There is a tendency to see Trump as a bolt out of the blue, an anomaly — an extraordinary showman who somehow conned just enough voters to gain him the Republican nomination and then to prevail as a minority vote getter with an electoral college majority. But now that we’ve had a few months to reflect on the election, it seems a little more clear that Trump represents something different and even more worrisome. His presidency is more like an American version of a global phenomenon — a populist ultra-rightist who has come to power on the strength of a political program of xenophobia, hatred of immigrants, and racism. The parallels between Trump’s most outlandish political messages as an unorthodox campaigner and the political ideology of the European extreme right parties are exact and uncanny. Take first his right-wing populism. Cas Mudde attempted to distill the “populist zeitgeist” of the European extreme right in a 2004 article (link), based on his long study of the extreme right parties of Europe. The match with the Trump campaign is exact. Populism is anti-elitist, and its leaders marshal resentment against “corrupt elites”. Mudde writes:

Moreover, populism is fundamentally divisive between “us” and “them”:

So who are the “people” of the populist right? They are the people of the imaginary “heartland”:

Further, as Mudde documents for European far-right parties, populist politicians are frequently antagonistic to the media — with the right-wing populist view that the media serves the interests of the elites, not the heartland. This line of thought has an extensive research literature as well — for example, Mazzoleni et al, The Media and Neo-Populism: A Contemporary Comparative Analysis. “In the populist mind, the elite are the henchmen of ‘special interests'” (561) — a line of heartland thinking that plays into dark conspiratorial theories and anti-Semitism. (Recall the closing political ad sponsored by the Trump campaign with its strong implications of anti-Semitic innuendo; link.)

These are parties “which appeal to resentments, prejudices and traditional values and offer simplistic and unrealistic solutions to the socio-political problems” (4).

And, as Ignazi observes for European extreme right politicians, much of their rhetoric is directed against traditional political parties themselves (recalling Trump’s own war with the GOP establishment during the campaign).

These themes are all too evident in the Trump political agenda, most recently with this week’s stunning restrictions on Muslim visitors and refugees and the deliberate choice not to refer to Jewish victims in the annual White House statement commemorating the Holocaust (link).

December 30, 2016 By Daniel Little in CAT_foundations Tags: fascism, intellectuals August 20, 2016 By Daniel Little in CAT_progress Tags: fascism Leave a comment Several recent posts have commented on the rise of a nationalistic, nativist politics in numerous contemporary democracies around the world. The implications of this political process are deeply challenging to the values of liberal democracy. We need to try to understand these developments. (Peter Merkl’s research on European right-wing extremism is very helpful here; Right-wing Extremism in the Twenty-first Century.)

One plausible approach to trying to understand the dynamics of this turn to the far right is to consider relevantly similar historical examples. A very interesting study on the history of Austria’s right-wing extremism between the wars was published recently by Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938.

Wasserman emphasizes the importance of ideas and culture within the rise of Austrofascism, and he makes use of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as a way of understanding the link between philosophy and politics. The pro-fascist right held a dominant role within major Viennese cultural and educational institutions. Here is how Wasserman describes the content of ultra-conservative philosophy and ideology in inter-war Vienna:

The ideas represented within its institutions ran a broad spectrum, yet its discourse centered on radical anti-Semitism, German nationalism, völkisch authoritarianism, anti-Enlightenment (and antimodernist) thinking, and corporatism. The potential for collaboration between Catholic conservatives and German nationalists has only in recent years begun to attract scholarly attention. (6)

This climate was highly inhospitable towards ideas and values from progressive thinkers. Wasserman describes the intellectual and cultural climate of Vienna in these terms:

At the turn of the century, Austria was one of the most culturally conservative nations in Europe. The advocacy of avant-garde scientific theories therefore put the First Vienna Circle— and its intellectual forbears— under pressure. Ultimately, it left them in marginal positions until several years after the Great War. In the wake of the Wahrmund affair, discussed in chapter 1, intellectuals advocating secularist, rationalist, or liberal views faced a hostile academic landscape. Ernst Mach, for example, was an intellectual outsider at the University of Vienna from 1895 until his death in 1916. Always supportive of socialist causes, he left a portion of his estate to the Social Democrats in his last will and testament. His theories of sensationalism and radical empiricism were challenged on all sides, most notably by his successor Ludwig Boltzmann. His students, among them David Josef Bach and Friedrich Adler, either had to leave the country to find appointments or give up academics altogether. Unable to find positions in Vienna, Frank moved to Prague and Neurath to Heidelberg. Hahn did not receive a position until after the war. The First Vienna Circle disbanded because of a lack of opportunity at home. (110-111)

