Lukacs, Buchanan, and “Anti-anticommunism”
It’s not particularly surprising that in his critique of Pat Buchanan’s new book and highly controversial interpretation of Churchill, John Lukacs would reduce the Second World War down to a morality play and claim that it’s irreconcilable to argue that the Third Reich was evil and that it might have been a mistake for Churchill to war against it.
As Tom Piatak has noted, we’ve heard this all before, albeit in a debased form, when Wolfowitz and Co. chided critics of the Iraq war with some variation on the line, “If you don’t back the invasion that means you’re part of Saddam’s fan club.”
It’s also not particularly surprising that Lukacs would forego a thorough investigation of Buchanan’s thesis and instead make rather not-so-subtle attempts at guilt by association, constantly linking Buchanan with the sometime Holocaust denier and fulltime Nazi nostalgic David Irving, as if to reassure his readers that it’s only those two crazies who have dissenting opinions about Churchill and the “Good War.” This kind of stuff is a dime a dozen, but we probably wouldn’t expect it from a world-renown historian and idol of many a paleoconservative.
Around 30 years ago, Lukacs himself wrote an essay that made use of counterfactual reasoning—history of what wasn’t but might have been—on much the same topic as Buchanan’s book. In “What if Hitler had won the Second World War” (1978), Lukacs concluded that after 1945 the Third Reich probably would have transformed into a far less radical if still authoritarian regime that would have pursued détente with the U.S. and perhaps even European unification (a vision not too dissimilar to that in Robert Harris’s “What if?” mystery-thriller Fatherland.)
That Lukacs once wrote such essay makes it all the more surprising that in his review for The American Conservative, “Necessary Evil,” he avoids seriously evaluating any of Buchanan’s historical arguments, preferring instead to rely on vague gesturing towards Buchanan’s propagating of “half truths” (which, as Aquinas reminds us, are “more dangerous than a lie.”)
I don’t think Lukacs actually reviewed The Unnecessary War without reading it, but then he certainly could have, for his critique of Buchanan amounts to a revival of some of the leitmotivs and greatest hits from his last 10 books or so, which themselves have been much like variations on a theme, each one suffering from the law of diminishing returns.
As a book review, Lukacs’s piece is thus highly disappointing, but then as kind oeuvre en miniature, it’s an invaluable portrait of an historian—and a window into his conceptions of Left and Right, World War II, and the Cold War. Lukacs doesn’t so much criticize Buchanan’s actual thesis or his counterfactual as return to many of his preoccupations of the past 50 years and lash out at old enemies who have little to do with the author.
Throughout the Cold War, Lukacs was notable for positioning himself as an “anti-anticommunist,” a highly idiosyncratic position—“Mathematically thinking, of course, an anti-anti-Communist is a pro-Communist, but we neither speak nor think mathematically”—and one that I ultimately find highly dubious. It’s through this lens that Lukacs views The Unnecessary War and because of this position, feels it quite necessary to oppose the book, without, it seems, much consideration of its content.
All of this begins to comes to the fore in this passage on the question of whether Hitler’s hegemony in the East might have been a lesser evil than Stalin’s:
Let me now raise the question: What would have happened if Britain and France had allowed Hitler to conquer Poland? After that he would have gone further east and then conquered the Soviet Union, with the acquiescence of the West. All to the good, Buchanan writes, since Communism was evil, more dangerous than German National Socialism. But there is—and there ought to be—no comparison here. Germany was part and parcel of European culture, civilization, and tradition. Russia was not. Stalin had a predecessor, Ivan the Terrible. Hitler had none. German National Socialist brutality was unprecedented. Russian brutality was not.
It’s of course rather un-PC (perhaps refreshingly so?) to argue that mass murder in Russia is par for the course and nothing to get worried about. But then it is rather odd to dismiss the crimes of the Soviet Union as “Russians behaving Russian” since Lukacs supports intervention against Germany on the basis of absolute morality. (There’s also the minor detail that Stalin was not, well, Russian (!)).
