Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Bonapartism

The increase in mass shootings in the Age of Trump is a symptom of deep cultural degradation

The coming to power of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 must be seen as one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, not least because it was so avoidable.

Both the decadent capitalist class and the powerful organisations of the working class played critical roles in allowing Hitler to be able to gain power – in his own words – “without so much as breaking a pane of glass”. 

To provide an understanding of what happened and why, we are publishing here an edited extract from a much longer article by Ted Grant, which was published in 1948 under the title The menace of fascism: what it is and how to fight it. 

We believe Ted’s analysis can help arm workers and youth today with the vital lessons of these catastrophic events – above all, the need to transform society through socialist revolution, as the only way to defeat and destroy reaction in whatever form it may rear its head. 

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The defeat of the German working class, with the coming to power of Hitler [on 30 January 1933], set the world workers’ movement back for many years. In tracing the background to the events in Germany, we can see clearly the class forces at work, the role of the German Social Democrats and Stalinists which led to the terrible defeat of one of the most powerfully organised labour movements in the world.

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the German working class overthrew the Kaiser and attempted a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in 1918. But it was the German Social Democrats who came to power, though they had actually opposed the insurrection and the revolution.

They had no intention of consummating the revolution. Their programme was based on ‘the inevitability of gradualism’. Having raised themselves above the level of the workers, they had abandoned the Marxist programme on which their party had been based for decades. Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann –  the leaders of the Social Democracy – conspired with the German General Staff to destroy the revolution and restore ‘law and order’. 

At this stage the capitalists were compelled to lean on the labour and trade union leaders in order to save their system from complete collapse. Grinding their teeth, they were forced to make tremendous concessions to the working class. 

The workers won the eight-hour day, trade union recognition, unemployment insurance, the right to elect shop committees, and universal suffrage for men and women. The agricultural labourers, who lived under semi-feudal conditions in East Prussia, won the right to organise and similar rights to those of the industrial workers.

Capitalist offensive

Recovering from the first shock, the big industrialists and landowners began to prepare for the offensive against the working class. Their attitude was exemplified by that of Krupp, the armament magnate, who arrogantly informed his workers: “We want only loyal workers who are grateful from the bottom of their hearts for the bread which we let them earn.” 

Already in these early years, the capitalists began to finance anti-labour leagues composed of ex-army officers, criminals, adventurers, and other social riff-raff. The Nazis were, at this time, one small anti-labour grouping among others.

They commenced a campaign of terror, which included breaking up working-class meetings and assassinations of left-wing and even capitalist democratic politicians. The State acted in complicity and in collusion with them. When the Munich Chief of Police, Pohner, was warned of the existence of “veritable organisations of political assassination”, he replied : “Yes, yes, but too few!”

But at this stage, these fascist groups had no mass base. They comprised an insignificant social force, composed only of the dregs of society. The middle class looked to the workers’ organisations to show a way out. The capitalists used the fascist organisations only as anti-labour auxiliaries, and a reserve for the future. 

Dealing with the development of the Nazi movement, Hitler admitted: “Only one thing could have broken our movement – if the adversary had understood its principles and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement.” 

Revolution bungled

In the revolutionary crisis of 1923, caused by inflation and the occupation of the Ruhr by France, the middle class looked towards the Communist Party which had succeeded in gaining the support of the majority of the workers. But the revolutionary situation was bungled by the then leaders of the German Communist Party, Brandler and Thalheimer, and by the wrong advice given by Stalin in Moscow to the leadership of the Communist Party.

After the possibility of seizing power had been lost, the leadership of the International tried to put all the responsibility on the shoulders of the German Party. But the German leaders had looked for advice to the leadership of the Communist International in Moscow. Stalin’s advice was catastrophic. He wrote to Zinoviev and Bukharin at that time:

“Should the Communists strive to seize power without the Social Democrats, are they mature enough for that? That, in my opinion is the question. Of course, the Fascists are not asleep, but it is to our interest that they attack first: that will rally the whole working class around the Communists (Germany is not Bulgaria). Besides, according to all information the Fascists are weak in Germany. In my opinion the Germans must be curbed and not spurred on.” [Quoted in Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin, page 312]

This, when they had the majority of the workers behind them! Thus tragically the German revolution was ruined and the basis laid for a subsequent increase in fascist influence.

