The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [487]
A striking feature of Communism was the speed at which, having torn down Russia's old social order, centred on a religiously-sanctioned autarchy, it replaced it with a caricature of what it had destroyed. In place of the absolute rule of the Czar came the absolute rule of the Communist dictators, Lenin and Stalin. In place of the old aristocracy emerged the new ruling elite of `the Party'. In place of that Christian Orthodoxy which had provided the people of Russia with an explanation for the world and the faith they should live by came the new Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, seeking to do precisely the same.
Initially Communism had been a below-the-line, `left-wing fantasy, associated with all the `progressive' tendencies of the early twentieth century, from avantgarde painting and `modernism' in architecture to a belief in `free love'. Within a few years the new Soviet Union had officially reinstated a belief in marriage and the family as a keystone of Communist society. It had imposed on its artists and writers the rigid doctrines of `Socialist Realism', whereby their only duty was to produce films, novels, plays, paintings, statues, buildings and musical compositions designed, in crudely sentimental fashion, to extol the glories of Communism and the heroic achievements of the proletariat.
As with any fantasy, Soviet Communism was based on building up a state of expectation which was unable to resolve with reality. It therefore needed constantly to be fed with new promises of glorious achievements to come, along with new excuses as to why it had so far failed to deliver on its earlier promises. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin unveiled the first of his `Five Year Plans, holding out the Utopia which would arrive when he had taken the Soviet Union's agriculture into state ownership and completed his visionary programme for dragging his backward country into the age of heroic industrialism. The first class of `enemies' and `wreckers' who were demonised as obstacles to achieving this were the kulaks: all those peasants with their little plots of land who still clung onto a belief in private property. Millions were either murdered directly, or died in the mass famine which followed when the land confiscated from them failed to produce food. In the late 1930s, frustrated by his continuing failure to achieve the Communist Utopia, Stalin switched the blame onto his own followers, as millions of Party members and officers of the Red Army were either shot or deported to die more slowly in the slave camps of Siberia.
The infection of one group-fantasy often helps to set off another. By this time, partly in response to the spread of Communist ideas across Europe, a new groupfantasy had taken possession of Germany: the virulence of which would before long pose a threat to the entire continent.
We traced earlier how Hitler's career as Nazi leader followed the five-stage fantasy pattern. The Anticipation Stage lasted through his rise to power in 1933. From then onwards he entered the Dream Stage in which everything seemed to be miraculously going his way. The key to the hold he exercised over Germany was the way he managed to collectivise the egos of his followers behind that particular projection of the Self archetype which was identified with German nationhood. By playing on the archetypal elements which provided the German people with the emotional core of their collective sense of identity, Hitler welded them into a single totality, obedient to his will: not least through the skilful use of quasireligious imagery, from the swastika symbol to that `cathedral of light' which was Speer's masterpiece in stage-managing the Nuremberg rallies.
Like Communism, Nazism was dependent on those same three factors displayed by any group-fantasy. The collective act of make-believe which bound its followers together was the dream of Germany reborn from its post-war