Lukacs has long had a tendency to dissolve Soviet violence into a kind of natural, predictable expression of “Russian national character.” And for an historian who prides himself in grasping that “ideas have consequences” and who stresses that “material conditions, almost always, matter less than mental conditions and inclinations” (Democracy and Populism, p. viii), he’s taken pains to deemphasize the importance of Marxism-Leninism. For Lukacs, the philosophy of communism has very little appeal outside the intelligentsia and thus regimes based on it won’t last. The Gulags and purges were a product of Russia, not Marx, anyway.
A rather contestable reading on many fronts. Sure, Russian history is pretty brutal, but the social engineering attempted under the Soviet regime—from forced famine to the institutionalized terror of the purges to almost unbelievable attempts at forcibly breeding half-man/half-ape New Soviet Citizens—were of a different character than any monstrosity of the Czars. And these were perversions that occurred in every communist experiment no matter the nationality. As for staying power, the miserable German Democratic Republic lasted only a couple of years less than the strong-as-iron German Empire. As for being a threat to the world, was it so wrong for Western nations to take the Comintern at its word?
Lukacs was certainly well aware of all this, and yet still opposed anticommunism because he viewed it as part and parcel of the real catastrophic ideology of the 20th century, nationalism.
This trope surfaces in his review of Buchanan:
Nationalism, not Communism, was the main political force in the 20th century, and so it is even now. When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, perhaps as many as 10,000 Germans killed themselves, and not all of these had been Nazis. When the Soviet Union and Communist rule in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, I do not know of a single Communist, whether in Russia or elsewhere, who committed suicide.
I’m not sure what if anything can be made of Lukacs’s comment about suicide since the Third Reich and Soviet Union collapsed is such vastly different historical contexts. What’s clear are the exact terms in which Churchill is to be admired and in which his warring against Germany is to be viewed as inherently justified: Churchill fought the evil “force” of nationalism.
The quotation above comes directly out of a famous passage from The Duel in which Lukacs compares Churchill and Hitler:
Churchill was the opponent of Hitler, the incarnation of the reaction to Hitler, the incarnation of the resistance of an old world, of old freedoms, of old standards against a man incarnating a force that was frighteningly efficient, brutal and new. Few things are as wrong as the tendency to see Hitler as a reactionary. He was the very antithesis of that. The true reactionary was Churchill. (pp. 14-15)
Hitler as modernist, mass democrat—Hitler as leftist even—is certainly a provocative, engaging interpretation and one that upturns most of what’s taken for granted and was taught to us in high school. But whatever we want to make of it, it’s also clear that in justifying the Second World War on the basis of Churchill’s “incarnation” of some mythic struggle against the force of nationalism, Lukacs is no longer writing history but has moved on to sentimental literature or moral allegory.
It’s also an allegory I doubt Churchill would have much understood. Churchill opposed Hitler not because the bulldog was an “antinationalist”—an almost laughable claim—but due to national rivalries stretching before the First World War when Germany emerged as the new kid on the European block. Churchill never expressed aversion to nationalism—was he not himself a full-blooded British nationalist!?!—and in his Great Contemporaries spoke highly of Mussolini and wrote of the Führer, “Whatever else may be thought about these exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.” (see Buchanan, p 336). As for incarnating the Old World against “modernism,” let’s not forget that Churchill supported Eugenics, helped develop area bombing of civilians and the use of poison gas, and possessed a worldview that Buchanan argues was, in many ways, “post-Christian” (see Buchanan, pp. 399-404).
(There’s also the curious problem of this “force” of nationalism, against which Churchill supposedly did battle. Lukacs seems to forget that nationalism is always national. Hitler didn’t embody “nationalism” but the prospect of Germany domineering Europe. By their very nature, various nationalisms can never be unified, and they usually end up fighting each other (a good thing, one would think, from Lukacs’s perspective.) Monolithic Nationalism has never be a threat. Communism, on the other hand, is a different story…)
My point here is not simply to bash Churchill, he’s rightly regarded as a hero. It is instead to bring to the fore the way that Churchill functions within Lukacs’s imagination. And never far away from Lukacs’s infatuation with the great “antinationalist” is his pose of “anti-anticommunism.”
For Lukacs, anticommunism was never merely anticommunism. For as the actual communist menace is a mirage, “anticommunism” is agitprop and fear mongering that props up wicked nationalism, again Lukacs’s central enemy. In his major essay, “The Poverty of Anticommunism,” Lukacs lists “anticommunism”—which he links directly with “nationalist socialism” and the “radical right”—as a force of history capable of overwhelming communism and liberalism. It emanated from Germany but is now particularly rampant in the United States.
