stock themes of the Nazi propaganda master, Josef Goebbels, and of his counterparts in the Soviet Union and in Italy. Privations which are the natural and inevitable result of “guns instead of butter” economic policies and of bureaucratic blundering are attributed to the wicked designs and conspiracies of foreign powers. The propaganda machines are adept in conjuring up demons to serve as scapegoats—Jews in Germany, for instance; Trotskyites, saboteurs, “grovelers before the West” in Russia.
Normal free contacts with foreign countries are discouraged and forbidden. This policy has been carried to its greatest extreme in Russia. Few foreigners are admitted to that country, and they find themselves under constant police surveillance. Foreign non-Communist newspapers are not sold, and Russians may not receive them. A unique recent decree, which goes beyond anything in the Nazi and Fascist record in this field, flatly prohibits intermarriage between Russians and foreigners. Soviet wives of foreigners in most cases have not been allowed to leave Russia. It has become increasingly dangerous for Russians to associate with foreigners.
Because Germany and Italy are in a less isolated geographical position, Hitler and Mussolini never imposed such a complete blackout on foreign contacts. But there was a constant attempt by Nazi and Fascist propagandists to cultivate a spirit of bellicose suspicion of foreigners as spies. Under all three dictatorships it was stock procedure to represent independent foreign journalists as malicious slanderers.
(10) Perhaps the most ominous common trait of the totalitarian creeds is an almost paranoid conviction of world-conquering mission. Belief that the Russian Revolution is only the first step toward a Communist revolution that will encompass the entire globe is the very essence of Lenin’s and Stalin’s teachings. In his book, Problems of Leninism, which has in Russia all the authority which Hitler’s Mein Kampf possessed in Nazi Germany, Stalin quotes with approval the following statement by Lenin:
It is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable.
Hitler’s idea of Teutonic racial destiny is an equivalent of Stalin’s and Lenin’s faith in the messianic role of the proletariat and the international revolutionary Communist movement. Both communism and nazism created fifth columns (the Communist far more numerous and better organized) and thereby contributed one of the great divisive and subversive forces of modern times.
And Mussolini boasted that, “if every century has its peculiar doctrine, there are a thousand indications that fascism is that of the twentieth century.”
An additional common trait of the Soviet and Nazi brands of totalitarianism is the capacity and willingness to commit atrocities (in the full sense of that much abused word) on a scale that makes the most ruthless and oppressive governments of the nineteenth century seem positively humanitarian. The Nazi slaughter of millions of Jews during the war would stand on a lonely pinnacle of state-inspired criminality if it were not for the much less publicized horrors which must be laid to the account of the Soviet regime.
First of these was the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class,” officially decreed in March 1930. Under this procedure hundreds of thousands of peasant families whose only crime was that they were a little more prosperous than their neighbors were stripped of all their possessions and impressed into slave labor. There were no gas-chamber executions of kulaks, but many perished as a result of overwork, underfeeding, and maltreatment.
Second was the man-made famine in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1932-33. This was not an unavoidable natural disaster. It was a deliberate reprisal inflicted by the government on the peasants because of their failure to work enthusiastically in the collective farms. Several million people perished in this famine. This is reflected in subsequent Soviet census reports for the Ukraine. I can testify from personal observation that a death rate of 10 per cent was normal in the very wide area affected by the famine. Death by starvation is slower and perhaps more painful than death by asphyxiation.
Third was the establishment of a vast system of slave labor as a normal feature of the Soviet economy. This system is far more cruel than was serfdom in Russia before its abolition in 1861 or slavery in the United States before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, just because it is completely dehumanized.
An individual master might be kind or capriciously indulgent, but a secret-police organization dealing with people who are assumed to be enemies of the state is certain to employ the methods of Simon Legree without stint or variation. This is confirmed by the unanimous testimony of the Poles who were sent to slave-labor camps, assembled in The Dark Side of the Moon (New York: Scribner, 1947) and by such records of personal experience as Jerzy Gliksman’s Tell the West (New York: Gresham Press, 1948), Vladimir Tchernavin’s I Speak for the Silent (Boston: Hale and Flint, 1935), and many others.
A good deal of nonsense has been written about the Soviet regime as a riddle, a mystery, an enigma, and what not. But there is no secret about the underlying philosophy of communism. The Communist International was surely the most open conspiracy to promote violent revolution ever organized.
It is true that Soviet propaganda and Soviet censorship created some confusion about the character and methods of Soviet rule—but only in the minds of people who really in their hearts wished to be fooled. The volume of evidence that Soviet communism shared with nazism the ten common traits which have been listed was overwhelming and was certainly available to any statesman who cared to give serious study to the problem.
Soviet behavior after the war is sometimes referred to in Western countries in accents of hurt disillusionment. But this behavior was completely in line with basic Communist philosophy. It could have been, doubtless was, predicted down to the smallest detail by anyone with a reasonable background of Soviet experience and study.
Before America’s Second Crusade was launched, two things were, or should have been, crystal clear. First, there was no moral or humanitarian reason to prefer Soviet conquest to Nazi or Japanese conquest. Second, from the cold-blooded standpoint of American political interest, one center of aggressive expansion in Moscow would not be more desirable than two centers in Berlin and Tokyo.
The organizers and eulogists of America’s Second Crusade completely overlooked both these points. They chose to wring their hands in easily predictable frustration after the inevitable consequences of helping the Soviet Union achieve vast territorial and political expansion unfolded in relentless sequence.
It was the announced purpose of the Treaty of Versailles to replace the state of war by a “firm, just and durable peace.” But the peace settlements with Germany and its allies were neither firm nor just nor durable. A century elapsed between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the next general European conflict. But there were only two decades of uneasy armistice between the First and Second World Wars.
The Treaty of Versailles might be called too mild for its sternness and too stern for its mildness. The negotiators at Versailles fell between the two stools of a peace of reconciliation and an utterly ruthless, Carthaginian destruction of Germany as a major power.
German public opinion could not be expected to accept willingly the mutilation of the country’s eastern frontier, the placing of millions of Sudeten Germans under undesired Czech rule, the inconvenient corridor which separated East Prussia
