#OTD in 1941 the Stalin - Hitler Alliance ended when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union

 "Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction." - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm (1948)

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize in Poland. Their alliance ended 80 years ago today

On August 23, 1939 the world was shocked to learn that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was named after their respective foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. What they called a "peace treaty" in reality was a war treaty.

On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk (Poland) and celebrated together.  

On March 5, 1940 Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and the order was carried out. 

Stalin deported hundreds of refugees to Nazi authorities. Most of them were German anti-fascists, communists, and Jews who were seeking asylum in the Soviet Union. 

Secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact not only partitioned Poland but also divided up Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland & Romania into Nazi and Soviet "spheres of influence."

This alliance ended on June 22, 1941 when Hitler double crossed Josef Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.     

"Stalin was shocked; he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The communist dictator had refused to believe them," reported Agence France Press. Stalin refused to listen to Churchill, and had relied on Hitler's assurances. 

It is important to recall that for the first 18 months of WW2 that the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany.  Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in a October 31, 1939  speech spoke candidly about this alliance, and ridiculed its victims.

"The ruling circles of Poland boasted quite a lot about the ‘stability’ of their state and the ‘might’ of their army. However, one swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty which had existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities." 

Black Ribbon Day 2020: The Hitler-Stalin Pact that started WW2 and that communists would like to erase.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." - Milan Kundera

Eighty one years ago on August 23, 1939 the world was shocked to learn that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. It was named after their respective foreign ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Observers would have been even more horrified had they known of the secret protocols that divided Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian powers. What they called a "peace treaty" in reality was a war treaty.

Rolling Soviet tanks and Nazi motorcyclists in Poland (September 1939).

 Nine days later on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II started. Sixteen days later the Soviet Union exercising its secret agreement with the Nazis invaded Poland from the East and met their German allies in the middle of Poland. On September 22, 1939 the German Nazi army joined with the Soviet Communist army in a military parade in Brest-Litovsk and the two sides celebrated together.

Nazi and Soviet soldiers greet one another in Poland (1939)

About 230,000 Polish soldiers and officers and thousands of military service representatives were taken captive by the Russians. The Soviet precursor to the KGB was the NKVD. "From October 1939, the delegated NKVD officials from Moscow heard the prisoners, encouraged them to cooperate and collected data. Only a few of the prisoners agreed to collaborate. The commanding officers’ reports included opinions about hostile attitudes of the Poles and a minimal chance of them being useful to the USSR authorities."

The decision to shoot the prisoners was signed on March 5, 1940 by seven members of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) authorities: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (proposer), Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.  

Thousands of Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders were taken into the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in the Soviet Union, shot in the back of the head or in the neck and buried in mass graves.
Months later, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the Baltic States in June 1940. 

This should not have come as a complete surprise.
 
The same people who would join Hitler's brown shirts were also susceptible recruits to join Antifa. Communists viewed the SA as a "proletarian-revolutionary paramilitary wing"of the Nazi movement and susceptible to being recruited to the communist cause. The case of Richard Scheringer, a supporter of Adolf Hitler and army officer who converted to communism in the early 1930s is a high profile example of this.
 
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emeritus, at Emory University, described how communists had mistakenly viewed the Nazis as a means to achieving power and undermining capitalist democracies. Antifa identified all political parties that were not communist as fascist. This meant that social democrats, centrist political parties, and conservative parties were together with the Nazis all labeled fascist. Fascism, according to Antifa, is anti-capitalism. This was the Comintern's class against class approach and fractured any potential broad anti-Nazi coalition.

"Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1932 had been immeasurably aided by the German communists' steadfast support for the Comintern tactic of “class against class,” which demanded no cooperation with other anti-Nazi forces. German communists blithely insisted that Hitler’s triumph would be evanescent—summarized in their optimistic slogan, Nach Hitler, kommen wir ('After Hitler, us'). 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is this strategy but on a grander scale. Let the Western democracies and the Nazis exhaust each other in the conflict and then seize everything. Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. reported that "Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West."