The camp of “anticommunism” is actually quite large and includes some rather strange bedfellows. Hitler is of course there, but then so are the Kennedys, Sen. Robert Taft, William F. Buckley, the members of American First Committee, Ronald Reagan, and Buchanan himself. If these figures every met at a cocktail party, they’d probably get into heated arguments; however, in the imagination of John Lukacs, they’re all on the same team. Put simply, if at one point in your life you questioned the need to war against Germany (or, excuse, “the force of nationalism”) and also considered communism a threat, and perhaps wanted to roll it back, then you’re a right-wing nutjob.
Thus Robert Taft, the classical liberal non-interventionist who in the interwar period thought that Bolshevism was a greater threat than fascism, is depicted as inseparable from the “extreme nationalists” (Democracy and Populism, p, 67). The AFC, the largest antiwar movement in American history which warned against the danger of instituting totalitarianism at home in order to defeat it abroad, is depicted in grotesque fashion in The Duel as a gaggle of Germanophilic imperialists (pp. 13-14).
Lukacs even thinks the forces of “anticommunism/nationalism” won, that Hitler won in the sense that the Third Reich is but an “extreme variant” of the contemporary state. “We are, at least in one sense, all national socialists now” (Democracy and Populism, p. 41).
Lukacs’s logic is as simple as it is flawed:
Hitler = Nationalism. Churchill warred against Hitler; ergo Churchill = Antinationalism.
Hitler = Anticommunism; ergo an Anticommunist ≈ Hitler
Such a sentiment (not exactly logical) seems to lead Lukacs to make rather breathtakingly wrong claims, such as that Robert Taft is “the idol of almost all present American conservatives” (!) (well, he is among a few), or that Hitler has great acclaim on the right in Europe and South America (!!).
Lukacs clearly doesn’t get out much. And as an historian, he has a rather annoying tendency of allowing grand, sweeping interpretations of history—as provocative, interesting, and “reactionary” as they might be at times—to get in the way of understanding the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” how it really happened.
It’s become rather predictable that whenever “nationalism” is mentioned in a discussion among paleos, someone will invariable quote Lukacs’s distinction between nationalism and patriotism, which he first set down in Historical Consciousness (1968) and has managed to repeat in just about every book since. Put simply: Nationalism is a modernist force based on a myth and “inseparable from the desire for power.” Patriotism, on the other hand, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” and is thus defensive in character. In one of his recent books he even calls nationalism “self-centered and selfish” and links patriotism with “charitable love.” (Democracy and Populism, p. 73).
This is all well and good; however, I find this distinction to be so uncontroversial and banal that I doubt one could find a single person on the planet who’d actually want to contest it—who wants to come out against “love” or give a shout out for delusional and self-centered “desire for power”? The statement is also rather unhelpful if we want to ask the question whether, in fact, in a world of mass communication and migration across the continent, the nation and nation-state actually are good categories for our conceptions of identity and “us-ness.” At any rate, before we cite Lukacs again to express our patriotism, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we want to adopt all the rest of the Lukacsian accoutrements as well.
Comments
Wonderful essay Richard! I think the word hero is too strong for Churchill. He was very brave physically, and had great political courage as well. He made way too many mistakes and commited to many crimes to be called a hero. He was like general Custer,a very brave man but not very succesful in what he accomplished.
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Richard,
Nicely balanced essay. Your comments about Lukacs are quite judicious and accurate,
in my opinion.
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“Lukacs clearly doesn’t get out much.”
We can agree that Prof Lukacs’s assessment of PJB’s new tome is off the mark, but do we need to be sophomoric about it. The comment above seems petulant and a bit odd.
“And as an historian, he has a rather annoying tendency to allow grand, sweeping interpretations of history—as provocative, interesting, and “reactionary” as they might be at times—get in the way of understanding the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” how it really happened.”
Though I may have issues with Prof Lukacs’s obsession with Hitler and Churchill, I believe Richard that this quote is out of bounds. It made me question how familiar you are with Lukacs’s Historical Consciousness, or any of his other writings on his historical philosophy or history as a mode of thinking. Without exemption, his work in this area has been long overlooked and it’s extremely spot on.
