The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism

I

CONCEPTS

1

Totalitarian Religions

(1952)

WALDEMAR GURIAN

We observe today an astonishing spectacle. Just as during the worst period of the French Revolution, Christianity, and particularly the Catholic Church, is under systematic attack in wide parts of the world, in the Soviet Union, in its European satellites, and in Red China. These countries are under control of groups which profess an atheistic doctrine. The official doctrine of the Soviet world expresses the belief that religion will disappear; it permits the application of tactics which strangulate Church life slowly, but successfully. Leading members of the hierarchy have been arrested and sentenced; schools and monasteries have been closed down; religious orders disbanded; missionary work of centuries has been destroyed. All this is accomplished by systematic and carefully planned campaigns. Every means of deception is used. In profoundly Catholic countries like Poland, caution prevails; in others brutal terror is applied. And all measures against Church life are presented, despite the clear atheism of the official doctrine, as measures against reactionaries and political counter-revolutionaries; churchmen are accused of being American agents and allies of Imperialism and Capitalism.I

But it is not only the Communists who have persecuted the Church in our time; the anti-Communist Nazi regime tried also to destroy the hurch, though this attack was made in the name of another doctrine, a racial philosophy. What both systems, Communism and Nazism, have in common is their totalitarian character. This common totalitarianism of course does not mean that they must always be friendly to each other; on the contrary, both fought against each other, accusing each other of being barbaric, inhuman, sadistic.

In this article I will not try to present the history of the antireligious policies of the two totalitarian systems of our time. I will try to show the basis of these policies, the spirit which makes them develop an absolute hostility against Christ and His Church.

The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements. They aim not at changes of political and social institutions, but at the reshaping of the nature of man and society. They claim to have the true and obligatory knowledge about life and its aims. They emphasize that they are based on doctrines which describe and determine totally and completely the existence and activities of men and society. It does not matter if these doctrines are presented as the exclusively correct expression of a scientific knowledge of society and the laws according to which history develops—as the Marxist Bolshevik variety of totalitarianism does—or if they pretend to justify the domination of the master race and express the myth destined to prevail in the twentieth century as the National Socialist variety asserts. The pretense of having the true doctrine gives to the totalitarian movements their basic character. They are intolerant. They aim at the extirpation of all other doctrines and philosophies. They cannot tolerate any limitation of their claims and their power. Totalitarian movements cannot conceive of realms of life outside and beyond their control; they cannot accept the fact that there are other doctrines or institutions with the right to remain independent, having a dignity and a validity of their own. That they do accept for a time, as long as power considerations demand it, the existence of other groups and other doctrines does not mean that they abandon their aim of absolute domination, of making all other doctrines disappear.

It is a fatal misunderstanding of totalitarian movements to confuse and identify them with authoritarian political regimes. True, authoritarian regimes do not know and accept real democratic institutions and processes, for example, periodical elections based upon universal suffrage which determine the composition of government; they reject constitutional limitations which do not depend upon decisions of the ruler. But they accept (or at least do not reject) an objective traditional social order which is independent of the ruler and the ruling group. Authoritarian regimes do not claim to bring a new faith, an all-embracing doctrine determining the whole of life; though they are nondemocratic, opposed to representative government based on universal suffrage, rejecting parties and the political influence of public opinion which expresses itself in free, not controlled, discussions.

The authoritarian regimes which in their traditional monarchic form became outmoded after the French Revolution, reappear today as reactions against the dissolution of unifying forces and institutions among nations. Nations in our time are often threatened by anarchy, by the deadly strife of parties which put their particular interests above the common good; for the parties have developed into instruments of the egoistic interests of their members or leaders who have forgotten their obligation towards the community as a whole. Authoritarian regimes of today may try, as the absolute monarchies of the Enlightenment did, to control all institutions—including the Church—claiming that the governments know best what the welfare of the community requires. They are surely antidemocratic, rejecting the participation of the people by national suffrage in government; they believe in a system of government exercised from above by a wise man or by a ruling elite. But they are not based upon the belief that the political regime must regulate the whole of life, that everything, including science and cultural activities, is subordinate to the movement which shapes the public power, that the doctrine of this movement is the key to the understanding of history and nature of society as well as of the destiny of man. The authoritarian regimes do not deny the existence of an objective order which is beyond the reach of political power, and they do not claim that political power determines what is the objective order and the truth. The authoritarian regimes express political views not shared by those who accept democracy and who believe that policies ought to be influenced by public opinion and its discussions. But they are not based upon political religions; their political power, unlike totalitarian power, does not determine the whole life of men and society.

Today, of course, it is not always easy to distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The Fascist regime in Mussolini’s Italy rose with totalitarian pretenses; Mussolini himself wrote an article about the Fascist doctrine. But I agree fully with Hannah Arendt, who in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951) cited Nazism and Bolshevism as the prototypes of totalitarianism. For Mussolini employed claims about a particular Fascist doctrine for propaganda purposes in order to justify his superiority over the liberal-parliamentary regime of the past. The Fascist doctrine did not prevent him—despite all clashes and conflicts from coming to terms with the Church. He accepted—true, for pragmatic reasons—the Catholic tradition prevailing in Italy. His rule had an authoritarian character despite totalitarian trimmings; he emphasized—as authoritarians are inclined to do—the power of the state, and therefore the right of the state to control all life and all institutions, including the Church. The Fascist attitude towards the Church brought about a renewal of the traditional conflicts between the Church and a strong State which would try to put the Church under its control, denying her independence in public life. Fascism tried, for example, to control Catholic Action; this attempt caused Pius XI to write the encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno.II

But despite all rhetorical boasts against which the Church took a stand Italian Fascism did not try seriously to replace the faith of the Church by a new religion, a political religion making the totalitarian movement the single force dominating all realms of life and giving true meaning to society and men.

