O diabo está nos detalhes, se costuma dizer. Mas, no caso do comunismo e do fascismo, as duas ideologias, os dois regimes, os dois males mais mortíferos do século 20 (talvez de toda a história humana, incluindo as hordas de bárbaros da Idade Média), o diabo está não só nos detalhes, mas no conjunto.
De fato, o diabo figura nas propostas, nas intenções, nos atos feitos e malfeitos desses dois sistemas, que devem ter provocado, conjuntamente, mais de cem milhões de mortos, matados e morridos (ou seja, direta e indiretamente) no que foi esse "breve" século 20, que segundo um marxista não arrependido, Eric J. Hobsbawm, teria durando apenas de 1917 a 1989, para todos os efeitos práticos. Na verdade, o fascismo (clássico, pelo menos) foi bem mais curto, entre 1922, ou 1924, desde a conquista e consolidação do poder por Mussolini, e 1945, quando Hitler se suicida, deixando atrás de si uma Alemanha em ruínas e mais de 20 milhões de mortos, pelo menos...
O bolchevismo, em sua feitura lenino-stalinista, durou bem mais, e matou muito mais, embora em doses menos concentradas do que o fascismo italiano (mais "ameno) e o nazismo hitlerista (mais "mortífero", em sua sanha assassina e absolutamente brutal). Ele foi de 1918 a 1953, quando o ditador assassino morre. Junto com o comunismo da coexistência pacífica, a partir de Krushev, e os diversos experimentos ao redor do mundo, o comunismo, em sua longa história de mais algumas décadas (foram setenta anos, no total), matou mais alguns milhões, em surtos esporádicos de loucura e de resiliência. Na Coreia do Norte, por exemplo, que é um regime stalinista-surrealista, a matança continua, ao passo que em Cuba, as mortes de um sistema nefando, que conseguiu o notável feito, jamais igualado na história, de expulsar mais de um décimo da população da ilha, foram comparativamente menores (mas não menos desculpáveis, pois sempre advindas não por "acidente" do sistema, mas por atos deliberados dos dirigentes delinquentes).
Este autor romeno, da geração pós-guerra, instalado nos Estados Unidos, examina a interface diabólica dos dois sistemas assassinos, na resenha publicada no Times Literary Suplement.
Vou comprar o livro, para ler com atenção, não que eu tenha muito a aprender historicamente com o que se passou, mas porque eu acho que certos elementos das ideologias dos dois sistemas assassinos ainda estão presentes entre nós, aliás muito presentes entre certos companheiros...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
John Gray
Vladimir Tismaneanu
THE DEVIL IN HISTORY
Communism, Fascism, and some lessons of the twentieth century
326pp. University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24.95.
978 0 520 23972 2
D
iscussing the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People
promulgated in the Soviet Union in January 1918, in which sections of the
population regarded as “former people” were disenfranchised, Vladimir
Tismaneanu writes: “It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the term
byvshie
liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak,
implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human”. The
disenfranchised groups included functionaries of the tsarist police and
military, class aliens who lived off unearned income, clergy of all
religions and anyone economically dependent on those so far listed. Debarred
from the rationing system (for many the chief source of sustenance), liable
to have their property confiscated, and prohibited from seeking public
office, people in these categories – along with their families, since being
a former person was defined as an inheritable condition – were excluded from
society. The system of categories, Tismaneanu writes, was “the prototype
taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in later years”. Denying some
human groups the moral standing that normally goes with being a person, this
act formed the basis for the Soviet project of purging society of the human
remnants of the past.
It is also one of the grounds for Tismaneanu’s belief that in important
respects Communism and Fascism were at one. He is clear that “Communism is
not
Fascism, and Fascism is
not Communism. Each totalitarian experiment
has its own irreducible attributes”. Even so, the two were alike in viewing
mass killing as a legitimate instrument of social engineering.
“Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal
modernity on the conviction that certain groups could be deservedly
murdered. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba,
Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain
social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.”
It is an observation that points to the central issue in the debate about
twentieth-century totalitarianism. Ever since it was first developed by the
Italian theorist of Fascism Giovanni Gentile – who approved of the system of
unlimited government that totalitarianism denotes – the concept has been
highly controversial. With many viewing Communist and Fascist regimes as too
dissimilar in their structures, objectives and ruling ideas to be included
in a single category and some seeing theories of totalitarianism as not much
more than a rationale for Cold War struggles, the idea has moved from being
widely contested to being distinctly unfashionable – in academic contexts, a
more damningly final dismissal. For those who have lived in totalitarian
regimes, this is a perplexing development. Tismaneanu writes vividly of his
own experience. A child of Jewish parents who became Communist activists as
part of the struggle against Fascism (his father lost an arm fighting in the
Spanish Civil War, while his mother worked as a nurse), he first began
thinking about totalitarianism when as a teenager in Communist Romania he
read a clandestinely circulated copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, he managed to
get hold of forbidden books by writers such as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt,
Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski and other anti-totalitarian thinkers. Also
drawn to what he calls “the occulted traditions of western Marxism”, he did
a doctorate on the Frankfurt School. Leaving Romania in 1981 and settling in
the United States, he revisited the country on a regular basis after the
toppling of Nicolae Ceausescu. In 2006 he was made head of a presidential
commission established to examine the workings of the Communist
dictatorship, an appointment that proved controversial, not least because of
his parents’ and his own Communist past.
