The Weimar Century by Greenberg Udi;

Author:Greenberg, Udi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

3.1. Waldemar Gurian after his exile from Germany (date unknown). Gurian’s writings were crucial in shaping Catholic thinking about communism and democracy. University of Notre Dame Archives.

Repackaging and expanding his Weimar-era personalist ideas for a broader audience, Gurian maintained that Bolshevism had gone through a radical metamorphosis and embraced a new ideological cover: one of racist and conservative nationalism. According to Gurian, Bolsheviks were no longer committed to communism’s social and economic goal of universal equality. Rather, they sought only to establish a “total state” of the kind Carl Schmitt envisioned in 1931, to fully politicize human life and eliminate all competing sources of authority beyond the state. In this quest to create this “total state,” the Bolsheviks in Germany had abandoned their Communist convictions and adopted the rhetoric of nationalism. The Third Reich, for all its anti-Soviet rhetoric, was ultimately a Bolshevik regime. According to Gurian, the Nazis, like the Soviets before them, sought only to eradicate traditional communities and to rule by isolating humans into helpless individuals who “cannot develop a common purpose.” In Gurian’s words, the “National Socialist state is just as much an educational dictatorship interfering in every department of life as its Communist opponent.” Gurian maintained that both of these regimes were best understood, not through their official ideologies, but through their mutual and identical vision of a “total state.” He therefore termed them both “totalitarian” (in German, totalitär), the twin incarnations of the same secular and destructive revolution.38

In Gurian’s eyes, the term “totalitarian” grasped Bolshevism’s frightening appropriation of national rhetoric. Indeed, it was this metamorphosis—from the language of economic equality to one of nation and tradition—that transformed Bolshevism into a “world menace.” While Communist rhetoric failed to capture the hearts of Europeans beyond the Soviet Union, the Nazi regime demonstrated that celebrating nationalism could deceive millions into the Bolshevik project of total politicization. By filling their rhetoric with a celebration of the community, the family, and the organic nation and seeking to defend traditional gender roles, the Nazis appropriated traditional values for their own nihilist goals. Indeed, Gurian claimed that compulsive lying and deception were the essence of the totalitarian phenomenon. In totalitarian regimes, he wrote, “all concepts are transformed and lose their previous significance. They continue to be employed as instruments of propaganda but simply as such for the sake of the emotions which, obviously as a result of traditional associations, they evoke.” In totalitarianism, “[j]ustice becomes the maintenance in power of a particular party.”

Liberty means the control of public life by the Bolshevik party … a contemptible device to enslave and deceive humanity…. Humanity means the inhuman annihilation, the “liquidation” of all those who are branded as enemies of the state and the workers…. Free choice is the same as acting under compulsion…. Truth means whatever the state prescribes; falsehood everything which is opposed to the state, to the party which controls it.

Totalitarianism could mask itself under any appealing rhetoric in its quest to annihilate all tradition and authority beyond the state.

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