Philosophy played an important role in the politics of inter-war Vienna, on both the right and the left. Othmar Spann was a highly influential conservative thinker who openly defended the values of National Socialism. On the left were Enlightenment-inspired philosophers who were proponents for reason and science. The pioneering analytic philosopher and guiding light of the Vienna Circle was Moritz Schlick. In 1934 Schlick was required to report to the Viennese police to demonstrate that the Vienna Circle was not a political organization (Black Vienna, 106). Schlick responded with three letters intended to demonstrate factually that the Circle was “absolutely unpolitical”. He defended a conception of value-free science, and maintained that the debates considered by the Vienna Circle were entirely within the scope of value-free science. But, as Wasserman points out, the doctrines of positivism and modern scientific rationality that were at the core of Vienna Circle philosophy were themselves politically contentious in the conservative intellectual climate of inter-war Vienna. It is also true that some members of the circle were in fact active progressive thinkers and actors. The most overtly political member of the Vienna Circle was Otto Neurath, who had been imprisoned for his participation in the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1918.

Intellectual influence depends on the ability of an intellectual movement to gain positions in universities and other cultural institutions. The effort to win positions of influence in Austrian universities and other leading cultural institutions was strongly weighted towards the conservatives and nationalists:

A comparison of placement success with the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists is telling. Spann managed to place four students into full professorships in Austria during the interwar period; Moritz Schlick did not manage to place a single one. Likewise, the psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler could not place anyone in German or Austrian universities. Although members of Schlick’s and Bühler’s respective circles attracted international recognition for their work in philosophy and science, they could not find institutional security in interwar Austria. The converse was true for the members of Spannkreis: they dominated the Austrian intellectual landscape yet enjoyed little international success. (91)

The rise of fascism in Austria was a violent history, including the 1927 police killing of 89 demonstrators (2) as well as the assassination of Moritz Schlick in 1936. Right-wing individuals and organizations were unleashed in attacks on progressives and socialists in Vienna, and the Austrofascist state (1933-38) was more than willing to use force against its enemies.

The assassination of Moritz Schlick was a single tragic moment in this large historical canvas. Schlick was shot to death in the main building of the university by a right-wing student, Johann Nelböck, in 1936. The background of the assassination appears to have involved politics as well as personal grievances, according to a document titled “Philosophie der Untat”, drafted by Professor Eckehart Köhler in 1968 and made publicly available in the 2000s through Reddit (link). Köhler’s document is well worth reading. It was drafted in 1968 and printed by the Union of Socialist Students of Austria for distribution at a philosophy of science conference in Vienna; but the student organization then got cold feet about the claims made and dumped 2000 copies into the Danube River. The document was rediscovered in the 1990s. According to Köhler, Nelböck was influenced by reactionary Vienna philosopher Leo Gabriel. It is apparent that the scientific philosophy of the Vienna Circle was at odds with the conservative thought that dominated Vienna; in fact, after his pardon by the Nazi government after the Anschluss, Nelböck proposed to create an alternative to positivism that he named “negativism”. It is ironic that the violence against Schlick had to do with the philosophy of positivism rather than the political program of socialism.

The University of Vienna had a shameful history during the Nazi period. Following the Anschluss the university expelled more than 2,700 faculty and students, most of whom were Jewish, according to Professor Katharina Kniefacz’s short history of these issues in the university (link). “Anti-Semitic tendencies culminated in the complete and systematic expulsion of Jewish teachers and students from the University of Vienna after Austria’s ‘Anschluss’ to the National Socialist German Reich in 1938” (6). Few were invited to return, and public contrition for these expulsions only began to occur in the 1990s. According to Kniefacz, anti-semitism within the university persisted for decades after the end of Nazi rule. And two rectors of the university who served without objection during the Nazi period are memorialized in the Main Building of the University (10).

This history is still of great relevance in Austria today. The Austrian far right came within a handful of votes of winning the presidency in May 2016, based on a virulent anti-immigrant platform. And the country’s high court has now invalidated that election, preparing the ground for a second election later this year. It is a very good question to wonder how widespread attitudes of racism, nativism, and anti-semitism are in the Austrian population today — the very climate of racism and intolerance mentioned in the Schlick memorial above.

