English

The protest of the Russian government against the moral equation of Nazism with Communism boils down to one of the most fearful historical falsifications of all times. Fearful because of the magnitude of the lie enveloped therein and doubly fearful because of the easy credulity with which it is generally welcomed by non-Communists and even anti-Communists.

Even John Earl Haynes, the great historian of American anti-Communism, underwrites this error: “Unlike Nazism, which explicitly placed war and violence at the core of its ideology, Communism sprang from idealistic roots.” Nothing in the historical documents justifies this statement. Centuries before Nazism and Fascism emerged, Communism was already spreading terror and slaughter throughout Europe and reached an apex of violence in the France of 1793. The very conception of genocide—the thorough extermination of peoples, races, and nations—is Communist in origin, and its clearest expression was already in the writings of Marx and Engels half a century before the birth of Hitler and Mussolini.

The romanticized idealism is on the periphery and not at the core of the Communist doctrine: the leaders and mentors have always laughed at it, leaving it to the crowd of “useful idiots.” It is significant that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Che Guevara dedicated very few lines to the description of the future Communist society and its supposed beauties, preferring to fill whole volumes with the emphatic expression of their hatred not only of the bourgeois and the aristocrats but of millennia of intellectual and moral culture, pejoratively explained away as mere ideological camouflage for financial interest and lust for power. Among non-Communists, the usual ascription of idealistic motives to Communism is born of no objective sign that they can identify in the works of the Communist grandees, but simply of the inverse projection of the rhetoric of accusation and denunciation that bubbles in them as in a cauldron of hate. The naïve reader’s spontaneous reaction before these works is to imagine that so much repulsion to evil can only be born of a deep love of the good. But it is proper to evil to hate itself, and it is simply not possible that the reduction of all moral, religious, artistic, and intellectual values of humanity to the condition of ideological camouflage for lower impulses is inspired by the love of the good. The gaze of fierce suspicion that Marx and his continuators direct against the most elevated creations of the past centuries denotes, rather, the satanic malice that attempts to see evil in everything so as to look more bearable in the comparison. To accept the legend of Communist idealism as true, we would have to invert all standards of moral judgment, admitting that the martyrs who let themselves be killed in the Roman arena acted out of vile interest, whereas the murderers of Christians in the Soviet Union and in China acted out of sheer goodness.

In the rare moments when one of the Communist theoreticians allows himself to contemplate imaginatively the supposed virtues of the future society, he does so in such exaggerated and caricatural terms that they can only be explained as a fit of hysterical self-excitement with no connection with the substantive ground of his theories. No one can repress an ironic smile when Trotsky says that in the Communist society every street sweeper will be a new Leonardo da Vinci. This, as a project of society, is a joke—Communism as a whole is a joke. It is only serious as an enterprise of hate and destruction.

Moreover, the Russian protest purposely suppresses two fundamental historical data:

1. Fascism was born of a mere internal split of the Socialist movement and not as an external reaction. Its origin, as has been conclusively proved, lies in the disappointment of European Socialists with the adherence of the proletariat of the several nations to the patriotic appeal of the war propaganda in 1914. Grounded on the idea that economic class solidarity was a deeper and more solid bond than national identities—allegedly factitious inventions of the bourgeoisie to camouflage its economic interests—Lenin and his party fellows believed that in the event of a European war the proletarians called to the trenches would rise en masse against their respective governments and would turn the war into a general Socialist uprising. This is exactly the opposite of what happened. Everywhere the proletariat adhered enthusiastically to the appeal of bellicose nationalism, against which not even some of the most outstanding Socialist leaders in France and in Germany were immune. At the end of the war, it was only natural that the Leninist myth of class solidarity should be subjected to dissolving critical analyses and that the concept of “nation” should be revalued as a unifying symbol of the Socialist struggle. Hence the great divide of the revolutionary movement: the one part remained faithful to the internationalist banner, thus being compelled to perform complicate mental gymnastics to reconcile it with the Soviet nationalism, while the other part simply preferred to create a new formula of revolutionary struggle—the nationalist Socialism, or National Socialism. It is not devoid of meaning that at the origin of “German Socialism”—as it was universally called in the thirties—the largest dose of financial contributions to Hitler’s party came precisely from the proletarian militancy (see James Pool, Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). For a body that Communists would later claim to be exclusively a class instrument of the bourgeoisie, it would have been quite a paradoxical beginning, if only this Soviet official explanation were not, as indeed it was and is, just a publicity ploy to camouflage ex post facto Stalin’s accountability for the strengthening of the Nazi regime.