Big business and the Nazis

Scared by the perspective of ‘Bolshevism’ in Germany, the American, British, and French capitalists poured in loans to prop-up German capitalism. These loans resulted in a capitalist boom on a world scale, which particularly affected Germany. The boom in Germany lasted from 1925 until 1929. 

The capitalists of Germany, coining enormous profits out of the rationalisation of German industry, did not need the fascists, and the support for the Nazis declined. They received only sufficient funds to keep them in existence as a reserve weapon and to prevent their disappearance from the scene altogether.

Then came the world slump of 1929-33. The workers’ standards of living dropped. Unemployment rose to seven million and more. 

The middle class were ruined in the economic crisis, and they found their standards dropping lower than the levels of the working class. The industrial workers had the protection of their union contracts and unemployment allowances within limits, and could thus resist the worst impositions of the combines and monopolies. But the middle class was helpless.

The industrialists were alarmed at the prospect of proletarian revolution. They now began to pour fabulous sums into the coffers of the Nazi Party. Krupp, Thyssen, Kirdorff, Borsig, the heads of the coal, steel, chemical and other industrial empires in Germany, supplied Hitler lavishly with the means of propaganda. 

The final decision to hand power over to Hitler was taken at the home of the Cologne banker, Schroder (who, according to the Nazi racial laws was a Jew!). Enormous subsidies such as no other political party in Germany had ever received were rained upon the Nazis by the capitalists. They considered the time had come to destroy the organisations and rights of the working class.

Trotsky and the United Front

In the general election of May 1924, the Nazis received 1,920,000 votes with 32 deputies. But in December of the same year, after the Dawes Plan had restored some stability to the German economy, they received 840,000 and the decline of the Nazis went even further. In the general election of May 1928, the Nazis received only 720,000 votes, losing 120,000 votes and two seats.

Then came the world slump and the frightful crisis of German capitalism. Within two years, at the general election of September 14, 1930, the Nazi vote rose to 6,000,000. The fascists had drawn to their banner large sections of the despairing middle class. 

The failure of the Socialists in 1918 and of the Communists in 1923 had driven a formidable proportion of the middle class from neutrality, or even support of the workers, to the side of the counter-revolution with its denunciation of ‘Marxism’, i.e. socialism.

As soon as the election results were known, Trotsky and the Left Opposition – who considered themselves a part of the Communist International although they had been expelled – issued an appeal to the German Communist Party to immediately organise a united front with the Social Democrats to prevent the coming to power of Hitler. Only thus could they hope to protect the rights of the working class from the threat of the Nazis. 

The Trotskyists warned of the tragic consequences which the coming to power of the Nazis could mean, not only to the German, but to the whole international working class movement. They warned that it would make war against the Soviet Union inevitable.

But the Stalinists took no heed. Their policy in Germany was that fascism or ‘social fascism’ was already in power; that the main danger to the working class was Social Democracy, who were also fascists – ‘social-fascists’.

‘Social fascists’

The fountainhead of this policy of the German CP, Stalin, gave the line to the German Party.

“These two organisations [Social Democracy and National Socialism] are not mutually exclusive, but on the contrary are mutually complementary. They are not antipodes but twins. Fascism is a shapeless bloc of these two organisations. Without this bloc the bourgeoisie could not remain at the helm.” (Communist International, No. 6, 1925)

The Stalinists even went to the extent of inciting Communist workers to beat up Socialist workers, break up their meetings, etc. Thaelmann openly put forward the slogan: “Chase the social fascists from their jobs in the plants and the trade unions.” Following on the line, the organ of the Young Communists The Young Guard, propounded the slogan: “Chase the social fascists from the plants, the employment exchanges and the apprentice schools.” 

They did not stop there. The leaders of the Communist International went to the extent of advocating that the German CP unite with the Fascists against the Social Democrats. The Social Democratic Party was in power in Prussia which consisted of two-thirds, and the most important part, of Germany. There was a traditional saying in Germany: “He who has Prussia has the Reich.” 

The Nazis organised a plebiscite on August 9, 1931, in an endeavour to throw the Social Democratic government out of office. Had they succeeded in this, they would have come to power in 1931 instead of 1933. 

