Laws, history and life

The debate between Ernest Nolte - whose 1963 Der Fascismus in seiner Epoche tried to go beyond both the Marxist and the Liberal patterns of interpretation of the WWII events and stir lots of controversy- and Francois Furet is impressive by the polite and extremely carefully worded exchange. It is a common place, indeed, but I really enjoyed the language of the letters exchange between the two, since 1995 in the last years of Furet's life. An island of academic freedom and distinctiveness, trying to solve by the force of the words painful and sometimes non-conventional ideas - as the insistence of Nolte regarding how to react to revisionists, not by laws, but by the force of the argument - but the problem is that a revisionist don't intend to change its perspective but to impose it in a well-known totalitarian way and they are not interested to hear arguments being already convinced of the absolute truth of their assertions.

For Furet, the 20th century totalitarianisms are twins, sharing are very much alike. And, Holocaust, as Furet wrote to Nolte (66) "was unique...in that it targeted for extermination men, women and children because they were born as they were". Nolte identified Fascism as a form of resistance to and reaction against modernity. By thus, "the final solution" was the logical outcome of an ideology, national-socialism, identifying the Jew with the modernity. As later Zeev Sternhell commented, national-socialism was reduced to the ideas of Hitler and the burden of Germany was eased. After the fall of communism, both points of view are disproportionately mixed by the new-nationalist ideologies, with an anti-semitic milestone, outlining among others that the communism was instaurated by Jews.

The destiny of ideas is often strange. Translated from books to reality, imposed to this reality with a meaning of change, read by people without education, culture and without the required wisdom they could be deadly weapons. Reading a religion book could be a revelatory experience: you find the answers, the recommended path to reach freedom, happiness, peace or to enjoy any other positive standards and feelings. Nothing similar to be found when you look about how religions are effectively working.

For me it was always complicate to look after laws of history or patterns likely to repeat at certain periods of time - Spengler's succesion of the epoch similarly with the seasons is, to be polite, at least childish. At the first lecture, a historical event is like an equation with a non-specified number of unknown details. Something you will never or aproximatively know - especially when it is about events who took place centuries ago - is how the main actors, the human ones, thought and felt and why they took some decisions, and not others. And it is why, for me, the explanation offered by Nolte is not satisfactory, even explained and explained again on hundred of pages: it is too simplistic, tailored as an intellectual relief, sequential and self-explanatory. Facts of life require more details and assertiveness.