Translated from Rolf Gutte/Freerk Huisken, Alles bewältigt, nichts begriffen! Nationalsozialismus im Unterricht. Eine Kritik der antifaschistischen Erziehung, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg, 2007, p. 296-307.
From anti-fascism to anti-totalitarianism
The two messages of anti-fascist education
The first message of anti-fascist education to young West Germans was: National Socialism was a crime, it realized itself as a state that was a deformed caricature of a state. Democracy is a system of values of the highest order simply because it is not fascist. Moreover, the democratic state is the total negation of fascism, its antithesis and therefore the only reliable political bulwark against it. This praise is demonstrated in every topic of anti-fascist education: Our democracy is not anti-Semitic and would never permit or even be capable of a Holocaust; it does not abolish civil liberties and does not oppress the people with manipulation and terror; it does not rob citizens of their privacy and does not incite them to senseless campaigns of conquest.
This appreciation of democracy is noticeably devoid of any argument that justifies the merits of democracy itself. However, if democracy is presented as so extraordinarily humane simply because it is not identical with the wicked fascism, then the classification of good and evil must already have been established beforehand. In any case, it cannot result from this negative demarcation because the same pattern of negative comparison could be used to establish, for example, that a slave owning society or the feudal system is also not identical with fascism; and yet no one would think of praising slavery or feudal rule because of this. On the contrary, everyone would rightly insist that a closer comparative examination of these systems with fascism would show that neither deserves such praise. When comparing fascism and democracy, an investigation based on objective criteria is obviously considered unnecessary. However, the way in which the comparison is made, which is curious because it is used to make democracy look good without any concept of democracy, is not at all suitable for this purpose. Its own logic contradicts all the rules of theoretical comparison. It does not – as would be the case in a correct comparison – first determine the comparable aspects of both systems in their respective particularities in order to then identify differences and/or similarities in a second step. Rather, it omits this step and defines both solely by their respective deviations from each other. The positive or negative evaluation based on this is completely arbitrary in view of this procedure and is owed solely to the political morality valid in each case. In this country, democracy praises itself for the sole reason that it is not fascism.
But it is not just the lack of a correct comparison between two political systems that is to be criticized. Since the fixed judgment is made long before any comparative operation, it does not matter that only distorted images of fascism and democracy are subjected to this comparison. According to this, the fascist program is not an expression of political will, but of a disturbed mind that pursues oppression as its goal. In contrast, democracy is idealized as a system that is primarily concerned with serving the people and, even in its global political involvements, only has peace and international understanding in mind. In this way, there is neither a correct explanation of fascism, nor an examination of what is to be made of this democracy, which prides itself on its renunciation of the incriminated and outlawed acts of the fascists. A society that actually defined itself by pursuing the well-being of its members would not measure itself – negatively – against fascism for this purpose.
This first message is generally accepted. It has been taken to heart and is familiar to democratic citizens in many variations:
■ So the person who shares this false comparison and is grateful to democracy for protecting him from fascism knows how to deal with critics of democracy of all stripes. He knows that they lack this gratitude, which is why he tells them that they would not have been able to speak like that under fascism, but would have been immediately thrown in a concentration camp. Democracy is praised for the fact that it does not punish unwanted criticism by liquidating the critic. Consequently, this praise of the freedom to criticize is only meant as a complaint about criticism. It does not call on the critic to publicly and openly discuss all the grievances he has denounced, but to “keep his mouth shut.”
■ The anti-fascist-inspired approach that advises banning critics from speaking reaches a harsher calibre when critics of democracy, for example, discover fascist elements in democratic politics or even believe that democracy as a whole is on the way to fascism. The still harmless theoretical judgment that this trivializes fascism is quickly combined with the remark that the critic would not talk like that if he had experienced fascism himself. In place of a rebuttal of the political judgment comes the confirmation of an atrocity. The criticism is seen as evidence of a defective awareness or even of malice, and fascism is wished upon the critic as a just punishment for inadmissible complaints. This shows that the abhorrence of fascism cannot be that great. After all, it is recommended by these democrats as a method of punishing undesirable critics.
