Vol. 55 No. 1 1988 - page 87

PETER
LOEWEN BERG
87
fascist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, there was every
reason for pessimism, if not despair.
It
may be said that the period
1938 to 1942 appeared to be the darkest hour ofWestern civilization.
Hitler and the German war machine appeared to be unstoppable.
It
seemed that the high water mark of liberal Western democracy had
been in the immediate years following World War One, when a new
group of succession states with short-lived democratic forms were
established in East and Central Europe. By the late 1930s Germany
was Nazi, while Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania , Italy,
and Poland were ruled by various forms of corporatist authoritarian
militarism or fascism. The one democratic state in East Central
Europe was a vulnerable and besieged Czechoslovakia.
For Freud's perspective on the political state of the world, it is
instructive to consult the companion piece to "Analysis Terminable
and Interminable" he was writing from 1934 to 1938,
Moses and
Monotheism.
There he wrote:
We are living in a specially remarkable period. We find to our
astonishment that progress has allied itself with barbarism. In
Soviet Russia they have set about improving the living condi–
tions of some hundred millions of people who were held firmly in
subjection . They have been rash enough to withdraw the
"opium" of religion from them and have been wise enough to
give them a reasonable amount of sexual liberty; but at the same
time they have submitted them to the most cruel coercion and
robbed them of any possibility of freedom of thought. With
similar violence, the Italian people are being trained up to
orderliness and a sense of duty. We feel it as a relieffrom an op–
pressive apprehension when we see in the case of the German
people that a relapse into almost prehistoric barbarism can occur
as well without being attached to any progressive ideas. In any
case, things have so turned out that today the conservative
democracies have become the guardians of cultural advance . .. .
We should appreciate Freud's masterful use of the ironic mode:
The Soviets have improved the life of their people with gruesome use
of force and the loss of freedom of ideas. Mussolini presumed to
create efficiency by cruel violence. Do these examples, Freud asks,
point to an anxiety-arousing conclusion (arising from a reconsidera–
tion of the history of the Great French Revolution, which combined
the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment with terror and mil–
itarism): that the price of material and institutional progress is sub-
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