0745685749 enemies democracy

42 The Inner Enemies of Democracy
In 1917, in the context of World War I, a new stage
began: for the first time, thanks to the Bolshevik coup
d’état, the spiritual power claimed by the original faithful
was backed up by the temporal power proper to
a large state, Russia. This gave rise to the period of
expansion of this form of messianism, this attempt to
introduce utopia into reality, which created a unique
social formation, the totalitarian state. The rest is
history: the rise in Europe of another form of totalitarianism,
Nazism, produced in part by the same structural
causes as Communism, but also posing as a shield or
weapon against it. Here, scientism no longer appealed
to the laws of history, but to those of biology, which
the Nazis discovered in a version of Social Darwinism
adapted to their needs. On the basis of its supposed
achievements, they could quietly contemplate the disappearance
of the ‘inferior races’. There followed the
complicity between the two forms of totalitarianism
and then the war to the death between them, won by
the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western
democracies.
Communism supplants and sometimes combats the
messianism that had preceded it, consisting of imperialist
wars in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity,
and colonial conquests in the name of European civilization.
Yet both belong to the same ‘genus’, and this
kinship helps us identify the specificity of Communist
utopianism. First, the messianism that emerged from
the French Revolution seeks, essentially, to bring salvation
to others: to other European nations, in the case of
Napoleon, and to the inhabitants of other continents
during the colonial wars. Communist utopianism, on
the other hand, is directed initially at the home affairs
of each country: the war that must lead to its triumph is
a civil war between classes; on the international level, it
recommended an expansion and generalization of these
civil wars rather than the subjugation of one country