nazism-and-communism-evil-twins.pdf

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ALAIN DE BENOIST

Nazism And Communism: Evil Twins? 0

Stéphane Courtois, ed. , Le Livre Noir du Communisme (Paris:

Laffont, 1997).

The publication of this Black Book by a group of historians to commemorate

the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution has opened a heated debate, first

in France and then abroad. Edited by Stéphane Courtois, who also wrote the pref-

ace (instead of François Furet, who died a few months before its publication),

this work attempts to provide an accurate account of the human cost of commu-

nism in view of the documentary evidence available today. The estimate is

around 100 million dead — four times the body-count of Nazism. These figures

are not really a revelation. From Boris Souvarine to Robert Conquest and Ale-

ksander Solzhenitsyn, many authors have dealt with matters such as the Gulag;

the famines deliberately provoked by the Kremlin (which in 1921-22 and 1932-

33 killed in the Ukraine five and six million people respectively); the forced

deportations, between 1930 and 1953, of seven million people within the Soviet

Union (kulaks, Volga Germans, Chechens, Tatars and others from Caucasus); the

millions killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, etc. By comparison, the

Black Book ’s figures are rather conservative. 1

The intense interest in the Black Book is due to the fact that it is based on

accurate documentation from the Moscow archives, now open to researchers.

This is why the figures have not been questioned. Based on this documentation,

some reviewers conclude that “the balance sheet of communism constitutes the

worst case of political carnage in history,” 2 or “the greatest, the bloodiest crimi-

nal system in history.” 3 Thus, the debate has not been about the facts themselves,

but their interpretation. According to Courtois, communist regimes everywhere

have “raised mass criminality to the level of a veritable system of government.”

From this, one can infer communism did not contradict its principles when it

killed people, but followed them — in other words, that communism was not just

0. Originally published in Eléments , No. 92 (July 1998), pp. 15-24. Translated by

Francesca Ficai.

1. While Stéphane Courtois estimates at 20 million the number of victims in the

USSR alone, Rudolf Rummel came up with a figure of 62 million. Jacques Rossi, Le Man-

uel du Goulag (Paris: Cherche-Midi, 1997) talks about 17 to 20 million prisoners in the

Gulag between 1940 and 1950.

2. Martin Malia, “The Lesser Evil?” in Times Literary Supplement (March 27,

1998), p. 3.

3. Pierre Chaunu, “Les Jumeaux Malins du Deuxième Millénaire,” in Commen-

taire (Spring 1998), p. 219.

NAZISM AND COMMUNISM

179

a system which committed crimes, but one whose very essence was criminal. As

Tony Judt put it, 4 today no one can dispute the criminal nature of communism. It

should be added, that communism killed many more people than Nazism, it

killed over a longer period of time than Nazism, and it began doing so before

Nazism. “The methods used by Lenin and systematized by Stalin and those who

emulated them,” writes Courtois, “are not only reminiscent of Nazi methods, but

preceeded them.” This alone calls for “a comparative analysis concerning simi-

larity between a regime which, since 1945, has been regarded as the most crimi-

nal of the century, and the communist system, which up to 1991 retained its

international legitimacy, is still in power in some countries, and has supporters

throughout the world.”

The debate concerns these two questions. The notion that communism can be

regarded as inherently criminal and virtually exterminationist continues to gener-

ate intense opposition, but no less so than the notion of the comparability of com-

munism and Nazism. Courtois has been attacked for even broaching these two

subjects. The attacks have been so violent that some authors have not hesitated to

speak of the Black Book as an “intellectual deception” and “propaganda” (Gilles

Perrault), a “mess” (Jean-Marie Colombani), “a gift to the National Front at the

time of the Papon trial” (Lilly Marcou), “the gruesome accounting of wholesal-

ers” (Daniel Bensaid), “an ideological tract” (Jean-Jacques Marie), “a fraud”

(Maurice Nadeau), “the denial of history” (Alain Blum) and even “negationism”

(Adam Rayski). Revealing in this regard is that Courtois has been reproached for

having written that: “the death by starvation of an Ukrainian kulak child as a

result of the deliberate famine orchestrated by the Stalinist regime rates the same

as the death by starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto during the fam-

ine brought about by the Nazi regime.” What is scandalous, however, is not this

sentence, but the fact that it was even questioned. Philippe Petit went as far as to

write that “all deaths do not have the same value.” 5 Unfortunately, he did not pro-

vide any criteria to distinguish between victims of the first rank and those of the

second. The fact that today it is still unclear whether a crime is a crime or whether

all the victims have the same value says much about the spirit of the times.