July 29, 2016 By Daniel Little in CAT_policy, CAT_progress Tags: fascism European research and policy organizations have devoted a fair amount of attention to the rise of extremist movements and intolerance in European countries in the past ten years. Attention has been directed towards both aspects of the problem that have been mentioned in earlier posts — rising public attitudes of intolerance, and the mobilization and spread of hate-based right-wing organizations. (The topic has also received a great deal of attention in the press — for example, in the Guardian (link), the New York Times (link), and Spiegel (link).)

These researchers find three underlying “ideological orientations” associated with these patterns of intolerance and discrimination: authoritarianism, “social dominance orientation”, and the rejection of diversity. And the factors that work against intolerance include “trust in others, the ability to forge firm friendships, contact with immigrants, and above all a positive basic attitude towards diversity” (14).

Also from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung is the report Is Europe on the “Right” Path?: Right-wing extremism and right-wing populism in Europe (link). This report provides country studies of the radical right in Germany, France, Britain, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Here is how Britta Schellenberg undertakes to synthesize these wide-ranging findings:

Each country study is detailed and interesting. The France study focuses on the Front National and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s success (and later Marine Le Pen’s success) since the 1984 European election in gaining visible support and electoral success with 10% to 15% of the vote (84). The Mouvement pour la France (MPF) and its leader Philippe de Villiers also receive attention in the report. And the resurgence of skinheads and direct action neo-fascists like the “violence-prone street brawlers of the Groupe Union Defense” are discussed (89-90).

The Heinrich Boll Stiftung report authored by sixteen representatives from EU countries, “How to Counter Right Wing Populism and Extremism in Europe”, summarizes current progressive thinking about how best to resist the rise of right-wing extremism (link). This document was the result of a conference held in Brussels and Antwerp in October 2015. Here are some key findings and recommendations:

Another FES study addresses the “massive challenges” faced by the EU in the context of citizens’ expectations (link). Richard Himler’s public opinion survey (2016) considers eight countries (Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, Slovak Republic, Spain, Italy, and the Czech Republic). Given Brexit, it is interesting to see the relative levels of dissatisfaction with EU membership in other countries as well. An average of 34% of respondents found that “disadvantages exceed advantages” in EU membership for their country, with the Czech Republic at 44% on this question and Spain at only 22%. January 28, 2011 By Daniel Little in CAT_history Tags: fascism Leave a comment The last century gave us far too many examples of the rise of extremism in mass societies — both democratic and authoritarian.  Some of the political mechanisms of extremist seizure of power are well known — paramilitary force, extremist organizations, demogogic leaders, hyper-heated rhetoric, appeals to nationalism and racism, and inflammatory mass media.  But it’s also worth asking — what is the cultural basis for the rise of various extremisms?  What factors in the ideas, thoughts, and emotions of a population have sometimes led to the rise of extremist states — fascism, ethnic cleansing, murderous nationalism, or deranged communism such as the killing fields of Cambodia?  Does philosophy play a role in the rise of extremism?

For observers born since 1930 a natural place to raise this question is the rise of National Socialism in Germany.  How could a party dedicated to an explicit programme of racism, repression, and murder have gained mass support and control of the state in Germany?

A particularly important early effort to answer this question was Fritz Stern’s pathbreaking The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (1961), now fifty years old. The book is a careful intellectual history; but it is more than that.  It is an effort to link a set of philosophical ideas to a series of political developments that involved increasingly wide circles of German citizens.  So it serves as one example of how we might think about the relationship between large cultural ideas and currents, and more specific developments in politics.

Stern opens the book with these words:

This is a study in the pathology of cultural criticism.  By analyzing the thought and influence of three leading critics of modern Germany, this study will demonstrate the dangers and dilemmas of a particular type of cultural despair.  Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck–their active lives spanning the years from the middle of the past century to the threshold of Hitler’s Third Reich–attacked, often incisively and justly, the deficiencies of German culture and the German spirit.  But they were more than critics of Germany’s cultural crisis; they were its symptoms and victims as well.  Unable to endure the ills which they diagnosed and which they had experienced in their own lives, they sought to become prophets who would point the way to a national rebirth.  Hence, they propounded all manner of reforms, ruthless and idealistic, nationalistic and utopian.  It was this leap from despair to utopia across all existing reality that gave their thought its fantastic quality. (1)

These three figures were important cultural voices in Germany, even though they were undistinguished within the academic world.  Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) were intellectual and cultural precursors for the ideology of National Socialism.  They were harsh, vitriolic critics of modern German social life; they were anti-Semites; and they were wedded to a discourse of passion and hatred as devices for influencing their readers.

