The trajectory of the idea of totalitarianism throughout scholarship and, more broadly speaking, the political culture of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been highly tortuous, with alternating periods of widespread impact and protracted moments of eclipse.1 It is probably too early to say whether its entrance into our political and historical lexicon was irreversible, but it has proven remarkably resilient. It even experienced a recent, spectacular renewal after 11 September 2001, when it was again mobilized in opposition to Islamic terrorism. Thus, ‘totalitarianism’ is a telling example of a massive—even if not always fruitful—symbiosis between politics and scholarship, between a fighting word, if not a slogan, and an analytical tool. Among the factors which explain its steadfastness and durability, public memory is certainly one preeminent force. On the one hand, the Holocaust has become an object of public commemorations, museums, and literary and aesthetic fictionalizations—some scholars define it as a ‘civil religion’ of the West—as well as a paradigm of contemporary violence and genocide. On the other hand, the fall of the Soviet Union definitively inscribed the communist experience into a historical perspective that focuses almost exclusively on its criminal dimension (mass deportations, mass executions, concentration camps) and simultaneously eclipses its once-exalted emancipatory potential. Rather than a prismatic, multifaceted, and contradictory phenomenon combining revolution and terror, liberation and oppression, social movements and political regimes, collective action and bureaucratic despotism, communism was reduced to the accomplishment of a murderous ideology. Stalinism became its ‘true’ face. In such a context, the concept of totalitarianism appeared as the most appropriate in order to grasp the meaning of a century so deeply shaken by violence and mass extermination, whose icons are Auschwitz and Kolyma. Faced with its defeated enemies, Western liberalism celebrated its final triumph. Originally formulated in Hegelian terms by Francis Fukuyama in 1989,2 this self-satisfied interpretation underlies many scholarly works from the turn of the century, from Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy to François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion.3 A similar conflation of scholarship and political commitment shapes the most recent and impressively growing wave of commentary on ‘totalitarianism’, this time devoted to the new threat challenging the West, Islamic terrorism. The old conflict between the ‘free world’ and totalitarianism (fascist or communist) has been replaced by a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which the latter assumes a new visage.
Stages in the History of a Concept
The premises of the idea of totalitarianism emerged during World War I, which was depicted as a ‘total war’ far before the advent of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes.4 As a modern conflict belonging to the age of democracy and mass society, it absorbed European societies’ material resources, mobilized their social and economic forces, and reshaped both their mentalities and cultures. Born as a classic interstate war in which the rules of international law had to be applied, it quickly turned into a gigantic, industrial massacre. ‘Total war’ opened the age of technological extermination and mass anonymous death; it produced the Armenian genocide (the first of the twentieth century) and prefigured the Holocaust, which could not be understood without this historical precedent of a continentally planned industrial killing.5 Therefore, World War I was a foundational experience: it forged a new warrior ethos in which the old ideals of heroism and chivalry merged with modern technology, nihilism became ‘rational’, combat was conceived as a methodical destruction of the enemy, and the loss of enormous amounts of human lives could be foreseen or planned as strategic calculation. To a certain extent, the idea of totalitarianism was the outcome of a process of brutalization of politics that shaped the imagination of an entire generation.6 The ‘total war’ rapidly became the ‘total state’. Moreover, the idea of totalitarianism belongs to a century in which, far beyond geopolitical interests and territorial pretentions, wars set irreconcilable values and ideologies in opposition. New concepts were necessary in order to capture its spirit; ‘totalitarianism’ was one of the most successful among its neologisms.
Very few notions of our political and historical lexicon are as malleable, elastic, polymorphous, and ultimately ambiguous as ‘totalitarianism’. It belongs to all currents of contemporary political thought, from fascism to anti-fascism, from Marxism to liberalism, from anarchism to conservatism. The adjective ‘totalitarian’ (totalitario), forged in the early 1920s by Italian anti-fascists in order to depict the novelty of Mussolini’s dictatorship, was later appropriated by fascists themselves. Whereas for Giovanni Amendola the fascist ‘totalitarian system’ was a synonym of tyranny, fascism clearly tried to conceptualize—and sacralize—a new form of power. In a famous article written for the Enciclopedia Italiana in 1932, Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile openly asserted the ‘totalitarian’ nature of their dictatorship: the abolition of any distinction between state and civil society and the birth of a new civilization embodied by a monolithic state.7 Many nationalists and ‘conservative revolutionaries’ of the Weimar Republic, from Ernst Jünger to Carl Schmitt, hoped for a ‘total mobilization’ and a ‘total state’ along the lines of Italian fascism; however, proponents of National Socialism eschewed this political concept.8 According to Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime was a ‘racial state’ (völkische Staat) rather than a ‘totalitarian state.9 Despite a growing ideological convergence ratified in 1938 by the Italian anti-Semitic and racial legislation, some crucial differences remained between fascism and National Socialism, whose worldviews focused respectively on state and race (Volk).
