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Fearful lie
Olavo de Carvalho
Diário do Comércio, August 8, 2008

The protest of the Russian government against the moral equation of Nazism with
Communism boils down to one of the most fearful historical falsifications of all times.
Fearful because of the magnitude of the lie enveloped therein and doubly fearful because
of the easy credulity with which it is generally welcomed by non-Communists and even
anti-Communists.
Even John Earl Haynes, the great historian of American anti-Communism, underwrites
this error: “Unlike Nazism, which explicitly placed war and violence at the core of its
ideology, Communism sprang from idealistic roots.” Nothing in the historical documents
justifies this statement. Centuries before Nazism and Fascism emerged, Communism was
already spreading terror and slaughter throughout Europe and reached an apex of
violence in the France of 1793. The very conception of genocide—the thorough
extermination of peoples, races, and nations—is Communist in origin, and its clearest
expression was already in the writings of Marx and Engels half a century before the birth
of Hitler and Mussolini.
The romanticized idealism is on the periphery and not at the core of the Communist
doctrine: the leaders and mentors have always laughed at it, leaving it to the crowd of
“useful idiots.” It is significant that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Che Guevara
dedicated very few lines to the description of the future Communist society and its
supposed beauties, preferring to fill whole volumes with the emphatic expression of their
hatred not only of the bourgeois and the aristocrats but of millennia of intellectual and
moral culture, pejoratively explained away as mere ideological camouflage for financial
interest and lust for power. Among non-Communists, the usual ascription of idealistic
motives to Communism is born of no objective sign that they can identify in the works of
the Communist grandees, but simply of the inverse projection of the rhetoric of
accusation and denunciation that bubbles in them as in a cauldron of hate. The naïve
reader’s spontaneous reaction before these works is to imagine that so much repulsion to
evil can only be born of a deep love of the good. But it is proper to evil to hate itself, and
it is simply not possible that the reduction of all moral, religious, artistic, and intellectual
values of humanity to the condition of ideological camouflage for lower impulses is
inspired by the love of the good. The gaze of fierce suspicion that Marx and his
continuators direct against the most elevated creations of the past centuries denotes,
rather, the satanic malice that attempts to see evil in everything with a view to looking
more bearable in the comparison. To accept the legend of Communist idealism as true,
we would have to invert all standards of moral judgment, admitting that the martyrs who
let themselves be killed in the Roman arena acted out of vile interest, whereas the
murderers of Christians in the Soviet Union and in China acted out of sheer goodness.
In the rare moments when one of the Communist theoreticians allows himself to
contemplate imaginatively the supposed virtues of the future society, he does so in such
exaggerated and caricatural terms that they can only be explained as a fit of hysterical
self-excitement with no connection with the substantive ground of his theories. No one
can repress an ironic smile when Trotsky says that in the Communist society every street
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sweeper will be a new Leonardo da Vinci. This, as a project of society, is a joke—

Communism as a whole is a joke. It is only serious as an enterprise of hate and
destruction.
Moreover, the Russian protest purposely suppresses two fundamental historical data:
1. Fascism was born of a mere internal split of the Socialist movement and not as an
external reaction. Its origin, as has been conclusively proved, lies in the disappointment
of European Socialists with the adherence of the proletariat of the several nations to the
patriotic appeal of the war propaganda in 1914. Grounded on the idea that economic class
solidarity was a deeper and more solid bond than national identities—allegedly factitious
inventions of the bourgeoisie to camouflage its economic interests—Lenin and his party
fellows believed that in the event of a European war the proletarians called to the
trenches would rise en masse against their respective governments and would turn the
war into a general Socialist uprising. This is exactly the opposite of what happened.
Everywhere the proletariat adhered enthusiastically to the appeal of bellicose nationalism,
against which not even some of the most outstanding Socialist leaders in France and in
Germany were immune. At the end of the war, it was only natural that the Leninist myth
of class solidarity should be subjected to dissolving critical analyses and that the concept
of “nation” should be revalued as a unifying symbol of the Socialist struggle. Hence the
great divide of the revolutionary movement: the one part remained faithful to the
internationalist banner, thus being compelled to perform complicate mental gymnastics to
reconcile it with the Soviet nationalism, while the other part simply preferred to create a
new formula of revolutionary struggle—the nationalist Socialism, or National Socialism.