■ A variant of the first message of anti-fascist education is also known within the left: Still better than fascism, is the saying with which people who have themselves had bad experiences with the free democratic complaint system lecture those critics who can’t come to terms with this enforced relativization of criticism. The theory of democracy, which is the “lesser evil” compared to fascism, is no more convincing than the emphatic praise of democracy. It discovers in democracy, for example, achievements such as the right to free expression alongside an evil policy on immigration. In doing so, it misunderstands civil liberties very thoroughly. It considers the use of these rights by leftists to be the political core of these rights, perhaps even imagining that they were created for their sake, and complains about them to the ruling democrats when they very practically point out that freedom of expression and demonstration does not even exist for them. Every unauthorized demonstration, every search of an editorial office, and every confiscation of leaflets is seen by such left-wing idealists as an abuse of these positive democratic institutions. When they do not oppose the office holders with their accusations, but rather turn to them, they underline their trust in the self-healing powers of elected democratic institutions. In this way, democratic politics can be finely sorted: Everything that is acceptable fits within it and testifies to its great value; everything that invites complaint does not owe anything to democracy, but is a foreign body in it, reminiscent of fascism.[1]
Although the second message of anti-fascist education may not have been as widespread, it too can be considered to have been pushed through. It consists of a skillful combination of coming to terms with the past and mastering the tasks that the democratic state has set itself for the present: Post-war politicians who saw their state as the final overcoming of National Socialism and at the same time recognized the old and new enemy in the real existing communism were certain that democracy and communism had just as little in common as democracy and fascism. It did not take long to come up with a theory to match this finding, which states that fascism and communism are two political systems that differ equally from democracy and therefore necessarily had to be the same. So anti-fascism was further developed into anti-totalitarianism and with it the second message of anti-fascist education was brought to the people: the motto of the beginnings that must be resisted now referred not only to fascism, which no longer existed, but to the plural “totalitarian systems,” the practical overcoming of which was now on the agenda and whose violent suppression was immediately envisaged. For this anti-communist purpose, a theory of totalitarianism was formulated and put into catchy formulas. For German post-war policy, this transformation of anti-fascism into anti-communism had the invaluable advantage of productively combining the intellectual coming to terms with the German past with the intellectual preparation of the nation for its political future and its role as a front-line state in the Western camp. What could give greater justification to the ideological and de facto rearmament of the German people and their preparation for a war against Bolshevism than the conviction that it was particularly legitimized for the fight against all totalitarianism because it was the democratically purified successor state of the Third Reich?!
Red equals brown
Anti-totalitarianism is the battle-cry of German post-war democracy: born out of an anti-communist enemy image and linked to the anti-fascist ideology of the post-war German state. Rarely does a term make it so clear that it has only been formulated as a theoretical assertion which is entirely owed to its political raison d'état. Hardly any other term so clearly reflects the servile nature of political science. For nothing is more absurd than the assertion that communism is a kind of fascism, that red equals brown. Every politician knows this, and so do the political scientists who set out to discover only similarities between two opposing systems. Not only are they not unaware that Hitler saw Bolshevism as his fiercest domestic and foreign policy enemy; they also know that the communists pursued anti-fascist policies.[2] Everyone knows that the Hitler-Stalin pact was not a pact of friendship, but was intended to postpone the armed conflict planned by Hitler. It has not escaped anyone’s notice that this opposition was also expressed and acted out after 1945, that it determined foreign and domestic policy. Even in recent times, groups ranging from leftist to communist have engaged in street battles with xenophobic neo-fascists.