2. Ever since the twenties the Soviet government, persuaded that German nationalism was a useful tool for breaking the bourgeois order in Europe, applied itself to promoting in secrecy the creation of a German army in Russian territory, thus violating the prohibition imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Without this collaboration, which intensified after Hitler’s rise to power, it would have been impossible for Germany to become a military power capable of disturbing the world equilibrium. Part of the Communist militancy felt deeply disappointed with Stalin on the occasion of the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which in 1939 made the Soviet Union and Germany partners in the brutal imperialist attack against Poland. But the agreement came as scandalous news only because no one outside the high Soviet circles knew about that military support, which was already more than a decade old and without which Nazism would never have come to constitute a menace to the world. Denouncing Nazism in words and promoting it through decisive actions was the constant Soviet policy since the rise of Hitler—a policy that was interrupted only when the German dictator, contrary to all that Stalin could have expected, attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. From both the ideological and the military points of view, Fascism and Nazism are branches of the Socialist movement. (There is no need to emphasize their all too obvious common origin in evolutionism and in the “cult of science.” Whoever wishes to learn more about it will do well to read Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, New York: Norton, 2004.)

But there still remains one point to be considered. While Communism proved uniformly cruel and genocidal in all countries where it spread, the same cannot be said of Fascism. Communist China soon surpassed the USSR itself in genocidal fury against its own population, but no Fascist regime outside Germany ever compared, not even remotely, with Nazi brutality. Rather, in most nations where it prevailed, Fascism tended toward a soft authoritarianism, which not only reserved the use of violence for the most dangerous armed enemies, but even tolerated the coexistence with hostile and rival powers. In the very Italy of Mussolini, the Fascist government accepted the rivalry of the monarchy and the Church—which in Hannah Arendt’s most pertinent analysis already suffices to exclude it from the category of “totalitarianism.” In Latin America, no military dictatorship—whether “Fascist” or not—ever reached the record of a hundred thousand victims that, according to the latest calculations, has resulted from the Communist dictatorship in Cuba. Compared with Fidel Castro, Pinochet is a harmless little dove. In other areas of the Third World, no allegedly Fascist regime ever did anything like the horrors of Communism in Vietnam and in Cambodia. Nazism is a specifically German variant of Fascism, and this variant is distinguished from the others by the abnormal dose of violence and cruelty that it desired and attained. In the matter of perilousness, Communism is to Fascism as the Mafia is to some neighborhood rapist. But we should not forget what Saint Thomas Aquinas says: the difference between hate and fear is a question of proportion—when the assailant is weaker, you hate him; when he is stronger, you fear him. Fascism is easy to hate simply because it was always weaker than Communism and above all because, as an organized political force, it is dead and buried. Fascism never had at its service a secret police the size of the KGB, with its five hundred thousand officers, unlimited secret budget, and at least five million informal agents throughout the world. Even in terms of advertisement, Goebbels’s lies were childish tricks as compared with Willi Münzenberg’s refined techniques and with the powerful industry of desinformatzia still fully operative in the world. While at the end of World War II the general pressure of the victorious nations led two dozens of defendants to the Nuremberg Court and initiated the implacable persecution to Nazi war criminals—which lasts until today—the end of the Soviet Union was followed by general efforts to prevent any accusation, however small, from being brought against Communist leaders responsible for five times as great a genocide. In Cambodia, the single country that has had the courage to essay a judicial investigation against the former Communist rulers, the UN did everything to thwart this initiative—which to this day is dragging through a thousand bureaucratic obstacles—awaiting death of old age to deliver the offenders from punishment. Fascism attracts hate because it is a gruesome relic of the past. Communism is alive, and its perilousness has not at all diminished. The fear that it inspires transmutes easily into affectation of reverence, for the selfsame motives that led Stalin’s entourage to feign love for him so as not to confess the terror that he inspired.

Translated by Alessandro Cota and Bruno Mori

Besides listening to the national anthem with his hands over his genitals instead of over his heart, Barack Hussein Obama has adulterated the presidential seal so as to make it into one of his campaign logos, declared that the American flag is “a symbol of oppression,” and, as a finishing stroke, removed the stars and stripes from the tail of his campaign jet, replacing them with the “O” that stands for . . . himself.

More than plain and simple contempt, this attitude denotes a conscious effort at destroying the national symbols. This effort, in its turn, does not require symbolic interpretation: its meaning is self-evident. It gives electoral expression to the cultural war that has been waged against the United States, from within and from abroad, ever since the sixties: the point is to erect, upon the rubble of patriotism and sovereignty, a new system of loyalties, based on the alliance between every anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Christian hatred and the billionaire interests engrossed in the implementation of the world government. The clearest token of this alliance are the candidate’s sources of funding: radical and pro-terrorist groups, on the one side, and the globalist megafortunes plus the mainstream media in full, on the other. Hence the vigor of his campaign, which has four times as much money as his opponent’s and—without any exaggeration—gets twenty or thirty times as much media coverage.