The central focus of this cultural criticism was the fact of modernity — liberalism, secularism, Manchesterism, consumptionism, and individualism.  These were conservative critics; they favored an earlier time that was more traditional, moral, hierarchical, and religious.  They preferred villages and towns to cities; they preferred cultivated thinkers to merchants and professionals, and they feared the rise of the proletariat.

By liberalism they meant to encompass several ideas: individualism, self-interest, parliamentary government, and glorification of commerce and the market.  And their criticisms were unswerving: they hoped to turn back all of the liberal democratic and industrial transformations that modern Europe was undergoing.

The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future. They were disinherited conservatives, who had nothing to conserve, because the spiritual values of the past had largely been buried and the material remnants of conservative power did not interest them.  They sought a breakthrough to the past, and they longed for a new community in which old ideas and institutions would once again command universal allegiance. (7)

The conservative revolutionaries denounced every aspect of the capitalistic society and its putative materialism.  They railed against the spiritual emptiness of life in an urban, commercial civilization, and lamented the decline of intellect and virtue in a mass society.  They attacked the press as corrupt, the political parties as the agents of national dissension, and the new rulers as ineffectual mediocrities.  The bleaker their picture of the present, the more attractive seemed the past, and they indulged in nostalgic recollections of the uncorrupted life of earlier rural communities, when men were pesants and kings true rulers. (9-10)

In addition to their critique of a rising liberalism in Germany (and Europe more generally), these critics were also united in a virulent anti-Semitism.  Their denunciations of the Jews became a common thread in Nazi propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stern makes the important point that these three writers depended on the emotions and the passions rather than reason and argument to express themselves.  “All three wrote with great fervor and passion.  They condemned or prophesied, rather than exposited or argued, and all their writings showed that they despised the discourse of intellectuals, denied reason, and exalted intuition” (4).  Here is a particularly important observation of the nature of this cultural criticism that appears to be relevant in our own time as well.  Julien Benda, a liberal thinker, noted that political discourse “began to play the game of political passions…. Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds” (6).

Stern has two fundamental aims in this study.  First, he hopes that the study of these three cultural critics will illuminate an important current of history: Germany’s drift towards extremism and anti-Semitism.

This study, then, takes up the origins, content, and impact of an ideology which not only resembles national socialism, but which the National Socialists themselves acknowledged as an essential part of their legacy.  But it will also point to another link, admittedly less tangible–to wit, that the Germanic critics in the peculiar tension between their lives and their ideological aspirations anticipate the type of malcontent who, in the 1920’s, found a haven in the idealism of the Hitler movement.  … We may not have sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture. (5)

But second, the book is interested in popular culture as well.  How did ordinary Germans fall prey to mobilization and propaganda based on nationalism, violence, and anti-Semitism?  Stern tries to show through a detailed study of the cultural framework expressed by these thinkers, that we can also attempt to reconstruct the modes of popular consciousness that percolated through German society in these decades.  These ultra-conservative currents helped to make even ordinary people susceptible to the efforts at mobilization that were directed towards them by the National Socialists.

Are there parallels in twentieth-century America?  Stern thought there were, in 1961.

Cultural pessimism has a strong appeal in America today.  As political conditions appear stable at home or irremediable abroad, American intellectuals have become concerned with the cultural problems of our society, and have substituted sociological or cultural analyses for political criticism. …  There is a discontent in the Western world that does not stem from economic want or from the threat of war; rather it springs from dissatisfaction with life in an urban and industrialized culture — a dissatisfaction that the three critics discussed in this book felt and fostered. (13, 14-15)

Two elements seem especially relevant in today’s political culture: the willingness of some voices in the political sphere to engage in the emotional hyperbole and hatred that were the stock-in-trade of these German critics; and the extremist language surrounding the rejection of “liberalism” that is to be found in the airwaves today.  Today too we are confronted with a virulent rejection of many aspects of a “liberal” world, and an apparent yearning for an earlier (mythical) time when there was one defining moral-religious framework to which all of society subscribed.

