Slave Labor Camps Research Articles

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt

Reviewed by: Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt Michael Leroy Oberg Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020. Pp. xx, 396. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 978-0-393-54156-4; cloth, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-393-60984-4.) The pages of Claudio Saunt's Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory echo with cries of injustice from the many thousands of Native people dispossessed and expelled from their homelands in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This challenging and very important book will force even those historians who find "Indian Removal" a familiar topic to reassess their thinking. This is the best book on removal that I have ever read. To begin with, Saunt rejects the term "Indian Removal" because "it conveys no sense of coercion or violence" (p. xiii). He avoids ethnic cleansing and genocide as well, though he is well aware that white Americans acted on occasion with genocidal intent. In their place he favors deportation, expulsion, and extermination. Three arguments rest at the heart of Unworthy Republic. First, "the state-administered mass expulsion of indigenous people was unprecedented" (p. xv). Though relocations were a fact of life for Native peoples, what occurred in the 1830s was different in terms of its size, scope, system, and nature. A related argument is that the mass expulsion "was a turning point for indigenous peoples and for the United States" (p. xvii). Thereafter it was the military might of the United States that maintained a moving frontier for white Americans "by killing native people or concentrating them on marginal lands" (p. xvii). Finally, Saunt argues that this deportation was not inevitable, whatever the policy's apologists or subsequent historians contend. The Constitution's three-fifths clause provided the votes needed to enact the Removal Bill in 1830. Indigenous peoples wanted to remain on their lands and asserted that they had the right to do so. Well before gold was discovered in northwest Georgia, well before the Cherokee Nation wrote its national constitution, a small group of southern planters hatched a plot to drive Native peoples across the Mississippi River by rendering life in their homelands unbearable. Andrew Jackson, whose violence toward Native peoples is well described, abetted this program to transform autonomous Native American communities into slave labor camps. In stunning detail, Saunt describes the mechanics of expulsion in all its violence and chicanery. He demonstrates how no white southerners took seriously Jackson's maudlin claims that deportation was a benevolent solution to a disordered frontier. The president's appointees, as wretched a crew as one will ever encounter, openly cheated Native peoples, ignored provisions in treaties that allowed Indians to remain on their lands, and did little to effectively curtail the ravages of expulsion, such as cholera, cold, and the lack of adequate provision. Saunt also brilliantly illuminates the machinations that financed the expulsion of Native peoples. Bankers in New York and Boston jumped "when the opportunity arose to invest in the dispossession of native peoples." They made a killing. "These men," Saunt writes, "were the North's equivalent of southern [End Page 340] planters. While one practiced slavery and the other investment banking, both groups were equally indifferent to the fate of indigenous Americans and the slaves who would replace them" (p. 187). Native peoples resisted those forces that sought their extermination, and Saunt tells their stories well. Importantly, he points out that this resistance exposed the lie in the government's claims. In the end, "the difference between deportation and extermination was never as clear as U.S. officials liked to believe," Saunt writes, and "the putative benevolent goal of moving indigenous Americans to the nation's outermost margins became the excuse to expel them by force of arms or to kill them" (p. 232). Soldiers, militiamen, and vigilantes "were merely substantiating what Jacksonian experts had predicted all along: Native peoples who remained in the East would be exterminated" (p. 233). White men wanted the land, and slave labor camps took root quickly...

