Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "fasicm-communism-choice"

This is a subject to which intend to return at much greater length at a different time. For the purposes of the night, I am going to keep this one short.

It struck me today, and not for the first time, that one of the fundamental differences between extreme left and extreme right ideologies is their ultimate intent vis-a-vis the individual human being. Both the extreme right (Fascism) and the extreme left (Communism) are of course ultrastatist, authoritarian, and totalitarian in character. Their methods are very nearly identical: what is to choose, really, between the concentration camps of Hitler and the gulags of Stalin? They differ in their dogma, but at a glance are nearly indistinguishable in practical effect. There are only two real differences between them, the first being who they tend to victimize, and the second, their innermost goals for those they dominate.

The first difference is not important to the subject at hand, so I will dismiss it quickly: Fascists oppress their ideological enemies, who are Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and more or less anyone who believes in democracy or republicanism. Communists oppress their ideological enemies, who are Fascists, Socialists, Anarchists, and more or less anyone who believes in democracy or republicanism. So here too, the difference is really a similarity dressed as a distinction. No, the real difference is in the aims.

In my long and frankly scholarly study of Fascism, what I found -- to my surprise -- is that while Fascists are of course totalitarian and authoritarian, their main goal is the obedience of the masses and nothing more. Fascist movements are not obsessed, often not even particuarly interested, in winning the hearts and minds of the populace. Fascist movements tend to regard themselves as elites, and while they have a vested interested in perpetuating themselves through recruitment, this recruitment is usually aimed at very specific strata of society, meaning men and women who would be useful to the regime in specific roles, and of course, children, who represent the future of the movement. But even in their recruitment of children, Fascists tend to shy away from a catch-all strategy. The Hitler Youth, for example, was not a compulsory movement in Nazi Germany: far from it. The tendency of Fascists to see themselves as a stuff superior, cut from tougher cloth than the ordinary human, is a defining characteristic of the breed. Though Fascist movements must become mass movements to achieve power, they are uncomfortable with becoming the "dull gray mass of lumpenprolitariat" they see Marxist movements to be. Fascism, unlike Socialism or Commmunism, makes no claim whatever on universal brotherhood. The claim would be incompatible with their extreme nationalism, which divides the world into three basic categories:

1. Members of the movement itself, the top.
2. Members of the country they belong to, the middle, superior by simple act of birth but lesser than members of the movement itself, and;
3. The rest of the world, occupying the bottom.

Fascists being an elite in their own minds, they are content with the mere obedience of the masses they control. They do not require their countrymen to love them, or to truly believe in their slogans and aims. They do not demand that you join their ranks. Their ultimate goal is simply to be obeyed. To stay in power. Their worldview requires nothing more. The winning of hearts and minds is limited to those whose hearts and minds are viewed as worthy or necessary.

As I said above, Communists (Marxists) are at a glance identical to their Fascist enemies. Push aside ideology and everything is the same -- the uniforms, the prison-like borders, the mass demonstrations, the slogans, the work camps, the torture cellars, the deification of a single leader or leaders, the aggressive foreign policy, the disregard for law and for human life. There is however that one difference which changes everything. Unlike the Fascist, the Communist does not cease his battle when he bludgeons and terrorizes the populance into submission. Indeed, it is only when the population has submitted physically, when it is obeying the voice on the loudspeaker, when it is doing what it is told in the field or factory or schoolroom without any visible hesitation or complaint, that the real work begins.

The Communist / Marxist views outward submission as a mere step in a process. The final process is what the Soviets called The New Communist Man, someone devoid of ideological impurity, who works ceaselessly and tirelessly for the Party and its goals, who has no fear of laying down his life for those goals, and who not only spews leftist dogma, but understands the dogma and believes in it to the exclusion of everything else, including objective reality. Far more than his Fascist counterpart, he fills the role Orwell described in "1984," of the man who is so consumed by political belief that he is less a man than a cell in a body. His individual characteristics submerge into a kind of generic unipersonality, so that an encounter with one of these ideal Marxists in Nigeria would be exactly like an encounter with another in Vietnam. So ultimately the goal is to eliminate the categories the Fascist holds so dear: instead of a tier system, there is only a undiffernetiated mass...a commune.

Exactly why the Communist / Marxist desires this absolute and total control over individuals, when mere physical obedience would be enough to retain power, is of course the great question, and I believe I have an answer to it. Setting aside for the moment the psychological questions inherent in libido domanandi, the lust to dominate for the sake of domination, I believe that the Communist desires this sort of spiritual dominion because it is in the nature of Communism to reject the "extraordinary personality" around which Fascists base their entire identity. Though Communism is frequently hijacked by cultic leaders like Stalin and his progeny, this is a perversion of the nature of Communism. True Communism is not a cult of personality but the cult of an idea, and the idea must always stand over the personality. Indeed, in any area where Communism has reached its fullest expression, anyone who stands out from the crowd is the enemy. The goal is not to rise above, but to submerge, to submerge so completely that individual characteristics disappear. It has become almost axiomatic that no one suffers more cruelly than a left-winger who deviates from his fellow left-wingers on some point of dogma: witness the fate of J.K. Rowling, a hard leftist driven almost into hiding simply for rejecting leftist groupthink on one relatively unimportant issue. Conformity, not merely physical conformity but conformity of the mind, of the heart, of the soul, is the ultimate goal of these people. They cannot abide disagreement, not even from their own. The nature of the disagreement is of course not the issue: the fact it exists is. We could further explore the psychology of this inability to accept dissent, because it is a key feature of the personalities of nearly all Neo-Marxists, but for tonight's purposes I think it necessary only to underscore the fact that it exists, and defines the movement, and provides its one truly important distinction from Fascism.

I sometimes feel, looking at the news, that in the future, the very near future at that, I will be forced to make a choice between Fascism and Communism, and sadly enough, I already know which would I would choose if I lacked the courage to die for my freedom. For anyone who wishes to retain any sense of self, Fascism is always preferable to Communism, no matter how vile or loathsome it is in every other respect, because Fascism tends to end where the surface of your skin does. If nothing else, it leaves space for internal freedom, for the right to rebel in private, within your own heart and your own mind and in the confines of your own home. Provided one obeys and puts on an outward show of conformity, the subject of Fascism is reasonably safe. Hitler famously remarked of a certain former political enemy he allowed to live -- and the remark was repeated by countless of his flunkies and paladins in similar circumstances -- "He is not for us, but he will never do anything against us." And for Hitler, that was reason enough to spare him. He did not need the man's soul, merely his obedience, or at very least his inertia. But as I said before, a Communist subject is not permitted even this level of freedom. It is not enough for him to submit; it is not enough for him to conform. He must believe. And the whole of the Marxist apparatus is designed to pummel him ceaselessly with propaganda until he either believes completely -- "loves Big Brother" as Orwell put it -- or tips his hand with some form of disagreement and is consequently eliminated as an enemy of the state.

Both nightmare futures you say? I tend to agree. But perhaps that is all we have or deserve: the lesser of two nightmares.