[lbo-talk] "Authoritarian" -- define, please

[Michael Pugliese]

Ethics & International Affairs, Oct 2004 v18 i2 p93(6)

     The ghosts of totalitarianism. (Book Review) Samuel Moyn.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International  
Affairs

Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Tzvetan Todorov,  
trans. David Bellos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 376  
pp., $29.95 cloth.

Tzvetan Todorov's book, originally published in 2000 in French and now  
available in a superb translation, paused at the end of a violent century  
to attempt to assess--as the title and subtitle suggest--how to remember  
it and what lessons to learn. A contemporary figure in the long tradition  
of French-speaking moralists, Todorov writes beautifully and with ethical  
passion about some of the darkest crimes in humanity's recent history. For  
Todorov, these crimes are not just past: reflecting on them can provide  
guidance for contemporary international affairs, such as NATO's  
intervention in Kosovo or the current war on terrorism. Todorov's basic  
theses are two: first, totalitarianism counts as the primary novelty of  
the twentieth century and has to be the basis for moral reflection about  
it; second, there is a proper manner of response to totalitarianism, which  
consists of the defense of a democratic and pluralistic alternative  
politics, one that reacts to the disasters of the past with moral  
vigilance in the present. Much of the book's contents is, as this summary  
suggests, unexceptionable. More interesting, perhaps, is the portrait  
gallery of moral heroes, most little known in the English-speaking world,  
who epitomize for Todorov clarity about totalitarianism and the proper  
uses of memory in politics: Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann,  
David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary, and Germaine Tillion. The book,  
structured as a series of essays, is interspersed with vivid presentations  
of these figures, who, Todorov says, admirably illustrated in practice the  
manner of acting that he wants to defend in theory.

Appealing as it may seem from this description of its contents, Todorov's  
book, to be understood more fully, has to be placed in the context--the  
French context--from which it originates. Since the mid 1970s, thanks to  
the shock of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag  
Archipelago, the intellectuals of France, especially a group of  
media-savvy authorities known as the "new philosophers," have focused  
perhaps obsessively--on the phenomenon of "totalitarianism" far more  
intensely than the thinking class of any other land. In particular, even  
as consciousness of the Holocaust grew after 1970, it is the reality of  
Soviet crimes that has attracted the most spectacular notice among  
Parisian thinkers and writers. In recent years, for example, The Black  
Book of Communism, though it had comparatively little impact when it  
appeared in English translation, caused a major stir and dispute  
essentially by listing communism's wrongdoings and attempting to quantity  
the fatalities it caused. (1) Ex-communists like the late Francois Furet  
puzzled through the problem of why so many (chiefly among intellectuals)  
had foolishly been attracted to communism and, along with others, raised  
the question whether communism, in its terror, rivaled or even outstripped  
fascism as the regime at the nether pole of evil. (2)

In this context, many in France since the mid-1970s have adopted the  
concept of "totalitarianism"--much criticized elsewhere--to refer to the  
new alternatives to democratic rule--fascist and communist-thrown tip by  
the twentieth century. In an early section of his book, Todorov devotes  
some energy to defining totalitarianism, arguing that it is characterized  
by a communal monism (rather than individualized diversity) rooted in  
secularized millenarianism (rather than anti-utopian realism). Even  
though, as he himself later observes, the concept may obscure as much as  
it illuminates, Todorov nevertheless enthusiastically defends it. He  
argues, for example, that renowned liberal philosopher and commentator  
Raymond Aron erred in distinguishing Nazi and communist ideals, since  
their murderous practices were akin to one another. (3)

It is hard to say how much Todorov himself drew from the overall sea  
change in political analysis in French culture in framing his own way of  
thinking: born in Bulgaria some five years before it became communist,  
thus originally a resident of the world he now analyzes before fleeing to  
Paris in his early twenties, Todorov offers reflections that flow--as he  
observes throughout this book--from personal experience. The return of the  
moralist in contemporary intellectual life also brings with it the risk of  
the moralizer; but no one can accuse Todorov of trendy sanctimony. Beyond  
the details of Todorov's case that communism and fascism were "peas in a  
pod" (so runs the title of the relevant chapter), there is nevertheless  
the important fact that Todorov is intervening in a characteristically  
French debate in which the distinction of the regimes from one another has  
become part of a much larger ideological dispute and therefore freighted  
with heavy implications.

What implications? For of course, it is hard to gainsay Todorov's argument  
that it is necessary for the experience of politically evil regimes to be  
at the heart of moral reflection today. Even so, Todorov's book  
illustrates some of the difficulties toward which such a commitment can  
lead.

In the first place, it leads to a theory of public memory committed to  
marginalizing the significance of the Jewish Holocaust among  
twentieth-century crimes (a maneuver abetted, of course, by the  
homogenizing concept of totalitarianism). Figuring as part of a cohort of  
French intellectuals in this regard, Todorov dedicates much of this book  
to the argument, not always frontally offered but usually directly  
implied, that Jewish Holocaust memory looms too large, and leads to the  
wrong morality, in the contemporary world. The "sanctifying" approach  
taken to the Holocaust, Todorov says, "automatically prevent[s] us from  
learning any lessons from the event and would close off all 'application.'  
It would be paradoxical, to say the least, if we asserted that the past  
should be a lesson for the present, and at the same time that it has no  
connection with the present. Things that are sanctified in this way are  
not much use to us in our real lives." (4) He has in mind a "cult of  
memory" that (in his view) ritualistically commemorates the Holocaust but  
does not mobilize in the present against roughly comparable disasters,  
including contemporary examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Of  
course, Todorov is quick to warn against measuring every garden-variety  
wrong against past crimes; but what he more fundamentally opposes is the  
restriction of a crime like the Holocaust to such a singular status that  
people who supposedly hate evil will stand by as roughly comparable wrongs  
are repeated, simply because they do not see them as similar. The key,  
then, is, Todorov says, to "mov[e] on from your own misfortunes and those  
of your close relatives to the misfortunes of others." This manner of  
response, Todorov says, is more dignified because it involves recognition  
of the proper uses of the past. (5) As the quotation suggests, Todorov  
sometimes writes as if the endeavors of gaining historical clarity about  
the differences among past crimes and taking moral action against present  
and future crimes are somehow mutually exclusive.

