John Lukacs on why some people love tyrants and tyrants admire each other
Hitler and Stalin, for example
John Lukacs was born in Hungary of Jewish parents, survived the Holocaust hiding in a basement, and in 1946 fled his country for the United States when he saw that Hungary would become communist. He had a distinguished career as an historian, both in teaching and writing, with books mostly on the twentieth century and others on broader questions. A Catholic, he famously called himself a reactionary rather than a conservative. This is taken from the chapter on 1939 in his A Thread of Years, a year-by-year reflection on the world from 1901 to 1969..
Except for a few pro-Communist intellectuals, Hitler’s pact with Stalin did not change the minds of many people, because by 1939 what an English wag supposedly said was true: that all the Isms were Wasms.
The second half of each chapter is an exchange with a critical friend. The friend responds:
“I guess you are thinking of that wondrous scene in the Kremlin when Stalin surprised the German delegation by inviting them to a last get-together, which turned out to be a celebratory banquet, and when he lifted his glass of Caucasian champagne, he smiled and looked straight at Ribbentrop: ‘I know how the German people love their fiihrer. I want to raise my glass to that great man.’ At the same time thousands of German Communists revere Stalin’s name while they haul stones in Hitler’s concentration camps.”
Among other things, yes. There were, of course, a few Communists who deserted the party (some of them reverting to Trotskyism, no big deal). But much more interesting and telling is the fact that not a single Nazi — or German sympathizer — left his party, that avatar of anti-Communism, because of his disillusionment with the Hitler-Stalin pact.
To the contrary: they were exhilarated by this smashing news of the Fiihrer’s success, by the statecraft of the Reich. This was so because brutal success is always more impressive than ideology, consistency in the use of power is more compelling than a consistency of ideas.
That, to me, is even more telling than Stalin’s statesmanship. And there were many people, intelligent people, who did not and do not understand what that means and still means. . . .
But I want to go further than that. When the Isms become Wasms, that is not a regression to the past. It is something else than Realpolitik. It is not a return to old statecraft, which occasionally allowed a few crimes to be committed for the sake of the state.
It is, rather, a symptom of the birth of the new barbarism. For instance, Stalin and Hitler will respect and even admire each other to the end — even during the war, when their armies and peoples will kill and burn and starve each other’s peoples by the millions.
And a new hierarchy will emerge in the German death camps and the Russian prison camps: their commanders and guards will rely more and more on the criminals among the prisoners to help run the camps, since the criminals can govern and rule the other inmates even more cruelly and unscrupulously and efficiently than the guards themselves.
Fifty years later there will be entire governments in alliance with and dependent upon criminals, whose power the highest authorities of their states can no longer control or restrict.
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