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tion," by the "kulaks." Beyond all the grimness there was always the
hypocritical cant about emancipation and eventual social justice; even at
the height of Stalinist repression, the state was supposed to wither away
some day. Nazism, on the other hand, was free of hypocrisy.
It was this gap between idea and reality which gave the communist
regimes their particularly sordid nature. But, dialectically, it also meant
that there were always internal mechanisms and criteria, within commu–
nist ideology itself, by which these regimes could measure themselves -
and find themselves wanting. A "socialism with a human face" was an
attempt to bring communist reality in tune with communist ideals, which
were after all derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition; there is
no "Nazism with a human face," nor could one have been concocted
out of the ideological themes of fascist or Nazi ideology.
Hence a Gorbachev - and a Dubcek before him - could set out to
reform a malfunctioning and repressive communist society by recourse to
"first principles"; consequently, the reality of communism could be
viewed as an abuse, and degeneration, of communist ideals. Nothing
parallel did emerge or could have emerged in fascism.
The operative consequences are clear: communism has internal
mechanisms of change, which may eventually carry communist regimes in
their quest for reform beyond communist "first principles" to the com–
mon heritage of the Enlightenment. Fascism, on the other hand, did not
have such internal mechanisms of change, and it could be changed only
from the outside - through military defeat, occupation, and a forcible
dismantling, from the outside, of the totality of its structures. No £,scist
regime has ever been changed from the inside.
Those who would like
to
use the Spanish and Portuguese examples
as a refutation of this statement should recall that Franco's Spain was a
complex structure, far from being a fascist state as such: it was a
combination of military dictatorship, old-type reactionary state and
church structures, plus a few fascist ingredients, mainly expressed through
the Falange, which never enjoyed the role that the mass fascist and Nazi
parties had in Italy and Germany. Similarly, Salazar's Portugal was an
old-type authoritarian regime, with some corporative phraseology, but
with no fascist-type mass party or ideology, and with relatively little state
interference in economic activity. That their left-wing opponents called
these regimes "fascist" because of their antidemocratic and antisocialist
nature does not yet make them fascist in any analytical sense.
Kirkpatrick's paradigm has thus to be reformulated: it is right-wing
fascist totalitarianism that cannot be changed from within, smashed only
by external war. Leftwing totalitarianism, because of the internal tension
between emancipatory ideology and repressive reality, does possess the
potentiality for change, and it is this tension that can become - as it did
