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