Soviet and Nazi soldiers fraternize after conquering Poland in 1939

The Communist International (Comintern) issued new orders to their members once the non-aggression pact had been made public.  Professor Klehr described the new directive.

Good communists were ordered to oppose anyone intending to stand in Hitler’s way.  With Ribbentrop’s second visit to Moscow at the end of September and the signing of a German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, the Comintern emphasized that the primary adversary was those countries that were at war with Germany, and those socialists and social democrats fighting against fascism. Germany had concluded a pact with the USSR, while “reactionary” England, at the helm of a vast colonial empire, was the “bulwark of capitalism.” Thus, communist parties in England and France were ordered to call for the defeat of their countries—ordered, in other words, to officially embrace treason. 

According to Klehr, Nazi reports confirmed that Communists were fulfilling their part of the agreement siding against Western Democracies. 

A June 1940 Gestapo report approvingly noted that the Soviet government was favorably disposed to the Third Reich and had endorsed its invasions of the Scandinavian states and Belgium and Holland “as necessary and proper.” The report went on to note that the Comintern had avoided open attacks on Germany,  and that the parties and publications allied with the Comintern were not pushing for communists to struggle against National Socialism or denounce fascism.

This arrangement only ended on June 22, 1941 when the Nazis double crossed their Soviet allies and launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Joseph Stalin, and Soviet foreign minister, Molotov

Communist morality has no problem with any of it because as the communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin observed in a speech to Russian communist youth on October 2, 1920:

"The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society."

The myth that the communists were anti-fascists is a dangerous one, and the fact is that they viewed the Nazis as an instrument to wipe out Western Democracies and replace them with communist regimes believing that the fascists would quickly fade out of power.

This reckless strategy cost 22 to 28 million Russian lives in World War Two, and nearly led to the Nazi conquest and occupation of Russia.

It also led to Poland spending another half century under Soviet domination and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia occupied by the Russians.  A conquest that arose out of the Hitler-Stalin pact that endured following the end of the war. 

The Baltic Way brought an end to one key element of Molotov Ribbentrop

It was a nonviolent movement thirty years ago that liberated the Baltic nations. The Baltic Way brought an end to this part of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.

On June 4, 1989 the Solidarity labor movement won in free elections and the Polish people finally regained their sovereignty after nearly 50 years under Soviet domination. They did it nonviolently.

So did the people of the Baltic states when two million Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined hands together in a giant human chain stretching 370 miles on August 23, 1989. Fifty years to the day after the treaty that brought them so much grief had been signed.

This history must not be forgotten. The Spanish scholar George Santayana understood that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The Embassy of Estonia, Embassy of Latvia, Embassy of Lithuania, JBANC, Estonian American National Council, EU Delegation to the USA, Lithuanian American Council, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation organized a reenactment of this nonviolent action that freed three peoples on the 80th anniversary of the signing of the pact.

In Washington DC on August 23, 2019, we held hands in a human chain to celebrate freedom in front of the U.S. Capitol and afterwards gathered at Biergarten Haus. 

At a time when communists are using the Antifa label to legitimize their deadly ideology it is important to remember their alliance with Nazism, and call on others to learn from this history.
 

Weimar Germany had hate speech laws and Antifa: Both helped fuel rise of the Nazis

Nonviolence was not even considered as an option in Germany in the 1930s and some would repeat the error again now in dealing with Nazis.

Burning of the German Parliament: Act of property destruction consolidated Nazi rule

On MSNBC on August 26, 2017 Professor Mark Bray, a historian and lecturer at Dartmouth, and author of "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, made the claim that fascism could only be defeated by violence and that Weimar Germany had practiced free expression against the Nazis and that passive acceptance of Hitler's movement fueled their rise to power, and that violence was the only way to defeat fascism. The historical record says otherwise.

First, Weimar Germany had modern like hate speech laws and vigorously enforced them but it did not have the desired effect. Making the Nazis hate speech illegal and outlawing their publications raised their profile and gathered more support. The New Yorker on February 14, 2015 in the article "Copenhagen, Speech and Violence" interviewed Flemming Rose, the foreign editor of the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten who set the record straight:

"Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences."