One can take issue with Lukacs’s review of PJB’s book and his interpretation of WWIII, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. From my perspective, it strikes me that his review of PJB’s work seems crankier in tone than usual, and may be indicative of a thinker at the twilight of his vocation. I’m not saying that a younger Lukacs would agree with PJB, but he may have been a tad bit more collegial and far more nuance in his assessment. I believe a bit more balance on both ends – Lukacs and critics thereof – would be appropriate at this stage.
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note: that should be WWII not III...sorry for the quick post…
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I think Lukacs is wrong about the Buchanan book, but I think there is something to be said for anti-anti-communism. If the Cold War in many ways warped American conservatism, some perspective on Communism was actually in order. Not that Stalin didn’t commit atrocities, but was Communism ever a significant military threat to the US?
I also agree with him about the problem with nationalism, but does that mean he supports Welsh and Scottish independence against British nationalism? I don’t know. I’m just asking. Britain has exploited nationalism for its own purposes as well.
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What seems particularly bizarre about Lukacs’ position on Hitler as the incarnation of “nationalism”, is that Lukacs’ friend George Kennan agreed with the point Richard makes here, that if the Hilter regime was really based on nationalism, it would fail as it would be in conflict with the competing nationalisms of the various nations of Europe. Of course, if Hitler’s ideology wasn’t really based on nationalism, then Lukacs’ theory of what WW2 was about falls apart. It is a heads Lukacs loses, tails he loses scenario.
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I have never trusted those who minimized Soviet mass murder both in the early Soviet years and during the Cold war, particularly those who also promoted Nazi Germany as singularly evil.
It’s clear in my mind that Hitler was merely following precedents established by Soviet Communists: State mass-murder of citizens based on ideology and religion; the idea that the machinery of State can and should be used to exterminate political opposition on a mass scale; the demonization of a specific religion and its practitioners; the total control by the State over all aspects of society; political ideology as religion…
It should have been well-established by now that State totalitarianism is singularly evil, not just its Nazi variety.
I think it’s mostly ambitious, power-mad Statist-socialists who still fantasize about playing God that are eager to distinguish Nazi brutality from Soviet brutality and minimize the latter. They don’t want the Communist variation of totalitarianism to reach the ill-repute of Nazism because that will spoil their future ambitions for the State (run by them, of course) as the final arbiter for everything based on the Soviet model.
These are the types who were pooh-poohing Solzhenitsyn even as he was pleading with the West to do something, or at least educate itself as to the evils of Communism. These are the same types who pooh-pooh the pleadings of the Palestinians trapped in the Soviet-like Occupied territories today.
In the Soviet era, it was “only” Russian Orthodox being murdered, and after all, the country has always been brutal, anyway; in the Levant and Iraq, it’s “only” Muslims and a few Christians being killed. Big deal. The Mideast has always been brutal anyway.
A man’s character can be determined by his position vis-à-vis Communism in the Soviet era and Neconservatism and Zionism today.
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Although I have been a friend of John Lukacs for many years, I agree fully with
this critique of John’s anti-anti-Communism coupled with his obvious revulsion for
Germans. Those attitudes explain why John has prospered within the liberal
establishment, withouthaving lost his conservative credentials.The books of his that
will likely withstand the test of time are the ones that show least these deforming
characteristics, e.g., Historical Consciousness, impressions of American life
and the charming studies of Philadelphia patricians.
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For those perplexed by why people would be opposed to extreme anti-communism I suggest you familiarize yourselves with the Vietnam War.
For those who after studying the Second World War, and still somehow inexplicably think that Adolph Hitler was not an extreme German nationalist, should read Mein Kampf.
And for those who apparently did not read Lukacs book review, I repeat, he simply said that a Europe half dominated by the Soviet Union was preferable to a Europe completely dominated by the Third Reich.
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“a Europe half dominated by the Soviet Union was preferable to a Europe completely dominated by the Third Reich.”
As if those two were the only possible outcomes.
How about a Europe in which Hitler and Stalin had pounded each other to pulp and collapsed? Or for that matter, how about a Europe in which Patton had been allowed to take out Stalin?