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

Reviewed by: Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert Joshua D. Rothman Empire of Cotton: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Pp. xxii, 615. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-375-41414-5.) Among the signal contributions of the new history of capitalism is the insistence that slavery be central to our understanding of the economic development of the modern world. Returning to and elaborating on ideas developed decades ago by Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and others, numerous historians have argued recently that slavery and capitalism were not incompatible so much as they were mutually constitutive, with each empowering the other until the structural and political tensions that existed between them led to slavery’s demise while propelling capitalism forward into new and more advanced forms. In keeping with the premise that the systematic exploitation of coerced workers sat at the heart of this interplay between slavery and capitalism, many authors deploy terminology that purposefully forces readers to confront the brutality, violence, and theft that made slavery specifically and modern capitalism generally what they were. In River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), for example, Walter Johnson describes the American slave regime as a “carceral landscape” in which space was always crafted toward the goal of effectively imprisoning laborers and bending their lives solely toward agricultural production. Similarly, in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014), Edward E. Baptist writes of the South’s “slave labor camps” rather than using the conventional though arguably euphemistic “plantations.” The distinctive linguistic contribution of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, meanwhile, is the expression “war capitalism,” which Beckert employs instead of the more anodyne “merchant capitalism” to describe how Europeans came to dominate the world economically between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries (pp. xv, xvi). In Beckert’s telling, what launched Europe into the Industrial Revolution and touched off the so-called great divergence between the West and the rest of humanity was not free markets, geographical good fortune, an innovative and individualistic culture, or liberal state institutions but rather European capitalists and statesmen forging an entirely new kind of global production complex. By combining slavery, territorial expropriation, and imperial expressions of market sovereignty abroad with the reorganization of free workers into a regimented wage labor force of machine operators at home, Europeans engineered productivity gains and capital accumulation that made their merchants, manufacturers, and financiers into some of the most powerful people on the planet and transformed the nation-states that enabled and supported them into the mightiest on earth. Cotton made it all possible, Beckert maintains, because it was unique among the age’s valuable commodities for the intensity of labor required in fields and factories alike, for the global scope of its potential markets, and for its capacity to bind together producers, manufacturers, and consumers in the [End Page 127] cities and countrysides of every continent. Cotton stimulated the massive growth of both slavery and wage labor, the cultivation of huge expanses of stolen agricultural land, the constant application of new technologies and new modes of production, and the making of European nation-states that stood behind the unleashed forces of private capital and became stronger by harnessing those forces to build their military power, geographic reach, and bureaucratic authority. Cotton, in short, was the raw material that spurred the sweeping violence of war capitalism and rearranged the economic networks of the entire planet. Befitting its subtitle, Empire of Cotton is truly a global history that is less about any particular place, nation, or people than it is about the evolution of state-making, capital networks, industrial development, trade organization, market integration, labor systems, and the relationships among those things and with the institutions to which they gave rise. The book is accordingly wide-ranging and kaleidoscopic, including locations as far-flung as Russia, China, Turkey, Japan, Peru, Denmark, Brazil, Germany, Egypt, and Togo. Still, throughout the book certain places stand out more than others. India, for example, is a key player in cotton’s story. For centuries the center of...

The Final Stage of the Holocaust

As the Allies advanced on Germany in the autumn of 1944, the SS carried out a comprehensive reorganization of the concentration and slave labor camps under its jurisdiction. Between September 1944 ...

Dr Meir (Mark) Dworzecki: the historical mission of a survivor historian

ABSTRACTThis article examines the mindset, concerns and ideas of Dr Meir (Mark) Dworzecki (1908–75), a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto and several slave labor camps, and a significant figure in early Israeli Holocaust research and commemoration. A physician, historian, active Zionist, and community leader, he established the world's first university chair in Holocaust studies at Bar-Ilan University. His impact on Yad Vashem and on the emergence of Holocaust historiography has begun to be reassessed. His prolific writings enable us to appreciate his motives, explore his research agenda, and learn his views on survivors in the postwar world and their mission.

Remembering survival: inside a Nazi slave-labor camp

In 1972 the Hamburg State Court acquitted Walter Becker, the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, of war crimes committed against Jews. Thirty years before, Becker had been responsible for liquidating the nearby Jewish ghetto, sending nearly 4,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka and 1,600 to slave-labor factories. The shocking acquittal, delivered despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of survivors, drives this author's inquiry. Drawing on the rich testimony of survivors of the Starachowice slave-labor camps, Christopher R. Browning examines the experiences and survival strategies of the Jewish prisoners and the policies and personnel of the Nazi guard. From the killings in the market square in 1942 through the succession of brutal camp regimes, there are stories of heroism, of corruption and retribution, of desperate choices forced on husbands and wives, parents and children. In the end, the ties of family and neighbor are the sinews of survival.