During the 1930s, when it became a widespread concept among Italian and German anti-fascist exiles, the word ‘totalitarianism’ appeared in the writings of some Soviet dissidents (notably Victor Serge10) and became instrumental in criticizing the common authoritarian features of fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. Catholic and Protestant exiled antifascists, classical liberal thinkers, heretical Marxists, and semi-anarchist writers all depicted the new European dictatorships as ‘totalitarian’. In 1939, the German–Soviet pact suddenly legitimized a concept whose status had until that moment been rather precarious and uncertain. In 1939 the first international symposium on totalitarianism took place in Philadelphia, gathering scholars from different disciplines, among whom a significant number were refugees.11 It became quite common, at least until 1941 and the German assault against the Soviet Union, to depict communist Russia as ‘red fascism’ and Nazi Germany as ‘brown Bolshevism’.12
A synoptic outline of the history of ‘totalitarianism’ can distinguish eight different moments: the birth of the concept in Italy in the 1920s; its spread in the 1930s among political exiles and the fascists themselves; its scholarly recognition in 1939, after the German–Soviet pact; the alliance between anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism after 1941; the redefinition of anti-totalitarianism as synonymous with anti-communism during the Cold War; the crisis and decline of the concept between the 1960s and the 1980s; its rebirth in the 1990s as a retrospective paradigm through which to conceptualize the past century; and finally, its remobilization after 11 September 2001, in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. This rough periodization reveals both the strength and the remarkable flexibility of a concept permanently mobilized against different and sometimes interchangeable targets. Across its different stages, it seizes the emergence of a new power that does not fit the traditional categories—absolutism, dictatorship, tyranny, despotism—elaborated by classical political thought from Aristotle to Max Weber, a power that does not correspond with the definition of ‘despotism’ (an arbitrary rule, lawless and grounded on fear) which Montesquieu depicted in The Spirit of the Laws (II, ix–x). As Hannah Arendt put it, the twentieth century produced a symbiosis of ideology and terror.
During World War II, the axis of this debate shifted from Europe to the United States, following the lines of a massive transatlantic migration of cultures, knowledge, and people. Viewed through the prism of intellectual history, it became an ideological controversy among exiles. Before being affected by geopolitical worries and eventually imprisoned within the boundaries of Western foreign policy, it expressed the vitality of a politically committed scholarship, expelled from its original environment and settled in a new world, in which it discovered the American institutions and political cultures. Especially for the Jewish-German émigrés—the core of this Wissentransfer from opposite coasts of the Atlantic Ocean—defining totalitarianism meant confronting and assimilating a culture of freedom that appeared to them as fresh and strong as the American democracy discovered by Tocqueville a century earlier. Exiled historian George L. Mosse captured this cultural and existential shift through a striking formula: from Bildung to the Bill of Rights.13 Salvaged through a modern Exodus, these refugee scholars studied totalitarianism within the context of a historical catastrophe, between the apocalyptic shipwreck of Europe and the disclosure of a new world. It was in the postwar years that the end of the alliance between anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism confronted them with new moral and political dilemmas.
In fact, the first seven stages of this debate could be broken down into two main moments: the period of the birth and spread of this concept (1925–45) and the moment of its apogee and decline in the West (1950–90), as it lost its consensual status. During the first period, its predominant function was critical, inasmuch as it was instrumental in criticizing Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin; during the second period, it mostly fulfilled an apologetic function: the defense of the ‘free world’ threatened by communism. In other words, totalitarianism became synonymous with communism and anti-totalitarianism simply meant anti-communism. In the Federal Republic of Germany, where it became the philosophical base of the Grundgesetz, a veil of oblivion fell on the Nazi crimes, removed as an obstacle to ‘reworking the past’ (Verarbeitung der Vergangenheit).14 In the name of the struggle against totalitarianism, the ‘free world’ supported violent military dictatorships in both Asia (from South Korea to Indonesia and Vietnam) and Latin America (from Guatemala to Chile). During these decades, the alliance established in the 1930s between anti-fascism and the ‘free world’ was broken and the word ‘totalitarianism’ itself was banned from the culture of the left. Only a few heretics like Herbert Marcuse in the United States and the small circle of French anti-Stalinist socialists gathered around the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Jean-François Lyotard)15 persisted in asserting their anti-totalitarianism. Therefore, ‘totalitarianism’ became above all an English-American word, quite neglected in continental Europe except for West Germany, a geopolitical outpost of the Cold War. In France and Italy, where the communist parties had played a hegemonic role in the Resistance, some crucial pieces of this debate like Hannah Arendt’s or Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s works were ignored or even not translated. The spread of this concept lay above all in a network of journals linked to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Encounter, Der Monat, Preuves, Tempo Presente, and so on), which was quickly dissolved in 1968, after the revelation of its financial links with the CIA.16 During the late 1960s and the 1970s, the years of youth rebellion and the campaigns against the Vietnam War, it declined even in Germany and the United States, where it appeared irremediably contaminated by anti-communist propaganda. When Herbert Marcuse pronounced this word during a lecture at the Free University of Berlin, Rudi Dutschke reproached him for ‘adopting the language of the enemy’.17
Shifting from Political Theory to Historiography
Hegemonic in the postwar years among American and German scholars, the totalitarian interpretation of fascism and communism since the 1970s has been increasingly contested and finally abandoned by a new generation of social and political historians who depicted themselves as ‘revisionist’.18 To many of them, it appeared epistemologically narrow, politically ambiguous, and, in the final analysis, useless. Unlike political theory, which is interested in defining the nature and typology of power, historical research deals with the origins, the development, the global dynamic, and the final outcome of political regimes, discovering major differences between Nazism and Stalinism that inevitably put into question any attempt to gather them into a single category.