What has been said about Italian Fascism must be said too about Franco’s Spain. Franco’s regime is authoritarian, but not totalitarian. It uses fewer totalitarian trimmings than Mussolini did—for it appeals more directly and intensely to Spanish traditions. It opposes liberalism and modern democracy in the name of those traditions, and it tries to emphasize the power of the state, but it does not assert the mission of a movement destined to bring a new faith and to shape the whole of life correspondingly.

The difficulty in making clear the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes is increased by the tendencies of totalitarian movements to utilize both traditional ideas and conservative-minded groups to bring themselves and their policies into power. A particularly striking example of this tendency was provided by Hitler and his National-Socialism. One of his most efficient propaganda slogans was the claim that he alone was able to crush Communism—as whose allies liberals and democrats were denounced—and that, therefore, he would preserve and rescue traditional values and religion. He was anti-Communist; so his propaganda tried to spread the wrong impression that his movement was pro-Christian. It was overlooked by his conservative admirers that one can fight one error not only in the name of truth, but in the name of other errors. Not only did the party program mention positive Christianity, but the first proclamation of Hitler after his appointment as chancellor mentioned protection of religion. Likewise, the Bolsheviks, who began as the fiercest opponents and destroyers of all traditional institutions and beliefs and as indefatigable workers for an international atheistic classless society, have learned to press traditional forces into their service. Stalin’s Soviet Union proclaims today that its policies realize Russian national aspirations; and the state Church of the Tsarist past is again utilized as an instrument of the government and its propaganda. Therefore, the strong state whose rulers are not dependent upon elections, parties, and a free public opinion, appears as characteristic of totalitarian regimes; their claim to have an all-embracing doctrine seems to be only an instrument for the erection of a political system where the state concentrates in its hands the maximum of power.

But I think this attempt to interpret totalitarianism only as a particularly ruthless form of authoritarianism and to explain away the importance of the totalitarian doctrine prevents real understanding of the political religions of the twentieth century. These political religions, the various kinds of totalitarianism, aim not only at the establishment of a strong state, but at the complete transformation and control of men and society. The totalitarian state which intervenes in all realms of life is not the end but merely an instrument of the totalitarian movement. The decisive feature of this movement is the acceptance of a doctrine which justifies absolute domination by those who have accepted it—the leaders and members of the totalitarian party. This doctrine does not exclude practical adaptations. The masses are not told the consequences of the doctrine; they must be seduced and tamed by giving the impression (especially before power is achieved) that their needs and demands will be satisfied. The Bolsheviks said in 1917 that they were for peace—the masses, the Russian soldiers and peasants did not understand that they were really only for the ending of the imperialist wars, for the transformation of these wars into revolutionary wars. They told the peasants that all landed estates would be turned over to them. The peasants did not realize that all land, including their own, would be finally put under the control of the state. The Nazis told the middle-class businessmen that they would abolish department stores, and end an economic order dominated by the easy gains of interest-takers. The nature of the totalitarian doctrines was but slowly realized. Hitler introduced even the measures against the Jews only step by step. He began with the ConcordatIII

in order to deceive the Catholics about his Church policies. The final status promised by the totalitarian doctrine can even become a myth whose realization is beyond human control. Stalin has extended the transitional period during which a strong political power would be necessary; therefore, he has delayed the withering away of the state as an instrument of coercion to the uncontrollable and unpredictable far-distant future.

What matters is not the content of totalitarian doctrine; its function of establishing total domination by the totalitarian leaders and elites is decisive—to use an expression of Hannah Arendt. Totalitarian doctrine justifies a continuous drive for more and more power as well as the dynamism and expansionism without end characteristic of totalitarian regimes; totalitarian doctrine makes totalitarian rulers deal with men and human groups as pure material; for what matters are not human beings and their reality, but the constant proof presented again and again that the doctrine is right, for it determines reality by power exercised in its name; this power that has no limits it is expanded and demonstrated again and again—becomes an end in itself, for it is proved to be meaningful because it corresponds to the doctrine and therefore justifies the actions of those who realize and interpret it.

Men and groups are not only to obey and to avoid any public opposition as in authoritarian regimes—but they are forced to be active and enthusiastic supporters. They are forced in such a way that they do not appear to be forced. They are liquidated, thrown away as if they were unnecessary and useless parts of a machine—according to the whims of the rulers, who show by this behavior their limitless, all-embracing power. The totalitarian masters shape the world according to their doctrine; any reality not corresponding to the doctrine is wrong, and its existence is rejected if the doctrine demands it. Hannah Arendt illustrates this attitude by mentioning a story which denies that there are other subways besides those of Moscow, for to admit of other subways would be to oppose Soviet propaganda whose claims the inhabitants of the Soviet Union must accept as reality. The policy of the iron curtain is a consequence of the totalitarian attempt to make the totalitarian world appear as the real world. The authoritarian regime establishes a form of political rule; the totalitarian regime tries to create an artificial world and impose it as reality. This world has to correspond to the demands of the totalitarian doctrine as interpreted by the rulers so that their power is constantly maintained and demonstrated by expansions. A vicious circle characterizes totalitarian rule: the doctrine justifies the absolute domination by such a group as the party—the instrument for the realization of Socialism and Communism or the racial elite—and the doctrine is proved to be true by the successful absolute domination consisting not only in the establishment of the totalitarian state, but in the imposition of an artificial world. God’s order is replaced by a man-made order, the artificial order required by the doctrine and created by the power exercised in its name.