Absent Fathers, Present Mothers: Images of Parenthood in Holocaust Survivor Narratives

Mothering and motherhood figure prominently in the personal narratives of women survivors of the Holocaust. In contrast, men identified as father figures are conspicuously absent from both women’s and men’s personal narratives, and fatherhood plays a relatively minor role in male narratives. This study argues that the paucity of references to fatherly behavior is attributable to a combination of factors. Gender is an important factor in determining the actual ordeals men and women faced as well as the ways in which they interpreted and narrated those events. While there is evidence that some survivors believed Jewish masculinity and paternal authority to have been called into question by the destruction of Jewish families in the Holocaust, gendered narrative construction appears to account for much of the disparity between father and mother figures The Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jewish communities of Europe placed Jewish families under tremendous strain. In their efforts to survive and to resist the Nazi threat, relations between family members changed, upsetting gender roles and power positions between mothers and fathers, parents and children. The survivors of the Holocaust, or Shoah, were primarily young adults whose formative years were spent in the grotesque world created by the Nazis. The selections and the inhumane conditions of the slave labor camps ensured that most of the concentration camp survivors would be between the ages of 18 and 45 at the war’s end, 1 though some children and older adults survived the

Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar

Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar

Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945-1979 (review)

Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003. 326 pp. $44.95. As I was finishing reading this fine book, I was in the process of negotiating the inscription for the entry to the new memorial that opened on June 2, 2004 at Belzec. The negotiations were conducted between Poles, Israelis, and American between men of two different generations and three different orientations to history and memory. Code words were being spoken: Martyrdom, Belzec death camp for Jews, industrialized murder, and Final Solution to the Jewish Question [Problem]. They meant different things to different people, different things in different languages. The Hebrew word for victim -- korban -- also has an echo of the religious meaning of sacrifice. It is no wonder that even with the best of will, the negotiations stretched on and on and on. The Psalmist said and American music made famous again: By the waters of Babylon we sat and we wept as we remembered Zion. The place from which you remember events shapes the nature of that memory. And place is not merely a concept of space, but one of time. Public memory, as Jonathan Huener so wisely states, is a dialogue between the past and the present pointing toward the future. In tracing the history of the site of Auschwitz, Poland through the postwar years from 1945 to 79 as his title indicates, Huener in fact does more than that. He does not stop with 1979, the year of the Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland, which included a stop at Auschwitz, but traces the history through the fall of Communism. He deals with the Auschwitz Convent Controversy and stops at 1989 when Communism falls and a new democratic government takes its place. Given what is happening to the site in the post-Communist era as Poland draws close to the West and recovers a fragment of its long history with the the current book virtually mandates a sequel that should be every bit as interesting as the first book, if not more so. His title is chosen with precision. Auschwitz, Poland. The town is near the camp is Oswiecim, yet the Germans called the concentration camp of Auschwitz, and the concentration camp was actually three camps in one: Auschwitz I, the prison camp; Auschwitz II, the death camp known also as Birkenau; and Auschwitz III, the work camps that stretched many miles into the surroundings countryside (also known as Buna-Monowitz, which was the site of many German slave labor camps and the place where heavy investments were made by Nazified German industry). The Poles inherited the concentration camp after the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the future of the camp as well as the history of the camp was contested from the very beginning. The outside world -- including the Jews -- does not differentiate between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II [Birkenau], though the camps, their populations, and their functions were vastly different. …

Telling it in Time: Interpreting Consistency and Change in the Life Stories of Holocaust Survivors

