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PARTISAN REVIEW
tarian until the last phase of the war, at the time when the genocide was
consummated and Himmler was monopolizing power as minister of the
interior, chief of police, commander of the home army, and so on.
During Hitler's fifteen years in power, the regime was a mixed one,
in
which traditional elements - the army, management, the economy -lim–
ited the activity of those who in the Third Reich were called fanatical
Hitlerites. Mme. Arendt's thesis is that these "fanatics" were at the core of
the movement, the embodiment of its historical essence, who were not
destined to give way to the moderates but who allied themselves with
moderates to allay suspicion. They had camouflaged themselves as na–
tionalists in order to seduce the philistines they despised. In the wake of
victory, they would have reigned at last and so transformed the social map
of Europe and extended the technique of genocide to Slavic peoples. The
fanatics did indeed win out during the war, but it can be argued that this
happened because of the force of circumstances, without having to assert
with any certainty what would have happened in the case of a
military
victory for the Third Reich. With regard to Stalinist totalitarianism,
Mme. Arendt limits herself to indicating that it has nothing to do with
Lenin, who, quite to the contrary, would have attempted to give the
Russian masses an undifferentiated structure. Likewise, she indicates that
totalitarianism had nothing to do with Marxism.
It
could have arisen only
in the 1930s.
Let us recapitulate a few of the banal statements among her profound
observations. The primary but not the solely sufficient condition of a to–
talitarian regime is the seizure of power by a party that assures itself a
monopoly of politics. This condition was attained in Lenin's own time,
thanks to Lenin himself The Bolsheviks, a minority party surrounded
by
enemies, took from the old regime its police, which, thanks to the civil
war, had acquired greater stature and power than it had possessed in the
last days of a weakened czarism. In Lenin's lifetime, the opposition parties,
including the socialist and revolutionary parties, were outlawed. Marxism
was not called into question, any more than was the equation of the
Party's power with proletarian power. More than that, the basis for
all
this
was set down: according to Marxist doctrine, the socialist revolution
ought to have succeeded capitalist expansion; the institutions of socialist
society should have been present at the heart of the old society. In the
face of what actually happened, Lenin's acceptance of Trotsky's thesis that
it was not impossible to jump over the bourgeois and capitalist phase was
the basis for that equivocation called "socialist construction," the industrial
development phase that Marxist theory itself considered to be the proper
function of capitalism. Until 1923, the discrepancy between ideology and
reality was not so blatant, because neither civil war and War Communism