Therefore, the conflict between the Church and the totalitarian regimes goes much deeper than the conflicts between the Church and the authoritarian regimes. The latter are conflicts caused by attempts of the secular power to put the spiritual power with its public functions under its control, to determine, for example, appointments of bishops, to control all educational activities of the Church, to restrict the formation of Catholic associations, to supervise or to forbid religious orders, to make the publication of papal and episcopal pronouncements dependent upon permission by state authorities (the so-called placet). The totalitarian regimes take over all methods of the authoritarian state to control and restrict Church activities; they do not admit, of course, any obligation to regard the Church as modern liberal-democratic regimes do as an association of citizens in whose internal life the government does not interfere. For all associations ought to be under control of the totalitarian movement; their coordination (Gleichschaltung) is carried out as one of the most important policies of the totalitarian regime, and only on account of power politics and propagandist considerations is the Church provisionally exempted from this coordination—Hitler concluded a Concordat not actually to comply with its terms, but to avoid an immediate open conflict with Catholics and to confuse them. The land and other property of the Catholic Church in Poland are not confiscated in order to keep the Catholic believers quiet.

The totalitarian regimes also apply methods and legislative measures which have been used by authoritarian regimes which tried to put the Church under political control, regarding it as an intolerably dangerous competitor of the secular civil authority and threatening loyal behavior towards the government or the nation. But this legislation and these measures are not specific in the totalitarian Church policies. The application of these means by totalitarian regimes has as its aim not the restriction and the control of the public activities of the Church but the complete destruction of religion and the Church. The faith of the Church will be replaced by the myth of the twentieth century, the racialist religion of the leaders of the Nazi movement. True, Rosenberg,IV

the authoritative teacher of the Nazi doctrine, maintained that the racial People’s Church of the future would tolerate Catholic and Protestant chapels, positive Christianity, but racialism would determine what could be accepted as positive and what must be rejected as negative Christianity. The Bolshevik anti-religious religion does not use, as the Nazis did, a misleading pseudo-religious terminology even though asserting that its atheism will necessarily triumph and can afford to accept freedom of religion and conscience. The Communists claim that the realization of Socialism and Communism will destroy the social roots of religious beliefs, which are opiates used either by exploiting groups to fool the masses or by the masses themselves as means of self-deception in order to escape from intolerable realities. If men become masters of society through and in Socialism and Communism, the Bolsheviks as followers of Marxism pretend there will be no need for a God Who has created men and the world—all religious mysteries will evaporate when faced by the reality of the perfect, man-made world of the classless society. The totalitarian movements are hostile to the Church not only on account of their policies towards the Church but on account of their basic belief, of the consciously formulated doctrine which, allegedly, is alone able to explain history and to give the right aim to all human activities.

The totalitarian doctrines are not only political ones, they claim to provide the key to the whole universe, to all realms of human life; they deny to the Church any independence in public activities. They are bitterly opposed to her doctrine, to her influence on the souls of men. This doctrine and this influence must be replaced by the totalitarian ones. Here appears the similarity between the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century and the antireligious ideologies of the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. These ideologies went beyond the original aim of the new French regime to control the Church; they tried to replace its doctrines by new ones corresponding to reason and the true nature of men. Modern totalitarianism is distinct from its predecessor by creating its doctrines as explanations of the historical processes—they can be realized only in their culmination, not at once, immediately, by proclamations, pressure and legislative actions. Marx made satirical remarks about the behavior of BakuninV

who, during one of his putsches, issued a decree abolishing belief in God; the Soviet regime has always pretended to respect religious feelings, but this of course has not prevented all kinds of persecution of religious groups, whereas atheistic propaganda is favored and supported. Hitler carefully avoided publicizing his hostility to Christianity—the Nazis fought allegedly only against so-called political Catholicism and against ministerial intervention in affairs of state. Another distinction is the abandonment of the attempts made, for example, by Robespierre with his introduction of the cult of the Supreme Being to create special new moral-religious cults; some Nazi fanatics did attempt such a creation but the Germanic religion did not work. The modern totalitarian cult is exercised by demonstrations of power and domination by the totalitarian regime and its leaders. Party congresses, May Day processions, incessant adulatory praise of the leaders, constant announcement that a new era has started and that all representatives of old epochs are doomed—these are the cult and the liturgy of the totalitarian movements. The totalitarian movements have their devils, too—not only external enemies but internal traitors, who are constantly unmasked and defeated, purged and liquidated.

Just because the totalitarian movements believe that their doctrine will be victorious and that all reality will be shaped in their image, they are able to apply deceptive tactics. The masses, which are kept in constant motion, must be educated and prepared to understand the goal grasped at the beginning only by the leaders. When the enemy is too strong, complicated maneuvers are necessary. As Lenin put it, it is necessary to retreat one step in order to be able to advance again. The Bolsheviks abandoned their attempts to destroy the prestige of the Orthodox Church or to split it by supporting the faction known as the so-called Living Church which accused the old Church leadership of being reactionary; they realized soon that this policy would not work; but they have continued to expect the disappearance of all religion as a result of their policies—even today when they use the Orthodox Church both as an instrument for their propaganda, and as a means to refute the accusation that antireligious policies prevail in the Soviet Union. A final objective here is also to weaken the Catholic Church; the Catholics of the Greek rite, the so-called Uniates, recognizing the authority of Rome, have been put under the authority of the Patriarch of Moscow. Groups of priests cooperating with Communism are established and favored in order to confuse and split the believers.

