Sovietism Is NOT Stalinism Is NOT Nazism

NY Times: “1945’s Legacy: A Terror Defeated, Another Arrives,” by Roger Cohen, May 15, 2005.

Who put what in the water at the NY Times Week In Review last week ???

It’s bad enough to have James Bennet sobbing that the Sunni militants in Iraq won’t fight according to American ideas about how the insurgency against them should be fought.

But then Roger Cohen – who is rarely objectionable, and often quite insightful – decides to pick up on the very WORST idea of Hannah Arendt –

who, like Cohen, was often quite insightful, but who also had some BAD moments, notably her deeply mistaken subsuming of both Nazism and Stalinism under the rubric of “totalitarianism.”

For most of the Cold War, this theoretically ill-defined and empirically dubious concept did most of its damage in academia, especially in destroying the intellectual integrity of Soviet studies,

as well as providing hacks like Jeanne Kirkpatrick with a convenient way of slamming “totalitarian” pro-Soviet regimes in Latin America like Nicaragua and Cuba

in contrast to “authoritarian” pro-US regimes like Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador and Argentina and Brazil during their juntas … well, you get the idea.

But now, in the relentless efforts of the right-wing Bush regime to overthrow EVERY consensual understanding of the post-WWII era,

the concept of “totalitarianism” is now being used to paper over the very real differences between Nazism and Stalinism, both in history and in principle.

We have already made clear in this blog OUR NEGATIVE ATTITUDE TOWARDS STALINISM …

So let’s kill right here the predictably false charge that will be made that we are trying to legitimate Stalinism – nothing could be further from the truth.

At the same time, as noted above, it IS important – for BOTH historical AND theoretical reasons – to make clear the very REAL differences among a) Sovietism; b) Stalinism; and c) Nazism, rather than subsuming them all under the rubric of “totalitarianism.”

Put simply, Stalinism is a deeply deformed version of Sovietism – which is, in turn, a deeply deformed version of state socialism – which is, in turn, a deeply deformed version of democratic socialism –

something which, sadly for the world – especially now, with the collapse of socialism as a global ideology, leaving the stage to a conflict between some version of market liberalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, some version of nationalism, be it Islamic / Christian / American / Chinese / Japanese – has never existed in any form other than the theoretical …

And while there are – to use the key terminology of medianalysis (Theory lectures 1 and 2) – structural similarities AND differences among all these varying forms of socialism,

whose closest real-world manifestation has been in post-WWII Western European social democracies,

there are also two key differences – as well as major structural similarities – between Stalinism and Nazism,

a topic that was a key feature of Cultural History lecture 22 on Nazi Welt-Krieg: Racism / Mass Murder / World War, which serves as the basis of our comments here.

While anyone interested in a full examination of this issue should check out the lecture, here we can BRIEFLY sum up the ANALYTICAL relation between Stalinism and Nazism in the following way:

Nazism has everything that Stalinism has – in terms of oppressive control over its subjects, routine use of violence and intimidation, etc. etc. etc.

At the same time, there are two attributes of Nazism that make it MORE murderous, on the one hand, and, on the other, more dynamic.

The first is that the key enemy in Stalinism is defined by class – with at least a rhetorical effort to promote a multi-national / non-racial solidarity along class lines.

For Nazis, on the other hand, the key enemy is defined by “race” – albeit a somewhat bizarre concept of “race,” which identified Jews as the prime enemy of the “Aryan” race, who had the right to dominate not just Jews but all other “inferior” races, most notably the Slavs who lived to Germany’s east and south.

The difference between using “race” on the one hand and “class” on the other to identify the “main” enemy is that, while class can be changed, race cannot –

which means that, however small, there is a fluidity to Stalinist demonization that is lacking in the more static and unchanging Nazi demonization –

which means that change, and hence escape, is at least possible in Stalinism, while there is NO possibility of victimized groups transcending their status in Nazism.

The second factor distinguishing Nazism from Stalinism, ironically enough, has to do with their relative dynamism in the arena of global politics.

In Nazism, global domination is an explicit and structural aspect of the ideology – much like Sunni political Islam today – as in the slogan, “Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt !!!” (Today, Germany – tomorrow, the world !!!)

Stalinism, on the other hand, was NOT fundamentally interested in world domination, but, rather, in achieving explicit recognition of a) the Soviet Union as a world power and b) Eastern and Central Europe as an unchallenged Soviet sphere of influence.

This key difference – from the point of view of international political stability – was something Cold War American elites either misunderstood or intentionally chose to ignore.

