The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [488]
If Communism had begun as a `left-wing' fantasy, centring its appeal on raising up the oppressed and building a classless, internationalist new world order, Nazism, like Fascism, was more obviously a `right-wing' fantasy, centred on nationalism, racial superiority and myths from the past, and the masculine values of power and strength, discipline and order. But it had not taken long for Communism to demonstrate that, behind its outward show of altruistic concern for the underdog, it was really driven just as much by an obsession with power and order as its right-wing `opposites'. Similarly Nazism pretended to have the caring `feminine' values, in its relentless sentimentalisation of kinder and kuche, the role of 'Aryan womanhood' and blond, blue-eyed children.
For both ideologies, their supreme mode of self-expression was staging spectacular displays of war machines and serried ranks of uniformed men marching with mechanical precision, to demonstrate total obedience to the `dream hero' leader. Based on a `dark inversion' of the Self, Communism and Nazism were equally totalitarian, seeking to control the inner life of each individual citizen and every aspect of collective life. Inevitably both were implacably atheistic, seeing religion as their despised and hated `opposite'.
Just as any fantasy to stay in being must step up its demands, so the most obvious characteristic of Hitler in the 1930s was his need constantly to expand his power: firstly by building up his armed might within Germany itself, then, as Predator, by seizing one neighbouring country after another.
In the fast-lengthening shadow cast by this colossal projection of collective egotism, the other nations of Europe in the late 1930s seemed weak, effete and powerless. Their well-meaning leaders seemed paralysed, unable to summon up any `masculine' strength of character in response. The Western world in general, as it slowly emerged from the trauma of the Great Depression, had become preoccupied with the material pleasures of returning prosperity.
In the cinema, it took refuge in the sugary escapism of Fred Astaire and Busby Berkeley musicals, and by 1939 in two of the most successful escapist movies of all time, each centred on a female character. Gone with the Wind, centred on a beautiful heroine caught between two men who, for opposing reasons, were both inadequate, carried audiences back to the romantic lost world of the Southern States aristocracy before the American Civil War, and ended on the despairing pseudo-optimism of its lost and battered heroine proclaiming `tomorrow is another day. The Wizard of Oz, centred on the child-star Judy Garland, carried them off to the infantile Technicolor-fantasy world of Munchkin-land, the Yellow Brick Road and a'wise old man' who turned out to be a silly old fraud, accompanied by the equally sentimental pseudo-optimism of `Somewhere, over the rainbow'.
Confronted by the gravest threat Western civilisation had ever faced, the peaceloving democracies, it seemed, had gone soft. What happened next was to provide the greatest psychological reversal of the past 200 years.
4. The re-emergence of the Self: 1940-1955
A measure of the psychic shift which was to follow was the contrast between the thin, defeated voice in which Neville Chamberlain informed his fellow-countrymen on 3 September 1939 that Britain was `now at war with Germany and the masculine rhetoric in which, within nine months, Winston Churchill would be inspiring them to one of the greatest acts of national defiance shown by any people in history.
On 24 August 1939 the two great totalitarian powers of Europe had joined forces in the Nazi-Soviet pact, to divide up Poland. A week later, Britain and France