Historians widely ignored Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which powerfully contributed to spreading this term in scholarly and public debates. Arendt devoted many illuminating pages to analysing the birth of stateless people first at the end of World War I with the fall of the old multinational empires, and then with the promulgation in many European countries of anti-Semitic laws that transformed the Jews into pariahs. In her view, the existence of a mass of human beings deprived of citizenship was a fundamental premise for the Holocaust. Before setting the gas chambers in motion, she wrote, the Nazis had understood that no country would lay claim to the Jewish refugees: ‘The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.’19 Similarly, she suggested a historical continuity between colonialism and National Socialism, pointing out their ideological and material filiation. Imperial rule in Africa had been the laboratory for a fusion of administration and massacre that totalitarian violence achieved some decades later. Bewildered by the heterogeneity of a book divided in three sections—anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism—not coherently connected with one another, historians preferred to ignore it, until it was rescued four decades later by postcolonial studies scholars.20
For most scholars, however, the totalitarian model avoided any genetic approach. In Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, a canonical book for two generations of political scientists, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out many incontestable affinities between National Socialism and communism, defining totalitarianism as a ‘systemic correlation’ of the following features: (a) the suppression of both democracy and the rule of law, here meaning constitutional liberties, pluralism, and division of powers; (b) the installation of single-party rule led by a charismatic leader; (c) the establishment of an official ideology through the state monopoly of media, including even the creation of ministries of propaganda; (d) the transformation of violence into a form of government through a system of concentration camps directed against political enemies and groups excluded from the national community; and (e) the free market replaced by a planned economy.21
All these features are easily detectable to different degrees in both Soviet communism and German National Socialism, but the picture that emerges from their account is static, formal, and superficial: totalitarianism is an abstract model. Its total control on both society and individuals is more reminiscent of literary fantasies, from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, than of the real fascist and communist regimes. Since the war years, some exiled scholars reversed the view of the Third Reich as a monolithic Leviathan (which was basically a Nazi self-representation) and Franz Neumann provocatively depicted it as a Behemoth: ‘a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy’.22 In the 1970s, some historians of the German functionalist school analysed Nazism as a ‘polycratic’ system based on different centres of power—the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy—united by a charismatic leader that Hans Mommsen ventured to call a ‘weak dictator’.23
A diachronic comparison of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shows significant differences. First of all, their duration: one lasted only twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, and the other more than seventy years. The former experienced a cumulative radicalization until its collapse, in an apocalyptic atmosphere, at the end of a world war it had sought and provoked. The latter emerged from a revolution and survived the death of Stalin, which was followed by a long post-totalitarian age; it was an internal crisis and not a military defeat that brought it down. Second, their ideologies could not have been more opposite. Hitler’s Third Reich defended a racist worldview grounded on a hybrid synthesis of Counter-Enlightenment (Gegenaufklärung) and the cult of modern technology, a synthesis of Teutonic mythologies and biological nationalism.24 As for actually-existing socialism, it expressed a scholastic, dogmatic, and clerical version of Marxism, claimed as an authentic inheritor of the Enlightenment and as a universalist, emancipatory philosophy. Finally, Hitler came to power legally in 1933, when Hindenburg nominated him chancellor—some observers qualified this choice as ‘miscalculation’25—with the approval of all traditional elites, both economic (big industry, finance, landed aristocracy) and military, not to mention a large section of nationalist intelligentsia. Soviet power, on the other hand, came out from a revolution that had completely overthrown the Czarist regime, expropriated the old rulers, and radically transformed the social and economic bases of the country, both nationalizing the economy and creating a new managerial layer.26
Whereas totalitarian scholarship focused on political homologies and the psychological affinities of tyrants, the ‘revisionist’ historians emphasized the enormous differences between Mussolini’s or Hitler’s charisma and the cult of personality in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The ‘aura’ that surrounded the bodies and words of the fascist leaders fit quite well the Weberian definition of charismatic power: they appeared as ‘providential men’ who needed an almost physical contact with their followers; their speeches possessed a magnetic strength and created a community of believers around them. Of course, propaganda was itself an implementation of this tendency, which nonetheless remained one of the matrices of their regimes. They should prefigure the fascist ‘New Man’ not only through their ideas, values, and decisions, but also through their bodies, their voices, and their behaviours.27 Stalin’s charisma was different. He never merged with the Soviet people, who viewed him as a distant silhouette on the Red Square stage during Soviet parades. The aura around it was a purely artificial construction. He neither created Bolshevism nor led the October Revolution but rather emerged from the party’s internal struggles after the Russian Civil War. Some historians point out that his personal power came from ‘afar’; it was much more distant and much less emotional or corporeal than those of his fascist counterparts.28
Comparing Totalitarian Violence
Violence was obviously another crux of the totalitarian model. Stalinist violence was essentially internal to the Soviet society, which it tried to submit, normalize, discipline, but also transform with coercive means. The overwhelming majority of its victims were Soviet citizens, most of them Russians, and this also holds for the victims of political purges (activists, civil servants, party functionaries, and military officers) as well as for the victims of social repression and forced collectivization (deported kulaks, criminal and ‘asocial’ people). The national communities punished because of their supposed collaboration with the enemy during World War II—Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others—were small minorities among the wider mass of victims of Stalinism. Nazi violence, on the contrary, was mostly external, that is to say, projected outside of the Third Reich. After the ‘synchronization’ (Gleichschaltung) of society—an intense repression directed primarily against the left and the trade unions—this violence ran rampant during the war. Taking a relatively soft form within a ‘racially’ circumscribed national community controlled by a pervasive police, it was however unleashed without limit against some categories excluded from the Volk (Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, homosexuals) and ultimately extended to the Slavic populations of the conquered territories, prisoners of war, and anti-fascist deportees. These latters’ treatment varied according to a clear racial hierarchy (the conditions of the British inmates were incomparably better than those of the Soviet ones).