The outcome of silencing hate speech is not what those who advocate for it would expect as Rose continued to explain:

"Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor."

Antifa (Anti Fascist Action) arose for the first time in violent opposition to the Nazis in a united front in 1932. However the Communist Party (KPD) in Germany viewed the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the main center left party, as "fascists painted red" because they supported the existing market system.  The SPD believed that they could use the apparatus of the state to pursue the Nazis in the courts and through hate speech legislation. Meanwhile the Communists actively fought the Nazi brownshirts in the streets, and that they alone, with their violence, could dismantle the Nazi movement.

Anti Fascist Action conference in Germany (1932)

Both approaches raised the profile of the National Socialists (Nazis) and the physical violence, and destruction of property created uncertainty in the populace that played to the Nazis favor. Of course there were other factors two that are often highlighted are the humiliating terms for Germany in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 following their defeat in World War One, and the Great Depression in 1929 were major factors that also contributed to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

When Adolf Hitler enters office as Chancellor in January of 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) was burned to the ground on February 27, 1933, the Nazis were able to blame the Communists, and use this act of violence to justify the enabling laws that consolidated Hitler's dictatorial powers. Decades later and there is still controversy about who actually set the fire, but the violent record of Antifa in fighting the Nazis made claims by the Nazis that they had set the fire plausible. Add to this that the Soviet Union and international communist movement would ally with Nazi Germany on August 28, 1939 until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Meanwhile Gandhi's call for nonviolent resistance to the rising Nazi movement was rejected and ridiculed, and even as late as 1940  the Indian independence leaders was engaged in the conversation of applying nonviolence to resisting the National Socialists. In August 6, 1940 Mohandas Gandhi published a letter from “a Dutch friend” in which his friend argued that:

“Through Nazism, the German youth has lost all individuality of thought and feeling. The great mass of young people has lost its heart and is degraded to the level of a machine. … A friend of mine, whose work it is to cross-examine German prisoners of war in England, was deeply shocked by the spiritual narrowness and heartlessness of these young men, and agreed with me that non-violence could not be applied with any success against such robots...”

Gandhi responded to the letter pointing out that the author had sent his name and address but that he (Gandhi) withheld both out of fear that harm would come to him if they were made public. Gandhi responded:

“Non-violent action, if it is adequate, must influence Hitler and easily the duped Germans. No man can be turned into a permanent machine. Immediately the dead weight of authority is lifted from his head, he begins to function normally. To lay down any such general proposition as my friend has, betrays ignorance of the working of non-violence.”

University Academics Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic on Nonviolent Conflict" compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. Finally there study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.”

Professor Bray is wrong. Non-violence could and was carried out successfully against the Nazis on at least two occasions that are well documented. Between 1940 and 1945 under the Nazi occupation of Denmark many Danes were able to organize an effective and completely nonviolent resistance that undermined German war fighting capability and successfully blocked efforts to deport and exterminate its Jewish population to the Nazi death camps by first hiding Danish Jews then ferrying them out to neutral Sweden. An equally dramatic case took place in Germany in February and March of 1943 when German (non-Jewish) wives married to Jewish men and their relatives organized mass demonstrations in Rosenstrasse Street in Berlin to protest their husband’s arrest and deportation escalating until the men were released and returned home.

The idea that one could only resist the Nazis violently with guns, bombs and explosives because they were so evil led to two outcomes: 1) acts of violent resistance which the Nazis used to escalate their violence against those populations that resisted and 2) that millions who did not have a "weapon" cooperated believing they had no other choice and marched to their deaths.

This happened in part because a the third option was not considered: refusing to cooperate, nonviolent resistance as a realistic alternative to dealing with the fascists. Even more shocking that in 2017 the lie that only violence works against fascists is still being peddled in our news media when the examples of Denmark and Rosenstrasse are so well documented.

