The Ravages Of Time

I've recently been reading two books, each of which has a unique and compelling focus, about the disasters - political, social, ethical, economic, intellectual - of the last century. Both books were written and published in the final decade of the twentieth century, before the events of September 11, 2001. Both, when considered as history, tend to put those events in a certain light that is hard to escape.

The first book I read, and hope to discuss in a future posting, was Martin Gilbert's Holocaust Journey (1997), an account of a personal journey made by the British historian and a group of students to many of the sites in Western, Central and Eastern Europe that are associated with the Jewish experience during the Second World War. The second was Robert Conquest's Reflections On A Ravaged Century (1999) - an extraordinary analysis of the mental distortions that characterized, and continue to characterize, the Western civic culture, and that made possible the twin monstrosities of Nazism and Communism. It's this book that I want to discuss here - not because I think it is in any way superior to Gilbert's unforgettable account of his journey of discovery, but because its scope and its conclusions make that journey, and the stages along its way, even more accessible and moving.

In his Preface, Conquest reflects that "the main responsibility for the century's disasters lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings, thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions." In addition to mentioning the abysses that did in fact open, he also talks of "the abysses from which we were lucky to escape, and which still yawn."

Much of the earlier part of the book is concerned with the rise, early in the twentieth century, of Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism, and the advent of totalitarianism. Conquest points to the affinities between the two ideologies:

"...both elements looked back as well as forward, claiming the past as well as the future. Pursuing this tradition, the National Socialists' historical myths sometimes directly overlapped those of the Communists: both saw the peasant rebellions in sixteenth-century Germany as predecessors of their own revolutions. One of the leading heroes of Engels's The Peasant War in Germany, Florian Geyer, had an SS division named for him.

Totalitarian absolutisms in fact developed from revolutionary populisms. Unlike the older despotisms, the new movements required this identification with "the people", "the masses". The overwhelming claim of the collective to the individual's allegiance thus emerged as the basis not only of Communism but also of Fascism and National Socialism. Like Communism, once in power these subordinated the individual to the State, as representing the Community."

Conquest shows how Mussolini - originally a leading figure in Italian left-wing socialism, and an avowed admirer of Lenin - carried out a process of transferring the idea of mass identification with a class to that of mass identification with a nation. Both Lenin and Trotsky were in agreement when they asserted that only Mussolini could have led an Italian revolution: for Mussolini made his primary task the submergence of the individual and of relations between individuals, and the destruction of informal, non-centralized civic life. To Mussolini's concept of the nation, the Nazis added what they called Blutgefühl (literally "blood feeling"), which transformed the emotion of patriotism into a raging racialism that went beyond the barriers of civilized morality. To Mussolini's concept, the Communists, for their part, added extreme "rationalism" - "reliance on supposedly perfect theory, that transcended, in principle at least, the natural affections for country or family."

National Socialism, Conquest argues, went beyond crude racialism in its ideology:

The central message, inculcated on a massive scale in the press, in Party gatherings, in universities and schools, was the new identification of the German individual with the nation and the state, in a higher mode than that of the older society, transcendental, mystical, scientific and philosophical. If we fail to take this into account, we miss the central drive of National Socialism. And this was what constituted its mass appeal to Germans, including much of the intelligentsia.

Fascism and National Socialism had their intellectual supporters, who included the Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, and the existentialist Martin Heidegger. Conquest quotes the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who wrote that "no modern society can dispense with a principle of legitimacy, and in a totalitarian society, this legitimacy can only be ideological. Total power and total ideology embrace each other."

Or, as Hitler said, without ideology violence could not be relied on. Nazis shared with Communists the conviction that the driving force of our society -and of all others - is power and "unappeasable strife".

Conquest notes the ease "with which people passed from Communism to what were in theory its most virulent enemies - Fascism and National Socialism. Several Italian Fascist leaders. like Bombacci, had held positions in the Comintern - as had Jacques Doriot in France. who even led a French pro-Nazi military formation on the Eastern Front in World War II."

Hitler himself was quoted as saying that Communists far more easily became Nazis than Social Democrats did: "The Reds we had beaten up became our best supporters." Conquest also draws our attention to later period in history, when the extreme left wing Red Brigade's Ulrike Meinhof said at her trial: "Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown onto the waste-heap of Europe for what they were: money-Jews [Geldjuden]." He also notes that "in the Khmer revolution the Communist leaders declared that 'in Kampuchea there is one nation and one language, the Khmer language. From now on the various nationalities do not exist in Kampuchea.' The victims, such minorities as the Chams, were subject to decrees like 'The Cham mentality is abolished.'"

Casting his gaze even wider, the book's author concludes that the sentiment of nationality is not the problem - it is the Idea of the nation. He sees a terrible example of this in Yugoslavia, and particularly in Serbia, where the outburst of nationalist extremism "was not spontaneous but, on the contrary, incited in the most calculating and cynical fashion by the Milosevic regime... it was created solely from above, and the damage is only now being repaired."

In a most moving passage, Conquest lets the great Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman describe how, under Bolshevism, an entire social class in Russia was transformed in the 1920s into "subhumans". Peasants who owned more than a few cows or a few acres more than their neighbours were classified and labelled as "kulaks". Bolshevik activists scoured the countryside, helping the GPU with the arrests and deportations and, Grossman adds,

" were all people who knew one another well, and knew their victims, but in carrying out their task they became crazed, stupefied...
They would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children 'kulak bastards', screaming 'bloodsuckers!'...
They had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called 'kulaks' were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a 'parasite's' table; the 'kulak' child was loathsome, the young 'kulak' girl was lower than a louse. They looked on the 'kulaks' as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive; they had no souls; they stank' they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labour of others... And there was no pity for them. They were not human beings; one had a hard time making out what they were - vermin, evidently."

Conquest writes: "Late in 1997 the Paris Le Monde interviewed me by phone. I was asked did I find the Holocaust 'worse' than the Stalinist crimes. I answered yes, I did, but when the interviewer asked me why, I could only answer honestly with 'I feel so.' Not a final judgment, let alone to suggest that the Holocaust was much 'worse' than the Stalinist terrors, or to decry the view of [Grossman], whose own mother was killed by the Nazis, that there is almost nothing to choose between the two systems. Still, this primary 'feeling', based indeed on knowledge, has a validity of its own. I would argue, too, that, whatever view one takes, without feeling the Holocaust one cannot feel Stalinism. The crux is nevertheless that such feelings are only acceptable when based on, or conjoined with, sound knowledge and careful thought. And, on the other side of our concern, our problems have been due not to fallacious ideas in the abstract but to the extreme, uncontrolled, emotional charge they carry."

I intend to return to my survey of this thought-provoking volume of essays in my next post to this blog. Conquest has much to say that can help us to understand the processes that are taking place in the world right now, processes that can at times seem almost incomprehensible without the kind of sound knowledge and careful thought with which he is endowed. Despite the ravages of time - or perhaps even, in a sense, because of them - his message sounds even clearer now than when the book was written.