Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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for their part, the communists and from the perspective of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy. If the cosmological enemy are the capitalists and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigmarole about race and nationalism are distractions. They're meant to fool the poor saps who enlist in that movement.
It's essentially steered by capitalist owners who it is claimed are are reduced to this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the last gasp of capitalism.
So bizarrely enough, from the communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis can be interpreted as a good sign because it means that capitalism is almost done, because this is the last undisguised, naked face of capitalism nearing its end. So beyond this ideological total opposition in terms of their hoped-for futures, the reality is that there were aspects that were shared on either side.
And that included the conviction that they could agree that the age of democracy was done. And that the 19th century had had its day with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights, classical liberal ideas, and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt. It had gotten you what? It got you the First World War as a total conflict, conflict leaving tens of millions dead.
And then economically, the Great Depression showing that the end was not far away. This produced, at one and the same time, both ideological opposition and instances of vastly cynical cooperation. In terms of the Weimar Republic... it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight that German democracy had ceased to function even before Hitler comes to power.
But in the process of making democracy unworkable in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi stormtrooper army with their brown shirts and the communist street fighters had cooperated in heightening an atmosphere of civil war that left people searching for desperate expedience in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The most compelling case of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in
on August 23rd, 1939, which enables Hitler to start World War II. A non-aggression pact in official terms It contains secret clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in Moscow under Stalin's wary eye had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe and making common cause as each claiming to be the winner of the future.
So in spite of their oppositions, these were regimes that were able very cynically to work together to dire effect. In the course of the 1950s, in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another, actually... bore morphological resemblances.
They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological differences, bore similarities. And such political scientists, Hannah Arendt, chief among them, crafted a model called totalitarianism. borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves, to define regimes like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union, for a new kind of dictatorship that was not a...
backwards caste revival of ancient barbarism, but with something new, a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and minds that didn't want just passive obedience, but wanted fanatical loyalty, that combined fear with compulsion in order to generate belief in a system, or at the very least, atomize the masses to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime.
This model has often met with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet achieved total control of the population under its grip. That's true, but that's not what Hannah Arendt was saying. Hannah Arendt was saying there will always be inefficiencies, there will be resistance, there will be divergences. What was new was not the alleged achievement of total control.
It was the ambition. The articulation of the ambition that it might be possible to exercise such fundamental and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. And the final frightening thought that Arendt kept before her was, what if this is not a model that comes to us from benighted, uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future is going to look like? That's a horrifying intuition.
Well, I think that this is... bunch of absurdity, and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious in its implications. To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War. The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have been limited to Poland is
that assertion is, is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and racism was not a ideology that was limited in its application. It looked toward world domination. The, the,
In the years since the Nazis had come to power, they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to think in continents, think in continents, to see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of the world. And now, in retrospect, we, of course, can see that Germany was not in a position to legitimate a claim like that.
But the Nazis' aims were anything but limited. In particular, this sort of argument has been tried out in different ways before. In previous decades, there had been attempts by historians who were actually well-read and well-published to argue that World War II had been in part a... contingent event that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations.
And such explanations argued that if you put Hitler's ideology aside, you actually could interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the stripe of Bismarck. Now, when I say it like that, I think you can spot the problem immediately. When you put the ideology aside,
to try to analyze Hitler's acts or alleged motives in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches is an enterprise that's doomed to failure justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and gypsies was an event that...
simply happened as a result of unforeseen events and that it was understood as somehow being humane also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers
who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union.
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