But if the world failed to mobilize against contemporary genocide and  
ethnic cleansing, it is probably not because it cared about the Holocaust  
too exclusively. Indeed, it is possible that Holocaust consciousness is in  
large part responsible for what little moral outrage there has been in  
response to more contemporary crimes. And Todorov's alternative, a culture  
that stresses the comparability of past and present events, is subject to  
its own characteristic defects. The spirit of comparability can lead to  
just as serious problems as the "cult of uniqueness" that Todorov decries.

Todorov's heroes sometimes failed to interpret the past accurately as they  
mobilized their memories in the present. Consider, in this regard, David  
Rousset, to whom Todorov devotes one of his most compelling vignettes. An  
ex-inmate of Buchenwald and other Nazi camps, Rousset did not stand by  
silently when news of Soviet camps became known in the West, or excuse  
communist crimes, like his fellow leftists, as a slander purveyed by  
capitalists or the price to be paid for utopia. Living through the era of  
totalitarian wrongs, which Jews would (Todorov suggests) later jealously  
interpret as the forum of their exclusive and climactic suffering, Rousset  
did not fetishize the particularity of his own experience, denying to  
other victims the right to complain. Instead, Rousset insisted on the  
commonalities between Nazism and communism without recklessly assimilating  
them together. (6) Earlier than most, he denounced Stalinist camps and  
mobilized against them, calling former inmates of Nazi camps to his aid,  
while other Parisian intellectuals turned a blind eye. One can easily  
agree with Todorov that these aspects of Rousset's career are quite  
inspirational. And yet, upon closer inspection his thought is more complex  
and ambiguous. As more and better information about the Holocaust became  
available, Rousset refused to acknowledge that the extermination camps for  
Jews were different in nature and purpose from the concentration camps  
that had interned common-law prisoners and political enemies like himself,  
because this fact interfered with his mobilization of the memory of the  
past for the sake of the present--that is, against the Soviet camps. For  
the same reason, he wanted to remember Jews in wartime, in part falsely,  
as if, though perhaps subjected to their own special fate, they had fully  
participated in the anti-fascist resistance that defined his own prewar  
and postwar activity. Todorov's hagiographic treatment of Rousset points  
to the danger that the "proper use" of memory that Todorov advocates in  
this book, and not sire ply the "wrongful abuse" that he condemns, can  
also lead to the distortion and instrumentalization of the past. So,  
beyond Todorov, the right hope is perhaps for a culture in which accuracy  
about the past is not too easily perverted in the quest for contemporary  
relevance by either the spirit of comparison or the "cult of uniqueness."

Second, and more fundamentally, Todorov's attempt to articulate an  
antitotalitarian moralism (a "critical humanism," to use his label) is  
open to question on moral grounds. Notice what kind of reasoning this way  
of thinking promotes. While generously allowing the perception of  
similarities between current events and humanity's darkest crimes, it  
shares with the syndrome of "sanctification" that Todorov rejects the  
erection of those crimes into the standard against which everything  
afterward is judged. This way of thinking converts moral and political  
analysis into the single question of how close a given event is to the  
totalitarianism that everyone rejects. But the effects of this style of  
engaging the world are severely problematic.

Todorov's final chapter, an interesting analysis critical of NATO's  
intervention in Kosovo, highlights the danger, to which Todorov thinks  
Western politicians fell prey, of "seeing ourselves as triumphing over  
absolute evil, the devil, and monsters in human disguise, [and] feeling  
proud of being the embodiment of rightness." (7) But ironically, Todorov's  
entire book is a defense of this way of thinking, by classifying  
intervention as legitimate if a particular case approaches the absolute  
evil of totalitarianism. Indeed, those who defended the Kosovo action  
argued in the same way as Todorov himself does in much of the book. It is  
possible that the Kosovo case presents such a difficulty to Todorov  
because the Western leaders who advocated intervention there, far from  
fastidiously defending the incomparability of past totalitarian violence,  
argued that in Kosovo it threatened, in some relevant comparative way, to  
recur. Suggesting, after Bosnia, that they had now/earned to be vigilant  
against human evil, they claimed to mobilize in the name of universalistic  
morality (rather than simply, for example, in the nation's best interest).  
Todorov responds that in the Kosovo case there were no real crimes to be  
prevented and that the invocation of the totalitarian precedent functioned  
as an ideology to conceal the genuine reasons for the intervention. But  
there is the point. The moral rhetoric for each side of the question is  
the same. The opposition to totalitarianism presents moral reasoning as if  
it were a simple question of fact: whether a given event is "close enough"  
to totalitarianism to demand prevention. The claim that it is provides a  
convenient rhetoric for presenting a maximal response justified by a  
variety of concerns as in fact simply serving the minimalist prevention of  
evil.
<SNIP>


-- 
Michael Pugliese