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democracies are justified in lending qualified support to authoritarian
regimes while nudging them towards reforms, whereas totalitarian (that
is, communist) regimes are wholly beyond redemption and should be
vigorously opposed by the Western powers, as there is no chance that
they could reform internally.
Soviet
i?iasnost
and
perestroika,
and the disintegration of practically all
communist regimes in Eastern Central Europe, have been an outcome of
internal forces, and thus Kirkpatrick has been proved totally misguided. If
her theoretical framework has any validity, it should be stated somewhat
differently. In terms of the chances of internal change, the dividing lines
are actually between "right-wing" totalitarianism and "left-wing"
totalitarianism. The conventional literature about totalitarianism has
tended to underline the similarities between these two types of systems
and viewed their differences mainly in terms of goals, but there is some–
thing much deeper involved here.
It can be stated as follows: in right-wing totalitarianism there is no
gap between ideology and reality, between the "ought" and the "is."
Fascism managed to install the kind of government it really wanted: if
you wished to know what the ideals of the Nazi Thousand Year Reich
were, you had only to look at the realities of the Nazi Third Reich
around 1940 to see all of them in operation: monopoly of power, a hi–
erarchical structure of state and society, anti-Semitism, power-politics,
racial superiority, external aggression. The Nazis promised to "cleanse"
German society from the Jews - and they did; they promised to reestab–
lish German hegemony in Europe, to find
Lebensraum
for Germany in the
East, to establish a New Order in Europe - and they did all these things,
with a vengeance . Basically, there remained no gap between what the
Nazis promised and what they achieved. Nazism was an ideology of
domination, and it established a reality of domination. Buchenwald,
Auschwitz, the cult of the Fuhrer, the total control of society by the SS
and Gestapo - all these were not aberrations of Nazi ideology: they
were Nazi ideology as carried out into praxis. This is what the Nazis
preached, and this is what they practiced.
In communist regimes, on the other hand, the picture is basically
different. Communism is an ideology of emancipation and social justice -
but communist regimes were based on enslavement and repression. Hence
there always existed a gap between the emancipatory promise of com–
munism and the actuality of "real-existing socialism": The Stalinist Con–
stitution of 1936 was replete with paragraphs which were part and parcel
of the European Enlightenment - the reality was something quite differ–
ent. Hence, hypocrisy - or The Lie, as Havel has called it - became the
operative principle of communist regimes. Repression was never justified
as such, but as a necessary evil, something caused by the "counter-revolu-