The Nazi threat today should not be underestimated and law enforcement agencies should remain vigilant in dealing with whatever violent actions they carry out and hold them accountable before the law. However history has demonstrated that Antifa, hate speech laws and labeling mainstream political parties fascist did not stop the Nazis but as a matter of fact helped fuel their rise to power and the later consolidation of Hitler's rule. Repeating those tactics today is madness.

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana

Armenian Genocide: 99 Years of Remembrance

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."- Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Cengiz Aktar is Senior Scholar at Istanbul Policy Center and today in Al Jazeera reported that  April 24, 1915 was the day when the decision to eliminate Armenians from Anatolia began to be implemented by the Ottoman government of Young Turks. This would eventually become known as the Armenian Genocide. The failure of the international community to condemn this crime encouraged others to repeat the crime on a greater scale afterwards.  On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler in a speech to his Wehrmacht commanders at his Obersalzberg home cited the events in Armenia to rationalize committing a new genocide:

"I have given the order – and will have everyone shot who utters but one word of criticism – that the aim of this war does not consist in reaching certain designated [geographical] lines, but in the enemies' physical elimination. Thus, for the time being only in the east, I put ready my Death's Head units, with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only thus will we gain the living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Ninety nine years later the world is talking about the extermination of the Armenians and other victims of man's inhumanity to man. Below is "The River Ran Red," the 2009 documentary by Michael Hagopian on the Armenian genocide.

Human Rights defender Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas in December of 2002 observed that "The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized."In the same address he continued stating that "If there is no solidarity between people we will be unable to preserve a fair world in which it is possible to continue living as human beings. I therefore humbly believe that rather than new models, both for societies and for relations between countries, what we need is a new spirit." 

Let us hope that emerging international solidarity and remembrance of these past crimes will prevent new crimes in the future. 

Moral Responsibility under Totalitarian Dictatorships (Pt. 1)

"[W]here there is no political alternative, there remains only the moral alternative – non-participation." - Hannah Arendt

By Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

1. We speak about moral responsibility and not about political and about totalitarian and not just any form of dictatorship or tyranny. To be clear about the subject, let me just define in a preliminary way the difference between moral and political on one side, between totalitarian and other forms of tyranny on the other. For the question is: Is there something like moral responsibility still extant under totalitarianism? And this question came up after the war in the war crime trials. All these trials under the assumption that there were moral alternatives that conscience continued to function as before.

1. All tyrannies deprive their citizens of power, condemn them to impotence, hence take away all possibilities to organize themselves. Atomization of the body politic. They expel men from the realm of the political and tell him to go and take care of their private matters only. Whatever regards all of them, the commonwealth, will be taken care by One man and his advisors only. They are not total or totalitarian because they respect to an extent the private sphere, and the citizens, except in case of emergency, are not involved in the possible crimes. Totalitarian tyranny is “democratic”: the citizens are deprived of all power, they are carefully atomized, but they constantly appear in public, their private life is by no means respected, on the contrary no privacy exists any longer, and they [are] implicated directly in all crimes. These crimes are not just committed in their name, but they themselves are asked to do it. Hence, they act, but without any initiative. They follow the leader, and their only virtue is obedience. They are participants – and this they never were in classic tyranny. This is the reason why they could be held criminally (and morally) responsible and why they could say, on the other hand a) I did not what I wanted to do, I had no bad motives (or good ones either), I am entirely motiveless, and b) If had not done it somebody else would, it did not matter. To put it differently: All citizens had become cogs. (No Nazi could be found after the debacle, no Stalinist can be found in Russia.

2. This is the setting. And the question is: Is there still moral responsibility left and what are its criteria? Political responsibility is out of the question once the totalitarian dictatorship is established because there is no power left. If you take as the model of moral responsibility the Socratic proposition: It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, then the answer from the political side would be: Suffering and Doing wrong are both equally bad, for there should be no wrong. In other words, the accent lies entirely on the world and not on the self. “The world is out of joint”, but not your self. In moral matters on the contrary: You are concerned with your self. Politically, it is almost as wrong not to resist evil as it is to do it. But to resist evil you may be forced to do evil. This tension between the political and moral spheres is inevitable. The early Christians knew it quite well. They engaged in doing good, hence decided that they would shun the public realm and remain in the seclusion of the private. (Tertullian, the Gospels) Machiavelli still knew it quite well: How not to be good – that is, not how to be bad (evil deeds may bring power but not glory, and glory is the ultimate goal of Machiavellian politics) but how not to apply this criterion.

