[spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms

[Soenke Zehle]

LRB | Vol. 27 No. 6 dated 17 March 2005 | Slavoj Zizek
The Two Totalitarianisms
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/print/zize01_.html>
Slavoj Zizek

A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the 
newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of 
the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of 
conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from 
ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist 
symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This 
proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in 
Europe’s ideological identity.

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in 
the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but 
still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye 
Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many 
CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from 
‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to 
find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi 
songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and 
Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the 
Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes 
and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis 
would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a 
Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism 
conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to 
which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how 
depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But 
for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological 
constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they 
were guilty by virtue of being Jews.

In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised 
in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are 
all its servants, the leader included. A Nazi leader, having delivered a 
speech, stood and silently accepted the applause, but under Stalinism, 
when the obligatory applause exploded at the end of the leader’s speech, 
he stood up and joined in. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, 
Hitler responds to the Nazi salute by raising his hand and saying: ‘Heil 
myself!’ This is pure humour because it could never have happened in 
reality, while Stalin effectively did ‘hail himself’ when he joined 
others in the applause. Consider the fact that, on Stalin’s birthday, 
prisoners would send him congratulatory telegrams from the darkest 
gulags: it isn’t possible to imagine a Jew in Auschwitz sending Hitler 
such a telegram. It is a tasteless distinction, but it supports the 
contention that under Stalin, the ruling ideology presupposed a space in 
which the leader and his subjects could meet as servants of Historical 
Reason. Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal.

We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who 
risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic 
deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one 
in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’. Herein lies 
the flaw (and the bias) of all attempts, such as that of the 
conservative historian Ernst Nolte, to adopt a neutral position – i.e. 
to ask why we don’t apply the same standards to the Communists as we 
apply to the Nazis. If Heidegger cannot be pardoned for his flirtation 
with Nazism, why can Lukács and Brecht and others be pardoned for their 
much longer engagement with Stalinism? This position reduces Nazism to a 
reaction to, and repetition of, practices already found in Bolshevism – 
terror, concentration camps, the struggle to the death against political 
enemies – so that the ‘original sin’ is that of Communism.

In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas’s principal opponent in the 
so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be 
regarded as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did 
Nazism, reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an 
excessive reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were 
merely copies of those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism. 
Nolte’s idea is that Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian 
form, and the difference between them consists only in the difference 
between the empirical agents which fill their respective structural 
roles (‘Jews’ instead of ‘class enemy’). The usual liberal reaction to 
Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, reducing it to a secondary echo of 
the Communist evil. However, even if we leave aside the unhelpful 
comparison between Communism – a thwarted attempt at liberation – and 
the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede Nolte’s central 
point. Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist threat; it did 
effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between Aryans and 
Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the Freudian 
sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle onto 
racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes 
in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is 
in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political 
struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism 
inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign 
(Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is 
not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal 
antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a 
different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial 
difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of 
the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.

It’s appropriate, then, to recognise the tragedy of the October 
Revolution: both its unique emancipatory potential and the historical 
necessity of its Stalinist outcome. We should have the honesty to 
acknowledge that the Stalinist purges were in a way more ‘irrational’ 
than the Fascist violence: its excess is an unmistakable sign that, in 
contrast to Fascism, Stalinism was a case of an authentic revolution 
perverted. Under Fascism, even in Nazi Germany, it was possible to 
survive, to maintain the appearance of a ‘normal’ everyday life, if one 
did not involve oneself in any oppositional political activity (and, of 
course, if one were not Jewish). Under Stalin in the late 1930s, on the 
other hand, nobody was safe: anyone could be unexpectedly denounced, 
arrested and shot as a traitor. The irrationality of Nazism was 
‘condensed’ in anti-semitism – in its belief in the Jewish plot – while 
the irrationality of Stalinism pervaded the entire social body. For that 
reason, Nazi police investigators looked for proofs and traces of active 
opposition to the regime, whereas Stalin’s investigators were happy to 
fabricate evidence, invent plots etc.

We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of 
Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School 
failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. 
The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), which 
suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, 
Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally 
organised, ‘administered’ society; Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism 
(1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of 
Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s, 
the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging 
dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil 
society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting, 
but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism. 
How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the 
conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from 
analysing the nightmare of ‘actually existing socialism’? And was its 
focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the 
real trauma?

It is here that one has to make a choice. The ‘pure’ liberal attitude 
towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, 
based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the 
rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It 
is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ 
than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to 
compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the 
conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an 
understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 
2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation 
that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed 
anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of 
Berlusconi’s idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project 
to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on 
anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand 
the European conservatives’ call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.

Slavoj Zizek, a psychoanalyst and dialectical materialist philosopher, 
is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and international 
co-director of the Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck College in London.