Even before these cleavages had been highlighted by historical scholarship, stacking up a vast quantity of empirical evidence, already in the 1950s they had been mentioned in the writings of several political thinkers. Raymond Aron, one of the few French analysts who did not reject the notion of totalitarianism, indicated the differences between Nazism and Stalinism by emphasizing their final outcomes: forced labour camps in the Soviet Union and the gas chambers in the Third Reich.29 Stalin’s social project of modernizing the Soviet Union through industrial five-year plans and the collectivization of agriculture certainly was not irrational in itself. The means employed to achieve these goals, however, were not only authoritarian and inhuman but also, in the final analysis, economically ineffective. Forced labour in the Gulags, the ‘military and feudal exploitation of the peasantry’, and the elimination of a significant section of the military elite during the purges of 1936–38, had catastrophic results (the collapse of agricultural production, famine, falling population) and put into question the modernization project itself.30 Most striking in Nazism, instead, is precisely the contradiction between the rationality of its procedures and the irrationality (human, social, and even economic) of its goals: the reorganization of Germany and continental Europe along the lines of racial hierarchies.31 In other words, Nazism combined ‘instrumental reason’ with the most radical form of irrationalism inherited from the Counter-Enlightenment. In the extermination camps (an eloquent illustration of this reactionary modernism) the methods of industrial production and scientific management were employed for killing. During the war, the extermination of the Jews became irrational even on a military and economic level, insofar as it was implemented by eliminating a potential labour force and drained resources for the war effort. As Arno J. Mayer put it, the history of the Holocaust was shaped by a permanent tension between ‘rational’ economic concerns and ideological imperatives that ultimately prevailed.32 The most recent scholarship has shown that the Nazi leadership grounded these extermination policies in economic considerations (thus clarifying certain aspects of the Holocaust) but this objective was put into question and finally compromised during the war.33 In the Soviet Union, the Gulag inmates (zeks) were exploited for the purposes of colonizing Siberian territories; deforesting regions; building railroads, power plants, and industries; and creating new cities. There, the brutal methods of slavery were employed for ‘building socialism’, that is, for laying the basis of modernity.34 According to Stephen Kotkin, the distinctiveness of Stalinism did not lie in ‘the formation of a mammoth state by means of the destruction of society’, but rather ‘in the creation, along with such a state, of a new society’.35 In Nazi Germany, the most advanced accomplishments of science, technology, and industry were mobilized for destroying human lives.
Sonia Combe sketched an illuminating comparison between two figures that embodied Stalinist and Nazi violence: Sergei Evstignev, the master of Ozerlag, a Siberian Gulag near Lake Baikal; and Rudolf Höss, the most famous commandant at Auschwitz.36 Interviewed at the beginning of the 1990s, Evstignev did not hide a certain pride for his accomplishments. His job consisted in ‘re-educating’ the inmates and, above all, in building a railroad, the ‘track’. In order to fulfil this goal, he could exploit the labour force of the deported, sparing or ‘consuming’ it according to his own requirements. The survival or death of the zeks depended on his choices, in the last analysis fixed by the central Soviet authorities: thousands of prisoners died working as slaves building the ‘track’, in terrible conditions. In Ozerlag, death was a consequence of the climate and forced labour. Evstignev evaluated the efficiency of Ozerlag by calculating how many miles of railway had been built every month.
Rudolf Höss led a network of concentration camps whose core was Auschwitz-Birkenau, a centre of industrial extermination. The basic criterion for calculating the ‘productivity’ of this establishment was the number of dead, which improved or dropped according to the efficiency of both transportation and technology. In Auschwitz, death was not a by-product of forced labour, but the camp’s very purpose. Interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, SS Franz Suchomel depicted it as ‘a factory’ and Treblinka as ‘a primitive but efficient production line of death’.37 Starting from this statement, Zygmunt Bauman analysed the Holocaust as a good illustration of ‘a textbook of scientific management’.38
Of course, no reasonable observer could deny that both Nazism and Stalinism implemented murderous policies, but their internal logic was deeply different and this incongruity puts into question a concept like totalitarianism, which is exclusively focused on their similarities. This explains the skepticism of so many historians, from those of the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte, who tried to analyse the German society behind the monolithic façade of the Nazi regime, to the most recent biographers of Hitler and almost all historians of the Holocaust.39 In the field of Soviet studies, the last significant works of the ‘totalitarian’ school appeared in the 1990s, when it had been marginalised by its ‘revisionist’ critics. The last important work devoted to the comparison between Nazism and Stalinism, gathering the contributions of many Western and Russian scholars, is significantly titled Beyond Totalitarianism.40
A potential virtue of the concept of totalitarianism lies in the fact that it favours historical comparisons, but its political constraints reduce them to a binary and synchronic parallelism: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. A diachronic and multidirectional comparison would, instead, open up new and interesting perspectives. Stalinism and Nazism did not lack for forerunners and competitors.