The German CP leadership decided to oppose the referendum and support the Social Democrats. But the leadership of the Comintern, under the direct influence of Stalin, demanded that the CP participate in this referendum and called it a ‘Red Referendum’.

It was mad adventures of this character which disoriented the workers and facilitated the success of the Nazis. The refusal of the leaders of the mass workers’ organisations to carry out a revolutionary policy against the fascists, resulted in this mighty working-class movement, with a Marxist tradition of 75 years, being smashed and rendered impotent before the Nazi thugs.

It is important to bear in mind that the Nazis won only a small percentage of the German workers; the overwhelming majority were opposed to them. In 1931, the Nazis obtained only 5% of the votes in the elections for the shop committees in the factories. This was after a terrific campaign to penetrate the working class. 

And in March 1933, after the fascists were placed in power, despite the fact that the terror had already begun, they got only 3% of the votes in the elections for the shop committees! Despite the false policies of the leaderships, which led to a certain demoralisation within the ranks of the workers and helped the fascists’ attempts to penetrate their ranks, the overwhelming majority of the workers remained faithful to the ideas of socialism and communism.

Betrayal

The workers were anxious and willing to fight the Nazis to prevent them coming to power. Millions were armed and trained in the Socialist and Communist defence organisations. This was a legacy of the German revolution. 

The organised working class constituted the mightiest power in Germany, had they only had the necessary policy to fight for the defence of their organisations and pass to the counter-offensive to take power. But the leaders betrayed the workers in Germany as they did in Italy.

As the danger of a Hitler coup grew closer, these misleaders declared that the Nazis were on the decline. The Socialist leaders declared, as if plagiarising their Italian counterparts: “Courage under unpopularity”. They urged the necessity to support the decree laws of the Bruning Government, and to support Hindenburg as against the danger from Hitler. 

They scoffed at the idea that a highly civilised country like Germany could fall under the domination of fascist barbarism. Fascism could come to power in a backward country like Italy, but not Germany with its highly-industrialised economy! At first, they scoffed at the crudities and insane ideas put forward by the Nazis. They urged the workers to laugh at them and disregard their provocations. It only gives them publicity, they said. It can’t happen here. 

Constantly they underestimated the danger from the fascists and appealed to the very state machine which was protecting and shielding the fascists.

As the fascist menace loomed nearer, sections of the socialist workers and the trade unions began to form defence groups in the factories and among the unemployed. But the German TUC, the Labour Federation, refused to support this: “the situation [was] not sufficiently grave to justify the workers preparing for a struggle to defend their rights.” It was opposed to “centralising and generalising these preventive measures”, on the grounds that they were “superfluous”.

On the eve of the Nazis’ accession to power, Schiffrin, one of the leaders of the Social Democrats wrote: “We no longer perceive anything but the odour of a rotting corpse. Fascism is definitely dead: it will never arise again.”

Surrender

The line of the leaders of the CP was, if anything, even worse. They declared that fascism was already in power in Germany and that the coming to power of Hitler would not make any difference. 

As early as the first victory of the Hitler movement at the polls in the September 14, 1930, elections, the central organ of the German CP Rote Fahne declared: “September 14 was the culminating point of the National Socialist movement in Germany. It will be followed only by weakening and decline.” Within three years, the Nazis had succeeded in winning the bulk of the middle class and obtaining over 13 million votes [a large portion of this sizeable vote came from peasantry, a very significant section of society at the time].

Even at the thirteenth hour, the Socialist and Stalinist leaders gave no fighting lead. On February 7, 1933, Kunstler, head of the Berlin Federation of the Social Democratic Party, gave this instruction to the labour workers: “Above all do not let yourselves be provoked. The life and health of the Berlin workers are too dear to be jeopardised lightly; they must be preserved for the day of struggle.”

The Communist Party leaders cried: “Let the workers beware of giving the Government any pretext for new measures against the Communist Party!” (Wilhelm Pieck, February 26, 1933)

The leaders of these parties did nothing even after Hitler came to power. And the German workers wanted to fight. 

On 5 March, the night of the elections, the heads of the Reichsbanner, the military organisation of the Social Democracy, asked for the signal for insurrection. They received the reply from the leaders of the Social Democratic Party: “Be calm! Above all no bloodshed”. The mighty German Labour movement was surrendered to Hitler without a shot being fired.