In this article, I inquire into the life of a single Holocaust survivor in order to give a "thick description" of the dynamics of talking about the past over time. David K., born in 1928 in Gheorgheni Hungary, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he spent one month before entering slave labor camps in Mühldorf and Mittergars. My reading of David's life is based upon two interviews, the first from 1982 (at age 54) and the second from 1995 (at age 67). I employ a method of structural interpretation, "narrative mapping," which is based upon the work of Labov and Waletzky (1967), in order to visualize the amount of overall consistency between the two interviews. I also carefully study individual narratives that are repeated over time. My reading of David's interviews suggests strong consistency along with significant changes. There is enormous consistency in the structure and content of narratives but differences in the point or evaluations of narratives. I also argue that David's later interview is more fully developed; David's later interview contains several new narratives and integrates historical insights into his account of the past. I discuss the merits of two explanations for this change, culture and time in development. Finally, I suggest possible strategies for researchers interested in working with the vast archives of survivor interviews.

The Banality of Agency: Bridging Personal Narrative and Political Economy

This is a set of papers about connections and about family ties. In each case, the authors narrate a personal story laden with emotions, risks, disruptions, and violence. But these are also stories of resilience, metamorphosis, and survival. In each case, the narratives of suffering and trauma are embedded in social and political contexts, providing a springboard for examining some of the larger social processes, historical forces, and related structures that are implicated in much of the violence characterizing both the twentieth century and our current times. Therein lies the idea behind the title of this collection: bringing the past into the present. To start with Barbara Rylko-Bauer's portrait of her mother, one wonders at what moment the author realized that her mother was also prisoner #32220 at Ravensbriick, #32049 in Gross Rosen, and on, in other slave labor camps. This is recovered memory-in many ways not only for Dr. Rylko, Sr., but also for her daughter, who endeavored to reconstruct her mother's story and learn about it in what proved to be a very complicated and indirect process. It is worth noting that Dr. Rylko worked as a slave doctor to a slave labor force, hundreds of Jewish women who had to work for a private German firm. The effort of the slave laborers was being used to generate private profit in industry. While many kinds of horror, specifically the press toward genocide, are notorious and frequently recollected from those years, the scandal of enslavement is a less visible memory. Stories are nonetheless available to be pieced together: the 280-mile trek, the typhus, and similar events. As Dr. Rylko said, so much has been written already about all this; documentation exists. But that the slave labor camps served German firms and international capital in general is less well understood. It is as if the cruelty and hatred directed at genocide victims has obliterated the memory of the mechanisms by which the concentration camps were established and justified in the first place, well before any talk of a final solution to the problem of a multi-ethnic Europe. The challenge laid out in the first paper is this: what are the paths that might lead us from a political economy of the Holocaust all the way to the psychological and social processes that are mentioned in each of these papers and that are evident in the experiences of the mother, the father, the aunt of contributor Erika Bourguignon, and of Bourguignon herself? This is a challenge because clearly (as Philippe Bourgois' father insisted) part of the story is still not remembered, is still hidden away. The craven behavior of the powerful in general, in addition to the criminal, genocidal behavior of the Nazis, is still not fully taken into account; as Rylko-Bauer notes, the story is not yet resocialized. Another recurring theme is this: How did events in Poland, both in the prewar period and the 1940s, determine or shape, in many ways, not only the life course of each of these family members, but also their interior lives? Erika Bourguignon, who has led investigations in this arena for decades, has sought to make us understand the cognitive, psychological, and affective experience of these violences. What leaves a mark is not only the dramatic violence of the camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Flossenburg; or of the slaughter in villages and towns such as Jedwabne; or of the arrests, the detentions, and the threat of terror; but also the less spectacular violence that each of these people endured and survived, the accumulated blows that proved fatal to many others. A further theme is the rejection of relativism by mother or father, and also by Bourguignon herself, as a refugee. For our protagonists and authors, it is inconceivable that one survivor's experience in the camps should be the same as that of another. Most of the major writers of the Holocaust, who were themselves survivors, have remarked on social inequalities inside the camps as well as the ghettos. …