Was it Western Communist sympathizers (aka anti-anti-Communists) that prevented the latter? We know there were plenty of them in the US at the time, and a lot of them had plenty of money.
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Thanks for this essay, Mr. Spencer.
The least clever aspect of Lukacs remark about suicidal Germans and reclining Communist Russians is that Communism lasted in Russia until 1989. I feel like an infant even having to type this observation.
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Patton was probably a Nationalist who really was a Nazi Fifth Columnist in cahoots with Skorzeny. The Bulge deal always did seem fishy. Plus I thinks his mama’s people were named BROWN.
Good thing Cool Hand Lukacs was hammering the Huns from the soft underbelly via Budapest salon and cafe urban warfare.
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At The American Conservative blog, Tom Piatak writes:
“The principal difference between the two men is that Buchanan sees Communism as having been a greater threat than Nazism, whereas Lukacs comes to the opposite conclusion...But Lukacs’ conclusion is especially odd, when he says one cannot say that Hitler was evil and also say it was unnecessary to wage war against him. Lukacs maintained a similar view of Soviet Communism for many years.”
This may be the key to Lukacs’ thinking: by the logic he employs to venerate WWII and promotes as eternal, if the Soviet Union was equally evil, we were morally obligated to invade it. Therefore, the Soviet Union cannot be recognized as equally evil. That would demonstrate that “appeasement” can work. And such a demonstration would shatter Neocon plans to hawk their wars of aggression (and make lots of money doing it).
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I should start by saying I like Lukacs and generally find his point on nationalism an important one. I think particularly in the Third World, variants on National Socialism should be taken seriously as an abiding political form for the modern era. I also think his works the End of the Twentieth Century and the Hitler of History are incredibly interesting. Historical Consciousness I still find too opaque. Finally, I’ve met Lukacs and consider him a real gentleman.
That all said, I think Lukacs is odd in this sense because on the Cold War he’s a realist and emphasizes the geographic and structural factors of conflict between East and West (and also in Russia’s concern for Afghanistan). But on the Nazis he seems to be talking in a moralistic fashion and adopts idealistic rhetoric. Of course, there are obviously big realist consequences to a Hitler victory in WWII, but those would not have necessarily been apparent to all in 1939, nor too would the inevitability of war been apparent.
Finally, a side point: the suicides in Germany stemmed in part from the arrival of the Red Army, which promised revenge and rapine which the Germans knew was coming their way. It’s not for nothing that the Stauffenberg plotters consisted largely of officers from Army Group Center, where scortched earth was practiced with the greatest German “efficiency.”
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The problem of extreme anti-communism had more to do with left of center types like the Neocons. It was the “extreme” or “radical nationalists” in America who opposed the Vietnam war from the right. Many “radical nationalists” were also opposed to the Korean war as well as the first Gulf war and the current war in Iraq. Note that it is the globalists, some internationalists and other left of center types who pushed the current Iraq war. It wasn’t “populists” or “nationalists” who conspired to get the US into the current Iraq quagmire.
On WW2, Lukacs claims that we were fighting to prevent the rise of a new barbarism, which is a fair enough point. However, even Lukacs at times admits that we are nonetheless seeing the rise of a new barbarism. At times, Lukacs has claimed that the victory over Nazism did little but gain a few decades before this barbarism has eclipsed civilization. Why these observations don’t create some doubt in his mind about the approach used to counter the Nazis is a question we are not going to get an answer to as is evidenced by Lukacs’ refusal to entertain Buchanan’s book on this subject.
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“How about a Europe in which Hitler and Stalin had pounded each other to pulp and collapsed? Or for that matter, how about a Europe in which Patton had been allowed to take out Stalin?”
Had Stalin fought alone he would have been defeated by the Germans. There was absolutely zero chance that we would have attacked the Russians. First, we did not have the necessary men or material. Second, the Brirish and American public had no desire to do so and would not have stood for it not to mention that no one in power would or did countenance it either.
As for your absurd contention that Lukacs has a hidden neoconservative agenda, again I quote his review:
“That the present American empire is much overextended, overgrown, and at risk of all kinds of dangers, most of them willfully ignored by the American people and their politicians, is so. Buchanan deserves credit for having pointed this out, again and again, in his articles and books.”