***

Communists have always rejected indignantly the very idea of comparing

communism and Nazism. This is not surprising: the comparison would have

been rejected with the same indignation by the Nazis. Yet, the comparison has

been made many times over the years by authors such as Waldemar Gurian, Elie

Halévy, George Orwell, Victor Serge, André Gide, Simone Weil, Marcel Mauss,

and Bernard Shaw. Those who had the sad privilege of being imprisoned both in

the Soviet and in the Nazi camps had the opportunity to compare them con-

In International Herald Tribune (December 23, 1997).

In Marianne (November 10, 1997).

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ALAIN DE BENOIST

cretely. One of these was Margarete Buber-Neumann. Part of a group of German

communists who had fallen in disfavor with Stalin, she was imprisoned in the

Karaganda camp in Siberia in 1937, then handed over by the Soviet secret police

(then called NKVD) to the Gestapo at the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

Set free from the Ravensbruck camp in 1945, she had this to say: “I do not think

a difference of degree ever existed or exists today in favor of the Soviet camps.”

Her voice was immediately suppressed.

The same comparison was the basis of Hannah Arendt’s famous study of total-

itarianism. Allan Bullock wrote parallel biographies of Stalin and Hitler. More

recently, Furet, who has long wondered about the real reasons for the refusal to

compare the two systems, has written: “This prohibition, internalized by the dis-

consolate as an almost religious truth, prevents thinking of communism in terms of

its deepest reality — that it is totalitarian.” 6 Nazism and communism have been

described by Pierre Chaunu as “heterozygous twins.” 7 In a speech at the annual

meeting of the French Institute, Alain Besançon, characterized these systems as

“equally criminal.” 8 The comparison between communism and Nazism is in fact

not only legitimate, but indispensable because, without it, these two phenomena

become unintelligible. The only way to understand them — and to understand the

history of the first part of this century — is to “take them together” (Furet), to study

them “in their own time” (Ernst Nolte), i.e., in their common historical context.

One of the reasons for this is what Nolte has called a “causal nexus” between

communism and Nazism. In some respects, Nazism appears as a symmetrical

reaction to communism. In 1922, at the time of the march on Rome, Mussolini

sought to confront the “red threat.” The following year, at the time of the march to

the Feldherrnhalle, Nazism was born in the wake of the Bavarian Commune and

the Spartacist insurrections. Given the weakness and ineptness of parliamentary

regimes, the “national” revolutionary coup d’état seemed to be a logical answer

to the Bolshevik coup d’état , and, at the same time, introduced into civil life some

of methods learned in the trenches. Thus, Nazism could be defined as an anti-

communist movement that borrowed from its adversary its forms and methods —

beginning with terror itself. This thesis, originally put forth in 1942 by Sigmund

Neumann, 9 has been systematized by Nolte in his “historical and genetic” inter-

pretation of the totalitarian phenomenon. It calls for an analysis of the common

origins and interdependence between the two systems. Of course, pushed too far,

it can lead to n eglecting the ideological roots of both, which predate the Great

6. Letter to Jean Daniel, in Commentaire (Spring 1998), p. 246. Cf. also François

Furet, “Nazisme et communisme: la comparaison interdite,” in L’Histoire (March 1995),

pp. 18-20.

7. Op. cit .

8. Now in Commentaire (Winter 1997-98), p.790. Some passages had already been

published in Le Monde (October 22, 1997), p. 17.

9. Permanent Revolution. Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War

(London, 1942).

NAZISM AND COMMUNISM

181

War (1914-18). Yet, there is no doubt that it contains at least an element of truth.

To put it another way, one can wonder whether Nazism would have been the same

if there had been no Soviet communism. The answer is probably: no.

Another reason that justifies the comparison is the overlapping of their histo-

ries. Just as the Soviet system had mobilized under the banner of “anti-fascism,”

so the Nazi system mobilized under the banner of “anti-communism.” The latter

saw liberal democracies as weak and vulnerable to the threat of communism,

while simultaneously the former denounced them as susceptible to “fascism.”

Being anti-Nazi, communism tried to demonstrate that all rational anti-fascism

led to communism. Being anti-communist, Nazism sought to instrumentalize

anti-communism in a similar way — by reference to a common enemy. This tac-

tic was not inconsequential. As George Orwell pointed out in the 1930s, many

people became Nazis out of fear of communism, while many became commu-

nists in order to fight Nazism. Fear of communism led many to support Hitler in

his “Crusade against Bolshevism.” Fear of Nazism led many to see the Soviet

Union as humanity’s last hope.