It should also be noted that democratic domestic and foreign policies do not even take to heart the identity it claims between communism and fascism. The fact that ruling democrats, including their police and judiciary, come to different conclusions in assessing xenophobic neo-fascism than when dealing politically with “left-wing extremism” has now been sufficiently proven[3] and explained in the analysis of Rostock, Hoyerswerda and Lübeck. While “left-wing extremist” concerns generally arouse suspicion of being subversive activities and are condemned on political grounds, “right-wing extremists” can be sure of a benevolent assessment of their xenophobic goals, in which democratic immigration policy makers certainly rediscover their own concerns. They only cause offense when they manifest themselves in all too obvious breaches of order and violations of the law.[4] Foreign policy also shows that the democratic Federal Republic has maintained and continues to maintain “good relations” with numerous fascist regimes – from Chile under Pinochet to Croatia under Tudjman – while communist or real socialist regimes, and even those that merely aligned themselves with the socialist bloc, were met with the most sincere hostility and the establishment of “good relations” was made dependent on a radical reversal of their policies. It is unnecessary to cite examples of this.
Last but not least, the material presented in this study makes it clear that the democratic critique of fascism does not formulate the same fundamental incompatibility that is immediately identified with communism and even real socialism. Whereas communism is equated in every textbook with the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, i.e. capital, the nation state and world revolution, and rightly discovers the absolute negation of bourgeois society in this, nothing of the sort is discovered in fascism, but only an abuse of bourgeois achievements: the turning away from the democratic form of government, the use of capital for political (war) objectives, a senseless declaration of enmity toward the Jews and the excessive and ultimately unsuccessful policy of world domination. Fascists do not in fact talk about abolishing the state and capital. Conversely, every bourgeois criticism of communism must concede that the “crimes” of fascism simply are not found in the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union never launched a world war or any other imperialist war of conquest, nor was it guilty of genocide, nor did it destroy “unworthy life,” nor was it committed to racism as a raison d'état, nor did it understand its economy as a war economy, nor did it dedicate the lives of its citizens entirely to preparing state policies of conquest. Even a comparison that brings together the findings of local science and politics on communism and fascism must therefore admit that there are affinities in principle between fascism and the democratic state that simply can’t be discovered between fascism and communism, even when communism has assumed its real socialist form.[5]
Even the statehood of the Soviet Union or the GDR with its chambers, councils, parties and elections can still be seen to have copied democratic forms rather than the fascist leadership principle. And even if a real socialist economy, in the course of its development, brought about money and commodities, profit and credit, then this testifies more to the misunderstanding that elements and principles of capitalism could be used to win the crown of the more effective system of wealth production in a peaceful competition between the East and the West than to an economy whose resources are used to prepare for war quite ruthlessly in relation to the country and its people.
But none of this has stopped “totalitarianism” research from formulating its anti-communist battle-cry into a theory and declaring red to be brown.
The theory of totalitarianism and what can be learned from it
The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs [KMK] even issued detailed “Guidelines for the Treatment of Totalitarianism in the Classroom” with a simultaneous “Recommendation for Textbook Design” in order to make the fight against the totalitarian system of Bolshevism a national moral duty for young people:
“The confrontation with totalitarianism is one of the essential tasks of the political education of our youth. Teachers at all types of schools are therefore obliged to familiarize pupils with the characteristics of totalitarianism ... In the presentation of Communist and National Socialist totalitarianism, their reprehensible objectives and criminal methods must be made clear... The lessons should awaken in young people the will to participate responsibly in the shaping of the democratic constitutional order and to contribute to defense against the claim to power of totalitarianism.”[6]
The quote leaves no doubt as to what students are supposed to learn. Anti-communist indoctrination is made a duty for teachers. What they could learn from this requirement, however, is something else. The KMK guidelines from 1963 already make it clear that political education does not consist of providing thorough information on relevant issues so that students can ultimately form their own opinions. In this case, the KMK specifies condemnation as a learning objective. This corresponds to the content of political battle cry and makes it clear that students are allowed to form their own opinions about Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” or Brecht’s “Mother Courage,” as well as about the curse and blessing of technology. However, when it comes to assessing political systems, that’s where the fun stops: Fascism and Communism must both be demonstrated to be equally reprehensible and criminal methods.