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Will the censor on this site kindly retract, if he has not already done so merely based on my having posted it, my last remaining comment above. I was unaware Professor Lukacs was impressed into forced labor by the Germans, and I thus apolgize publicly for questioning his physical courage and toughness.
As to my other deleted comment on this thread, I fail to see how simply raising a question about Lukacs rationale for anti anticommunism and why such a rationale would not logically dictate anti anti-islamofascism on the part of “patriotic” conservatives is unfit for publication? Over on Zmirak’s post, Tom Piatak basically made the same point vis a vis American leftist elites thwarting invasion of Stlain’s Soviet Union and its implications for undermining the appeasment cudgel for Frum and Co. And for the record, I deeply respect Mr. Piatak as traditional Catholic conservative intellectual of the first order, (and the censor truly is a gutless moral coward if you erase this statement.)
But whatever, it ain’t my candy store. If SPLC has you boys that scared, it’s a good thing that John Zmirak’s old boss Big Daddy Foster’s courting of David Duke by buying his voter list has passed the in-house thought police’s muster. It sure as hell didn’t pass muster with the New Orleans Jewish Community, but Flushing John (or Kew Gardens, Astoria or whatever precinct of Yankeedom from whence he came), like all carpetbaggers, has said goodbye to all that for the bigtime. Don’t like guilt by association there Big Jawn? Well I sure as hell don’t appreciate having my integrity questioned because the monitors of this website are crapping in their skivvies scared of thugs who traffick in slander and character assasination every day.
I guess what it boils down to is some folks can dabble with Kluxers, bash Lukcas as a “Crank”, and still not be excommunicated if they possess the right credentials and rip off Frans Hal’s Jolly Toper for cachet. Now I understand why Andy Capp put this place in the rearview. Enjoy the canapes, should be plenty to go round once all the declasse rabble gets escorted from the toff’s ball
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Correction:
Mr Piatak’s comment was posted at Chronicles website, where I will also now exclusively expend kilowatts on the writings of Dr.’s Fleming and Wilson. I never quite understood why most readers over there never posted here. I do now.
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“Had Stalin fought alone he would have been defeated by the Germans...”
Who, unable to occupy the vast Soviet Union, would have eventually been bled to death and the Nazis would have weakened and been toppled (since we’re playing the speculation game.)
“There was absolutely zero chance that we would have attacked the Russians.”
Again, if Patton’s council had been followed, and if Americans had been properly educated prior to WWII about Communism (and not misled by Communist sympathizers and fifth columnists), there is zero chance we would NOT have attacked the mass murdering Communists (who should be distinguished from “the Russians,” just as Jews should be distinguished from Neocons and Zionists.)
PS: I’m not contending the Lukacs has a hidden Neocon agenda, I am contending that he and all others who have turned WWII into a civil religion AND not spoken out energetically and explicitly against the Neocons’ hijacking of it in order to conduct wars of profit and aggression are useful idiots. Lukacs’ minimization of the evils of Communism compounds his culpability. And as Gottfried noted above: “Those attitudes explain why John has prospered within the liberal
establishment…”
Is Lukacs part of the Neocon agenda? No more than the average Germans he hates so much who found it more profitable to look the other way were part of the Nazi one.
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Lukacs is truly a devotee of the Hofstadter school of anti-right bashing. I never quite understood why L is so determined to refute Hannah Arendt’s attempt to conflate the Nazi and Soviet regimes until I read these insightful pieces on takimag. Apparently the Nazis are always worse than the Soviets according to L, despite Arendt’s copious documentation on the vast similarities between these two totalitarian camps.
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Lukac’s Russophobia or slavophobia is hardly “refreshingly un-pc.” It probably derives from his background and has been widely disseminated by media and academia throughout the United States in particular along what, until rather recently was an official political culture of anti-anticommunism.