Tismaneanu has produced numerous studies of Stalinism, nationalism and
totalitarianism, but it seems to be the parallels between the Ceauzescu
regime and interwar Fascism that have come to preoccupy him. “Although
Romania was a socialist state committed to Marxist tenets and thus
ostensibly left-wing, especially after 1960, the ruling party started to
embrace themes, motifs, and obsessions of the interwar Far Right.” After
Ceausescu came to power in 1965, “the ideology came to blend residual
Leninism with an unavowed yet unmistakable Fascism”. As Tismaneanu came to
realize, “This was only an apparent paradox”. European Fascism was a
mishmash of mad and bad ideas – clerical authoritarianism and anti-liberal
Nietzschean atheism, a neo-primitivist cult of “thinking with the blood” and
modernist worship of technology, among others. But ethnocentric nationalism,
racism and anti-Semitism have been features of Fascism in all its varieties,
and it is the Communist embrace of these far right themes that forms the
background for The Devil in History. If his parents joined forces with
Communism in order to resist Fascism, it has fallen to Tismaneanu to grapple
with the fact that Communism acquired some of Fascism’s defining
characteristics.
An ambitious and challenging rereading of twentieth-century history, The Devil
in History is most illuminating in showing that parallels between the two
totalitarian experiments existed from the beginning. Tismaneanu confesses to
being baffled by what he describes as “the still amazing infatuation of
important intellectuals with the communist Utopia”. “It is no longer
possible to maintain and defend a relatively benign Lenin”, he writes,
“whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin.” Unlike
Stalin, Lenin showed no signs of psychopathology. Rather than being an
expression of paranoia, methodical violence and pedagogic terror were
integral features of Bolshevik doctrine. By their own account, Lenin and his
followers acted on the basis of the belief that some human groups had to be
destroyed in order to realize the potential of humanity. These facts
continue to be ignored by many who consider themselves liberals, and it is
worth asking why.
Underlying academic debates about the adequacy of totalitarianism as a
theoretical category, Tismaneanu suggests, is a question about evil in
politics. Rightly, he does not ask which of the two totalitarian experiments
was more evil – an approach that easily degenerates into an inconclusive and
at times morally repugnant wrangle about numbers. There is a crucial
difference, which he acknowledges at several points in The Devil in History,
between dying as a result of exclusion from society and being killed as part
of a campaign of terror and being marked out for death in a campaign of
unconditional extermination – as Jews were by Nazis and their local
collaborators in many European countries and German-occupied Soviet Russia.
Numerical comparisons pass over this vital moral distinction. While the
stigma of being a former person extended throughout families, it was
possible to be readmitted into society by undergoing “re-education”,
becoming an informer, and generally collaborating with the regime. When
Stalin engineered an artificial famine which condemned millions to
starvation and consigned peoples such as the Tatars and Kalmyks to
deportation and death, he did not aim at their complete annihilation. Around
one in five adult males is estimated to have spent time in the Gulag, along
with unnumbered children after the age of criminal responsibility was
lowered (along with liability to capital punishment) to include
twelve-year-olds in 1935, as well as a massive influx of “female thieves”
(war widows) after 1945; but most who spent time in the camps survived to
return to what passed as normal life. Though there were sections of the
Gulag from which few emerged alive – such as those described by Varlam
Shalamov in Kolyma Tales – there was no Soviet Treblinka.
Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded
much of actually existing humankind
Tismaneanu’s account of Communist totalitarianism will be resisted by those
who want to believe that it was an essentially humanistic project derailed
by events – national backwardness, foreign encirclement and the like. But as
he points out, the Soviet state was founded on policies which implied that
some human beings were not fully human. Lenin may have held to a version of
humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind.
It was not simply because they could be expected to be hostile to the new
regime that priests, merchants, members of formerly privileged classes and
functionaries of the old order were deprived of civil rights. They
represented a kind of humanity that had had its day. There is nothing to
suggest that the Bolsheviks viewed the fate of former persons as the tragic
price of revolution. Such superfluous human beings were no more than the
detritus of history. If radical evil consists in denying the protection of
morality to sections of humankind, the regime founded by Lenin undoubtedly
qualifies.
We are left with the question why so many liberals disregard these facts.
Clearly a part of the explanation lies in the utopian character of the
Communist project. In politics, the other face of radical evil is an inhuman
vision of radical goodness. Lenin envisioned a world without states or
markets in which power relations had ceased to exist. Hitler imagined a
world in which power reflected an immutable racial hierarchy. It is hard to
imagine any decent human being embracing the hideous Nazi vision – a mix of
the völkisch chimera of a seamless “organic” culture, fraudulent “racial
science” and revolutionary anti-capitalism – but the appeal to large
sections of the German people of the fantasy of a conflict-free, homogeneous
society cannot be denied. Lenin’s very different view of the future was in
some ways no less hideous. Authentically Marxian in its most essential
features, it left no room for the diverse forms of activity that humans have
devised to create meaning in their lives. Religion and the practice of
science and the arts for their own sake would be left behind. The little
that survived of the human inheritance would be yoked to collective welfare
and communal labour. It is a horribly impoverished vision, which fortunately
has no prospect of being realized.