The Nazi policies towards the Church at the beginning were more disguised than those of the Bolsheviks. They tried to mislead Christian believers by their opposition to atheistic Communism and by concluding a concordat with Rome. They emphasized always that they were fighting only against political Catholicism and the representatives of religion who—by becoming too power-hungry or even allegedly indulging in vices—were in reality betrayers of the faith. In the name of national unity and the necessity of keeping religion pure the Church was eliminated step by step from the exercise of influence on public life. Catholic schools were abolished, Catholic publications had to stop because of a paper shortage which Nazi publications did not experience. Religious orders no longer had a chance to exist; there was no longer any opportunity to recruit seminarians. But all this was done step by step, cautiously. It is characteristic that GoebbelsVI

prevented the arrest of Bishop Count Galen (who publicly criticized such Nazi policies as the liquidation of insane and feeble-minded people) in accordance with the principle: We do not want martyrs. Churchmen were arrested, allegedly, only because they were criminals and enemies of the national unity, the community of the German people.

Peculiar to totalitarian movements is their attempt to change the center of life. The transcendent world is either absolutely denied as in the Bolshevik belief in the inevitable coming of the atheistic classless society, or it is made into an instrument of purely immanent political and social forces as in the Nazi order. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical of 1937 With Utmost Anxiety, (Mit brennender Sorge) gives a classical analysis of this misuse of religious words and concepts for purely secular meaning. The Pope rejects the Nazi talk about God, which makes God a symbol of the power of a race. He rejects the use of sacred words for the purpose of praising the policy and public acts of the Nazi totalitarian movement. He reveals the misuse of the word justice when it is made to express racial feelings, as in the sentence: Just is what Nordic-Aryan men regard as just.

The fact that a political movement informed and guided by the allegedly just and at the same time true doctrine is put at the center of life makes this doctrine the aim of life. If religion is not openly rejected—and explained away in Marxian fashion as the product of an imperfect society—it is deprived of all dignity and independence by being made a tool of political and social power politics, a collection of myths which strengthen the will to live and die for the totalitarian movement. The politico-social religions compel the swallowing-up of true religion and universal human ethics by arbitrary pseudoscientific and pseudomythical doctrines. These doctrines claim to correspond to and to be reality—because they are backed by groups which, having achieved political power, can make the system of domination established by them appear to be the reality.

The conflict between the Church and totalitarianism is, therefore, not only a conflict of power and influence, but a conflict over the nature of men and society. Totalitarianism will reduce men not merely to cogs in its power machinery but to creatures utilizing all their capacities to celebrate their own enslavement. What is just, what is good, what is beautiful, what is free, is defined by the totalitarian rulers, for they must always be right and competent in all fields according to the doctrine, the obligatory philosophy, pseudotheology and mythology of history. This must be constantly confirmed by demonstrations of public enthusiasm and by display of unceasing efforts to prove that the totalitarian fiat has no limitations.

The Church thus must appear to the totalitarians as an intolerable challenge. Even if they succeed in depriving it of any independent role in public life, the fact remains that the Church is not based upon the totalitarian faith, the totalitarian doctrine. And the Christian faith is not compatible with an image of man which can regard as the meaning of his life only participation in worldly society based either on economic achievements or on the master race. The Catholic faith does not accept belief in the power of man to create by his own forces a world in which he is absolute master and which is absolutely perfect and self-sufficient. The Catholic faith does not permit an absolute domination over men, one which regards them simply as material for the achievement and demonstration of power and as instruments of an earthly development looked upon as necessary by the totalitarian doctrine.

The totalitarian movements, the pseudoreligious movements and exponents of antireligious politico-social religions, have arisen in the twentieth century as products of a religious and spiritual crisis. In the modern secularized world, religion—if not deemed superfluous or unimportant—has continued to be widely accepted only as a traditional force linked with familiar social orders. As these orders experienced a crisis the basic secularistic belief became manifest. What matters is economic productivity and right organization; what matters is political power to form and establish a new society. The totalitarian political religions are expressions of secularist thought in a world where the inherited traditional stability and continuity are threatened or have disappeared. They try to establish again a secure world without uncertainties and internal crises by accepting an interpretation of history and society which claims to be absolute truth, which explains all the failures of the past and present and which announces a happy future. This future will come after a merciless fight to the finish. This belief in the future golden age is connected with a belief in the particular mission of a group, the party which formulates and applies the right revolutionary consciousness of the masses or the racial elite which ends misrule by evil and inferior elements. The present is sacrificed to the future and the individual is regarded as material in and for the necessary and, therefore, just development. World and history are explained by natural laws which are known to those who master the doctrine.

Secularism in its totalitarian form becomes a secular religion, putting a human doctrine in the place of Revelation, a visible worldly society in the place of union with God as the aim of life. Not utilitarian calculations but demonstrations of faith in the unlimited power of the doctrine and its representatives really matter. Utilitarian calculations would limit the policies of expansion and the urge to absolute domination. This totalitarian, immanentist faith cannot be met by an optimistic secularism which is not aware of the fundamental crisis of our time or by an apparently religious attitude for which religion is, despite theoretical denials, indissolubly bound to a particular social order. The pseudocertainty of totalitarianism which establishes by terror and a refined system of pressure a closed pseudoreal world can be opposed only by the true certainty based upon belief in true revelation and by the realization that man is infinitely more than an instrument for life and society in this world, that there are rights and duties of the human person which cannot be sacrificed to a doctrine about political and social development. The conflict between the Church and totalitarianism is, therefore, much more than a conflict between Church and state, for totalitarianism tries to establish a reality in which all human forces and beliefs serve only this world, an earthly society, which is self-sufficient and has no other end than itself. The world leading to God, totalitarianism replaces by a self-sufficient world which, through the effort and struggles of men, makes God appear merely as a superstitious creation of men before they were able to master their life and society or simply as a mythical symbol of the power exercised by their social or racial elites.