3. In this political sense, all people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship become guilty: Jaspers: Dass wir leben ist unsere Schld. Namely: Even those of us who did not participate did not resist. Resistance would have been suicide, and, more important, it would have been without effect. This is a political responsibility – it means you have a share by simply belonging to the group in whose name evil is being done. Napoleon when he became rule of France, said at once: I assume responsibility for everything France has done from the times of Charlemagne to the terror of Robespierre. But this did not mean that : I am guilty of what has been done. The responsibility lies on me because I am the representative of the body politic. In this sense, we are indeed held responsible for the sins of our fathers – Germany, Negroes, -- but we are not guilty of them.

II. Let us underline the distinction between responsibility and guilt: You may be politically responsible without any guilt. For guilt, it is necessary that you have done something, and even the sin of omission still implies that you could have acted and therefore your abstention is a kind of acting, only another mode. Just as silence can be a mode of speaking. To say: I am guilty of what others did – this feeling of guilt without deed is sentimentality and dangerous nonsense. Those Germans who declared after the war: We are all guilty, actually made it impossible to find who was guilty of something specific – where all are guilty no one is, practically speaking. This sentimentality was a very effective cover for the criminals. Had the Germans said: We are responsible, they would have found out those who actually were guilty and punished them. (Example the Auschwitz Trial: There were actual criminals, not desk criminals, on trial, and public opinion was clearly on their side.) And they would have found out differences in guilt in certain circumstances – guilty for obeying orders and guilty of their own initiative, for doing for instance what even in this state was not permitted. Before we proceed: You may be politically responsible without any guilt; conversely, by not being guilty you were not yet politically responsible.

Let us consider the nature of the crimes as they appeared in the court rooms: The crimes of which people who had lived under totalitarian rule were accused were of two altogether different orders: They were either “acts of state” – the Final solution was an act of State, entirely legal in Nazi Germany, -- or as in the Auschwitz Trial, they accused of criminal acts which were criminal acts under all circumstances, which were individual acts. No moral problem is involved in the latter. We are concerned only with the former. Acts of State is an old concept; it means 1. that the State may be forced to commit acts, which, if done by an individual, would be criminal, which are clearly against the moral order. And it means 2. that these acts are outside all jurisdiction, because no other state has a right to sit in judgment. Every state is sovereign, and this means that it obeys no other law and is subject to no judge outside itself. Behind this stands the theory of a special “Reason of State”, raison d’état, which says: If the survival of the state is at stake that is, also the survival of the legal and moral order, the state may do certain unlawful things in order to keep this legal order in existence. It does not mean the abolition of legal order, but on the contrary, its existence. That is, the State or its servants commit certain moral crimes because of political responsibility. They risk, to speak Machiavelli’s language, the salvation of their soul for the sake of the secular lawful order. Those who do not do so are accused of shunning political responsibility. They are acting irresponsible. Hence, those who are morally guiltless may be politically irresponsible.

