Twenty years after the wall

[Louis VI the Fat]

EDIT: I will debate with you kiddies when I get back home. This is taking too much time out of my packing. :P

Might I suggest you pack, for example, Darius Gawin? Below in italic an excerpt from 'Totalitarianism and Modernity'.

revolutionary conservatism (f.e. Mussolini, Hitler),

Think of it, that is an oxymoron. :P Hitler was the farthest possible thing from conservative.

'Revolutionary conservatism' is an aptly chosen term, because of the seeming contradiction. It perfectly captures the tension in German conservatism of sixty years ago. Fascism wasn't anti-modern, like most reactionary political ideologies. Fascism had a different attitude altogether.

Gawin:

'the attitude of the radical right, that gave rise to fascism, towards modernity was much more complex. They criticised modernity for the sake of the upcoming future - the best illustrative example of such an attitude were the so-called German revolutionary conservatives. What they felt was not a melancholy for elapsing time but a great enthusiasm, with which they welcomed a new age of history approaching from the future'.


For the revolutionary conservatives a key term was "modernity" - understood as a system of capitalistic, industrial society. Although the left declared against capitalism, yet - according to the revolutionary conservatives - it was still in the centre of modernity. Thus a leftist revolution was basically "reactionary". Only revolutionary conservatism - that is fascism - offered truly radical criticism of modernity and proposed a real vision of overcoming it. So, revolutionary conservatism wanted to be - to use modern terminology - "post-modern", while communism wanted to solidify and radicalise "modernity" in a revolutionary way.

Does it mean that we can put fascism and Nazism on the one plane with communism, explaining at the same time - as Ernst Nolte - that it was a wrong answer to the right question? It seems, however, that in this dispute right was rather Francois Furet who in classification of evil awarded primacy to Nazism. Communism and Nazism could be put on the one plane because they had the common roots in the crisis of liberal world of the 19th century. Thus, Nazism was not a mere "reaction" to the emergence of Communism (as Nolte claims) but there was rather a symbiotic interdependence between them. It is true that in chronological order Lenin rose to power before Mussolini, as Stalin was ahead of Hitler. In order of ideas, however, both trends derived from one another - and already from the end of the 19th century, from the moment of anti-Positivistic breakthrough in European culture when both the radical left and radical right were born.

Dear Gawin even manages to return the discussion about the nature of the two totalitarianisms to the subject of 1989:

Today, after the year of 1989, it is evident that it is America that turned out to be the victor who defeated both totalitarianisms; moreover, it was America that was the winner at every turning point in the history of the 20th century, both in 1918, in 1945 and in 1989. And it was the Atlantic Enlightenment that originated a new post-modernism, although very different to the one of which the revolutionary conservatives wanted to be the self-proclaimed prophets.