The struggle for a united front by the Communist Party; the formation of such a united front of struggle in 1930, would have transformed the whole future course of events. The middle class would have followed the lead of the workers’ organisations. 

Had the fascists been confronted with the organised might of the workers, they would have been smashed. Cravenly capitulating to the ‘authorities’, the leadership allowed Hitler to score a very cheap victory.

Reign of terror

In the 30 June 1934 purge, Hitler struck against those elements in the ranks of the fascists who were demagogically playing on the aspirations of the ruined middle class, as well as against those who had genuinely been deluded by the propaganda lies of the Nazis [i.e. the delusion that the Nazis would attack big business]. Having accomplished this, Hitler transformed his dictatorship into a military-police state, representing the interests of the industrialists and landlords.

The middle class was despoiled, the workers’ organisations crushed, and only the high Nazi functionaries and big business benefited from Hitler’s rule. All the worst excesses of the capitalist system found expression because no opposition, or the check of public opinion, was allowed.

Once in power, the Nazis went ahead speedily, and accomplished in months what had taken the Italian fascists years. The political parties were illegalised; the trade unions were destroyed; the funds of the workers’ organisations were confiscated for the benefit of the Nazis. The concentration camps were opened, and a reign of terror commenced against the working class Socialists and Communists, and Jews, such as had never been seen in modern history.

How purity politics leave progressive power on the table.

Was it cowardice, blindness, white privilege — or something worse? The House Jan. 6 committee didn’t want to know

Across Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine has reinvigorated narratives that present life under Soviet rule as akin to Nazi genocide. It’s bad history — and it indulges the nationalist groups who collaborated with Adolf Hitler.

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The Memorial of Red Army Soldiers is scaffolded ahead being dismantled at the Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius on December 6, 2022. (Petras Malukas / AFP via Getty Images)

Just months before the bulldozers came, there was one last sea of flowers. They could not actually be laid at Riga’s monument to Victory in World War II, which was doomed to destruction in May 2022. Rather, they appeared along a rigid no-gap fence, constructed by police dozens of feet from the actual memorial. First the bulldozers came for the flowers, then after a decree a month later, they came for the memorial itself.

The destruction date was kept secret, but when the 260-foot futurist spire came crashing down into the reflecting pool, applause broke out, and congratulatory videos of the event were tweeted by leading Latvian officials. Now, the children and grandchildren of some of the ten million Red Army casualties — maimed or, more often than not, resting in unmarked graves — no longer have a site of memory to carry the last photos of their heroic loved ones.

The disinformation wars around the fight in Ukraine have spread well beyond the present, unsettling even the dead of the past — namely, those who fell in the global anti-fascist struggle against Nazism. Like Big Oil’s bonanza profits, this has brought a windfall for World War II revisionists and even Nazi apologists, undermining any shared narrative and understanding of the globally unifying struggle against fascism, which once formed the moral arc of the postwar order. What one might call the “Baltic narrative” of “double genocide,” or twinned “red-brown” totalitarianisms, has moved from the margins into the center, along with white supremacism, conspiracism, antisemitism, and the demonization of “antifa.” Where once it distorted public debate, now it carries out material destruction in deeds.

Soviet and Red Army memorials are falling throughout Europe, from Kiev to Riga and beyond. Estonia is planning the removal of no less than four hundred monuments, and Latvia recently passed a law to remove sixty-nine of them. The goal is to vilify and expunge that last trace of the Soviet era, once widely accepted as its redeeming feature — its indubitable status as the vanquisher of Nazism. Whereas once Eastern European nationalists had to swallow their pride and accept this, they no longer feel bound to. With the Ukraine crisis, not only can Nazi collaborators be celebrated, but the last material evidence of the Soviet victory can now be erased, removing a crucial signpost of stability in Europe’s collective memory.

Replacing the anti-fascist, “popular-front” narrative of World War II is a highly problematic false equivalency of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. It tells us that two genocidally criminal dictatorships joined in alliance, and is even framed in a racialized manner, as German- and Russian-ethnic variants on the same minority-targeting rule of terror. The putative “Russian national character” is now indicted as perennially predisposed to invasion and looting. In Vilnius, the site made out of the old KGB headquarters has since 1992 been pointedly labeled a “museum of genocide victims,” as if Soviet terror had a racialized character, aimed at the destruction of children and the aged, rather than just political opponents, as Nazism clearly did.