For Isaac Deutscher, Stalin was a hybrid synthesis of Bolshevism and Tsarism, just as Napoleon had embodied both the revolutionary wave of 1789 and the absolutism of Louis XIV.41 Similarly, Arno J. Mayer depicts Stalin as a ‘radical modernizer’ and his rule as ‘an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes’.42 As for the deportation of the kulaks during the agricultural collectivization of the 1930s, Peter Holquist suggests that it fundamentally repeated the resettlement of more than 700,000 peasants in the 1860s, at the time of Alexander II’s reforms, which were inscribed in a broader project for the Russification of the Caucasus region.43
The ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ was the result of a ‘revolution from above’ conceived and realized with authoritarian and bureaucratic methods that were far more improvised than they were rigorously planned (and, indeed, had uncontrolled consequences). More than Auschwitz or Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet collectivization is reminiscent of the great famine that decimated the Irish population in the middle of the nineteenth century44 or the Bengali famine of 1943. As several scholarly works have convincingly proven, the death of civilians was not the purpose of military operations, but it was accepted as inevitable ‘collateral damage’, like in Ukraine in 1930–33. And even Stalin’s hatred for the Ukrainian peasantry was eclipsed by Churchill’s racist views on the British Empire’s Indian subjects.45 But the conventional ‘totalitarian’ approach does not allow any comparison with Allied violence, insofar as this latter came from ‘anti-totalitarian’ actors.
Nazism too had its historical predecessors. Reducing it to a reaction or a defensive violence against Bolshevism, means ignoring both its cultural and material historical premises in nineteenth-century European racism and imperialism. German anti-Semitism was much older than the Russian Revolution and the concept of ‘vital space’ (Lebensraum) appeared at the turn of the twentieth century as the German version of an imperialist idea already widespread across the old continent. It simply reflected a Western vision of the non-European world as a space open to conquest and colonization.46 The idea of the ‘extinction’ of the ‘lower races’ belonged to the entire European culture, and particularly British and French culture. Born from the defeat of 1918, the collapse of the Prussian Empire and the ‘punishment’ inflicted on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, Nazism transferred the old colonial ambitions of pan-Germanism from Africa to Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, British India still remained a model for Hitler, who conceived and planned the war against the Soviet Union as a colonial war of conquest and pillage. Rather than Bolshevism, it was the extermination of the Herero, perpetrated in 1904 in South-Western Africa (today Namibia) by the troops of General von Trotha, that prefigured the ‘Final Solution’ in terms of both its language (Vernichtung, Untermenschentum) and its processes (famine, camps, deportation, systematic annihilation). We might say (paraphrasing Ernst Nolte) that the ‘logical and factual prius’ of the Holocaust should be sought in German colonial history.47 Outside Germany, the closest experience of genocide before the Holocaust was the fascist colonization of Ethiopia in 1935, conducted as a war against ‘lower races’, with chemical weapons and mass destruction, including a huge campaign of ‘counter-insurgency’ against the Abyssinian guerrilla warfare that was a forerunner of the Nazi Partisanenkampf in the Soviet Union.48 In fact, the scholarship on totalitarianism almost exclusively focuses on the interaction between National Socialism and Bolshevism by disregarding Nazism’s relationship with Italian fascism. Karl Dietrich Bracher, one of the most radical defenders of the idea of totalitarianism, simply refused to inscribe Nazism into a European fascist family.49 Distinguishing between a ‘right-wing’ (German) and a ‘left-wing’ (Italian) totalitarianism, rooted respectively in the völkisch ideology and the tradition of Sorelian socialism, Renzo De Felice similarly denied any degree of kinship between Hitler and Mussolini: fascism, he concluded in apologetic terms, remained outside the ‘shadow cone’ of the Holocaust.50 Other historians have pointed out the totalitarian character of fascism—according to Emilio Gentile, it is even the most accomplished form of totalitarianism, given its emphasis on the state dimension—but generally avoid any comparison with Nazi violence.51
Comparing Nazi and Stalinist Ideologies
The pillar of the totalitarian model of scholarship remains ideology. Reduced to a system of power grounded on ideology (what Waldemar Gurian called ‘ideocracy’52) it offers a purely negative definition: totalitarianism as anti-liberalism. This is the only way to put fascism and communism in a single category. But adopting this ‘ideocratic’ model, scholarship turns into genealogy, sketching out the varied origins of twentieth-century political wickedness. The most conservative scholars (for instance Eric Voegelin) saw totalitarianism as the epilogue of secularization, a process started with the Reformation and finally resulting in a world deprived of any religiosity: ‘the journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology’.53 The sharpest controversy divides those who seek the source of evil in the authoritarian potentialities of the Enlightenment from those for whom fascism completed the trajectory of the Counter-Enlightenment. Thus, Isaiah Berlin depicted Rousseau as ‘one of the most sinister and formidable enemies of liberty in modern thought’,54 and Zeev Sternhell sees fascism as a radical attempt to destroy the ‘French-Kantian’ tradition of rationalism, universalism, and humanism.55 Other scholars emphasize the convergence of antidemocratic tendencies coming from both the radical Enlightenment and ethnic nationalism, suggesting multiple intermingled genealogies. For Jacob Talmon, left-wing anti-liberalism (radical democracy embodied by Rousseau, Robespierre, and Babeuf) and right-wing irrationalism (racial mythologies from Fichte to Hitler) merged in totalitarianism, a monster whose two heads, communist and fascist, were equally holistic and messianic, and therefore opposed to empiric and pluralistic liberalism.56 In The Road of Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek identified the essence of totalitarianism in the planned economy. He pointed out its bases in the socialist critique of private property, the core of modern freedom, holding that this critique contaminated radical nationalism after World War I and ultimately produced National Socialism.57
