still at it:During these sessions Elke Urban models herself on Margot Honecker [above, beaming!], the leader's wife who was also a hardline education minister. She said that only one group had dared to stand up and defend the dissident pupil during her classes. "I deliberately create a totalitarian atmosphere and I am still always shocked how quickly and easily people are conditioned by it," she said. "East Germany may have left a pile of Stasi files behind rather than a pile of corpses, but the similarities with the Nazi regime are there.""Nazi, Stasi, Germany's festering half-rhyme," as Garton-Ash has put it.
Trouble is, they then go on to show up why that argument doesn't really hold water.
But museum directors like Ms Urban are not ready to apply the same techniques to the Nazi era. "There are too many neo-Nazis around who would probably relish the chance of sitting in a National Socialist classroom. We don't dare to do it."Zizek has been fairly clear on this, now Badiou is also saying it often: there is something worth retrieving in communism, in spite of its horrific manifestations. The difference, surely, is a matter of the political and ethical commitments mouthed by these two 'totalitarianisms', the kernels of these two different politics. The idea of an equal, inclusive society makes intuitive sense; the idea of a society riven by friend-enemy distinctions* along race/ethnic lines, not so much; the idea of a teacher inculcating values of community and fairness is OK; the idea of a teacher slagging off Jews and running out the gamut of inhuman insults about abject outsiders, not so good.
[*Clearly this was trotted (!) out in Soviet times too, but I think the retrievable kernel(s) are about first principles: there is an argument, which even Arednt kind of admits, that the early days of Soviet Communism were not so concerned with bloodletting and opening up these internal fronts. Those grand days of peasant kicking were yet to come. Instead, we're talking about Russia, 1917. Although perhaps, to be fair, we should be talking about Berlin, 1933? Were Jews integral to Nazism, or a kind of lynchpin -- as Bauman argues in Holocaust and Modernity? Could it have been anyone, or did it have to be the Jews, perverse lodestone of many a nationalist dunce? Is it not just about the structure of us-versus-them, a question of extreme and violently instrumentalised boundary maintenance?]
S.N. Eisenstadt puts these matters in a helpful light in his recent two volume work, Comparative Civilisations and Multiple Modernities -- both a doorstopper and a bravura performance.
It was in so far as such multifaceted modes of construction of collective identities and of strong but flexible centres faltered that the two major forms of absolutising tendencies, bearing within themselves the kernels of barbarism, of destruction, of drastic exclusion, demonisation and annihilation of others -- the Communist and the extreme fascist, especially the National Socialist movements and regimes -- triumphed.Same, but different.
Within each of these movements and regimes instituted by them there developed strong tendencies to exclusivism and to barbarism -- as has been recently stressed in the discourse around Alan Besancon's theses about the equivalence of Communism and National Socialism in and around the publication [of] The Black Book of Communism. But contrary to the claim to a total equivalence of the barbaric tendencies of these two types of regimes, and despite many similarities between them, there was a crucial difference between them. This difference, as Leszek Kolakowski and Martin Malla have shown in their comments on Besancon, was rooted in the attitudes of these respective movements and regimes to the universalistic and concomitant potentially -- even if only potentially -- inclusivist components of the modern cultural and political program. The socialist and communist movements were fully set within the framework of the cultural program of modernity, above all of the Enlightenment and of the Revolutions, and their criticism of the modern capitalist bourgeois society was made in terms of non-completeness of the modern program -- entailing the potentiality of continual inclusion -- even if these potentialities were strongly counteracted by the barbaric exclusivist practices of these regimes rooted in their absolutising tendencies. Hence within the Communist movements and regimes with all their destructive annihilating forces there could develop tendencies of resistance which could at least potentially challenge the barbaric and exclusivist practices of the regimes.
The extreme fascist or national-socialist regimes, aimed above all at the reconstruction of the boundaries of modern collectivities, negated the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity and promulgated ideologies and praxis of total exclusion, total barbarisation without possibilities of challenge from within to the total demonisation of the excluded. It is indeed when these two absolutising tendencies come together -- as in Cambodia -- that they give rise to some of the most gruesome aspects of modern barbarism.