With this backup, he presumes not only to defy every convention but also to trample on the most elementary legal requirements: after withholding for months his birth certificate, he at last produced a manifestly spurious one (see http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/12993.htm). The original document, which is still missing, is necessary to clear up an essential question: Is Obama an American citizen, or is he an alien and therefore ineligible? The concealment and the subsequent fraud speak in favor of the latter hypothesis, but the steadfast enthusiasm of Obamaniacs, contrasting with their absolute lack of interest in clarifying this question, shows that they would rather demolish the American electoral system at one blow than allow Republicans to stay in power: the new system of loyalties is already in force, placing over national integrity the partisan ambitions of the Left.

With the same self-confident insolence, Obama’s government plans run flagrantly counter to the will of the majority, without the candidate having to fear the loss of even a single vote. The nation wants gas prices down; Obama promises to send them up, by maintaining the ban on new oil drilling. America wants to see illegal immigrants depart; Obama promises not only to grant them amnesty but also to give them taxpayer-funded health care. The nation wants fewer taxes; Obama promises to create a few more. If millions of American citizens who think and want the opposite of what Obama does have sworn to vote for Obama for president, it is not on account of what he promises, but in spite of his promising them even hell itself. The attraction of the hypnotic image is stronger than the cost-benefit analysis.

Obama’s campaign is a work of precision psychological engineering, planned not to win over voters through rational persuasion, but to weaken, shock, and stupefy them to the point of making them accept every loss, every humiliation, every defeat, just in order not to contradict the assumed moral obligation to elect him, it being of little importance whether he actually is an enemy in disguise. Here is what Obama is demanding—and obtaining—from voters: that they sacrifice everything to a fetish, that they do so to some extent consciously, sharing therefore the blame for the operation and becoming in advance unable to fight against it once it has been accomplished.

We have already seen this operation be carried out in Brazil, on the basis of the stereotypical image of the “worker president,” against whose crimes and perfidies no one can raise an audible voice anymore, for everyone, dragged by the psychological blackmail, became an accomplice somehow in the rite of sacrifice before the altar of the idol.

Translated by Alessandro Cota and Bruno Mori

I have been presenting, in newspaper articles as well as in lectures and conferences, a few conclusions of an extensive study on the revolutionary mentality. Here are the chief ones:

1. The revolutionary mentality, as it appears recorded in the writings and acts of every revolutionary leader since the fifteenth century, without one notable exception, consists not in adhering to this or that concrete politico-social proposal but in a certain structure of apprehension of reality, characterized by the inversion of the causal and temporal order and of the subject-object relation, a variety of secondary inversions deriving therefrom.

2. These inversions constitute not only a “spiritual disease,” in the sense given to the term by F. W. J. von Schelling and Eric Voegelin, but a mental disease in the strict clinical sense. The revolutionary mentality is a specific variant of “interpretation delusion,” a syndrome whose pioneering description by the psychiatrists Paul Sérieux and Jean Capgras was set forth in their classic book Les Folies Raisonnantes: Le Délire d’Interprétation (Paris: Alcan, 1909; also available online at http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=61092&p=1&do=page).

Sérieux and Capgras remark: “While most of the dementing systematized psychoses rest upon predominant and almost permanent sensory disorders, all the cases that we have collected under the foregoing term are, almost exclusively, based upon delusional interpretations; hallucinations, episodic whenever existing, play hardly any role here. . . . [The interpretation delusion] is a false reasoning that has as its point of departure a real sensation, an exact fact, which, by virtue of associations of ideas conditional upon tendencies, upon affectivity, takes on, with the aid of erroneous inductions and deductions, a personal significance to the patient. . . . The interpretation delusion is distinguished from hallucination and from illusion, which are sensory disorders. . . . [It also] differs from delusional idea, an imaginary conception that is made up altogether or at least not drawn from an observed fact.” It differs too, according to the authors, from mere false interpretation, that is, from vulgar mistake, for two reasons: First, “the error is said to be, more often than not, rectifiable; the delusional interpretation, incorrigible.” Second, “the error remains isolated, circumscribed; the delusional interpretation tends to diffuse, to radiate, it associates itself with analogous ideas and organizes itself into a system.”

In a subsequent article I shall explain the specific difference between revolutionary mentality and the other varieties of interpretation delusion. Here I intend only to illustrate something that I have said and repeated dozens of times: the inversion of reality is so constant and so omnipresent a factor in the revolutionary thought of all periods that samples of it can be found in whatever the mouthpieces of revolutionary ideologies utter about subjects of their political interest. A researcher has such an immense amount of instances at his disposal that the only difficulty for him is the embarras de choix, the choice of the most obvious and illustrative cases.