Some inconvenient (for Lukacs) facts from The Black Book of Communism:
First, we should consider the possibility that responsibility for the crimes of Communism can be traced to a Russian penchant for oppression. However, the tsarist regime of terror against which the Bolsheviks fought pales in comparison with the horrors committed by the Bolsheviks when they took power. The tsar allowed political prisoners to face a meaningful justice system. The counsel for the defendant could represent his client up to the time of indictment and even beyond, and he could also appeal to national and international public opinion, an option unavailable under Communist regimes. Prisoners and convicts benefited from a set of rules governing the prisons, and the system of imprisonment and deportation was relatively lenient. Those who were deported could take their families, read and write as they pleased, go hunting and fishing, and talk about their “misfortune” with their companions. Lenin and Stalin had firsthand experience of this. Even the events described by Fyodor Dostoevsky in Memoirs from the House of the Dead, which had a great impact when it was published, seem tame by comparison with the horrors of Communism. True, riots and insurrections were brutally crushed by the ancien regime. However, from 1825 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6,360, of whom only 3,932 were executed. This number can be subdivided chronologically into 191 for the years 1825-1905 and 3,741 for 1906-1910. These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918 after they had been in power for only four months. It follows that tsarist repression was not in the same league as Communist dictatorship.
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Lukac’s remark about suicides in Russia after the collapse of the USSR could also be evidence of slavphobic contempt for Russians (if it is not just some additional dandruff). Some 6,000,000 died of causes related to sudden impoverishment, disease, hunger during Yeltsin’s binge of “liberalization” when the Harvard Business School and the oligarchs looted the country.
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It should be remembered that john Lukacs is first and foremost a self-admitted reactionary elitist with a romantic affection for the patriots among the upper classes during the Modern Age, which he defines as roughly the 500 years preceding 1945.
For well nuanced explications of his opinions on various twentieth century modes of opinion one should read his book “A Thread of Years” which explores how certain people felt and thought via various vignettes from 1901 through 1969.
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Grant has a good point—throughout all of Lukacs’s books (or at the the dozen or so I’ve read), he’s expressed an animus towards Arendt, even though he never much goes into detail about what exactly he dislikes so much in her long, dense, sometimes impenetrable volume. In the end, I think it is something as simple as “she equated Stalinism and Nazism.” I guess this makes her a “nationalist,” or perhaps “the idol of the American conservative movement” much like Robert Taft…
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I have never trusted those who minimized Soviet mass murder both in the early Soviet years and during the Cold war, particularly those who also promoted Nazi Germany as singularly evil.
Neither have I, Mr. Moore, and I am perpetually dumbfounded why its atrocities are so extravagantly ignored by this country’s soapbox gentry. We’ll never see a PBS documentary, or HBO miniseries, on the miseries of the Gulag or the massacres of the Great Purge - much less on the big, winnowing scythe of starvation that was employed by all Marxist “republics.”
In this country, Communist crimes are merely “strategic mistakes.” And as disproven as the tawdry doctrine now stands, Communism gets very good press. Strangely.
Or maybe not so strangely.
For all his bellows of being “paleo”, Lukacs to me seems a prototypical neoconservative. He shares with them a decidedly leftist tendency when it comes to domestic policy, saving a hawkish, “conservative” view for international issues. For Lukacs, the bugbear has always been Nazis (then and now); for the neocons, it’s Arabs. But open borders, “anti-racism” and First Amendment delimits? Bring ‘em on!
Both decry nationalism: Somehow having a cultural and geographic identity is deplorable. They warn this national consciousness will lead to chauvinism and depravity. History, however, indicates that ain’t necessarily so - and both Lukacs and the neocons know this. But they’re not in the habit of letting the truth and sanity contradict them. Obviously, their true motivations for condemning all national affinities (save Israel’s) are never to be spoken aloud.
Another neocon trait.
In fact, ever notice how neoconservative exchanges with current heavyweights of the Left reveal unaffected - and creepy - mutual fondness? (’Course… there was a time when even Henry Kissinger believed Marxism was inevitable.) It’s not to hard to conjecture that the movement’s steady attenuation as world-class standard of political vision threatens a creeping dissolution of the neocon’s own self-appraisal that they are prescient about all things, always.
It’s difficult to see why such a trifle would trouble them, though. After all, when they’re proven wrong, they can always blame someone else. And do.
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Here’s something else odd about that article.
As a print subscriber to TAC, it does not appear in my copy of the March 19th issue.
The other articles listed on the table of contents on TAC’s website do, but Lukacs review does not.
Indeed, the article is dated to the not yet published June 2 issue.