Speakin' Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia

Speakin’ Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia Frederick Knight During the 1930s, artists and intellectuals employed by the New Deal’s Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) combed the Southern United States to interview former slaves and their offspring about their experiences during “slavery times.”1 In particular, a group of interviewers from the Savannah Unit of the FWP searched coastal Georgia and the Sea Islands for “African survivals” or cultural forms that could be traced back to Africa. Black coastal Georgians had become known for their distinctive Gullah language and their cultural practices, and the FWP sought to add to the extant record. As the interviewers moved from town to town and spoke to former slaves and descendants of slaves, they unearthed a number of African survivals including religious practices, words, and material objects. For example, an interviewer recorded the testimony of Ben Washington, who lived five miles from the community of Eulonia, Georgia, in McIntosh County, and gave evidence of African cultural practices among Afro-Georgians. Washington wore a “long frock coat and high felt hat” and, like an African elder, was “carrying a walking stick.” He spoke of a world inhabited by spirits, of root doctors who had the power to heal, of the magic power of crosses, of funeral ceremonies, and of religious services marked with drum music and sacred dance. He also mentioned magic tools and recalled, “I heah lots uh tings bout duh hoe. I heah tell bout how it jis stan right up in duh fiel by itself an wuk fu yuh widout nobody techin it —das ef yuh kin wuk it right.”2 Washington was one of several Afro-Georgians who recounted stories about magic tools, accounts which contained a deeper set of African ideas about work, knowledge, speech, power, and transformation that contested the ultimate authority of the planter class. Though recorded in the twentieth century, the interviews of Ben Washington and others in Drums and Shadows provide a glimpse of the world view of Afro-Georgians in the colonial and antebellum eras. For generations, black Georgians passed on stories about people who mastered magic tools. Given their relative isolation from white planters, who generally lived away from their agricultural estates, the Gullah of coastal Georgia possessed a significant amount of cultural autonomy. In front of their hearths and on their front porches, they maintained a vibrant oral tradition, including tales of people who could make tools work by themselves. To understand the deeper significance of their stories about magic tools, it is useful to place the Afro-Georgian community within an historical context of the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade, slave labor in the Georgia Lowcountry, and the structure of plantation authority and power. When the tales about magic tools appeared in print in 1940, Africans and their descendants had inhabited Georgia for nearly two centuries and had constituted a majority of the population in some regions since the colonial era. After the colonial government lifted its ban on slavery, prospective Georgia planters bought slaves from South Carolina or followed their neighbors to the north and in other parts of the Anglo-American world into the Atlantic slave trade, establishing slave labor camps for staple crop production.3 The African work force that raised these staple crops came from both West Central Africa and West Africa, though people from particular regions predominated. According to the database compiled by David Eltis, et. al., ships bound to Georgia carried a total of 15,729 Africans to Georgia, of whom 13,782 survived. Of the people disembarking in Georgia, 3,999 (25.4% of the total) came from regions of Africa not specified in the documents. 3,153 came from West-Central Africa (20% of the total; 26.90% of the total when those whose origin was unspecified are excluded). 2,890 people who disembarked in Georgia were from Sierra Leone (18.40%; 24.60%). 2,513 were from the Senegambia Region (16.00% and 21.40%). 1,606 Africans came from Gold Coast ports (10.20%; 13.70%). And 1,568 arrived from the Windward Coast (9.97%; 13.40%).4 While these figures provide...