One of the greatest failures of German liberals and academics in the 1920s and 1930s was their inability — perhaps even their unwillingness — to make the positive case for a modern, liberal society.  The values of justice, equality, citizenship, and mutual respect embodied through decent economic and political institutions need to be defended; and German thinkers fell short in this historical task in the early twentieth century.  It is certainly important for Americans in the early twenty-first century to be more successful in making this case.

January 8, 2010 By Daniel Little in CAT_history Tags: fascism, violence 5 Comments Image: resistance to Spanish fascism, Abraham Lincoln Brigade

In Fascists Here is Mann’s definition of fascism:

Mann disputes the common dichotomy between “idealist” and “materialist” theories of large movements and structures such as fascism.  Instead, he brings forward his own long-developed analysis of the four major sources of power in complex societies:

Mann makes a very important point when he emphasizes that fascism was not an historical anomaly; rather, it was the expression of forces and crises that can recur in the twenty-first century as well.  “Fascists have been at the heart of modernity….  Fascists only embraced more fervently than anyone else the central political icon of our time, the nation-state, together with its ideologies and pathologies” (9).

The largest single topic in each of the country studies is Mann’s effort to understand the motivations of the fascist followers themselves.  Who were the committed followers?  Who were the sympathetic but less-engaged followers? Ideology and values play a large role in Mann’s interpretation and explanation of the program of fascism.  He rejects the view that fascism was wholly opportunistic and succeeded solely through its adeptness with propaganda; rather, he takes fascist social and political theory seriously, judging that fascist parties offered plausible solutions to perceived social problems (p. 2).  These parties attracted followers because they persuaded large numbers of Italians, Germans, or Spaniards that they had the ability to solve the problems their societies faced.  Key ideological themes were nationalism (the aggressive values and emotions of ethnicity and the nation) and “state-ism” (the legitimacy and necessity of a strong state with few limits on its power as an institution for solving “modern” problems).  “Fascists were motivated by a highly emotional struggle to cleanse their nation of “enemies,” and so they indulged in reckless aggression and terrible evil” (22). There is a deep question implicated in the effort to provide a definition of fascism.  Is the definition Mann offers a stipulative statement about how Mann will use the word “fascism”?  Or is it a condensed empirical theory, abstracted from the small number of clear cases — Italy, Austria, Germany?  Is it an inductive discovery that “fascism is the extreme version of nation-ism and state-ism”; or is it a purely conventional stipulation?  Put it another way; does it make a difference that Mann finds that Spain is not “fascist” by this definition?  Does such a finding provide any genuine sociological/empirical insight?  Does it allow us to judge that “Spain’s regime was likely to have other important behavioral differences relative to Italy”?  I am tempted to think that Weber’s conception of the ideal type is relevant here; the definition offered above is a description of the ideal type of fascism, and each of the existing fascisms differ in various ways from this description.  The empirical issue is one level lower: not at the level of “fascism”, but rather at the cluster of characteristics that are invoked in the ideal-type theory (paramilitary organizations, ideology of nationalism, authoritarian theory of the state, anti-democratic rhetoric).

It is interesting to think back to Fritz Ringer’s analysis of the intellectual climate of the German mandarins (link) and relate his interpretation to Mann’s treatment of the conservative-authoritarian ideologies of central Europe. Ringer’s treatment singles out many of the same ideological themes and dissatisfactions that Mann identifies — hostility to class conflict and mass democracy and the main elements of liberal modernity.  Ringer’s narrative serves as something like a snapshot of the educated elites going through the intellectual-ideological progressions Mann describes.

Here is a sobering and tragic video (in Spanish) documenting the Spanish Nationalist government’s expulsion of thousands of Republican veterans to the Austrian concentration camp Mathausen, where most of them were murdered.  There is a Facebook group, Plataforma Memoria Histórica – Guerra Civil Español (link), which is collecting materials on the Civil War.  This is a great collective effort to remember and to make sense of that struggle with fascism.

December 11, 2009 By Daniel Little in CAT_history Tags: authoritarianism, fascism 1 Comment Image: book burning by National Socialist paramilitaries, 1933 Image: Ukraine peasants fleeing famine Image: street battle, Spanish Civil War

Arthur Koestler was an articulate witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century; and much of what he witnessed was terrible.  Reading his books gives one an intense and personal vision of fascism, dictatorship, mass murder, starvation, and cruelty on a monstrous scale.  As George Orwell wrote of Koestler’s books in 1944, “The subject-matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages from the atmosphere of nightmare” (link).  Koestler worked as a Communist journalist in Berlin in the early 1930s during the rise of the brown shirts; he was the first European journalist to travel through the Ukraine to witness the results of famine in Stalin’s war against the Kulaks (Lynne Viola, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside); and he observed the Spanish Civil War, where he was arrested after the fall of Malaga, imprisoned, and sentenced to death as a Red.  (Here is an earlier post on Koestler.)