III. Let us see how this works under totalitarian circumstances. I can’t give here an analysis of this form of government, you will have to believe me. Human nature, generally speaking, is such that no totalitarian government is possible without becoming criminal itself. That is the gigantic crimes committed by these governments are not committed in order to preserve a normal legal and moral order, but they are committed for their own sake or the sake of ideology: the essence of a totalitarian order is criminality. Instead of Thou shalt not kill comes the order: Thou shalt kill and we shall tell you when and whom. Instead of: Thou shall not bear false witness, comes the order: Only by denouncing all those close to you can you prove that you have only one loyalty. And this criminality is a legal order, it is the law of the land to which you owe legal obedience just as in any other government. That is, they are immoral and criminal, but not as particular acts may be, but as an ORDER, a legal system. In other words the extermination of certain ethnic groups under Hitler and the extermination of classes under Stalin had no goal outside itself; it would not have come to a halt for instance when all Jews were dead or all members of classes. The movement was supposed to go on and on. It was not restricted to common-sense utilitarian goals, and it had in the case of Hitler nothing to do with the war. Hitler may have won it without it just as Stalin may not almost have lost it if he had not subjected the military to the same ruthless decimation process as the Peasants and the Bureaucracy. What were the alternatives to participation? The only political alternative in both cases was rebellion or revolution. But this did not happen for the simple reason that such governments, like all tyrannies, rely on mass support, and revolution is never possible without a previous loss of authority. What was feebly tried in both cases were conspiracies – and no conspiracy has ever brought about a revolution. In both cases, the change came from without – the death of Hitler, the defeat of Germany, and the death of Stalin. (If Stalin was killed the significant fact is that his assassins did not own up to their liberating deed – out of fear of the masses.) Hence, there is no political alternative, and where there is no political alternative, there remains only the moral alternative – non-participation.

Source: Arendt, Hannah “Moral Responsibility under Totalitarian Dictatorship,” The Hannah Arendt Papers, Library of Congress, Speeches and Writings File: 1923–1975

The Venice Film Festival: Totalitarians and Cinema

Their apologists then and now






When I saw the image of Oliver Stone and Hugo Chavez walking down the red carpet together at the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of South of the Border a "documentary" i.e. propaganda puff piece on Mr. Chavez a week after the observance of the start of WWII it seemed in poor taste. It also reminded me of the origins of the film festival they were attending, and more importantly the role that cinema and modern communications have played in bolstering totalitarianism then and now.



At the top of the page we see two photographs of documentary filmmakers and democratically elected enemies of democracy at their side. Back in the 1930s it was Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl with Adolf Hitler whose political party had participated in four elections and began "reforming" the German Constitution transforming it into a totalitarian state. During this process Leni filmed Triumph of the Will at the 6th National Socialist German Worker's (NAZI) Party Conference along with their the annual rally following Hitler around and documenting his entrance at the rally and speeches.



There would be ten party conferences with an eleventh planned for 1939 cancelled due to the outbreak of WWII. It has been described as one of the greatest films in history, and has continued to influence movies, documentaries, and commercials to this day. Riefenstahl won the German Film Prize (Deutscher Filmpreis), a gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale, and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris. When Oliver Stone ascribes Mr. Chavez's democratic credentials to winning elections while at the same time ignoring the undermining human rights standards in Venezuela and filming a propaganda film South of the Border without taking into account the opposition to Chavez he is following a path Leni Riefenstahl blazed in the 1930s.



The Venice Film Festival founded in 1932 by Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica" is the world's oldest film festival. The festival has taken place every year in late August or early September. There was no competition at the 1932 festival that would begin at the second festival in August 1934 in which nineteen countries took part with over 300 accredited journalists and the "Coppa Mussolini" was introduced for best foreign film and best Italian film and would continue to be awarded through 1942. The Venice film festival was founded in and flourished in Benito Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.

In 1936 Nazi Germany hosted the Olympics and emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad and Goebbel's attempt to give the regime a more human face:"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.' Overt Jew-baiting was toned down for the duration, visitors were treated well, and at Goebbels’s insistence the German news media covered the Games in a sporting spirit." Frederick Birchall's report in The New York Times that the Games put Germans “back in the fold of nations,” and even made them “more human again.” Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure.

Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was invited to and attended the 1938 edition of the Venice Film Festival where Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, a documentary of the 1936 Nazi olympics was the winner. One years later the world would be plunged into World War II and in short order the Holocaust would claim 6 million Jewish lives.



Like Leni Riefenstahl, Oliver Stone won at the 1994 edition of the Venice Film Festival with his fictional work Natural Born Killers. Let us hope that his propaganda documentaries do not fare as well as Ms. Riefenstahl's.