Beyond these genealogical and philosophical discrepancies, the question remains whether ideology suffices as a satisfactory interpretation of Nazi and Stalinist violence. For the upholders of the totalitarian model, this conclusion is self-evident.58 Stressing a clear continuity from Jacobinism and Bolshevism, which produced similar forms of mass violence, Richard Pipes explains that ‘terror was rooted in the Jacobin ideas of Lenin’, whose ultimate goal was the physical extermination of the bourgeoisie, an objective logically inscribed in his ‘doctrine of the class war’ and ‘congenial to his emotional attitude to surrounding reality’.59 In his eyes, the Committee of Public Safety of 1793 derived from the sociétés de pensée of the French Enlightenment just as the Cheka was an outcome of the Populist circles of the Tsarist era, from which the Bolsheviks inherited their terrorist views. Martin Malia depicts communism as the accomplishment of a pernicious form of utopianism: ‘In the world created by the October Revolution, we are never facing a society, but only a regime, an “ideocratic’ regime’”.60 The common feature of these interpretations lies in reducing both the French and the Russian Revolutions to eruptions of fanaticism. Quoting Tocqueville, Pipes compared the revolution to a ‘virus’.61 As for François Furet, he suggested that the Gulag should be set in the lineage of the French revolutionary Terror, given the essential identity between their procedures. ‘Through the general will’, he argued, ‘the people-as-king achieved a mythical identity with power’, a belief which was ‘the matrix of totalitarianism’.62 From the Historikerstreit to The Black Book of Communism (1997), the thesis of the substantial identity between Nazism and Bolshevism continued to be very popular. However, it seems rather old-fashioned from the perspective of recent scholarship, which has abandoned it in favour of more nuanced and multicausal approaches.
The Holocaust is an eloquent test of this change of historiographical paradigm. For several decades, scholars have been divided between two main currents that Saul Friedländer distinguished as intentionalism and functionalism: the first mostly focused on its ideological drives, and the second on the unexpected character of the extermination of the Jews, resulting from a set of pragmatic choices made within immediate circumstances.63 For intentionalist historians, World War II simply created a historical constellation that allowed the accomplishment of a project as old as anti-Semitism itself; for the functionalists, hatred against Jews was a necessary but insufficient premise of an event that developed amidst the war.64 Many recent works tried to overcome this outdated dispute by adopting a wider approach to Nazi violence, extracting the event itself from the narrow framework of Holocaust Studies. Thus, ideology appears embedded in a broader and syncretic geopolitical project: a colonial plan to conquer Germany’s ‘vital space’ and destroy the Soviet Union, a Bolshevik state that the Nazis identified with the Jews. Territorial conquest, the destruction of communism, food shortages and the famine among Slavic populations, German settlements, the pillaging of natural resources, and the extermination of the Jews: all these goals came together in a war whose meaning could be summarised as a gigantic biological and political reorganization of Europe.
As Timothy Snyder suggests, Mein Kampf was built on a Christian paradigm—paradise, fall, exodus, redemption—and resulted in an ‘amalgamation of religious and zoological ideas’.65 But this tendency to interpret history and society through a biological prism was typical of nineteenth-century positivism, shaping all currents of thought from nationalism to socialism. Hitlerism remained a radical version of völkisch nationalism, and its ideological peculiarities were the product of multiple symbioses that transformed it, to quote Saul Friedländer, into ‘a meeting point of German Christianity, neoromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultra-conservative nationalism’.66 This amalgamation of social Darwinism, eugenics, and mythical and Counter-Enlightenment thought produced a singular form of ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’—the extermination of the Jews as a form of German emancipation—without comparison in other European countries. This peculiar synthesis, however, was only a premise of Nazi violence. According to Friedländer, the Holocaust was neither the inevitable outcome of Hitler’s rise to power (the implementation of a pre-established plan) nor the random product of a ‘cumulative radicalization’ of miscalculated policies. It was, rather, the ‘result of converging factors, of the interaction between intentions and contingencies, between discernible causes and chance. General ideological objectives and tactical policy decisions enhanced one another and always remained open to more radical moves as circumstances changed’.67
According to Snyder, Operation Barbarossa revealed a fatal miscalculation by both Hitler and Stalin. The latter did not have any illusion about the temporary character of his alliance with the German dictator, but he also did not expect aggression so soon and did not believe the warnings he received from numerous sources during the spring, which he attributed to British propaganda. His passivity brought the Soviet Union to the verge of collapse. As for Hitler, he remained prisoner of his vision of the Slavs as an ‘inferior race’ and mistakenly thought it possible to destroy the Soviet Union in three months. The failure of this German offensive decided the final outcome of the conflict. Launching their blitzkrieg, the Nazis had four fundamental goals: the rapid annihilation of the Soviet Union; a planned famine that would have hit 30 million people during the winter of 1941; a vast program of German colonization of the Western territories of the defeated Soviet Union (Ostplan); and the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish Question, that is, the mass transfer of the European Jews to the most distant areas of the occupied territories, where they would be gradually eliminated. The failure of this blitzkrieg pushed Hitler to change his priorities: the ‘Final Solution’, initially planned to be accomplished at the end of the war, suddenly became an immediate goal, insofar as it was the only one that could possibly be fulfilled in the short term. Since they could not be evacuated, the Jews were killed, whereas the occupied countries were systematically destroyed. Thus, Snyder argues, ‘the killing was less a sign of than a substitute for triumph’.68 His interpretation avoids many commonplaces of ‘totalitarian’ scholarship. He sees Hitler and Stalin as historical actors whose endeavours and purposes have to be critically understood, far beyond their cruelty, in order to avoid merely reducing them to metaphors for evil. Their ideologies shared almost nothing and even their extermination policies were profoundly different: National Socialism killed mostly non-Germans, almost exclusively during the war; Stalinism killed predominantly Soviet citizens, before the war years.