I

. For a detailed chronicle of the spectacle here described by Gurian, see Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.

II

. Non Abbiamo Bisogno (We Do Not Need), promulgated on June 29, 1931, was a defense of Catholic Action and other Catholic youth organizations dedicated to religious education and faith cultivation that had come under attack from the Fascist regime of Mussolini.

III

. The Concordat was an agreement signed between the Nazi government and the Vatican in July 1933. In exchange for the Vatican’s pledge not to involve itself in German politics by promoting a political party (e.g., the Catholic Centre Party), the Nazi government legally authorized Church activities such as youth organizations, rallies, etc. The Nazis wasted no time in breaking their pledge and quickly began to undermine the autonomy of these Catholic lay organizations in myriad ways. It is worth pointing out that Gurian knew whereof he spoke. Gurian, after leaving Germany for Switzerland in 1933, published German Letters with another exiled journalist. These letters provide a detailed picture of Nazi policies and the resulting conditions. In 1936 Gurian also published Hitler and the Christians.

IV

. Alfred Rosenberg, an early member of the Nazi party, wrote key Nazi treatises on foreign policy and the nature of German racial purity.

V

. Michael Bakhunin was a nineteenth-century Russian theorist of anarchism.

VI

. Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi minister of propaganda.

2

The Unique Character of a Totalitarian Society

(1954)

CARL J. FRIEDRICH

It is the contention of this paper that (a) Fascist and Communist totalitarian society are basically alike, that is to say are more nearly alike to each other than to any other systems of government and society, and (b) totalitarian society is historically unique and sui generis. These two theses are closely linked and must be examined together. At the outset, it should be stated that these contentions do not presuppose that our understanding of totalitarian society is complete or even adequate; these theses are based upon what we at present know reasonably surely about them. Nor do the two theses presuppose that totalitarian societies are fixed and static entities—on the contrary, it is being assumed that they have undergone and continue to undergo a steady evolution; presumably involving both growth and deterioration.¹

The debate about these causes or origins of totalitarianism, and more especially of Fascism, has run all the way from a primitive bad-man theory to the moral crisis of our time kind of argument. A detailed inspection of the available evidence would seem to suggest that virtually every one of the factors which has been stressed as offering by itself an explanation of the origin of totalitarianism has played its role. For example, in the German case, Hitler’s moral and personal defects, weaknesses in the German constitutional tradition, certain traits involved in the German national character, the Versailles Treaty and its aftermath, the economic crisis and the contradictions of an aging capitalism, the threat of Communism, the decline of Christianity and other spiritual moorings, and so forth have all played a role in the total configuration of factors contributing to the overall result. As in the case of other broad developments in history, only a multiple-factor analysis will do. In keeping with his general philosophical methodological position, the author is presupposing that ta politika are decisive for the patterning of any society.²

The argument of historical uniqueness of any configuration does not mean that it is wholly unique; for nothing is. All historical phenomena belong to broad classes of analytical objects. When we say that the Greek polis was historically unique, we do not mean that there were never any cities, or city-states, but we do mean that the Greek and more particularly the Athenian polis had so many and such striking traits peculiar to it that it deserves to be considered historically unique. History is primarily concerned with individualities, whether these be persons, things, or events, and a sufficiently variegated pattern of distinctive elements therefore constitutes historical uniqueness.³

In passing, one should perhaps safeguard oneself against the objection that everything historically considered is historically unique. This objection, while often made, is not actually correct. A great many events (as well as persons and things) are so nearly alike that they lack that distinctive quality which constitutes historical uniqueness; but it is true that when taken in sufficiently large classes and broad enough perspective, their uniqueness often appears. Thus the monarchy in this or that German territory in the eighteenth century is not in any sense historically unique, but the monarchical paternalism of all these and a number of related societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does indeed constitute what we may call a historically unique configuration.

Why do we say that Fascist and Communist totalitarian society and government are basically alike? In the first instance, the qualifying adverb basically is intended to indicate that they are not wholly alike. Popular and journalistic interpretation has oscillated between these two extremes of proclaiming the two societies as wholly alike or as not at all basically alike. The latter was the prevailing mood during the popular front days in Europe, and in liberal circles in the United States; it was even more popular during the Second World War, and more especially among Allied propagandists. It is, of course, the insistently promoted official Soviet and Hitler party line. The proposition that they are wholly alike is presently favored in the United States and western Europe, and hence it may seem unnecessary to labor the point. But there is, in the first place, a lingering doubt remaining from former days, and there is secondly and perhaps more importantly the problem of the range of alikeness, or to put it another way, the question of what makes them basically alike. For it is obvious that they are not alike in intention. The sharply divergent content of their ideologies proves it. So do the historical facts which show the Fascist movements to arise in reaction to the Communist challenge and to offer themselves to a frightened bourgeoisie as saviors from the Communist threat.I

These facts are so familiar that they do not require documentation. The well-known frauds involved in the argument are part of the pattern of psychic antagonism and combative projection.

