Hungarian Review September 2013 [antikvár]

TOTALITARIANISM, TERROR, AND THE ABSURDEditorial Note by John O'SullivanGeorge Jonas tells a story in our current issue that would be literally unbelievable if it were not corroborated by a good half of twentieth century history. A university professor who had been critical of the regime in a country under post-war Soviet domination was tried and executed for the murder of a missing student. He was also accused - and why not? - of being a "Titoist agent" etc., etc.No one believed that the professor had committed a murder, of course, nor even that he was a "Titoist" saboteur. Yet they were still surprised when the "missing" student turned up for classes, without explanation, when the next term came around. Some even wondered (heretically, it should be pointed out) if the authorities had blundered by allowing this proof of their perfidy to come to light. As Mr Jonas points out in his reflections on totalitarian terrorism, however, that people should know of their crime was the whole point for totalitarians: " as sophisticated people understood. The message of Stalinism was: 'We can do anything.'"This determination to compel universal assent to a massive Lie in which no one believes is peculiar to totalitarianism. It does not exist in authoritarian regimes which, even if they censor, do not demand assent to lies, let alone to lies that they themselves expose. If a Marxist were to take a critical look at this phenomenon, he would have to call it "surplus repression". It is especially disturbing that assent to the Lie occurred also in the West where those who said "yes" have no one to blame but themselves.Genuine "Titoists", including Josip Broz himself, were the first beneficiaries of this voluntary Western self-deception. As Attila Balázs documents in this issue, Yugoslavia under Tito was less an actual country than an island in the mind where the lion lay down with the lamb and both got up in the morning. It combined the many virtues of socialism with the few efficiencies of capitalism while lacking the usual cruelties of both. It was socialism under the sun in every sense.The late Tibor Szamuely (the anti-communist historian and nephew of the infamous commissar of the same name) used to remark mordantly that the TitoTOTALITARIANISM, TERROR, AND THE ABSURD