Nazism or Communism? Which was ‘worse’? And why?

I sent the FCO some thoughts on this subject when I was HM Ambassador in Warsaw. I pointed out that today’s Europe would look and feel rather different if Hitler was lying embalmed in Berlin just as Lenin lies creepily in Moscow. I argued that WW2 and the post-war settlement mainly killed off the Nazi vampire (in Europe at least – it is alive and well in eg Hamas propaganda). But the Soviet vampire was not dead, creating tensions at the heart of European identity.

The debate rumbles on in various political fora: see eg the argument made in the European Parliament by some conservative MEPs that if Nazi symbols were banned in today’s Europe, why not ban the communist hammer and sickle symbol too?

This issue was taken up in the London Review of Books by Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian Marxist with a provocative if not necessarily consistent worldview but certainly lively turn of phrase, coming direct from the grand Titoist Yugoslav tradition of Doing Whatever it Takes to be the Centre of Attention.

His analysis is worth reading on a ‘know the enemy’ basis. It gets to the morbid heart of the pro-Stalinist worldview – and honestly makes the best available excuses for it.

Zizek’s argument boils down to this:

  • Stalin and Stalinism claimed to be part of the Enlightenment tradition
  • Nazism by contrast displaced the inherent rationality of class struggle on to irrational emphasis on race and biology
  • therefore the Stalin purges were in fact even more irrational than Fascist violence, in that they demonstrated “an authentic revolution perverted” (Note: ingenious! One can not expect the madman to be rational, ergo irrationality can be expressed only by the tragedy of rational people acting irrationally)
  • so sides must be taken
  • between only two choices.
  • Fascism has to be proclaimed to be fundamentally worse than Communism.
  • since the alternative is to see Fascism as a natural reaction to the Communist threat and therefore somehow a lesser evil. Which is bad since it weakens a “postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity”

Nice try, druze.

But no.

There is another choice which also happens to be the right one, namely to see Communism and Fascism/Nazism (not that the latter were the same thing) as two rival visions of a manic socialist collectivist approach to society and state coercive power, which in fact had far more in common in terms of ‘class struggle’ – and ultimately anti-semitism too – than the differences claimed by Zizek.

This thesis is admirably advanced with plenty of marvellous examples by Jonah Goldberg in his new book Liberal Fascism. Ignore the trite negative reviews, and buy it.

Both Communism and Nazism/Fascism took utopian ends as justifying any means, above all a towering supremacy of the collectivist state over the individual. One was totalitarian international socialism. The other was totalitarian national socialism. Both murdered millions of people. Both were essentially and intrinsically destructive and violent. For these reasons and more, neither can seriously be claimed to be part of an Enlightenment tradition, unless that tradition is defined as Un-Enlightened..

Zizek and his sly arguments are at least correct on one point. There is a form of ‘European Identity based squarely on a profound Stalin-inspired ‘law of the excluded middle’ attempt to cast any objection to Communism as ‘essentially’ support for Fascism. This Vast Lie has been remarkably successful down the decades, and still gives all sorts of cover to extremist collectivist viewpoints of different shapes and sizes.

Luckily for Europe, many countries which laboured under Stalinism are now free; their representatives can speak out against this sort of thing in a way most politicians in Old Europe can not imagine doing.

It is no surprise that S Zizek as a leading supporter of an oh-so-fashionable Stalinist defence team comes from former non-aligned’ communist Yugoslavia: a country which wriggled out from the worst excesses of Stalinism, later collapsing not because there were serious intellectual forces opposing communism as such but rather because of populist mobilisation based on ethnic exclusivism and partly driven by sheer gangsterism.

Zizek is a Marxist philosopher who dwells on the level of ideas. If he wants to study aspects of the allegedly Enlightenment tradition of Stalinism in a way both more dialectical and materialistic simultaneously (and rather closer to home than the European Parliament), he need only walk down the road in Slovenia.

And start digging.