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become - a creative force for internal change and transformation. This
also brings out the fact that leftwing totalitarianism, that is, communism,
does after all belong to the Western, Enlightenment heritage - though
this should in no way be used as justificatory or mitigating argument in
defense of its repressive nature; fascism, on the other hand, is a head-on
challenge to that emancipatory tradition. Hence it is beyond this pale,
and hence one can envision a common agenda for Western democracies
and a reformed, or totally restructured, communist regime, while
coexistence with fascism was, and is, unthinkable.
Another reflection has to do with the concept of totalitarianism
itself. We all know that originally this was a term used with positive
connotation by the fascists - for example, by Mussolini in his article,
"Totalitarianism," in the
En.ciclopedia Italian.a
of 1932. It was meant to
connote the kind of government which is in control of all aspects of its
subjects' lives: family, religion, the economy, the realm of ideas - all are
subservient to the "higher" aim of national policy. During the height of
the Cold War, the term came to connote - and now negatively - both
fascist and communist forms of government and differentiate them from
Western, liberal democracies, with their idea of minimal state interference
in thc various aspects of human life . In both cases the assumption was
that a totalitarian state actually controls, more or less totally, those vari–
ous spheres of human activity.
What the disintegration of the various communist regimes now
suggests is that totalitarianism in this sense was in reality a Schoolmen's
phantom - and it may not be an accident that the thinkers who helped
to propagate its value as an analytical tool in the 1950s were students of
ideas rather than cmpirical social scientists: Popper, Arendt, Talmon,
Friedrich were all refugees from and victims of totalitarian regimes. They
certainly knew what they were opposed to intellectually, but few of
them actually lived in a totalitarian country for any length of time or
studied it empirically. Hence they tended to analyze the
ideologies
of fas–
cism and communism - their claim to total control - rather than
question how successful this total control really was.
What emerges now from the ruins of the communist regimes is,
paradoxically, how superficial and less than durable and effective this total
control actually was. With the disappearance of communist regimes,
what we see in most cases is the reemergence of ideologies and structures
of the precommunist period. What is surprising is to see how strong
those ideas and those commitments and structures really were - and how
brittle the communist control of the minds and hearts of men and
women proved to be. Thus, countries with a strong religious tradition -
like
Poland - emerge with a strong, Church-oriented opposition, and
the historical Catholic-national political culture of Poland reemerges to-
