Letter from François Furet to Ernst Nolte
(on the causal relationship between bolshevism and fascism)
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This below is:
Letter from François Furet to Ernst Nolte
CENTER DE RECHERCHES POLITIQUES RAYMOND ARON
Paris, April 3, 1996
Dear colleague,
When I dedicated a long comment to you, I was well aware that I would arouse hostility towards my book in your country and beyond. This is how it happened; the very fact that I quoted you aroused a downright “Pavlovian” reflex on the left. Even Anglo-Saxon historians as diverse as Eric Hobsbawn or Tony Judt have reproached me for the fact that I only quoted your name without considering it necessary to justify this excommunication. One must break the spell of this magical train of thought; therefore I regret my actions less than ever. First of all, simply for professional reasons, as I was discussing questions which you have written about a lot for a long time. Your book “Fascism in its Epoch” (1963) had already interested me thirty years ago when it was published in French. Aside from this respect for the rules of our subject, your books also raise so many problems that are indispensable to understanding the 20th century that it is a great delusion to condemn them wholesale.
Indeed, this delusion finds its most visible origin in the obsession with Nazism that has dominated the democratic tradition for half a century, as if the Second World War would make its historical and moral significance ever more evident. Indeed, this obsession, instead of regressing as one moved away from the events that underlaid it, has grown in the 50 years that separate us from it, as the most important criterion for the good citizens to be distinguished from the “bad” ones (to resort for a moment to the vocabulary of the French Revolution). Yes, it even gave rise to imaginary fascisms because, even after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, people still wanted to find later incarnations of fascism.
The crimes of Nazism were so enormous, and so universally evident by the end of the war, that it is undoubtedly useful, and even necessary, to be keep the memory of them alive for educational reasons, even long after the generations who committed these crimes have disappeared. Public opinion is more or less clearly aware that there is something specifically modern about these crimes, that they have something in common with certain features of our society and that we must be all the more vigilant in preventing a possible repetition. This horror of ourselves formed the breeding ground for the anti-fascist obsession and was at the same time its best justification.
But it has also been instrumentalized by the communist movement from very beginning. This instrumentalization was most clear and lasting shortly after the Second World War, when history seemed to issue a certificate of democracy to Stalin as a result of the defeat of Hitler, as if anti-fascism, a purely negative determination, would suffice as a guarantee for freedom. In this way, the anti-fascist obsession added an unfortunate effect to its necessary role. It has made an analysis of the communist regimes, if not impossible, at least difficult.
In your view, this delusion is particularly total in the German left and even in Germany in general, and for reasons that are in part very obvious. Nazism was a German apocalypse that robbed your country of its tradition and plunged it into an unprecedented calamity, which was magnified by the general condemnation. It is easy to see why collective political sentiments were almost exclusively mobilized by this national tragedy. It is just as easy to see why the anti-communist argument was subject to a kind of taboo, since Hitler had already made use of it. The same phenomenon can be observed, mutatis mutandis, in Italy for the same reasons.
Nevertheless, I ask wonder whether in your letter you are not exaggerating a little the analysis of the exceptional German case in this regard. After all, fascism, in its Nazi form, was a more or less taboo subject for every historian, even in my country and more generally in democratic Europe. By that I mean that the moral condemnation to which the two regimes were subject prevented studying or even realizing the popularity they enjoyed in the interwar period. Equally great was the taboo on any comparative analysis or even any notion of interdependence between communism and fascism, even if it was not for the same reasons. In France, too, such views were dismissed as mere instruments of the Cold War, although they are very common, especially among authors from the 1930s. It seems to me that the difference between your country and my country in this regard is more in degree than in principle. In France, the existence of a time-honored revolutionary and democratic tradition has promoted the communist illusion and has made it less possible to expose its dark points. The victory of the anti-fascist coalition, the “Popular Front,” in 1936 has worked the same effect. The existence of an “anti-fascist” Marxist tradition is not alien to German culture. It is precisely this tradition that served the former German Democratic Republic for intellectual legitimization.
Whatever the situation of the French and German historians with regard to their understanding of the 20th century, it is clear that the obsession with fascism and thus anti-fascism has been instrumentalized by the communist movement as a means to hiding its own reality from the eyes of public opinion. Hence the need to question this view, which has gained the power of a theology, in order to approach the real history of fascism and communism. You have paved the way in this respect, and as time goes on, in ten or fifty years, when we have gained more distance, this will be clear to everyone.
Although I come from a different direction, I am, like you, trying to understand the strange fascination that the two great ideological and political movements—namely, fascism and communism—have exercised in our century. You focus attention on fascism, while I try to grasp the seductiveness that the communist idea has exerted on people's minds. But nobody can understand either camp without taking the other into account; so much do they depend on one another in their ideas, their passions, and in the global historical reality.