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“For all his bellows of being “paleo”, Lukacs to me seems a prototypical neoconservative. He shares with them a decidedly leftist tendency when it comes to domestic policy, saving a hawkish, “conservative” view for international issues. For Lukacs, the bugbear has always been Nazis (then and now); for the neocons, it’s Arabs. But open borders, “anti-racism” and First Amendment delimits? Bring ‘em on!”
This is nonsense. Lukacs is not a foreign policy hawk-he’s written in favor of a non-interventionist foreign policy (he opposed both wars against Iraq). The reference to open borders indicates you are ignorant of Prof. Lukacs’ work. Lukacs’ on immigration (p.156, “Outgrowing Democracy"): “The 1965 Immigration Act was part and parcel of the surge of the last corrupt chapter of political liberalism in the United States, true; but the indifference(and, on occasion, political cowardice) of polticians to this new, clear and present, danger to the Republic has not at all been a monopoly of liberals.” Immigration is a clear and present danger. Are those the words of a “prototypical neo-con”?
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This ignorant bashing of John Lukacs is getting out of hand. Lukacs opposition to the anti-communist hysteria is precisely because of the devestating effects its rabble rousing caused: the rise of the military-industrial complex and our insane aggressions in Vietnam and Iraq. He reached this conclusion decades ago while Pat Buchanan was still pimping the Vietnam war for Nixon and Kissinger. In his own words Buckleyite conservatism
<em>"“advanced together with the popular belief of American omnipotence, with the spreading of hundreds of American military bases all around the world, with the willingness to employ American military power halfway across it, with the sense of an American hegemony, moving inexorably and with few interruptions from the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.”
As the American polity becomes increasingly totalitarian under the jingoistic justifications surrounding the Patriot Act it would behoove the nitwits on this site to actually understand what their betters have warned about the consequences of stirring up the lower orders.
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<a href=http://www.amazon.com/dp/074532181X?tag=tispeofthyeme-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=074532181X&adid=1RNN29W86ZATC1NWHKWD&>Conjuring Hitler: How Britain And America Made the Third Reich</a>
Nazism is usually depicted as the outcome of political blunders and unique economic factors: we are told that it could not be prevented, and that it will never be repeated.
In this explosive book, Guido Giacomo Preparata shows that the truth is very different: using meticulous economic analysis, he demonstrates that Hitler’s extraordinary rise to power was in fact facilitated—and eventually financed—by the British and American political classes during the decade following World War I.
Through a close analysis of events in the Third Reich, Preparata unveils a startling history of Anglo-American geopolitical interests in the early twentieth century. He explains that Britain, still clinging to its empire, was terrified of an alliance forming between Germany and Russia. He shows how the UK, through the Bank of England, came to exercise control over Weimar Germany and how Anglo-American financial support for Hitler enabled the Nazis to seize power.
This controversial study shows that Nazism was not regarded as an aberration: for the British and American establishment of the time, it was regarded as a convenient way of destabilising Europe and driving Germany into conflict with Stalinist Russia, thus preventing the formation of any rival continental power block.
Guido Giacomo Preparata lays bare the economic forces at play in the Third Reich, and identifies the key players in the British and American establishment who aided Hitler’s meteoric rise.
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“Grant has a good point—throughout all of Lukacs’s books (or at the the dozen or so I’ve read), he’s expressed an animus towards Arendt, even though he never much goes into detail about what exactly he dislikes so much in her long, dense, sometimes impenetrable volume. In the end, I think it is something as simple as “she equated Stalinism and Nazism.” I guess this makes her a “nationalist,” or perhaps “the idol of the American conservative movement” much like Robert Taft...”
From my perspective, being familiar with both authors, I would surmise: Arendt tends toward an “ahistorical” approach to philosophy; whether in her Human Condition or her other efforts, Arendt tends too much toward the abstract - engaging in a philosophical meditation that relies too little on history as a mode of thought. One of Lukacs’ - oft overlooked - yet most important contributions to western thought is his promotion of a historical philosophy as opposed to a philosophy of history. He does a judicious job explaining the folly of a philosophy of history…
I believe Arendt falls more into the latter perspective, which may shed more light on Lukacs’ disagreement (animus is too loaded and inaccurate a descriptor)with her.
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