641
More specific in totalitarian propaganda, however, than direct threats and crimes against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings and, later, mass murder perpetrated on “guilty” and “innocent” alike. People are threatened by Communist propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly behind their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threatened by the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life, with an irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. The strong emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the “scientific” nature of its assertions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also address themselves to masses. And it is true that the advertising columns of every newspaper show this “scientificality,” by which a manufacturer proves with facts and figures and the help of a “research” department that his is the “best soap in the world.”9 It is also true that there is a certain element of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the “only soap that prevents pimples” may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who do not use his soap. Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obsession of totalitarian movements with “scientific” proofs ceases once they are in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans.
642
But there is nothing more to the frequently overrated similarities between mass advertisement and mass propaganda. Businessmen usually do not pose as prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their predictions. The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological origin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more clearly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality. There is of course a great appeal to the masses in “absolutist systems which represent all the events of history as depending upon the great first causes linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from the history of the human race” (in the words of Tocqueville). But it cannot be doubted either that the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and did not merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the following: “The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and life,… so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more insight we have into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes.”10 It is quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin’s creed in two sentences which might run as follows: “The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more do we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic materialism, the greater will be our success.” Stalin’s notion of “correct leadership,”11 at any rate, could hardly be better illustrated.
643
Totalitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its technique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits. However, totalitarian ideologies did not invent this procedure, and were not the only ones to use it. Scientificality of mass propaganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics that it has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with science which has characterized the Western world since the rise of mathematics and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be only the last stage in a process during which “science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”12 And there was, indeed, an early connection between scientificality and the rise of the masses. The “collectivism” of masses was welcomed by those who hoped for the appearance of “natural laws of historical development” which would eliminate the unpredictability of the individual’s actions and behavior.13 There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could already “see the time approaching when the ‘art of moving the masses’ will be so perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance,” and it has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and there.14
1078
12 Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” in Social Research, December, 1948.
1078
13 See F. A. v. Hayek, “The Counter-Revolution of Science,” in Economica, Vol. VIII (February, May, August, 1941), p. 13.
1078
14 Ibid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Producteur, I, 399.
644
Yet whatever the shortcomings of positivism, pragmatism, and behaviorism, and however great their influence on the formation of the nineteenth-century brand of common sense, it is not at all “the cancerous growth of the utilitarian segment of existence”15 which characterizes the masses to whom totalitarian propaganda and scientificality appeal. The positivists’ conviction, as we know it from Comte, that the future is eventually scientifically predictable, rests on the evaluation of interest as an all-pervasive force in history and the assumption that objective laws of power can be discovered. Rohan’s political theory that “the kings command the peoples and the interest commands the king,” that objective interest is the rule “that alone can never fail,” that “rightly or wrongly understood, the interest makes governments live or die” is the traditional core of modern utilitarianism, positivist or socialist, but none of these theories assumes that it is possible “to transform the nature of man” as totalitarianism indeed tries to do. On the contrary, they all implicitly or explicitly assume that human nature is always the same, that history is the story of changing objective circumstances and the human reactions to them, and that interest, rightly understood, may lead to a change of circumstances, but not to a change of human reactions as such. “Scientism” in politics still presupposes that human welfare is its object, a concept which is utterly alien to totalitarianism.16
1078
15 Voegelin, op. cit.
1078
16 William Ebenstein, The Nazi Slate, New York, 1943, in discussing the “Permanent War Economy” of the Nazi state is almost the only critic who has realized that “the endless discussion … as to the socialist or capitalist nature of the German economy under the Nazi regime is largely artificial …[because it] tends to overlook the vital fact that capitalism and socialism are categories which relate to Western welfare economics” (p. 239).
828
In the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement. When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the Bolsheviks talk about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men; they are movements in themselves. Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks’ belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx’s notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself.
2
Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government
829
The difference between Marx’s historical and Darwin’s naturalistic approach has frequently been pointed out, usually and rightly in favor of Marx. This has led us to forget the great and positive interest Marx took in Darwin’s theories; Engels could not think of a greater compliment to Marx’s scholarly, achievements than to call him the “Darwin of history.”1 If one considers, not the actual achievement, but the basic philosophies of both men, it turns out that ultimately the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same. Darwin’s introduction of the concept of development into nature, his insistence that, at least in the field of biology, natural movement is not circular but unilinear, moving in an infinitely progressing direction, means in fact that nature is, as it were, being swept into history, that natural life is considered to be historical. The “natural” law of the survival of the fittest is just as much a historical law and could be used as such by racism as Marx’s law of the survival of the most progressive class. Marx’s class struggle, on the other hand, as the driving force of history is only the outward expression of the development of productive forces which in turn have their origin in the “labor-power” of men. Labor, according to Marx, is not a historical but a natural-biological force—released through man’s “metabolism with nature” by which he conserves his individual life and reproduces the species.2 Engels saw the affinity between the basic convictions of the two men very clearly because he understood the decisive role which the concept of development played in both theories. The tremendous intellectual change which took place in the middle of the last century consisted in the refusal to view or accept anything “as it is” and in the consistent interpretation of everything as being only a stage of some further development. Whether the driving force of this development was called nature or history is relatively secondary. In these ideologies, the term “law” itself changed its meaning: from expressing the framework of stability within which human actions and motions can take place, it became the expression of the motion itself.
1148
1 In his funeral speech 011 Marx, Engels said: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic life, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.” A similar comment is found in Engels’ introduction to the edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1890, and in his introduction to the Ursprung der Familie, he once more mentions “Darwin’s theory of evolution” and “Marx’s theory of surplus value” side by side.
1148
2 For Marx’s labor concept as “an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no metabolism between man and nature, and therefore no life,” see Capital, Vol. I, Part I, ch. 1 and 5. The quoted passage is from ch. 1, section 2.
486
Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppression. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the necessarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides automatically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from generally accepted principles.