It is equally obvious that more of the preceding liberal and constitutional society survives in the Fascist than in the Communist society; but this is in part due to the fact that no liberal, constitutional society preceded Soviet Communism. It is conceivable that at least for a considerable initial period, the situation in this respect would be sharply different in, say, Great Britain or the United States. This tendency of isolated fragments of the preceding state of society to survive has been a most potent source of misinterpretation of the Fascist totalitarian society. In the twenties, Italian totalitarianism was very commonly misinterpreted as being merely this and that, with the trains on time and the beggars off the street thrown in for symbolic measure.⁴

In the thirties, various authors, some Marxist, others of Marxist antecedents, still others just befuddled, undertook to interpret German totalitarianism as either the end phase of capitalism⁵

or of militarist imperialism (in the manner of VeblenII

).⁶

It is not generally appreciated, even by scholars, how profound a shock to Marxist orthodoxy the rise of German Fascism turned out to be. Men of the dogmatic acumen of HilferdingIII

were so struck by it that they felt a complete reassessment of Marxist doctrine was called for.⁷

For there was no trace in Marx and Engels of this eventuality emerging. To be sure, Marx was not unaware (how could he be?) that a frightened bourgeoisie might rally behind a rider on horseback, such as Napoleon III, but this kind of amiable opera bouffe of mid-nineteenth-century politics is a far cry indeed from the totalitarian society of our time. All one has to do is to look at the intellectual life of France in that period to sense the difference. It was a natural escape for such Marxist and Veblenian interpreters to try and depict the totalitarian society Hitler and Himmler were building as nothing but a capitalist one, totally at variance with the socialist society which was being formed in the Soviet Union. Blinded by the dichotomy of capitalism and socialism of the Marxian heritage, and afflicted by its preoccupation with the economic as contrasted with the governmental and political aspects of society, they did not see that the planned, that is to say the thoroughly coordinated and governmentally controlled, economy of the Nazi state was different from that of the Soviet state only by the degree of thoroughness with which the coordination and subordination of the managerial as well as labor elements had been carried forward; this process was advancing apace and given another ten to twenty years would probably have become as nearly complete as in the Soviet Union.⁸

Characteristically, however (to mention only one common feature), strikes are completely barred, as criminal sabotage of the workers’ state in both totalitarian societies. Having said this much, one has at the same time indicated once more some significant divergences between the two totalitarian societies as well: they do not advance toward the totality of their economic controls either by the same stages, or at the same tempo. (It might, as an amusing variant of this line of reasoning, be recalled that Sidney and Beatrice WebbIV

in The Truth about Soviet Russia (1942) argued that Stalin was no dictator at all, but had brought not only political but economic democracy to Russia, whereas the real dictator appeared to them to be the American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

Other attempts at differentiating sharply between the Soviet Communist and the Fascist regimes turn upon such items as the content of their divergent ideologies, the national characters of the peoples within which they arise, the stage of respective economic development, and the like. It would be tedious to refute these various lines of reasoning, especially as their positions will by implication be denied through a more positive analysis of the basic features which, according to general agreement, they have in common. These same features do at the same time constitute the ground for asserting that these totalitarian societies are historically unique.

The factors or aspects which basically are shared by all totalitarian societies of our time are five, or can be grouped around five closely linked clusters of characteristic features. These societies all possess:

1. An official ideology, consisting of an official body of doctrine covering all vital aspects of man’s existence, to which everyone living in that society is supposed to adhere at least passively; this ideology is characteristically focused in terms of chiliastic claims as to the perfect final society of mankind.⁹

2. A single mass party consisting of a relatively small percentage of the total population (up to 10 percent) of men and women passionately and unquestioningly dedicated to the ideology and prepared to assist in every way in promoting its general acceptance, such party being organized in strictly hierarchical, oligarchical manner, usually under a single leader and typically either superior to or completely commingled with the bureaucratic governmental organization.

3. A technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control (in the hands of the party and its subservient cadres, such as the bureaucracy and the armed forces) of all means of effective armed combat.

4. A similarly technologically conditioned near-complete monopoly of control (in the same hands) of all means of effective mass communication, such as the press, radio, motion pictures, and so on.

5. A system of terroristic police control, depending for its effectiveness upon points 3 and 4 and characteristically directed not only against demonstrable enemies of the regime, but against arbitrarily selected classes of the population; such arbitrary selection turning upon exigencies of the regime’s survival, as well as ideological implications, and systematically exploiting scientific psychology.

The suggestion that to these five clusters of basic traits there should be added that of the secret police gaining ascendancy over the army, seems unacceptable, because both of these factors are controversial, whereas the five which have been delineated are quite generally admitted to be factually established features of these regimes. In the nature of the case, it is very difficult to determine whether, when, and to what extent the secret police gained ascendancy over the army; another difficulty arises from the fact that insofar as the police is a branch of the civilian government, it is in the ascendancy in constitutional states as well.

The argument that total subversion is another distinctive feature of totalitarian systems has merit, but it is arguable whether this aspect of totalitarianism constitutes a sufficiently separate item. It would seem to me that it is comprehended under the first of the five characteristics, where we state that the official ideology is one to which everyone living in that society is supposed to adhere. The five main clusters of traits, for the sake of clarity, ought not to be unnecessarily expanded.

Within this broad similarity, there are many significant variations, both in time and in place, as already mentioned. For instance, the party appears to play less of a role in the Soviet Union today than earlier;¹⁰

the ideology of the Soviet Union is more rigid, because of its Marxist bible, than that of Italian or German Fascism, where ideology was formulated by the leader of the party;¹¹

and—to give a third illustration at random—Hitler’s extermination of the Jews was ideologically motivated and contrary to the apparent immediate needs of the regime, whereas Stalin’s recent Jewish purges appear to be taking place in response to exigencies of the international situation, rather than to ideology, hence the vigorous denial of anti-Semitism.¹²

It is submitted that every one of these factors to a large extent, and all of them in combination, are certainly lacking from all historically known despotic, let alone authoritarian, societies of the past. It might be mentioned in passing that many authoritarian societies of the past should in point of fact be sharply differentiated from autocratic societies. The medieval and early modern distinction of monarchy and tyranny was in many ways sounder than our common differentiation of democratic and autocratic.¹³

Neither the oriental despotisms of the more remote past nor the absolute monarchies of modern Europe, neither the tyrannies of the ancient Greek polis nor the imperial establishment of Rome, nor yet the tyrannies of the city-states of the Italian Renaissance exhibit any one of these factors to any marked extent. Attempts, such as Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (in which he tries to show Caesar to have been a totalitarian dictator in the making) or more learned efforts along similar lines,¹⁴

collapse when subjected to a more detailed scrutiny in terms of these five factors. To be sure, there have often been made efforts to organize some kind of secret police, but they are not even horse-and-buggy affairs compared to the enterprises of a HimmlerV

or a Beria.VI

Similarly, there have been in the past both military and propagandistic concentrations of power and control, but as in the previous case, the limits of technology prevented any thorough-going development along totalitarian lines. Rather than elaborate this point, which is obvious enough, once one has faced up to it, it seems more urgent to stress the common reason for the uniqueness of factors 3, 4, and 5, and thus to turn back to the other side of the general thesis.

