50
PARTISAN REVIEW
of his own thought. While "bourgeois" governments had received them
with relative indifference, in the first years of the so-called "people's
regime," many intellectuals were surprised and flattered with unexpected
attention, and many fell victim to their seduced vanity. Only after a long
time and much bitter experience did they realize that the respect they had
been granted represented merely another form of surveillance and that
their privileges were the cost of their complicity. The nightmarish first
decade after the war, with its militant Stalinist motto, "With us or against
us" (which potential prisoners translated as "Everyone who is not with us
is against us- and so will be destroyed"), has been engraved, to prolonged
and inhibiting effect, on people's memory in the East. The number of
those in league with power was not small. The natural instinct of self–
preservation also functioned in borderline cases - especially in borderline
cases. When Kadar's slogan was recast in the 1980s as "Everyone who is
not against us is with us," the entire metabolism of survival had changed.
Yet the essence of totalitarian pedagogy remained just as false . "Real so–
cialism" was, in the end, an endless education in deceit.
The extensive pathology of the system, expanded and refined over
four decades, both supported and gradually undermined it. The unfath–
omable extent of the system's structural decay became apparent only after
the edifice collapsed, exposing the rubble behind its
fa~ade
of jargon and
freeing the prisoners held captive by its duplicity. The chronic deforma–
tion of existence requires a meticulous diagnosis. If those who observed
this process firsthand have truly seen through it, how it insinuates itself
within one and takes root, they should be the first to reject the cheap,
shabby rhetoric of oversimplified verdicts with which totalitarianism has
indoctrinated its subordinates and often its opponents. Yet as Nietzsche
said, those who look too long into the abyss are themselves invaded by it.
Unfortunately, polarities often prove complementary. Intellectuals
know this as well, if not better than, anyone. Many anti-fascists were
communists, and not a few opponents of totalitarianism (fascists, com–
munists, or religious fundamentalists) are conscious or unconscious pio–
neers of another form of despotism. It would be tragic if the collapse of
"real socialism" were to inflame fanaticism of an opposite extreme and
reinforce the proponents of an antiquated conservatism or even kindle an
outbreak of religious, nationalist, or social extremism.
The liberal spirit of democracy, discussed today in an atmosphere of
growing conservatism as if one were discussing the
dernier cri,
is not
merely opposed to totalitarianism but is completely foreign to it, beyond
any polarities. Many can justifY from personal experience their fierce
skepticism of contemporary political kitsch and their distrust of its many
forms of manipulation - even now that the so-called communist mask has
