On 2010-02-20, at 8:49 AM, Matthias Wasser wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I have a totally unsupported hunch that "antiauthoritarianism" in its
>> various senses is so deeply ingrained in our worldview (so that calling
>> Chavez or whoever an "authoritarian" is an insult for some reason) that it
>> is hard for us to accept that many many people in Europe in the first half
>> of the 20th century perceived a totally authoritarian state as a good thing.
>
>
> Throughout her pre-collegiate education an American is likely to have read
> the Sparknotes for: the Giver, Anthem, 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World,
> the Lottery... In high school we were taught "Harrison Bergeron" as an
> example, rather than parody, of the genre.
>
>
>> Therefore, the notion is dropping out of our understanding of the period
>> and its movements (including our understanding of Stalinism, in which people
>> tend to forget, or not know in the first place, that it was supported by the
>> majority of the Soviet population), sort of like how many people treat the
>> ancient belief in polytheism as a mere epiphenomenon.
>
>
> I feel that you may be conflating different levels of explanation, here, but
> I'm too lazy to put forth an argument.
=============================
Chris is conflating the basic human need for economic and physical security with what he suggests is an inherent tendency of the masses to favour "a totally authoritarian state".
It's true that war-related economic collapse and the inability of weak parliamentary systems in Russia and Germany to effect a recovery from their respective crises led to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and Nazis, each with quite different aims, but each equipped with a monopoly of power which allowed them to satisfy their peoples' craving for peace, order, the revival of economic activity and the promise of further progress. This was the basis for their undeniable mass support and acceptance of the single party state. You could say the same of China today.
However, when the Nazis delivered the German people into a disasterous losing war and Soviet living standards could no longer keep pace with, much less surpass, those in the West, the DSAP and CPSU both lost their popular appeal, as did the authoritarian states they constructed which were replaced by bourgeois democratic republics enjoying the same legitimacy resting on a perception of economic progress and stability.
In fact, all things being equal, the historical record shows the masses prefer and have fought for multiparty systems, where they can exercise democratic and political rights, against authoritarian ones, where those rights are suppressed and economic advance is offset by widely feared state surveillance and episodic outbreaks of state terror.