Replacing the anti-fascist, ‘popular-front’ narrative of World War II is a highly problematic false equivalency of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany.

Here, the Cold War rubric of “totalitarianism” is certainly not weaponized to raise awareness of Nazi crimes, but rather to demonize the Soviet project as equivalent to it. This means jumbling up the self-declared destroyer of the legacy of the French Revolution with that of its heir. Conveniently for the liberal West, left outside this frame are crimes of colonialism by a half-dozen supposed “liberal, democratic” countries, but also crimes of fascist movements and governments in a dozen more lands outside Germany and Italy. Like an undead ghoul that refuses to stay buried, this is a tune heard long before, during the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) in 1980s West Germany. Back then, revisionists like Ernst Nolte proposed a “European Civil War” narrative based in imitative competition between communism and fascism. Infamously, Auschwitz was held to be only a “copy” of the Russian original.

The great difference now, is not only are refugee and Holocaust-survivor historians mostly not around to defend against such revisionism, but the most outspoken propagator of historical confusion is an American, and an Ivy League professor-slash-zealous self-appointed oracle on tyranny, fascism, and democracy, Timothy Snyder. From the World Economic Forum to virtually every major media outlet, he has morphed into a policy-pundit panic-peddler, projecting fascism and genocide onto contemporary Russia, while infamously trying to frame Hitler’s consistent and uncompromising genocidal assault against the Jews as a result of “ecological panic,” as if the Jewish minority threatened the precious little fertile land Europe had at its disposal. With an impudent acceleration of mainstream rhetoric into war-party maximalism, nuance is sacrificed for zealotry. Snyder is a case of a clear link between a stage one of rewriting history followed by a stage two that legitimizes foreign-policy directives and civic law of virulent ultranationalist orthodoxy.

Snyder’s “century of blood,” with its “twinned totalitarianisms,” has become a new “common-sense,” liberal talking point — “Nolte with an NPR tote bag,” as a colleague put it. His Bloodlands is just a more sophisticated rendering of suggestive correlation between Nazism and the Soviet Union, legitimizing formerly fringe-nationalist dogmatic talking points, while hiding behind extremely problematic chains of citation. He has proved repeatedly willing to connect Nazi atrocities to Soviet crimes. Even Wehrmacht-veteran historians like Joachim Fest, who minimized the Holocaust, made clear that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who was “devoid of any civilizing ideas.”

In his narratives, Snyder engages in a style of suggestive justificatory thinking that even the Nazis themselves did not engage in: there is, indeed, no major basis of evidence that Nazis linked the Holocaust, or the genocide of the Roma and disabled, to anything perpetrated by the Soviet regime. Elite consecration of “double genocide,” now embraced as the American diplomatic norm, tacitly legitimizes Polish, Hungarian, and Baltic-state efforts to banish by judicial means any dissent from this dogma. In two recent laws in 2018 and 2022, Poland criminalized accusing Poles of committing crimes against Jews, and moreover prohibited any property restitution from the Holocaust. There is even a Polish Anti-Defamation League that finances cases that prosecute historians that investigate Polish complicity with the Holocaust. (Notably, in Turkey/Armenia and Rwanda, “double genocide,” stands in for a deliberate attempt to vandalized understanding of genocide by recasting it as a “civil war.”)

The Snyder narrative empowers and gives license to the memory destruction of all things Soviet, and diverts attention away from the even more widespread landscape of fascist-collaborator memory and monuments.

The Snyder narrative empowers and gives license to the memory destruction of all things Soviet, and diverts attention away from the even more widespread landscape of fascist-collaborator memory and monuments. If such a line is successfully enshrined, the label “communist,” sufficiently demonized, can be weaponized against any and all dissent, silencing system alternatives, and crushing all faculties for understanding the ongoing crimes of capitalism. The rehabilitation of Nazi-collaborator legacies beyond the Baltic cannot but be a consequence, as witness the rise of far-right parties in Sweden and Italy, which grew out of these circles. The yearly fascist “pilgrimage” to Mussolini’s tomb in Predappio, celebrating the March on Rome, mobilizes growing numbers who can today see blessing from their government. Meanwhile in the United States, House Republicans are pursuing legislation of “teaching acts” to enforce vilification of communism.