Similarly, many scholars combine intentionalist and functionalist approaches in analysing the different waves of Soviet violence. The first took place in the middle of a civil war, between 1918 and 1921, with the excesses, the summary executions, and the crimes of all civil wars. It was certainly shaped by a Bolshevik vision of violence as ‘midwife’ of history, but it did not come out from a project of ‘class extermination’. At its origins, Bolshevism shared the culture of other European social democracies: until 1914, Lenin considered himself a faithful disciple of Karl Kautsky, the ‘pope’ of German Marxism, and his ideological orientation did not differ from that of many Russian and European socialists who would come to strongly criticize the October Revolution. The second and third waves (the collectivization of agriculture and the Moscow Trials respectively) took place in a pacified and stabilized country. The second wave in particular came not from an ideologically grounded extermination project but from an authoritarian and bureaucratic project of social modernization that, as John Arch Getty put it, turned into an ‘erratic’ and ‘miscalculated’ policy whose ultimate consequence was the establishment of terror as a permanent practice of power.69 Instead of theorizing a linear continuity from Lenin to Gorbachev and explaining Stalinist terror as an expression of the ‘ideocratic’ character of the Soviet Union, it would probably be more useful to contextualize this violence and to consider ideology as just one of its multiple impulses. In short, the ‘ideocracy’ model irresistibly tends toward teleology, positing a lineal continuity from a virtual to an actual totalitarian evil. According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, the ‘totalitarian model scholarship’—seeing the Soviet Union as a ‘top–down entity’, a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror on a passive society—‘was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed (instead of the party being always right, it was always wrong)’.70
Since 11 September 2001, a new chapter has begun in this intellectual debate. Whereas the end of actually existing socialism deprived liberal democracy of the enemy against which it usually vaunted its moral and political virtues, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington suddenly reactivated the old anti-totalitarian paraphernalia, which was now directed against the new threat of Islamic fundamentalism. As during the Cold War, a new army of crusaders quickly appeared, many of them coming from the left, like Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, and Bernard-Henri Lévy.71 In 2003, at the moment of the American invasion of Iraq, Paul Berman depicted a religious movement like al-Qaeda and a secular regime like Saddam Hussein’s Baath as two forms of totalitarianism, equally inspired by ‘a cult of cruelty and death’.72 Adam Michnik, the famous Polish dissident from Solidarity and editor of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, summarized the meaning of this new campaign in defence of the West:
I remember my nation’s experience with totalitarian dictatorship. This is why I was able to draw the right conclusions from Sept. 11, 2001. […] Just as the great Moscow trials showed the world the essence of the Stalinist system; just as ‘Kristallnacht’ exposed the hidden truth of Hitler’s Nazism, watching the collapsing World Trade Center towers made me realize that the world was facing a new totalitarian challenge. Violence, fanaticism, and lies were challenging democratic values.73
Adopting this general belief, many scholars applied to Islam the analytical categories that had earlier been forged for the purposes of interpreting the history of twentieth-century Europe. With this epistemic transfer, a movement like the Muslim Brotherhood has become a sort of Leninist ‘vanguard party’, equipped with many of the organizational and ideological tools of European totalitarianism. Its inspiration, the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb, was depicted as the ideologist of ‘a monolithic state ruled by a single party’ and oriented toward a form of ‘Leninism in Islamic dress’.74 According to Jeffrey M. Bale, Islamic doctrines are ‘intrinsically antidemocratic and totalitarian ideologies’, insofar as they reproduce in a religious form all typical features of secular Western totalitarianism: Manicheism, monism (notably utopian collectivism), and paranoia, systematically aiming at dehumanizing and destroying their enemies.75 Curiously, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic regime which is the closest to the totalitarian model, is rarely mentioned by the new Western crusaders. But unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia is an ally of the West, occupying an economic and geopolitical position that automatically excludes it from the axis of evil.
Fitting Islamic terrorism into the totalitarian model is no easy task. Unlike European fascism, which was born as a reaction against democracy, it emerged from a historical, continuous lack of democracy. In many Muslim countries, it embodied a protest against reactionary and authoritarian regimes supported by the United States and the former colonial powers, thus paradoxically achieving a certain moral legitimacy.76 It struggles against the West, which in Arab countries usually appears in imperial and authoritarian rather than democratic forms. In the Middle East, where since 1991 the West’s ‘humanitarian wars’ have killed several hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, it is difficult to explain that these are in fact anti-totalitarian struggles for freedom and democracy. This is as unconvincing as it was for Latin Americans in the 1970s to believe that the military dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla were protecting them from communist totalitarianism. Unlike in the period of the Cold War, when the West could appear to dissidents in the Soviet satellite states as ‘the free world’, today the United States appears to most Islamic countries as an imperial power.