To compare regimes is not to assimilate them: comparable regimes are not

necessarily the same. To compare means to consider two distinct individual phe-

nomena within the same category. It is neither to trivialize nor to relativize. The

victims of communism do not cancel out the victims of Nazism any more than

the victims of Nazism cancel out the victims of communism. Thus, the crimes of

one regime cannot be used to justify or diminish the importance of the crimes

perpetrated by the other: deaths do not cancel out: they add up. The fact that

communism destroyed even more people than Nazism does not mean that the

latter is “preferable” to the former, because it was never a matter of choosing

between the two.

***

Communism destroyed more people than Nazism. Yet, the prevailing opin-

ion is still that Nazism was worse than communism. How is this possible? Con-

fronted with equally destructive systems, how can the more destructive one be

the less horrible? How can one continue to reject the idea that they can be com-

pared? The only way to do so is to refrain from drawing any balance sheet of

the two systems to avoid confronting the results of the comparison. The argu-

ment most often advanced for this has to do with the difference between the ini-

tial inspirations of the two systems: Nazism was a doctrine of hate;

communism, a doctrine of liberation. Communism was fostered by love of

humanity, which Robert Hue calls “communion”; Nazism, by the rejection of

the idea of humanity. Jean-Jacques Becker claims that “humanism is at the root

of communism, while the opposite is the case with Nazism.” 10 Roger Martelli

10.

“Les Fièvres Anticommunistes,” in L’Histoire (November, 1997), p. 22.

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ALAIN DE BENOIST

adds: “Communism represents an idea of humanity based on reason and human

equality.” 11 Roland Leroy writes: “At the roots of Nazism there is hatred of man-

kind. At the roots of communism, there is love of mankind.” According to Guy

Konopnicki: “People became Nazi because of hatred of humanity. People

became communist strictly for the opposite reason.” 12

The conclusion is that Nazi crimes were foreseeable; communist crimes

were not. Stalin’s crimes were the result of a perversion of communism, which

was “an ideal of human liberation,” 13 while Hitler’s crimes followed directly

from his ideology. Nazism could be compared to a serial killer, while commu-

nism to the unfortunate good Samaritan who kills those he wants to save. Crimi-

nal by vocation, by exterminating people Nazism kept its promises and carried

out its program. Criminal by mistake, communism betrayed its promises. Nazi

practices followed directly from its doctrine, while the practices of Soviet com-

munism “constituted, so to say, a misguided application of a sound ideology.” 14

Communism was destructive only by accident, inadvertence, or awkwardness. Its

crimes resulted from a faulty interpretation or from misdirection. Communist ter-

ror might be compared to an unlucky avatar, to “a kind of meteorological acci-

dent” (Besançon). In short, despite 100 million dead, communism could be

defined as an idea of brotherly love that fell into hate unwillingly — a respect-

able project gone bad.

Thus, the human cost of communism should be regarded as the result of a

“deviation.” Soviet terror, Jean-Jacques Becker explains, resulted above all from

“the inability of its leaders to achieve by other means” an ideal “based on social

justice and love of life.” 15 Communist militants, Gilles Perrault adds, “joined a

project that sought to be universal and emancipatory. The fact that this ideal was

corrupted does not detract from their motivations.” According to Madeleine

Rebérioux, honorary president of the League of Human Rights: “To say that

communism is equivalent to Nazism is to forget . . . that the USSR never orga-

nized the exclusion of any human group from the common law”! 16 In short: com-

munist crimes w ere progressive. This argument calls for closer scrutiny.

11. “Une Différence de Nature,” in Avant-garde (December 1997), p. 28.

12. “Un Naufrage dans l’Archipel du Goulag,” in L’Evénement du Jeudi (November

6, 1997), p. 22.

13. Robert Hue, “Nazisme, Communisme: La Comparison est Odieuse et Inaccept-

able,” in L’Evénement du Jeudi (November 13, 1997), p. 59. Simone Korff Sausse has

rightly remarked that Robert Hue denounces the Gulag as a “monstrosity” in order to

present Stalinism as a pathological excrescence without any relation with “real” commu-

nism. The “monster” (the Gulag) is what differs in nature from normality (communism).

“Here is a good example,” she writes, “of a stalinist maneuver pretending to be a critique

of Stalinism. The notion of the monster seeks to rule out debate.” See “Monstruosité et

Manoeuvre Stalinienne,” in Libération (December 9, 1997), p. 5.

14.

In L’Histoire (January 1998), p. 3.

15.

Interview in La Vie (November 27, 1997), p. 11.

16.

In Le Journal du Dimanche (November 2, 1997).

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