These experiences are described in his autobiography, The Invisible Writing , and the narrative of his experiences in Spain is presented in Dialogue With Death .  But Koestler’s best known book is a novel, Darkness at Noon , which is the story of the final weeks of life of the fictional Soviet revolutionary Rubashov in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and the Moscow show trials.  After a life as leader, theorist, and agent in service of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, Rubashov is arrested for fictitious crimes of conspiracy and betrayal against the State.  He is arrested before dawn; it takes him quite a while to find his pince-nez.  He is thrown into a Soviet political prison — it is reminiscent to him of the fascist prisons in which he had suffered beatings and torture years earlier.  He is brought to confess to these crimes and others under interrogation by his former comrade-in-arms, Ivanov, and the new Soviet thug, Gletkin.  Ivanov is psychologically manipulative; Gletkin is brutal; but both strive to break Rubashov and compel his confession.  They are successful; Rubashov confesses to betraying the Revolution; and like Bukharin, he is convicted and summarily shot in the back of the neck.  Along the way there is quite a bit of debate about history, the individual, the Party, and the Future of Humanity.  The key question of the novel is the puzzle: why did Rubashov confess rather than following the secret advice of the prison barber — “die in silence!”?

Koestler himself was a committed Communist agent in Berlin in the 1930s; so his descriptions of Rubashov’s activities in eastern Europe have the ring of truth — including Rubashov’s betrayals of Richard and Little Loewy in the name of socialism.  The novel recreates the Moscow show trials of 1937 with uncanny insight.  Rubashov is loosely based on Nikolai Bukharin, one of the intellectual and political leaders of the Russian Revolution.  Koestler’s novel was written only two years after the trial and execution of these leaders of the Russian Revolution at the hands of Stalin’s functionaries.  Here is what he says about the central character:

The characters in this book are fictitious.  The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real.  The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials.  Several of them were personally known to the author.  This book is dedicated to their memory.  Paris, October, 1938-April, 1940

But here is what I find fascinating.  Koestler’s fictional recreation of the arrest and trial of the top Party officials, in the person of Rubashov, and the background assumptions and rationalizations assumed by the prosecutors and interrogators, is remarkably close to the historical reality.  Here is Koestler’s description of his own arrest and arrival in a Spanish fascist prison in Malaga:

It is a unique sound.  A cell door has no handle, either outside or inside; it cannot be shut except by being slammed to.  It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches thick, and every time it falls to there is a resounding crash just as though a shot has been fired.  But this report dies away without an echo.  Prison sounds are echo-less and bleak.

When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.

First of all he gives a fleeting look round the walls and takes a mental inventory of all the objects in what is now to be his domain:

His next action is invariably to try to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out.  He fails, and his suit is covered with white from the plaster on the wall against which he has pressed himself. (Dialogue with Death, 59)

And now turn to Rubashov’s first few minutes in Stalin’s jail cell:

Rubashov walked up and down in the cell, from the door to the window and back, between bunk, wash-basin and bucket, six and a half steps there, six and a half steps back.  At the door he turned to the right, at the window to the left.  It was an old prison habit; if one did not change the direction of the turn one rapidly became dizzy. ….  Rubashov stood hesitantly in the middle of the cell, then put his pince-nez on again and propped himself at the window. (Darkness at Noon, 14, 18)

Much of the drama of Darkness at Noon is the series of interrogations Rubashov undergoes, and the mental transformation that they bring about in this courageous man to bring him to confess to the most farfetched and unbelievable crimes.  The transcripts of Bukharin’s prosecution exist; Robert Tucker and Stephen Cohen’s THE GREAT PURGE TRIAL provides extensive transcripts of the interrogation of Bukharin and other show trial victims.  It is striking to compare the interrogation of Bukharin with the interrogation of Rubashov.  Consider this bit of interrogation of Rubashov, beginning with the voice of prosecutor Ivanov:

“To return to more tangible things: you mean, therefore, that ‘we’ — namely, Party and State — no longer represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity.”