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Minimizers

The ground zero for these narratives are the well-funded and centrally established Museums of Occupation in Baltic countries. Founded in the early 1990s, in addition to state budget largesse, the lavish support is owed to some undisclosed private foundations with small boards of a dozen private individuals who heavily fundraise in the United States. Inarguably, these are complex exercises in Holocaust minimization, with 90 percent-plus of permanent exhibition space devoted to crimes of Communism with less than 5 percent (usually in harder-to-reach corners) devoted to the Holocaust.

Entirely left out are the other Nazi genocidal campaigns against the Sinti and Roma and those broadly deemed to be “disabled.” This deliberate disproportionality may be both despite and because of the fact that the Baltic had the highest local participation in the murder of the Jews, among all the Nazi-occupied. In fact, this was one of the only regions of Europe where killers were volunteers and recruited from the general population. Also unique was that these mass murderers of the defenseless were then exported to other countries to kill Jews, not just their own compatriots. The line in these museums to outright Holocaust denial is perilously thin. For instance, the Riga museum, founded in 1993, suppresses evidence that the Nazis operated a death camp with experiments on children on Latvian territory.

The narrative of these museums enshrines the “Molotov-Ribbentrop pact” as a Nazi-Soviet alliance to destroy the small peoples of Central and East Europe. Regularly and inaccurately framed as an “alliance,” this distressing “nonaggression” pact with its secret clauses only emerged out of a fraught and desperate chain of events. In brief, countries in West and East had already signed such agreements with Nazi Germany before — a naval arms agreement with Britain in 1934, and a nonaggression pact with Poland that same year. Two years later, it was only the Soviet Union that confronted the fascist regimes on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, where no other powers came to the aid of a democratically elected republican government fighting off a fascist coup.

Finally the infamous Munich agreement of 1938, where Britain and France agreed to the dismemberment of the last democratic and multinational state in Central and East Europe, Czechoslovakia, occurred without any consultation with the Soviets. In fact, Nazi occupation of Baltic lands began without Soviet cooperation or involvement with the March 1939 seizure of Klaipėda. Establishment circles in the late 1930s clearly saw Hitler and Mussolini as the lesser evil, as the occidentalist line of defense between “Western civilization” and “Eastern barbarism,” a viewpoint incredibly returning now to widespread acceptance. Collective security agreements that included the Soviets were by too many deemed as unthinkable, a view that made the war inevitable and unthinkably worse than it almost certainly otherwise would have been, a burden of horrors carried mostly by the peoples of the USSR.

The permanent exhibits in these “occupation museums” draw a direct equivalence between experience under Nazi occupation and that as a Soviet republic, and are a mandatory part of all childhood education in each of the Baltic countries. From the very entryway and throughout the halls, portraits of Hitler and Stalin are everywhere paired, to form an indelible association of the two. Particularly ironic, and left unmentioned, is that the Baltic Soviet Republics were explicitly an experiment in a reversal of the traditional imperial flow of resources away from the periphery and onto the metropole. Instead, they were “showcase republics,” whose industry catapulted fifteen times over their own past levels, and that of other Soviet republics, in the postwar era. These countries were also spared from cultural repression, with banned books and exiled writers freely available as resources denied elsewhere in the USSR.

The permanent exhibits in these ‘occupation museums’ draw a direct equivalence between experience under Nazi occupation and that as a Soviet republic.

These memorials these Baltic states are determined to destroy largely served as yearly pilgrimage points for the Russian community, paying tribute on Victory Day to family members’ sacrifices in the anti-fascist cause. The destruction of these monuments has been increasingly spectacular, greeted by adoring crowds, applauding as they crash to the ground. These acts of historical negationism hearken back to the damnatio memoriae of ancient times to posthumously condemn and remove unpopular elites and emperors from the public record. Yet these were an essentially incomplete practice; for instance, the carved out absences on statues and mosaics were left visible to preserve a “negative memory” of the act of damnation itself.

This recent wave reflects a deeper desire and perhaps a more completist agenda of entirely eradicating historical evidence. In Ukraine, for instance, already in 2015, all fifteen hundred–odd statues of Lenin were entirely removed. (Neither is the distant past safe as almost a dozen monuments to the nineteenth-century Afro-Russian literary genius Alexander Pushkin have been demolished in Ukraine, with even the eighteenth-century Catherine the Great having similarly followed into oblivion.)

