816
PARTISAN ftEVIEW
that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of
their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in
academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism,
but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality
of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the
Protocols of the Elders of
Zion;
not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role
played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs litera–
ture about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for
the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable
constructions was always to reveal official history as a joke, to demon–
strate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and
known historical reality was only the outward
fa~ade
erected explicitly
to fool the people.
To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography,
to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as
well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible,
demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and mon–
strous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts,
that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the
difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and
become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of "pressure and
infinite repetition." Not Stalin's and Hitler's
skill
in the art of lying
but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collec–
tive unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted
the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship
appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole
marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended
to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.
The attraction which the totalitarian movements exert on the
elite, so long as and wherever they have not seized power, has been
perplexing because the patently vulgar and arbitrary, positive doctrines
of totalitarianism are more conspicuous to the outsider and mere
observer than the general mood of the pretotalitarian atmosphere.
These doctrines were so much at variance with generally accepted
intellectual, cultural, and moral standards that one could conclude
that only an inherent fundamental shortcoming of character in the
intellectual,
ula trahison des clerer"
(J.
Benda), or a perverse self–
hatred of the spirit, accounted for the delight with which the elite