So how do textbooks manage to reduce the actual differences and opposing political positions of fascism on the one hand and communism on the other to a common denominator? “Totalitarianism is based on an ideology that has the character of a substitute religion and doctrine of salvation; ... enforces the autocracy of one party and eliminates all opposition; uses democratic forms to pseudo-legitimize the dictatorship of a minority; rules with systematic, political, spiritual and mental terror, which basically threatens everyone, even its own supporters, but is directed above all against certain groups declared to be enemies; disregards human dignity; falsifies and misuses valuable concepts (peace, freedom, democracy, socialism, honor, fatherland, etc.) and perverts moral and legal values in the service of party goals; strives for world domination.”[7]
This exemplary quote provides exhaustive information:
■ First of all, the theory of anti-totalitarianism takes a small selection from the life and activities of societies. It leaves out anything that eludes an equalizing intention. The goals and organizational methods of work, the maintenance of the population, the relationship between work and free time, all fall under the category of ‘unimportant details’. The theory of totalitarianism is not interested in whether there are classes and how their antagonistic relationship is regulated. The role played by the military in fascism and communism is also generously ignored.
■ If you look at the individual pieces that are put together to create a chilling picture of totalitarianism, you make further astonishing discoveries. From the very first assertion – “Totalitarianism is based on an ideology that has the character of a substitute religion and doctrine of salvation” – you can learn what can be done with the art of abstraction. For such a judgment can only be reached by disregarding anything of substance about the respective state “ideology” and suppressing its opposing, hostile starting point. But this cannot be avoided if the only thing that matters is what they have in common. This is discovered in the fact that both systems are supposed to have established a kind of compulsory religion. The respective ideology should not be accessible to reason, nor should it be examined, let alone criticized. Rather, as a sum of articles of faith, it is said to have been imposed on people by force.
Such a condemnation, which foregoes any assessment of the thing condemned, reveals that it is based solely on the previously established declaration of war and nothing else. Scientifically, it is circular, and politically, it falls back entirely on the democratic declaration of hostility that it actually wanted to scientifically underpin.
■ This also applies to the second accusation: “Totalitarianism enforces the autocracy of one party.”
First, we can learn something similar and, second, something different about a political indoctrination carried out with the ideology of totalitarianism. This accusation also merely diagnoses the deviation from democratic procedures as the only humane ones. Compared to the multi-party system, states in which there is only one party and therefore no right to parliamentary opposition, are subject to a negative assessment. An unbiased view would not judge a one-party system on the basis of whether it deviates from the multi-party system, but firstly by whether bourgeois parliamentarism is at work here at all; secondly, by what interests this one party pursues and, thirdly, by whether these interests are fulfilled. Fourth and finally, the question would be how the two systems deal with social consensus. It is striking that the theory of totalitarianism can only approach this question from a democratic perspective, i.e. it views consensus as the subjugation of a minority to a majority, whereby the minority then has the right to opposition. However, this only makes sense in a society that itself creates chronic dissatisfaction within its ranks, which must therefore be determined in principle by contradictions and whose political leadership is characterized by the fact that it does not want to abolish this contradiction, but wants to use it to the advantage of one social interest and at the expense of another.[8] Consequently, the whole standard loses its function where capital ownership no longer separates the majority of people from their products.