This common cause appears to be our advanced technology. Without the inventions of the last few generations, none of these features could have been created, no matter how glad Peter or Frederick the Great might have been to do so. This technological aspect of totalitarianism is, of course, particularly striking in the matter of arms and communications. The constitution of the United States guarantees to every citizen the right to bear arms. In the days of the Minutemen this was a very important right, and the freedom of the citizen was indeed symbolized by the gun over the hearth, as it is in Switzerland to this day. But who can bear such arms as a tank, a bomber, or a flame-thrower, let alone an atom bomb? The citizen as an individual, and indeed in larger groups, is simply defenseless against the overwhelming technological superiority of those who can centralize in their hands the means wherewith to wield these modern arms and thereby physically to coerce. Similar observations readily apply concerning the press, the radio, and so forth. Freedom does not have the same intrinsic value, resting upon individual effort and exertion, which it had a hundred and fifty years ago. The trend of technological advance carries with it, with relatively few exceptions, the trend toward greater and greater size of organization. Thus, totalitarian societies appear in this respect to be merely exaggerations, but nonetheless logical exaggerations, of inherent implications of the technological state in which we find ourselves.¹⁵

The situation is rather different with respect to the first two distinctive features of totalitarian societies. Neither ideology nor party have any significant relation to the state of technology.¹⁶

But they do have a vital relation to another common feature of all contemporary societies, namely, the increasing amount of general literacy.¹⁷

To this literacy must be added (in Russia, Italy, Germany, and other countries where totalitarian societies have arisen within the context of the Christian tradition) the fact that Christianity has tended to establish a broad predilection for convictional certainty.¹⁸

But probably more important than either is the democratic antecedents of these totalitarian societies. Marx and Engels saw themselves as constituting the vanguard of the democratic movement of their day, and Stalin talked of the Soviet totalitarian society as the perfect democracy with evident conviction.¹⁹

However, not only Marx and Engels, but Mussolini and Hitler organized parties with a program intended for mass appeal, designed to win as many adherents as possible.²⁰

It would never have occurred to the absolute monarchs of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe to stoop so low, nor would the Roman Emperors have considered such an undertaking as politically significant. They appealed to the masses against senatorial privilege from time to time, but an organized and ideologically homogeneous party was inconceivable. There was, to be sure, a party of the MedicisVII

in Florence,²¹

but this was in the days of flourishing factions contesting for power with each other—in other words, during a period resembling in some limited ways the democratic condition. But the carefully organized single mass party, complete with program and ideology, is a distinct peculiarity of the totalitarian societies of our time. The tie to its Christian and democratic antecedents may gradually weaken—there are signs that both the ideology and the party in Soviet totalitarian society are declining in importance²²

—but there is some room for doubt as to whether a totalitarian society could survive their destruction.

The foregoing may lend itself to the misinterpretation that democracy, Christianity, or technology had, in the author’s view, caused totalitarianism. No proposition of the kind is intended. All that is meant is that it could only have arisen in the kind of context created by Christianity, democracy, and modern technology. But it seems basically unsound to pick out of past intellectual history some one or several exponents or supposed exponents of some aspect of totalitarian views—for instance, of an authoritarian society, be it Plato or Thomas Aquinas, Hobbes or Rousseau, Hegel or Carlyle—and hold him responsible for the totalitarian movements or societies by claiming that he was a totalitarian. None of those mentioned were, because none of them could be: the historically unique features of the totalitarian society were unknown to them.²³

Usually, it is quite easy to show that the particular thinker would, on his own terms, have turned with disgust and indignation upon these latter-day totalitarians, for a variety of reasons inherent in his system. The peculiar moral obtuseness of contemporary totalitarian societies which has been stressed as the distinguishing feature of these societies (we think, wrongly),²⁴

manifesting itself in violence on an unprecedented scale, is demonstrably entirely alien to the thinkers we have named. They are all ardent rationalists, if not moralists, whereas the totalitarians of today are indifferent to such considerations because theirs is essentially an engineering approach to society. They solve problems in a manner which they believe to be scientific, while at the same time denying the importance of freedom and more especially freedom of inquiry, of teaching and learning, the essential conditions of scientific truth.