Furthermore, the violence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is qualitatively different from that of classic totalitarianism, which involved a state monopoly of the means of coercion. Despite its endemic character, Islamic terrorism arises within weak states, coming out of their fragmentation and incompleteness. Historically speaking, terrorist violence has always been antipodal to state violence, and in this respect al-Qaeda or even ISIS are not exceptions. In recent years, ISIS has become something akin to a state, as a territorial and institutionalized entity. In this, it benefited from ten years of Western military interventions that destabilized the entire Middle East, which helped it to extend its influence and create many terrorist units where they had never existed before. But other differences are also significant. Fascism and communism were projected toward the future, as wanting to build new societies and create a ‘New Man;’ they did not want to restore old forms of absolutism.77 Mussolini and Goebbels explained that their national ‘revolutions’ had nothing to do with legitimism. The reactionary modernism of Islamic terrorism, conversely, employs modern technologies like rockets, bombs, cell phones, and websites in order to return to the original purity of a mythical Islam. If it has utopian tendencies, it looks to the past rather than to the future. Finally, Islamic fundamentalism does not fit the definition of ‘political religion’ usually applied to totalitarianism. This concept designates secular movements and regimes that replaced traditional religions, adopting their own liturgies and symbols and asking their disciples to ‘believe’ instead of acting according to rational choices. Inversely, Islamic terrorism is a violent reaction against the process of secularization and modernization that shaped the Muslim world after its decolonization. Instead of a secular religion, it is a politicized religion, a jihad against secularism and political modernity. Speaking of a ‘theocratic’ totalitarianism makes this concept even more flexible and ambiguous than ever, once again confirming its essential function: not critically interpreting history and the world, but rather fighting an enemy.
Slavoj Žižek sarcastically depicted totalitarianism as an ‘ideological antioxidant’ similar to the ‘Celestial Seasonings’ green tea which, according to the advert, ‘neutralizes harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals’.78 Historically, ‘totalitarianism’ played this role of a generic antibiotic healing the body of liberal democracy: stigmatizing its totalitarian enemies, the West absolved its own forms of imperial violence and oppression. Yet despite such persistent scholarly criticism, the concept of totalitarianism has not disappeared, instead showing an astonishing strength and capacity for renewal, and even extending its influence to new fields. Totalitarianism—and this is its paradox—is both useless and irreplaceable. It is irreplaceable for political theory, which defines the nature and forms of power, and useless for historical research, which tries to reconstitute and analyse a past made up of concrete and multifaceted events. Franz Neumann defined it as a Weberian ‘ideal type’, an abstract model that does not exist in reality.79 As an ideal type, it is much more reminiscent of the nightmare described by George Orwell in 1984, with its Big Brother, its Ministry of Truth, and its Newspeak, than ‘actually existing’ fascism and communism. Totalitarianism is an abstract idea, whereas historical reality is a concrete totality. A similar debate exists for other concepts that historical scholarship has imported from other disciplines, above all the notion of genocide. Born in the field of criminal law, it aims to designate guilt and innocence, inflicting punishment, recognizing suffering, and obtaining reparation; but its shift into the realm of historical studies introduced a compelling dichotomy that impoverishes the picture of the past. Perpetrators and victims are never alone; they are surrounded by a multiplicity of actors and move in a changing landscape; they become perpetrators and victims through a complex interaction of elements both ancient and new, inherited and invented, which shape their motives, behaviours, and reactions. Scholars try to explain this complexity; as Marc Bloch once highlighted, they are not there to administer the tribunal of History. This is why many have decided to dismiss this category. According to Henry Huttenbach,
too often has the accusation of genocide been made simply for the emotional effect or to make a political point with the result that the number of events claimed to be genocides rapidly increased to the point that the term lost its original meaning.80
For good or bad reasons, this concept condenses moral and political concerns that inevitably affect its use and entail prudence. Observing this permanent interference between memory claims and interpretive controversies, Jacques Sémelin suggests containing ‘genocide’ within its proper identity and juridical and memory realms, privileging other concepts like ‘mass violence’ in scholarship.81
This can provide a healthy sense of caution, but it should not be mistaken for the illusory claim that there exists some ‘scientific’, neutral, and free-value scholarship. Rather, it should make us aware that history is written amidst a force field affected in various different ways by memory, politics, and law, in which the elucidation of the past cannot be separated from the public use of history. Does this mean that there is a Chinese Wall separating concepts from reality? If scholars of fascism and communism keep a certain critical distance towards ‘totalitarianism’, preferring other less all-embracing but more nuanced and appropriate definitions, our historical consciousness does need points of reference. We look at the past in order to understand our present, and this means a ‘public use’ of history.82 So while the concept of totalitarianism will continue to be criticized for its ambiguities, its weaknesses, and its abuses, it probably will not be abandoned entirely. Beyond being a banner for the West, it stores the memory of a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist gulags, and Pol Pot’s killing fields. There lies its legitimacy, which does not need any academic recognition. The twentieth century experienced the shipwreck of politics, which, according to Hannah Arendt, signifies a space open to conflict, to pluralism of ideas and human practices, and to otherness. Politics, she wrote, is not a question of ontology; it designates the infra, the interaction between human beings, between different subjects. Totalitarianism eliminates this public sphere, instead compressing human beings into a closed, homogeneous, and monolithic entity. It destroys civil society by absorbing and suffocating it into the state; from this point of view, it is opposite to Marx’s communism, in which the state disappears into a self-emancipated community. The concept of totalitarianism inscribes this traumatic experience into our collective memory and our representation of the past.