“This time you have grasped it,” said Rubashov smiling.  Ivanov did not answer his smile.
“When did you develop this opinion?”

“Fairly gradually: during the last few years,” said Rubashov.

“Can’t you tell me more exactly? One year? Two? Three years?”

“That’s a stupid question,” said Rubashov. “At what age did you become adult? At seventeen? At eighteen and a half? At nineteen?”

“It’s you who are pretending to be stupid,” said Ivanov.  “Each step in one’s spiritual development is the result of definite experiences.  If you really want to know: I became a man at seventeen, when I was sent into exile for the first time.” (69)

And now a similar moment in the actual transcripts of the interrogation of Bukharin.

Vyshinsky: Allow me to begin the interrogation of the accused Bukharin. Formulate briefly what exactly it is you plead guilty to.

Bukharin: Firstly, to belonging to the counter-revolutionary “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.”

Vyshinsky: Since what year?

Bukharin: Roughly since 1928. I plead guilty to being one of the outstanding leaders of this “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” Consequently I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took a direct part, in any particular act.  Because I am responsible as one of the leaders and not as a cog in this counter-revolutionary organization.

Vyshinsky: What aims were pursued by this counter-revolutionary organization?
Bukharin: This counter-revolutionary organization, to formulate it briefly …

Vyshinsky: Yes, briefly for the present.

Bukharin: The principal aim it pursued, although, so to speak, it did not fully realize it, and did not dot all the “i’s” — was essentially the aim of restoring capitalist relations in the U.S.S.R. (Tucker, 328)

And now, back to Darkness at Noon and Rubashov; the porter’s daughter reads aloud the newspaper account of the last minutes of Rubashov’s testimony:

“Asked whether he pleaded guilty, the accused Rubashov answered ‘Yes’ in a clear voice.  To a further question of the Public Prosecutor as to whether the accused had acted as an agent of the counter-revolution, he again answered ‘Yes’ in a lower voice ….”

Here seems to be Koestler’s own explanation of the puzzle of the confessions:

Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins.  The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats — and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.  They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.  There was no way back for them.  Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.  The public expected no swan-songs of them.  They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night…. (DN, 105)

Fiction and reality are deeply intertwined here.  I don’t believe that Koestler had access to transcripts of the show trials at the time he wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, though he had read accounts of the trials.  So the convergence of the fictional Rubashov and the historical Bukharin is remarkable.  And the transformation of Koestler’s own experiences — in Communist activism and in fascist prison under sentence of death — into the fiction of Rubashov is very striking.

The state prosecutor who conducted the show trial of Bukharin was Andrei Vyshinsky.  Following his success in the show trials, Vyshinsky became a prominent diplomat under Stalin.  And after World War II he served as permanent representative to the United Nations during the period that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was drafted and adopted.  He led the Soviet Bloc nations in abstention from the vote adopting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.  Here is a fragment of the outrageous speech he gave on this occasion:

Human rights could not be conceived outside the State; the very concept of right and law was connected with that of the State. (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent , 21-22)

I am drawn to Koestler’s writings — both his fiction and his autobiographical writings —  in part because he provides such a powerful example of an engaged mind attempting to make sense of the history around him. Much of his work is a first-person effort to “understand society” — to make sense of the social forces and individual behavior that the twentieth century presented.  George Orwell is another of my favorites in this aspect of literature, including especially Homage to Catalonia and A Collection of Essays ; so it is very interesting to me that Orwell wrote the short essay about Koestler mentioned above.  It is also interesting that they were both published in England by Victor Gollancz, along with E. P. Thompson.

(Louis Menand has an interesting profile of Koestler in the New Yorker this month.)

March 5, 2008 By Daniel Little in CAT_history, CAT_power Tags: autobiography, fascism Leave a comment Arthur Koestler is most celebrated for his historical novel about the Moscow show trials, Darkness at Noon . And the book is indeed a deeply revealing look at the heart of totalitarianism in the twentieth century — the more so if you do a side-by-side reading of the trial of the fictional Rubashov and the transcripts of the trial of the historical Bukharin (Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites: Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court ). Koestler caught the psychology and history of the period exactly right — and he did it more or less as a contemporary observer, not an archival historian with leisurely access to the archives after the fact.

But in some ways I find his autobiographical books even more gripping, and none more so than The invisible writing; An autobiography , published in 1954.

