[spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms

[Aliette Guibert]

This debate between the European members of parliament is stupid. There is
no bad or a check icon. There are iconoclastic signs and the others which
are not. Nothing of that kind
has credit note with the evil or the good but strictly with the faith at a
special moment.

There is no check or of bad totalitarianism. The totalitarianism it is the
totalitarianism: it is always bad for the liberties, it is always criminal -
even totalitarianism of the good is criminal.

As for the disappearence of the sickle and the hammer, as for the
nazis'swastika (from India): nobody will remember more the state of mind of
societies, the injustice in
front of the production of industrial time, the rationalist
administration, which have preexisted. The swastika since the Nazis, if it
was taken back by the neonazis, was so much used by the extreme
left-wing Punks to appoint the manipulations and the abuses in the
Press, the visionaries of our present years from the 70s, and it is not it
which acted formerly, the icon unifier, but arms were stretched
out in sign of submission.

What is needed it is not the disappearance of the symbol but the education
of the fact that they represented of concretely disastrous for the
people - including the Nazi project which is itself a modern project
that we deny or not. We'll do not settle the history short of negationism
without expecting for the worst futures from it.

The sickle and the hammer were symbols of the peoples revolted to the
assault of the power before the power deceived it, etc. it was a
progressive symbol even if Stalin connoted i later ; and if Hitler had not
promoted
the swastika, nobody would worry about it today.

No totalitarianism is reduced to its iconography.

No iconography can be reducible in the totalitarianism - it would be too
easy for the offspring! The problem it is only the context and the
environment of the iconographic quotation.

If the totalitarianism is inflexible it is surely no the iconography
which is the main vehicle but the structure, the administration, the
rationalism objectives and objectal projects which were not questioned after
the
liberation of 1945, it is an integral part of the modern society and
matérialist postmodernism; the liberties being got rid of, the free traffic
of
the disinformation can indeed come true.

Today we are manipulated in all the loss of our liberties in all the loss of
our liberties in the name of the good. It is exactly this justification to
the social subjection in Big
Brother. Read again it; it is exactly the society which
Bush is establishing for a long time in the United States, for example
against the CAE and the others, every day a little more against every
American citizen.

Negationism does not open the critical cognitive doors. More we see removing
liberties more we get out the immunizing social defence connected to the
informated societies. From a generation to the other one. Now we have to
think of the transmission so that generation following ones can think of the
radical criticisms leading to the united change and to the tolerance of the
cultures.

Without such projects this moral Europe makes me more and more fear. I am
afraid that the worst - which for some of us is already there - reproduces.

I am against all the process of censorsshops -from the digital economy of
the web to the icons of the totalitarism whatever they would be-. I am for
the critical education to the autonomous consciousness.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle at web.de>
To: <spectre at mikrolisten.de>
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 1:40 PM
Subject: [spectre] Zizek, The Two Totalitarianisms


> 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.
>
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