Ideas
The knock on the door. What was the difference between the Nazis and the Soviets? None, say some. But for all its atrocities - worse than the Third Reich in terms of murder - socialism fought to improve the welfare, employment and education of the common people
Published 26 January 2004
Hope and Memory: reflections on the twentieth century
Tzvetan Todorov Atlantic Books, 337pp, £22
ISBN 1903809479
Tzvetan Todorov used to be a Bulgarian structuralist and is now a French humanist. Or rather, this Bulgarian-born philosopher has been resident in Paris so long that he is now an honorary Frenchman, and during his time there the intellectual scene has shifted from the austere rigours of structuralism to the more moral, humane kind of commentary which Todorov himself now practices. Hope and Memory is a study of the twin totalitarianisms of Stalinism and Nazism, and as such joins a recent wave of similar investigations.
In contrast to most authors on the subject of state repression, Todorov can claim some direct experience of it, growing up as he did in a particularly dreary Soviet satellite. He has written a sober account of the modern absolutist state, interwoven with some moving narratives of men and women who protested against it and were persecuted for their pains. As with sermons, one admires the moral seriousness of the project while quietly noting its relative lack of intellectual originality.
Why exactly are we looking back to Lavrenti Beria in the age of Osama Bin Laden? One answer, one suspects, is as part of the fashionable campaign to send terms such as political "left" and "right" packing. For if, as Todorov and others believe, Hitler and Stalin were more bedfellows than antagonists, doesn't this just go to show that "left" and "right" were pointless labels all along? In this way, Bolshevism can be cunningly pressed into the service of Blairism.
This, to be sure, is far from Todorov's intention. Even so, he believes that the true battle for the 20th century was one between totalitarianism and democracy - not, for example, between capitalism and socialism, or colonialism and nationalism, terms which make only the coyest of appearances in his book. In fact, "capitalism" doesn't appear at all. As so often, the conveniently sanitising word "democracy" does service for it, which aligns a liberal such as Todorov with a neo-conservative such as Donald Rumsfeld.
This is a pity, since Todorov is no champion of the neo-cons. He begins with a discussion of 11 September which lists the numerous places throughout the world where the US has been responsible for mass civilian casualties in the past half-century. If you aired this kind of stuff on some US campuses today, you might quickly find yourself out of a job. The totalitarian vision of George Orwell, Todorov argues, has now given way to the fantasies of James Bond, as "a megalomaniac billionaire hidden in an underground cavern dispatches kamikaze pilots to destroy targets in American cities". But to seek to impose freedom on others, he wisely remarks, is to oppress them.
Even so, Todorov's heterodoxy has its limits. He tells us, for example, that terrorism excludes violence committed by states, whereas political terror as we know it actually began life as a state phenomenon. Terror, as Hegel recognised when faced with the French revolution, has an impeccable middle-class pedigree. When Edmund Burke denounced the French Jacobins as "terrorist", using the word perhaps for the first time, he certainly had in mind a bunch of crazed fanatics, but they were a government, not a guerrilla army. Todorov also believes that democracies are by definition moderate, so that the real conflict is between this temperateness and the extremism of both left and right. Yet extremism and moderation are notoriously relative terms. Todorov may find Paul Wolfowitz or Ariel Sharon moderate, since they live in democracies of a kind, while others might regard their views as extreme.
Hope and Memory, a book in which there is a great deal of memory and precious little hope, claims that totalitarianism was both the greatest innovation, and the greatest evil, of the 20th century. Yet its definition of the political form leaves something to be desired. It isn't clear, for example, how the totalitarian is to be distinguished from the despotic. Todorov rightly claims that totalitarian systems dismantle the distinction between public and private life, but insists somewhat more perversely that totalitarianism is always a form of utopianism. Mesmerised by visions of a perfect future, it tramples roughshod over the present. It also makes a cult of science, claiming absolute knowledge of the laws of historical progress. Was this really true of Franco and Salazar, as it may well have been of Robespierre and Molotov? Does the Burmese junta worship at the altar of scientific knowledge? Were the brutish, heavy-bellied leaders of the German Democratic Republic genuinely entranced by a vision of lithe proletarian supermen? Besides, there have been plenty of champions of democracy and civic liberties who also believed in progress, perfectibility and historical laws - a good slice of the 18th-century Enlightenment, for example.
Nobody can doubt that there are profound affinities between the Nazis and the Stalinists. But this book makes far too little of their evident differences. And since scholars almost always insist on enforcing precise distinctions, as opposed to searching out general connections, one can only assume that a political animus is at work here. It is true that from Mao to Mugabe, leaders with absolute power tend to display remarkably similar features. Most of them, for example, seem to become clinically paranoid, except for those who were paranoid in the first place. But this is no reason to merge one such regime into another. For all its unspeakable atrocities, which in terms of mass murder far outstripped those of the Third Reich, socialism actually fought to improve the welfare, housing, employment and education of the common people, a cause that was hardly dear to the heart of Hitler. Socialism might have bungled the task of emancipating women, but fascism vilified it. Stalinism was the result of a noble project of human emancipation gone grotesquely awry, whereas Nazism was never such a project in the first place. It was not, like Stalinism, a perversion and betrayal. It did not soil its lips with talk of human equality and comradeship. And when Todorov rashly speaks of totalitarian states as collectivist "at every level", he forgets the pact between fascism and finance capital.
One would not complain, as one might of the Soviets, that the Nazis made a detestable mockery of a laudable notion. They did not throw their support behind anti-colonial uprisings, fight for better working conditions and military detente through their agencies in the west, or speak up against oppressive political powers. The barbarous ideology of fascism was not a guiding light, however delusory, for millions of ordinary men and women struggling for a more decent society. Hope and Memory tips its hat to this truth in one throwaway sentence, before returning to its banal thesis that these two forms of political horror were more or less indistinguishable.
And what, in the meanwhile, of democracy? Precious personal liberties are a product of democratic nations, as Todorov insists, but so are Enron and weaponised anthrax, about which he is not quite so vociferous. Democracy, he concedes, "does not promise happiness on earth; but it does guarantee that there won't be a knock on the door before dawn and that men in gray uniforms won't take you off for interrogation". To which astonishing claim, clamorously endorsed by Arab-Americans everywhere, one can only suggest that the good professor might try to get out of his Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique a little more often.
Democracy versus totalitarianism, then. But the trouble is that liberal-capitalist democracies, when plunged into dire trouble, sometimes become totalitarian as a way of solving their problems; and if this book was not so strikingly silent about the causes of such absolutist regimes, it might be rather less confident that liberal values are one thing and a knock on the door before dawn quite another. For liberal values include market enterprise, which can easily get out of hand; and the more economic anarchy you breed, the more you will need an authoritarian system to prop it up and suppress the discontents it creates. Besides, the more you export your free-marketeering to the rest of the world, the more you will need authoritarian measures to protect yourself against the angry backlash this is likely to generate. Democracy rather than totalitarianism by all means; but, looking at the US neo-conservatives, it is hard to believe that in our world liberty and autocracy are simple opposites.
Terry Eagleton's most recent book is After Theory (Allen Lane)
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