I select here, at random, an article by the world-famous liberation theologist Leonardo Boff published last July 14 in Jornal do Brasil (see http://jbonline.terra.com.br/editorias/pais/papel/2008/07/14/pais20080714007.html).

Quoting Arnold Toynbee, the author says that a constant in the decay of civilizations is the disruption of the balance between the number of challenges and each civilization’s capacity to respond. “When the challenges are such that they exceed the capacity to respond, the civilization starts to decline, enters in crisis, and disappears.”

Applying this concept to the description of the current state of affairs, Mr. Boff says: “Our civilizational paradigm, developed in the West and spread throughout the globe, is everywhere failing to hold water. So severe are the global challenges, especially those concerning ecology, energy, food, and population, that we have lost our capacity to deliver a collective and inclusive response. This kind of civilization shall dissolve.”

Having reviewed, with the aid of Eric Hobsbawn and Jacques Attali, some possible catastrophic developments of the situation, Mr. Boff enunciates what, in his mind, is the only hope left: “Mankind, if it is unwilling to destroy itself, must devise a world social contract by creating global governance agencies for the collective and equitable management of nature’s scarce resources.” In short, socialist world government.

Every fact mentioned in his article is real, but systematically misplaced.

1. The challenges that Mr. Boff mentions to illustrate Toynbee’s thesis do not illustrate it, failing by far to bear it out. What Toynbee has in view are not such material difficulties as those referred to, but above all the simultaneous pressure of an “internal proletariat” and of an “external proletariat,” both engaged in destroying the target civilization. The former can be exemplified by the illegal immigrants who receive from the American government every sort of benefits (denied even to legal residents) and thereby grow stronger in order to assault the local culture and fight for the dismemberment of the United States. The “external proletariat” is represented by the multitude of organizations engrossed in a violent and incessant campaign of anti-Americanism, in which Mr. Boff himself, at least on the Brazilian scale, is a prominent voice. The action of the two proletariats is intensely promoted and subsidized by the supporters of world government, who then present the ensuing debilitation of the United States as an involuntary and impersonal phenomenon, disguising the self-fulfilling prophecy through the appeal to “historical constants.”

2. Of the four challenges adduced by Mr. Boff—ecology, food, population, and energy crises—the first three affect much less the West than Islamic and Communist countries along with their respective spheres of influence. Never has there been an ecological disaster that ranks in its effects with the Chernobyl explosion or with the widespread pollution in China, nor is there population drama that compares to the Chinese one, nor even food shortage as scary as that observed in such African countries under Islamic and Communist rule as, respectively, Sudan and Zimbabwe. If ever a paradigm was menaced by the three problems that Mr. Boff indicates, it is the anti-Western paradigm of China, of Russia, of Islamic countries. In the West, instead of overpopulation, there is nowadays depopulation; instead of food shortage, endemic obesity; and nowhere in the world are ecological risks, whether real or imaginary, kept under such strict control as in developed capitalist countries. How could a civilization be under threat of imminent extinction when the challenges to it are absent or under control? And how could it be advantageously replaced by some “new paradigm” inspired precisely by the nations that helplessly succumb to these same challenges? The inversion of reality here is so symmetrical, so patent, so literal, even so naïve, that one could not wish for a clearer and more didactic instance of interpretation delusion.

As to the energy crisis, there is none in the United States, but it is a possible risk, which is becoming imminent thanks to the activity of—you guessed it—those very supporters of world government, the likes of Pelosi and Obama, who by every possible means block new drilling, turning the owner of the largest oil reserves in the world into a nation dependent upon foreign suppliers. These, in their turn, with the money collected from their major client, finance not only propaganda campaigns but even terrorist movements against it, while at the same time arming themselves to the teeth for the “people’s war” (General Giap’s expression adopted by Hugo Chávez) against the “imperialist monster” that feeds them. As a result of the “breakdown of the imperial order”—again Mr. Boff’s words—“there begins a collective process of chaos. . . . Globalization continues, but balkanization predominates, with regional powers that may give rise to greatly devastating conflicts. . . . This extreme situation calls for an equally extreme solution.” Evidently, the extreme solution is the aforementioned planetary socialism.

In other words, of the four “challenges” that according to Mr. Boff make Western civilization inviable and call for the advent of world government, three exist only among the enemies of the West, the same enemies who inoculate the fourth one into it by spreading diseases in order to sell medicine.

Mr. Boff, himself one of the agents in the operation, albeit of a lesser kind, is aware of all this. His perception of the facts is exact. It is his interpretation of the picture that is altogether inverted, detail by detail, compulsively so, to create a system of errors in which revolutionary perfidy may look like the highest expression of good and virtue.

Translated by Alessandro Cota and Bruno Mori