The Invisible Writing is an amazing window onto some of the most important events of the twentieth century: the rise of Hitler, the struggles between Communists and Nazis in the streets of Berlin, the gradual decapitation of all forces of the left in Germany in the 1930s, the great famine in the Ukraine, and the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War. Here is a telling description of a moment in time: “With the constant dismissals at Ullstein’s [the publisher], and the shadow of Hitler lying across the country like a monster-shaped cloud, our motley little crowd of intellectuals was too scared to be capable of any clear thought. It was easy to win their sympathy for Russia, but almost impossible to make them take a determined stand for their own interests in Germany. The liberals in Germany — and elsewhere — have rarely understood that there are situations in which caution amounts to suicide.”

Koestler was situated in such a way as to be a participant-eyewitness in these world-historical events. A few snapshots from this period — street fighting in Berlin in 1932 between Communist workers and Nazi thugs; a train journey through the Ukraine during the worst of the deliberate war of famine that Stalin waged against the peasantry; Koestler’s own denunciation of a loved one for a trivial suspicion; and a series of narrow escapes in fascist Spain (including a period of three months in a Franco prison under a sentence of death).

Koestler’s political adulthood witnessed his own movement from Communist journalist and activist in Berlin in the 1930s to a committed anti-Communist in the 1950s. And his anti-Communism derived from his own honest willingness to confront the terrible truths of Stalinism — Comintern’s betrayal of the Spanish republicans, the Moscow show trials, the deliberate policy of famine as a tool of social war, and the repression and brutality of the Soviet state against its own citizens.

The book provides absorbing, valuable reading. And it offers deep lessons for us today — about politics, about personal integrity, about the relationship between individuals and the state, and about the terrible power that ideology has wielded over humanity.

What Koestler learned from his part of the twentieth century, and was able to express so evocatively in his writings, was a series of brutal facts about power: the power of a fascist state to destroy all organizations that might challenge its grip on society, the power of propaganda to conceal and falsify evident social realities, and the power of ideology to blind intellectuals to the meaning of the events unfolding around them. Lies and coercion were the central realities of the state and the party — both in Germany and in the Soviet Union.

Koestler describes the central paradox of the Moscow show trials in these terms:

To the western mind, unacquainted with the system and the rules, the confessions in the Trials appeared as one of the great enigmas of our time. Why had the Old Bolsheviks, heroes and leaders of the revolution, who had so often braved death that they called themselves ‘dead men on furlough’, confessed to these absurd and hair-raising lies? If one discounted those who were merely trying to save their necks, like Radek; and those who were mentally broken like Zinoviev; or trying to shield their families like Kameniev, who was said to be particularly devoted to his son–then there still remained a hard core of men like Bukharin, Piatakov, Mrachkovsky, Smirnov, and at least a score of other with a revolutionary past of thirty, forty years behind them, the veterans of Czarist prisons and Siberian exile, whose total and gleeful self-abasement remained inexplicable. It was this ‘hard core’ that Rubashov was meant to represent.

Here is a final, amazing twentieth century irony. The lead prosecutor in the Moscow show trials (1936-38) — the person who established the jurisprudence of coercion, intimidation, and the crushing subordination of the individual to the overwhelming power of the state, was Andrei Vyshinsky. It was he who stage-managed the shameful miscarriage of justice that led to the executions of Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, and other leading Bolsheviks. And it was the very same Andrei Vyshinsky who was the Soviet Union’s chief delegate in 1949 in the drafting of … the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here, surely, we find a person with a fine understanding of human rights. December 13, 2007 By Daniel Little in CAT_explanation Tags: explanation, fascism, narrative, social groups Leave a comment

In a previous post I discussed the problem of explaining fascism. Let’s return to this issue as a topic for historical and social inquiry.

There are clearly a number of different explanatory questions we might have in mind: why did fascist movements emerge and gain popular support in the first three decades of the twentieth century? Why did these movements prevail in several countries and not in others? (This version parallels Skocpol’s question about revolutions.) Why did fascist states develop the political institutions they did in Germany, Italy, and Spain? How did fascist states and leaders exercise power? What prevented the rise of powerful fascist movements on France and Britain — in spite of the presence of ultra-nationalist leaders and organizations?

This approach sketches out a view of what might be a basis for an explanation of the rise of fascist social movements. Here we have singled out several causal-social factors that facilitate popular mobilization and the politicization of social movements. What it doesn’t yet explain is why and in what circumstances these movements are likely to grow powerful enough to challenge the existing state structure; this remains for another discussion.
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