The reason for this caution in Stalin’s case was two-fold: on the one hand, he saw himself as a 20th successor to the greatest Russian czars, who were vicious autocrats, but not world-conquerors;

on the other, Stalin’s chief dispute with his ideological and power rival Trotsky was over the precise question of “revolution in one country” (Stalin’s formulation) vs. “global revolution” (Trotsky’s preference).

When Stalin had a Soviet agent plant an ice pick in Trotsky’s head in Mexico City in August 1940, he definitively resolved THAT argument in favor of “revolution in one country,” and AGAINST “global revolution.”

For Hitler and the Nazis, conversely, Germany’s domination of the rest of the world was an integral and structural part of their program – as evidenced by Hitler’s unilateral breaking of the Nazi / Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in June 1941,

when he invaded the Soviet Union, a move that took Stalin – who was just concerned with maintaining his power in the 20th century version of the Russian Empire – completely by surprise.

In the context of international political stability, then, Hitler was a fundamentally dynamic and disruptive force – again, like Sunni political Islam today, with their demand for the re-establishment of the caliphate and huge Muslim super-states that would swallow up the nation-states that exist today –

while Stalin was a fundamentally status-quo power, seeking recognition of his legitimacy and the agreement of other great powers NOT to intervene against him – like Shiite political Islam, which basically wants its legitimacy recognized by other states, especially Sunni Islamic states, as in the attack against post-Khomeini Iran by the all-too-dynamic Saddam during the 1980s.

This, then, is the historical and theoretical framework for President Bush’s latest attempt to de-stabilize world politics – this time, in Eastern Europe, where he’s encouraged the Baltic states, and other subordinate members of the Soviet Union like Georgia, to feel resentful about past historical wrongs that most of the rest of Europe would just as soon forget about.

Given time, we’ll pass over an exhaustive detailing of the problems with this effort, and stick simply to the basic historical fact that Bush had better be careful in stoking resentments against a country that no longer exists,

lest he be reminded of the enthusiastic role that the Baltic states – as well as certain Balkan states, like Croatia – played in supporting the Nazis generally, and especially in helping organize the Holocaust.

If he wants to talk about Yalta, he may well find himself confronted with the pro-Nazi past of many of the victims of admitted Soviet domination –

and given his luck so far in Iraq, blundering into situations he really doesn’t understand, one would think he would be a little more cautious.

But the 2004 election was clearly a sign of God’s blessing, and so – just as with PBS and, now, it seems, NPR – Bush has a mandate to start de-stabilizing the entire world, and not just the Middle East.

Herewith some of the less bizarre selections from Roger Cohen’s unfortunate contribution to Bush’s latest efforts to make everyone’s life a living hell … just kidding … ;-) (bold emphasis mine):

At the core of the explosive issues confronted by the president in the Baltic states and Moscow lies this vexed question: Can a meaningful distinction be made, in moral terms, between Communist totalitarian terror and Nazism? …

History is indeed making a surreal comeback – in Beijing and Seoul (where Japan is the target), and in Riga and Moscow. It is reasonable to ask why.

The answer is that unraveling the tangled legacy of the cold war is time-consuming. That struggle had its imperatives, dictated by the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The manipulation of memory and truth created a web of obfuscation stretching from Santiago to Stalingrad.

The disputes of the past two weeks illustrate the lingering difficulties. Russia, outraged that the result of its Great Patriotic War, fought at a terrible cost, could be viewed as “slavery and subjugation” by its neighbors, asked whether those neighbors would have been around at all if the Red Army had not helped defeat Hitler. “When people today discuss whether we occupied anybody’s country or not, I want to ask them: what would have happened to you had we not broken the back of fascism?” the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, declared. “Would your people be among the living now?”

Fair question – but not one that removes Moscow’s responsibility for mass deportations from the Baltic states after 1945. Mr. Putin also weighed in, suggesting that the indignation from Riga to Vilnius was aimed in part at disguising a history of collaboration with the Nazis. …

It is also true that the killing from Ukraine to China in the name of class struggle never became Hitler’s industrialized mass murder and did not aim at the physical elimination of a whole people – an idea and method that have held the Western imagination with a particular force. The aim of the Nazis was extermination of the Jews, whereas Stalin’s liquidations were the byproduct rather than the core of his ideology.

A distinction that seems to make a real difference …

All THAT said, the really sad thing here is the extent to which the Bush administration has been so successful in enrolling even smart people like Roger Cohen and “responsible” institutions like the NY Times in his efforts …

Which is probably the scariest aspect of this whole disturbing situation …