At the same time, the standard is based on whitewashing: in democracy, it claims, “all opposition” is given its due, no opposition is eliminated, there is no “intellectual terror,” but everyone is politely invited to put their dissenting views up for serious discussion. Fascism and communism are therefore not even measured by what is customary in democracy in dealing with desired or undesired opposition, but by ideals that occur to oppositionists in a democracy; especially when their criticisms are rejected one after the other. But this type of thing is always good for denouncing the enemy.[9]
■ The theory of totalitarianism therefore views the incriminated societies exclusively through the – rose-tinted – glasses of the local nation state. It assumes that not only fascism, but also communism, should in principle only be concerned with the top priorities of the democratic state: elections and the separation of powers, private property and the market economy, the rule of law and the welfare state, diplomacy and international law. It doesn’t even ask whether communists actually want all this, whether they want to establish rule over a people, whether private property is indispensable for their organization of work and supply, and whether they consider it so urgent to cultivate good relations with foreign governments, i.e. whether the standard applied even applies to the other society. This is just as uninteresting for this theory as the question of whether the institutions of real existing socialism with the same or similar names (GDR government, People’s Chamber, Supreme Soviet, etc.) actually conceal what democracy has to offer state institutions. Where it is not about democracy, the dictatorship of a class, of the proletariat, is the same as the dictatorship of an individual – which is how Hitlerism is always presented. Where it’s not about democracy, world domination, one of Hitler’s projects, is the same as the world revolution once propagated by communists, which does not mean the establishment of a worldwide monopoly of power, but the abolition of “the rule of man over man.”
Universal battle cry
The theory of totalitarianism rejects objections of this or any other kind. It has declared itself immune to any attack by immediately interpreting all objections as a reverse partisanship or as a diversion to academic sidetracks that gets in the way of the main thrust: “The theory of totalitarianism has been and still is subject to a variety of attacks. The main criticism is that it ignores the opposing ideological objectives of the two systems and fails to take sufficient account of their different economic and social conditions. However, such objections can be set aside in our context, as we are concerned here with the comparison of techniques of rule and their effects on the individual. And here the similarities can hardly be denied.” [10]
The “variety of attacks” are not refuted, but “set aside” because “in our context” it is about something else. An honest and revealing answer! You just want to see it differently, which is why the question of the other point of view is no longer open to argument. It does not arise from the matter being judged, but is a question of political standpoint. And this has weight and urges science to bend its thinking to it; which has been done successfully.
Anti-totalitarianism therefore differs from anti-fascism not only in its thrust, but also in its logic. For whereas anti-fascism in its lessons still draws its material from topics – from the seizure of power to the Holocaust to the Second World War – anti-totalitarianism gets by without any such material. Here, the abstraction from any specific systemic purpose stands for the critique itself. That is what this battle cry amounts to. At the same time, it points to its political expediency. It is universally applicable: It rearms in the name of humanity and democracy against inhumanity and totalitarianism and interferes in world history as a once again sovereign German state unsuspiciously, as it were, because it is no longer fascist – this was the foreign policy thrust of German politics until the self-dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Public political agitation corresponded to this no differently than the political education of schoolchildren. Under the title of “anti-totalitarianism,” anti-fascist education was simultaneously practiced as anti-communist education, and the Federal Republic set out to liberate its brothers and sisters from totalitarian oppression and to restore Germany as a great power.
In addition, anti-totalitarianism gave the German version of anti-communism an extra moral dimension in the Western alliance’s fight against the “evil empire”: A nation that had not only experienced totalitarian fascism at first hand, but had credibly renounced it, that had legitimized itself as a democratic nation, could use its own national claims to pose as a power disinterestedly engaged in the fight against “evil” and present itself as such to the outside world. The FRG could not have wished for a better justification for pursuing its own interests. However, the abdication of real socialism is by no means the end of the cover story. It will continue to be cultivated. Pretty much every declaration of hostility by the free West can be subsumed under it. The logic of a critique that relies entirely on methodical generalization, according to which any non-democracy can in principle fall from grace, pays off. So it should not be surprising that it is part of the new political self-image of the FRG in the world order that it speaks out as an advocate of the morally good in the fight against all forms of totalitarianism, even though there is no communist state to be seen anywhere. Secondly, the new Germany knows that its foreign policy concerns are well served by this cover story precisely because it avoids any specific systematic declaration of hostility. No wonder that the attempt to withdraw it from circulation and return to the old anti-fascism, when – as critical people have pointed out – communism no longer exists but fascism still does, has met with fierce protest.