It is not devoid of meaning that at the origin of “German Socialism”—as it was
universally called in the thirties—the largest dose of financial contributions to Hitler’s
party came precisely from the proletarian militancy (see James Pool, Who Financed
Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933, New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1997). For a body that Communists would later claim to be exclusively a class
instrument of the bourgeoisie, it would have been quite a paradoxical beginning, if only
this Soviet official explanation were not, as indeed it was and is, just a publicity ploy to
camouflage ex post facto Stalin’s accountability for the strengthening of the Nazi regime.
2. Ever since the twenties the Soviet government, persuaded that German nationalism
was a useful tool for breaking the bourgeois order in Europe, applied itself to promoting
in secrecy the creation of a German army in Russian territory, thus violating the
prohibition imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Without this collaboration, which
intensified after Hitler’s rise to power, it would have been impossible for Germany to
become a military power capable of disturbing the world equilibrium. Part of the
Communist militancy felt deeply disappointed with Stalin on the occasion of the signing
of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which in 1939 made the Soviet Union and Germany
partners in the brutal imperialist attack against Poland. But the agreement came as
scandalous news only because no one outside the high Soviet circles knew about that
military support, which was already more than a decade old and without which Nazism
would never have come to constitute a menace to the world. Denouncing Nazism in
words and promoting it through decisive actions was the constant Soviet policy since the
rise of Hitler—a policy that was interrupted only when the German dictator, contrary to
all that Stalin could have expected, attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. From both the
ideological and the military points of view, Fascism and Nazism are branches of the
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Socialist movement. (There is no need to emphasize their all too obvious common origin
in evolutionism and in the “cult of science.” Whoever wishes to learn more about it will
do well to read Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, New
York: Norton, 2004.)
But there still remains one point to be considered. While Communism proved uniformly
cruel and genocidal in all countries where it spread, the same cannot be said of Fascism.
Communist China soon surpassed the USSR itself in genocidal fury against its own
population, but no Fascist regime outside Germany ever compared, not even remotely,
with Nazi brutality. Rather, in most nations where it prevailed, Fascism tended toward a
soft authoritarianism, which not only reserved the use of violence for the most dangerous
armed enemies, but even tolerated the coexistence with hostile and rival powers. In the
very Italy of Mussolini, the Fascist government accepted the rivalry of the monarchy and
the Church—which in Hannah Arendt’s most pertinent analysis already suffices to
exclude it from the category of “totalitarianism.” In Latin America, no military
dictatorship—whether “Fascist” or not—ever reached the record of a hundred thousand
victims that, according to the latest calculations, has resulted from the Communist
dictatorship in Cuba. Compared with Fidel Castro, Pinochet is a harmless little dove. In
other areas of the Third World, no allegedly Fascist regime ever did anything like the
horrors of Communism in Vietnam and in Cambodia. Nazism is a specifically German
variant of Fascism, and this variant is distinguished from the others by the abnormal dose
of violence and cruelty that it desired and attained. In the matter of perilousness,
Communism is to Fascism as the Mafia is to some neighborhood rapist. But we should
not forget what Saint Thomas Aquinas says: the difference between hate and fear is a
question of proportion—when the assailant is weaker, you hate him; when he is stronger,
you fear him. Fascism is easy to hate simply because it was always weaker than
Communism and above all because, as an organized political force, it is dead and buried.
Fascism never had at its service a secret police the size of the KGB, with its five hundred
thousand officers, unlimited secret budget, and at least five million informal agents
throughout the world. Even in terms of advertisement, Goebbels’s lies were childish
tricks as compared with Willi Münzenberg’s refined techniques and with the powerful
industry of desinformatzia still fully operative in the world. While at the end of World
War II the general pressure of the victorious nations led two dozens of defendants to the
Nuremberg Court and initiated the implacable persecution to Nazi war criminals—which
lasts until today—the end of the Soviet Union was followed by general efforts to prevent
any accusation, however small, from being brought against Communist leaders
responsible for five times as great a genocide. In Cambodia, the single country that has
had the courage to essay a judicial investigation against the former Communist rulers, the
UN did everything to thwart this initiative—which to this day is dragging through a
thousand bureaucratic obstacles—awaiting death of old age to deliver the offenders from
punishment. Fascism attracts hate because it is a gruesome relic of the past. Communism
is alive, and its perilousness has not at all diminished. The fear that it inspires transmutes
easily into affectation of reverence, for the selfsame motives that led Stalin’s entourage to
feign love for him so as not to confess the terror that he inspired.
Translated by Alessandro Cota and Bruno Mori