Liberals will object that Communist and Fascist projects are inherently
opposed – one emerging from Enlightenment universalism, the other from
Counter-Enlightenment ideas of racial purity. There is a difference, but
there are commonalities as well. If Nazism repudiated Enlightenment values
of human equality and universal emancipation, the Nazi project of racial
hierarchy continued some influential strands of Enlightenment thinking. Nazi
“scientific racism” had precedents in the Positivist plans for a science of
society grounded in physiology, and in theories of human inequality and
eugenics promoted by nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as
Francis Galton and (in more explicitly racial terms) Ernst Haeckel. Lenin’s
egalitarian project also claimed a basis in science – the ersatz science of
historical materialism.
There is another respect in which Communism and Fascism were alike. At one in
claiming a basis in science, they were both fuelled by millenarian religion.
As Bertrand Russell recognized in his neglected classic The Practice and
Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1920 after he had visited the Soviet
Union and talked with Lenin), Bolshevism was more than a political doctrine,
however radical or extreme. With all its militant secularism, the Bolshevik
drive to transform society was powered by apocalyptic myths. As Tismaneanu
writes, with reference to Norman Cohn’s seminal work on millenarian
movements, “both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and
psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized
extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers”. The
chiliastic character of Communism is not a novel theme, and here as
elsewhere in his book, Tismaneanu fashions a powerful synthesis of existing
critiques. What he does not fully explore is the function of Communism in
channelling religious myth in a modern secular form – a role that goes some
way to explaining its continuing attraction.
Citing Boris Souvarine, Tismaneanu praises the heterodox Marxist for his
account of “the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the
ideological despotism of the extreme Left and Right”. In the context of the
argument of The Devil in History, however, it may be the idea of derailed
modernity that is strange. Elsewhere in the book, Tismaneanu recognizes
Communism and Fascism as alternative forms of development, unquestionably
barbaric but still fully modern. His ambiguity on this point reflects a gap
in his account of contemporary liberalism. Throughout much of his argument,
he takes for granted that the recycling of religious myth as secular
political doctrine that occurred in Communism does not occur in advanced
liberal democracies. But Western-led policies were based on the belief that
after a brief period of economic shock therapy, post-Soviet Russia and
Eastern Europe would revert to a normal path of development and adopt
liberal values – an idea with no basis in history. In Russia and much of
Europe, liberal values have never been “normal”. “In the end”, Tismaneanu
writes, “‘the return to Europe’ heralded in 1989 stood for ‘normalcy and the
modern way of life’.” However, if post-Communist countries have returned to
normal it is to a version – so far relatively mild, but real enough – of the
toxic normality that prevailed in much of the continent during long
stretches of the twentieth century.
The blind spot in The Devil in History is the power of myth in liberal
societies. “The demise of Communism in Europe”, Tismaneanu writes, “allowed
space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of
fantasies of salvation.” He is referring to post-Communist countries where
the Soviet collapse left a vacuum that was filled by ethnocentric
nationalism and a post-Holocaust variety of anti-Semitism that demonizes
Jews in countries where hardly any Jews remain. But the impact of the
collapse was also felt in Western democracies, where it boosted the belief
that liberal societies are the only ones that can be fully modern.
Commendably, Tismaneanu refuses to play “the obsolete pseudo-Hegelian tune
of the ‘ultimate liberal triumph’”. However, the issue is not whether
liberalism is destined to prevail – a stale debate about historical
inevitability – but whether liberal societies can escape what he aptly
describes as “a contagious hubris of modernity”. For those possessed by the
idea that the Communist collapse was a triumph for the only truly modern way
of life – a species of eschatological myth rather than any kind of empirical
observation – the question did not arise. For them, liberalism was the
riddle of history solved, and knew itself to be the solution.
The same myth – a hollowed-out version of a religious belief in providence –
underpins the abiding appeal of Communism. One of the features that
distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his
followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned
despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to
maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new
model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes
engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and
paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed
to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between
utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms,
liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity,
and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind –
liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of
their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties
were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to
admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than
fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea
that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals
today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the
contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with
Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept
that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.
John Gray is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. His
books include Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia,
2007, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the strange quest to cheat
death, 2011, and, most recently, The Silence of Animals: On progress and
other modern myths, which is due to be published next month.
=============
The Devil in History
Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century
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The Devil in History is a
provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism.
Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist
totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism,
utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth
century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu
brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes
overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political
totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these
radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and
revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders
within these political movements, the place of violence within these
systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics.
The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding
of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron,
Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw,
Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a
theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism
and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this
book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of
human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and
purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological
commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the
sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party,
movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to
renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a
mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