Anti-totalitarianism allows the strongest condemnation of communism, socialism and recently state terrorism and at the same time generosity in dealing with states that are still engaged in their own “ethnic cleansing” and have to first learn democracy anyway – from “us,” of course. And if fascists do not act in the way that German foreign policy imagines, then they too are of course very totalitarian. Conversely, “critical dialogue” is also possible with those states that are filed under “state terrorism” if they open up to the West, and only this proves that they have turned away from fundamentalist totalitarianism. Thirdly and finally, “we” have a new past to deal with, that of our brothers and sisters from the “totalitarian” GDR and the successor organization to the “totalitarian” Sociality Unity Party. There is always a lot of enmity for democratic politicians to deal with; and there is hardly anything that cannot be dealt with using this all-purpose title for declarations of enmity, which was constructively developed from anti-fascism.
[1] If the criticism is not meant to be idealistic about democracy, but insists that democracy easily leads to judgments and measures that everyone is familiar with from fascism, then it is correct. But the question is what this comparison is actually good for: Isn’t it just saying that democracy is open to criticism in that it has similarities with fascism? At the same time, the criticism of democracy is in essence a criticism of fascism, and conversely, the criticism of fascism is always also a criticism of democracy. The two are not fundamentally different political systems. Fascism does not criticize democratic capitalism in the same way as communism does, but accuses it of failure. Everything else can be read in: K. Hecker, Der Faschismus und seine demokratische Bewältigung (GegenStandpunkt Verlag, Munich: 1995; untranslated)
[2] Albeit with errors.
[3] See the regular commentary in “konkret” [German leftist magazine].
[4] It is also worth studying the justifications for the 1956 ban on the Communist Party of Germany [KPD]. It is well known that the KPD’s integrative alliance policy was just as useless as its non-tactical idealism of democracy. In its program, agreement with the basic principles of the “communist world view” – the abolition of the state, private property and the world revolution – was discovered and that was enough.
[5] And even the always popular comparison between the Gulag and Auschwitz is not accurate. The internment, labor and re-education camps of the Soviet Union, which cost the lives of many real enemies of the Soviet Union and at least as many communist critics of Soviet policy, did not represent a racist sorting of the people like that carried out by the fascists and brought to an end in the extermination camps. The Soviet Union took the different wills of opponents of the regime and critics of Soviet policy as the starting point for its exclusion and punishment campaigns, sorted them into “teachable” and “unteachable, i.e. hostile” and then dealt with people accordingly. The fascists, on the other hand, also sent Jews to the gas chambers who had declared their allegiance to Germany or even to the Führer by referring to their nature. Although this difference may be irrelevant to the respective victims, and also from a moral point of view, it isn’t irrelevant for the criticism of the theory of totalitarianism that we are concerned with here. Because this theory gives no importance to the sorting of people according to will or nature, either in the eliminatory social institutions or in the departments where it is a matter of formulating social goals and pursuing them in unity.
[6] Resolution of the KMK of July 5, 1962.
[7] Der Nationalsozialismus, Informationen zur politischen Bildung [National Socialism, Information on Political Education], volumes 123/126/127; 1982 reprint, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung edition [Federal Agency for Political Education], Bonn 1991, p. 31.
[8] Where, on the other hand, there is a consensus of interests on the goals of coexistence, there is no need for opposition, and certainly no need for a politically pre-sorted opposition that is certain to protest in vain until the next election. What is needed is regular debate and agreement on ways and means, on needs and their validity.
[9] This criticism falls back on the proponents of the theory of totalitarianism. Firstly, one-party rule is the ideal of every ruling democratic politician who, as is well known, strives for absolute majorities and does everything to ensure that he can exercise his rule as undisturbed as possible; secondly, this ideal regularly becomes a reality to some extent in grand coalitions, and thirdly, democracy has even explicitly provided for the principle of autocracy for its “emergencies.”
[10] Information on Political Education No. 227, p. 4.