This interdependence can be studied in different ways: from the point of view of ideas, passions and regimes, for example. The first aspect leads us to analyze the extent to which democratic politics has been torn between the principle of the universal on the one hand and that of the particular on the other, or, to use their words, between transcendence and immanence: a philosophical antagonism that has intensified the passions of mutual enmity. The fascist movement was nourished by anti-communism and the communist movement by anti-fascism. But both shared the hatred of the bourgeois world that allowed them to ally with one another. After all, the comparison between the two regimes—the Bolshevik-Stalinist regime and the Hitler regime—provided material for an extensive literature since the 1930s, to which Hannah Arendt gave the most famous (but not the only) arguments after the war.
In my book, I have tried to do justice to all of these aspects. As you have very correctly seen, I am closer to your interpretation in this respect than to that of Arendt. The concept of totalitarianism allows one to compare what is comparable in the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, but it is insufficient to explain their different origins. That which follows the “historical-genetic” development—to use your expression—of the fascist and communist regimes seems to me to be more convincing and of a stronger force of interpretation. Still, I disagree with you on one important point. It seems to me that you overemphasize the reactive character of fascism in relation to communism, that is, the fact that fascism emerged later in chronological order and was determined by the October Revolution. Personally, I see in the two movements two potential manifestation of modern democracy that emerge from the same history.
Lenin seized power in 1917, Mussolini in 1922, and Hitler failed in 1923 and succeeded ten years later. Accordingly, Mussolini's fascism could well be seen as a “reaction” to the threat posed by an Italian Bolshevism that had also emerged from the war and more or less followed in the footsteps of its Russian model. One can just as well make Nazism into a response to the German obsession with the “Comintern,” a response in accordance with the revolutionary and dictatorial manifestation of communism. This interpretation contains a part of the truth, insofar as the fear of communism actually formed a breeding ground for the fascist parties, but in my opinion only a part; for it has the disadvantage that it conceals everything endogenous and special about the individual fascist regimes in favor of all those things which it fight against together. The cultural elements from which they had put together a “doctrine” existed before the First World War and thus before the October Revolution. Mussolini did not wait until 1917 to invent the link between the revolutionary idea and the national one. The German extreme right, and even the right as a whole, did not need communism to abhor democracy. The National Bolsheviks admired Stalin. I will readily admit that for Hitler the hatred of Bolshevism had priority, but only in its capacity as the end product of bourgeois-democratic society. Incidentally, some of his closest followers, such as Goebbels, made no secret of the fact that they loathed Paris and London more than Moscow.
That is why I believe that the thesis of fascism as a movement “reacting” to communism explains only part of the phenomenon. It does not shed light on the Italian or German specialty. Above all, it does not allow us to understand what origins and characteristics the two fascist movements had in common with the hated regime. I explained this in considerable detail in the 6th chapter of my book (especially on pages 197-198), and I can spare you a repetition here. I would add, however, that if you ascribe not only a chronological but also a causal priority to Bolshevism over fascism, you are exposing yourself to the allegation of wanting to excuse Nazism in a certain way. The assertion that “the Gulag existed before Auschwitz” is not false, nor is it irrelevant, but it does not mean a cause and effect relationship.
Nor can I agree with your analysis of the “rational motives” for Hitler's anti-Semitism. It was true that the existence of numerous Jews on the various leadership posts of Communism—first and foremost the Russian Party—is a proven fact. But Hitler and the Nazis in no way relied on this argument to give substance to their hatred of the Jews, which predated the October Revolution. Moreover, Mussolini, whom they held in such high esteem, had already led an anti-communist fascism that was not anti-Semitic to victory before them,. Here, too, there is a difference that separates me from you, namely with regard to the origins of Nazism, which were older and more specifically German than the hostility towards Bolshevism. Before the Jews were scapegoated for Bolshevism, they were already the scapegoats for democracy. If it is true that their special relationship with modern universalism made them an ideal target for such condemnation, they did so in both roles, both as citizens and as communists, the first conception preceding the second. (Incidentally, you yourself expressly mentioned that there were many Jews in the ranks of the Communists, but that many of them are also to be found among the representatives of liberal anti-communism in this century.)
Here, too, I come back to the particular violence of German culture towards modern democracy as an explanatory element for Nazism, which existed before Bolshevism. What you call the “rational core” of Nazi anti-Semitism, in my view, consisted rather in the imaginary superimposition of two successive, but not mutually incompatible, embodiments of modernity by the Jews. In my opinion, reading “Mein Kampf” confirms this interpretation. In this book, Bolshevism is only the last stage in the endeavor of the Jews to achieve world domination.
But this question is so comprehensive and central that we will come back to it more often in our future correspondence.
With great respect,
François Furet.