More On Lukacs
Posted on May 29th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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My posts this week at Taki’s Magazine continue the discussion of Lukacs and Buchanan that started with the review from the 6/2 issue. One expands on my earlier critique of the review, and the other addresses Lukacs’ critics.
The May 23rd post questions whether Nazi dominance would have been more enduring than Russian in East Europe since it would also have provoked nationalistic reactions. I think it would since it, unlike Marxist_leninist ideology, never pretended to dominate on behalf of its subjects and would never have found surrogate local elites through which to rule. It conceived of subject peoples as extractors/producers of whatever resources the land could furnish the Germanic peoples. The exercise of its rule would have been nakedly and unrelentingly brutal, as opposed to the cloaked and more episodic dominance by Russia. It could not have been shamed by a failure to live up to a universalist set of ideals.
Then there is the vigor of the German scientific/technological production sector which would certainly rendered its oppression more efficient and safer from external opposition over time.
Roosevelt and Churchill, and others, viewed the Germans as different than other powers – more virulent as a threat, one that had proved that it needed to be defeated because it wouldn’t be contained.
This objection overlooks the point I was making in referring to nationalist and anticommunist collaborationists with the Nazi occupation. They already had a number of surrogate local elites doing their bidding, and they promoted the local fascist or quasi-fascist movements that propagated the doctrine of the “New Order” in their respective countries. In the wake of a victory, there would have been more such collaborators. The idea that unrelenting brutality cannot exist alongside puppet regimes through which the occupier operates is strange. The brutality inspires collaboration in order to limit the damage of the occupation, and is then used as a tool of enforcing the authority of the collaborationist regime. The Soviets did not lose control of their empire because they were shamed into doing it, but because their system was exhausted intellectually, economically and politically, and they were unwilling, unlike the CCP leadership in Beijing, to kill large numbers of people to keep the system going. Resistance to a German-dominated Europe would have come sooner and would have been more intense and frequent. Whether the German war machine would have been to keep suppressing all of the rebellions that their exploitative policies would have provoked is an open question, but the Germans would have been no more immune to the changes in warfare than other colonial powers and would have fallen victim to the same problems of fighting nationalist insurgencies.
Your discussion of anti-anti-communism is fascinating, and deserves a more detailed comment than I can offer here.
You are right, of course, that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” really meant national socialism, which in some ways the Stalin régime resembled. At the same time, the interntionalist rhetoric of the Stalinists abroad continued to attract supoprt. This support existed in the United States, too, and gained a great deal of influence among the chattering classes and in the Roosevelt administration.
Thus anti-anti-communism, too, was tainted. It meant not just suspicion of foreign entanglements and the national security state, and a Kennanesque restraint as a strategic imperative, but in too many cases sympathy for the criminal régimes in Russia, China, etc.All too often, anti-anti-communism turned into what Roger Scruton calls “oikophobia.”–the conviction that one’s own country can do no right.
A similar phenomenon exists today. Jihadis of varius sorts are a real problem, and if, say, they got hold of a nuke, could be a serious threat. Some anti-jihadi types would turn defense against this threat into “World War IV,” which is stupid if not wicked. Oppose attacking Iram? You must be a mullah-lover or a panderer like Ken Livingstone.
A politics that is resistant to interventionism and crusading, cognizant of national security concerns, and resistant to statism generally is not an easy thing to create.