Closely related to these issues of novelty and conceptual distinctiveness is the as yet unresolved problem of succession in totalitarian regimes. This issue has recently been highlighted by the death of Stalin. Most of the comments revealed as in a flash the hopeless noncomprehension of the totalitarian reality, as men gravely disputed about the successor to Stalin as if he had been occupying a legally or traditionally defined office, such as the King of France, or even the Tsars of Russia. In fact, the problem of succession in government has to date not been solved in any totalitarian society. This is a most important shortcoming, in view of the millennial importance of succession. Constitutional democracy and hereditary monarchy, oriental despotism with its deification of the ruler as well as its ancient tribal antecedents—they all revolve around this issue of succession. Tyranny has perennially been weak on this score, as Aristotle noted, and as the history of the two Napoleons suggests. Maybe totalitarian societies will discover a means to cope with the problem. The vast array of documentary evidence we now have about Fascism does not contain any really viable scheme for succession. The obstacles to evolving one are formidable. The building up of concentrated veneration for the one father of the people or leader, which approximates and at times exceeds what the deifiers of kings used to do, obviously must create a vacuum the moment this unique person has gone the way of all flesh. How the then-controller of the machinery of communication can be brought to shift, and shift dramatically, to a new man who only yesterday was his equal and maybe competitor seems perplexing. Equally puzzling appears the question of what will be done by him who controls the terror apparatus.²⁵

The sharp delineation of what distinguishes the past from the present in thought as well as action should not be mistaken, of course, for a denial of significant links. One does not have to mistake Hobbes for a totalitarian in order to recognize the connection between his failure to understand the vital role of religion and of intermediary groups in a well-ordered commonwealth and the totalitarians’ comparable blindness in these matters. The road of Western thought runs from Luther to Lincoln, as it does from Luther to Hitler; the seamless web of history is woven of many intertwined strands, and totalitarianism, for all its uniqueness, does not spring from the head of any ideologue or demagogue without antecedents. But these antecedents did not cause the phenomenon, and there was nothing inevitable about Hitler or Stalin. The totalitarian societies are basically alike, and they are historically unique; but why they are what they are we do not know.²⁶

Like everything genuinely novel in history, whether good or bad, whether beautiful or ugly, totalitarianism remains wrapped in the womb of creation. Hence only the genuinely creative answer will do effective service in supplanting and superseding it. The future, if there is one, will be a future beyond Communism and Fascism; not some neo-ism of recent or more ancient prescription.

I

. Friederich Hayek was an early and notable critic of this view. See in particular The Road to Serfdom, especially chapter 12, The Socialist Roots of Naziism. The germ of this book was, in part, a memorandum Hayek wrote in the spring of 1933 to Lord Beveridge, the chair of the London School of Economics, on this same topic. Titled Nazi-Socialism, it can be found as an appendix in The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents, edited by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

II

. Thorstein Veblen, the American sociologist and economist. His best-known work is The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

III

. Rudolf Hilferding was a prominent German economist who first gained attention in 1904 when he provided an influential defense of Marxist economics against a prominent critic, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Hilferding’s 1910 work Finance Capital has been called the most important work in Marxian economics in the twentieth century. He was a leader in the German Social Democrat Party prior to World War I.

IV

. Sidney and Beatrice Webb were socialist economists and early members of the Fabian Society. They authored Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935) among other books.

V

. Heinrich Himmler was the leader of the Nazi SS. This group, which began as a bodyguard service for senior Nazi leaders, would become a massive internal security force with responsibility for enforcing racial purity. Hitler entrusted Himmler with the implementation of the Final Solution—the destruction of the eastern European Jewry.

VI

. Lavrenty Beria was head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, from 1938 to 1953.

VII

. The Medici family was extremely influential in Florentine politics and Italian politics more broadly from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.

3

The Power of the Powerless

I

(1978)

VáCLAV HAVEL

To the memory of Jan Patočka

II

Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term dictatorship, regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. We usually associate the term with the notion of a small group of people who take over the government of a given country by force; their power is wielded openly, using the direct instruments of power at their disposal, and they are easily distinguished socially from the majority over whom they rule. One of the essential aspects of this traditional or classical notion of dictatorship is the assumption that it is temporary, ephemeral, lacking historical roots. Its existence seems to be bound up with the lives of those who established it It is usually local in extent and significance, and regardless of the ideology it utilizes to grant itself legitimacy, its power derives ultimately from the numbers and the armed might of its soldiers and police. The principal threat to its existence is felt to be the possibility that someone better equipped in this sense might appear and overthrow it.

Even this very superficial overview should make it clear that the system in which we live has very little in common with a classical dictatorship. In the first place, our system is not limited in a local, geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over a huge power bloc controlled by one of the two superpowers. And although it quite naturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, the range of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a single, unifying framework throughout the power bloc. Not only is the dictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and structured in the same way (that is, in the way evolved by the ruling superpower), but each country has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the superpower center and totally subordinated to its interests. In the stalemated world of nuclear parity, of course, that circumstance endows the system with an unprecedented degree of external stability compared with classical dictatorships. Many local crises which, in an isolated state, would lead to a change in the system, can be resolved through direct intervention by the armed forces of the rest of the bloc.II

In the second place, if a feature of classical dictatorships is their lack of historical roots (frequently they appear to be no more than historical freaks, the fortuitous consequence of fortuitous social processes or of human and mob tendencies), the same cannot be said so facilely about our system. For even though our dictatorship has long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements (and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity. These origins provided a solid foundation of sorts on which it could build until it became the utterly new social and political reality it is today, which has become so inextricably a part of the structure of the modern world. A feature of those historical origins was the correct understanding of social conflicts in the period from which those original movements emerged. The fact that at the very core of this correct understanding there was a genetic disposition toward the monstrous alienation characteristic of its subsequent development is not essential here. And in any case, this element also grew organically from the climate of that time and therefore can be said to have its origin there as well.

One legacy of that original correct understanding is a third, peculiarity that makes our systems different from other modern dictatorships: it commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more. Life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth. (In our case, the connection with Byzantine theocracy is direct: the highest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual authority.) It is true of course that, all this aside, ideology no longer has any great influence on people, at least within our bloc (with the possible exception of Russia, where the serf mentality, with its blind, fatalistic respect for rulers and its automatic acceptance of all their claims, is still dominant and combined with a