The "Twin Evils": My Not-so-final Verdict (2)

Funny how I tried to argue that maybe the whole business of comparing Communism and Fascism is overrated and yet I get caught into it myself. It's hard to resist it. At the end of the day, it is one of those topics that seems historical and factually-based but is in fact quite ideological. In that sense, no amount of argument will settle the issue: if you are comfortable with the European right in its pre-liberal manifestations (see how polite that came out?), you will claim that Fascism was better than Communism and that, if anything, it was the understandable reaction to Communism. I get the impression that this same stance is sort of the "secret handshake" of the American hard-right. People in the far right of the American conservative movement excoriate Roosevelt not only for his "big government" domestic agenda but also for his foreign policy. As far as I now, whenever things get explicit, they veer of instead of saying what really is in their mind: that Roosevelt should have backed Hitler. (I remember that back when I still dignified Ann Coulter with my reading she once came the closest you can find, by saying that liberals loved Roosevelt because he "saved Mother Russia". But I kicked the Coulter habit long ago and won't bother commenting.) 

If you are part of the non-American left, you feel compelled to claim that Communism was better than Fascism. (For historical reasons, the current factions of the American left are, by and large, staunchly anti-Communist and do not have any "sin" to atone for.) Finally, if you want to belong to the large group of "right-thinking, serious people" be it as a neoliberal or a Third Way social democrat, then you will claim that both were "Twin Evils" and that you have nothing to do with them. (That's part of the reason I've spent time blogging about this "foundational myth.")

So what about this particular, non-American leftist? Like I said long ago, I feel that probably I shouldn't have a dog in this fight. "I am not and have never been" a Stalinist but seems like sooner or later somebody will call me one (that's standard operating procedure in Colombia these days) so I better have my answer ready.

Fascism was a type of regime that flourished in Europe between 1922 (Italy) and 1976 (Spain). Of those 54 years, the Nazi era covers only 12 (1933-1945). (I know very little of, and will say close to nothing about, Japan's militaristic regime of the 1930s.) The Nazi variant of Fascism, the most prominent one, for sure, never quite knew "normality" of any kind. It was always on a war footing, be it fighting its domestic enemies, or engaged in that foreign policy nuisance we call WWII. After 1945, European Fascism is reduced to the Iberian Peninsula and survives in one way or another until the mid-70s. But, of course, by that point it has been transformed in many ways. 

Communism, instead, lasted from 1917 to 1989 (although, of course, one percent of mankind belongs to the Chinese Communist Party). It ruled over many different countries in four continents. In some countries it reached the "normalization stage" and lasted for a while (Eastern Europe, for instance). 

So, comparing Fascism and Communism is a bit of apples and oranges. Are we supposed to compare Italy in 1936 with Angola in 1976? Or Yugoslavia in 1977 with Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942? That's why the conventional approach is to compare both regimes in their most horrific manifestations: Hitler and Stalin. At this point it should be clear that we are unlikely to learn anything clear from this exercise but let's get into it.

Probably we'll never know if Hitler killed more people than Stalin. For what it's worth, I have the feeling, without any claim to authority, that it's a bit of a toss up. The claim that Stalin killed 20 million people sounds to me a bit iffy. It depends on exactly how we define a "victim" (do famine casualties count?). At any rate, the numbers game can quickly become distasteful. Sooner or later somebody will try to find in it grounds for an exoneration. Just to get a feel, remember the times when it was uncertain the number of victims of the Holocaust. I don't see why it would be less criminal to gas 2 million people than 6 million.

So, if we want to keep going with this, we need to make our minds based on nebulous criteria. Here's one that I had been toying with for a while and envy Zizek for having the guts for putting it out: there is something especially monstrous about Hitler's annihilationist drive. Stalin's crimes were the result of some kind of cold iron logic (remember, the guy's nickname came from "steel") that is, in its own perverted way, similar to the logic of modern nation states. In any modern state, a person allied with foreign interests plotting for the government's overthrow, would be treated harshly. Likewise, to this day many governments implement economic plans that they know will impoverish dramatically many of their citizens. No government with a claim to be civilized will nowadays take these two lines of logic to the extreme that Stalin took them. No government will simply execute hundreds of thousands of dissidents accusing them of all sorts of fabricated charges. (I'm going by the "official" number of people directly killed in the Great Purge. Not that I entirely believe it, but a. it's backed by hard data and b. it is enough to make my point.) No modern government will engineer a famine and plunge all its working masses into barely-subsistence conditions just to meet some industrialization goal. (Remember, Stalin was murderous with the peasantry, but the urban proletariat was also reduced to abysmal levels of consumption.) 

But there is nothing in our modern sensibilities that connects with Hitler. We just cannot envision the line of reasoning that could lead to the decision to exterminate millions of people on purely ethnic and bogus "biological" grounds. If the Soviet kulaks could have "somehow" survive on their rations, Stalin would not have sent the troops just to shoot them. For Hitler, there was nothing his targeted victims could have done to be spared. 

If Stalin is the perverse extreme of some notions of the 20th and 21st Century State, Hitler is, at best, the perverse extreme of organicist notions of society from the 19th Century, notions that, although not entirely dead, should be dead. Hitler's view of racial minorities was one shaped by the idea of society as a body in need of therapy. This view immediately reduces large swathes of the population to the role of vermin or viruses. I cannot find anything worth rescuing in that type of thought. 

(It is not dead, like I said. Some other day I will rant about the damage inflicted by hate-monger Orianna Fallaci. In the meantime, I should just say that her pamphlets were straight from that same kind of mind frame and that it was shameful that she was given a pass in spite of that. While I'm at it, this type of "organicist" thinking often finds its way into public discourse in Latin America. Many coups have been justified as a kind of "social chemotherapy.")

I thought this would be my last post on this but no. There's a third coming up soon. Stay tuned! (Well, it's an inside joke where "inside" means between me and me. I know that nobody is reading this.)