Beyond communist icons, now whatever solemnity still retained for war dead in the anti-Nazi fight seems to fall by the wayside. Lithuania has moved to retain only instances where actual names of soldiers appear on such monuments — a distinction without a difference, as such names are rarely included. And in a sign that once a purge begins its momentum radicalizes, even statues and monuments of Lithuanian artists and writers believed to have communist sympathies have been set for the chopping block. In Helsinki, even a 1989 Soviet monument to world peace has been dismantled, a decade after some in Finland had tried to blow it up.

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Memory Purge

Germany is a special case, uniquely bound by treaty to care for and protect Soviet-era monuments and it is perhaps the only European country where a statue to Lenin has recently gone up — a Communist statement to raise awareness to the widespread razing elsewhere. Yet on a less obvious level, Germany, as Europe’s hegemonic power, may well have set the stage for this purge of the public sphere with its 2006–8 demolition of Berlin’s GDR-era Palast der Republik and its replacement by the resurrected imperial Stadtschloss palace. East Germany’s Palast der Republik, a 1970s late-space-age construction, was unconnected to any communist-era human rights abuses. If anything, it was a showplace for at the least the potential of a socialist society to prioritize shared investment in a common good.

Adjacent to the parliament, were several restaurants, event halls with rock concerts and fashion shows, and even an underground bowling alley. Its destruction and replacement by the near-billion-dollar former house of the Kaiser in Europe’s financially leading state, sets a tone of imperial capitalist prosperity as the ultimate value, while indulging in some not so clandestine far-right nostalgia; here is Europe’s “leading” country with nowhere to look but backward. (Even if the destruction may have been impelled by the presence of asbestos, would that necessitate the rebuilding of the Imperial Palace?) The underlying message, of an outright memory purge, as graffiti near the site had it: Die DDR hats nie gegeben (The German Democratic Republic never existed).

The wish to erase all signs of communism comes from a deep wellspring of obsessive emotionalism, an almost Oedipal style conflict with the “bad parent” (already in May of 1945, General Georgy Zhukov was said to have uttered to General Konstantin Rokossovsky that “we liberated them and they will never forgive us for this.”) It is remarkable, in the Baltic case, that the moniker “occupation” is only applied to the Soviet period, not to the almost two-and-a-half centuries of Russian rule during the autocratic tsarist empire, during which Baltic peoples were barely allowed physical access to their current capitals that house these occupation museums.

The spate of memorial destruction is posthumous vengeance, deeply antidemocratic despite supposedly celebrating democratic values.

A further irony is that since accession to the European Union, very little of major industry or real estate remains in the hands of Baltic peoples, not mostly owned by Germans, Swedes, and even some Irish. The spate of memorial destruction is posthumous vengeance, deeply antidemocratic despite supposedly celebrating democratic values. A performative contradiction, the recent demolition in Riga, occurred against the explicit desires of most of the Russian-speaking community, which makes up close to 40 percent of the total population. Much of its older generation have, moreover, been denied basic citizenship rights, as well as cultural and educational autonomy, since independence via an arcane set of requirements and surveillance that resembles a repression of those deemed second-class.

The destruction of memorials is also a profound symptom of the poverty of imagination, and an undermining of cultural heritage and the necessity and discipline of history. It simply negates historical sources and evidence, and purges the public sphere. As many have suggested, the power of these figures could be symbolically diverted, e.g., turned upside down or half dug in the ground, or even colorfully paper-macheed as with the Bismarck statue recently in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

Today’s revisionist damnatio memoriae is now riding the wave, not coincidentally, of far-right “occidentalist” ultranationalism supplanting traditional conservatism. What was earlier a steady hum has since roared into overdrive: this intellectual casualty of the Ukraine war is a collectively binding narrative of World War II that set anti-fascism front and center. This rising drumbeat of obsessive revisionism might well be the new neoliberal orthodoxy, as well as a desperate revival of opportunistic anti-communism. The zombie-like struggle against communism, bizarrely waged some three decades after the collapse of the USSR is more than a back door for ultranationalism. It is a cultural cannibal, consuming memory and history. After all, just behind “double genocide,” are the specters of “white Genocide,” “Weimar 2.0,” and “race war.”

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