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note In late 1998, we watched with mixed emotions the television coverage from Phnom Penh of Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea being greeted with handshakes and smiles by Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen. The two elderly revolutionaries arrived in the city by military helicopter following their surrender to the government, officially ending more than thirty years of civil war. If the two looked surprisingly genial and meek for criminals against humanity, it was even more disconcerting to hear them speak. Reporters asked the two whether they felt any remorse for devastating their country and killing more than two million civilians—mostly by execution and starvation in slave-labor camps. “Yes, sorry,” Khieu Samphan said as he departed in order to check into a hotel in Phnom Penh. “And we ask our compatriots to forget the past so our nation can concentrate on the future. Let bygones be bygones.” Refusing to accept responsibility for the genocide, Nuon Chea added, “Let’s consider that an old issue.” “Yes,” repeated Khieu Samphan, “we must forget the past.” The last two decades have seen the collapse of a number of authoritarian regimes around the world. In the aftermath, citizens of newly democratized countries must often face a test similar to that occurring in Cambodia: how to understand and articulate a national past that may have included various forms of state-sponsored terror and oppression. But a decision to “let bygones be bygones” is particularly difficult when the truth has been suppressed or manipulated for a long period and the “official” versions of people’s lives endure unamended. It is natural, of course, to want to forget painful memories, but traumas, as guest editor Susie Jie Young Kim says, “leave a trace: a mnemonic site.” Until the truth is told, national and individual traumas persist in the very heart of the present and ineluctably affect future generations. The fiftieth and twentieth anniversaries of two of the most traumatic events in the recent history of Korea are marked by the publication of The Wounded Season: the civil war, which began on June 25, 1950, and resulted in the partitioning of the country into North and South; and the Kwangju Uprising, which began on May 18, 1980, and radicalized a large portion of the population into exposing the ruthlessness and greed of the junta that [End Page vii] had come to power the year before. The world knows the military history of the Korean War, but the conflict’s impact on the psyches of individuals, families, and communities is fundamental to another set of stories altogether—another history that endures in the memories of people who lived through the conflict. Even more dramatic is the case of the Kwangju Uprising, the truth about which was kept from the Korean people for over a decade by the men responsible for its bloody course. The uprising began in the capital city of South Cholla Province the day after General Chun Doo Hwan imposed martial law on the nation, arrested opposition leaders, and banned all political activities. The citizens of Kwangju held anti-government demonstrations that raged for ten days, until Chun sent soldiers, paratroopers, tanks, and helicopter gunships into the city. Officials claimed that 200 civilians died, but local people have always insisted the number is closer to 2,000. The Korean stories collected in The Wounded Season exemplify the way fiction writers are able to give a voice to those who have been silenced or censored. Writers can articulate “counter-memories,” as Kim calls them in her overview essay, and in doing so their works make indelible those truths that authoritarian regimes attempt to erase. Powerfully told stories enable people to resolve the painful contradictions that result from suppressed memories, and by telling the truth, they create a way for healing to begin. Written by some of that country’s most accomplished authors, the Korean stories in The Wounded Season depict people whose lives are grievously altered by events and then further harmed by inauthentic but officially accepted versions of what has happened to them. The characters include a doctor who may have committed a murder during the Korean War; an unemployed...

Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands

Across the educational world today stretches an iron curtain which the professional educationists are busily fashioning. Behind it, in slave-labor camps, are the classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the hither side lies the free world of science and learning, menaced but not yet conquered. A division into two educational worlds is the great danger that faces us today. American intellectual life is threatened because the first twelve years of formal schooling in the United States are falling more and more completely under the policy-making control of a new breed of educator who has no real place in—who does not respect and who is not respected by—the world of scientists, scholars, and professional men.

Human Rights in Africa: Toward the Definition of the Problem of a Double Standard

In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

A Note on Cultural Exploitation

Those of us who persist in clinging to certain archaic notions about the human degradation attendant upon capitalism, and who in consequence cannot shake off the suspicion that this might be a better world with the arrival of something we call socialism, are often taxed with the lack of foresight of Karl Marx. Not only is Marx held posthumously accountable for all the crimes committed in his name or in the name of socialism—from the Stalinist slave-labor camps to the Socialist management of imperialist pacification in Algeria—but he is also charged with having failed to foresee that capitalism would be able to provide not less and less, but more and more and more of the good things of life for its proletariat. It is true that in recent months these sardonic cries have become somewhat muted, as the unemployed are once again arrested for stealing food and display other signs of reluctance to proceed quietly from overemployment to home relief; but still the claim is made that the working class under capitalism (especially in Magic America), far from being increasingly exploited and degraded, is living at least as well as anyone else in the world, if not better.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Study of Totalitarianism

THE general study of totalitarianism is of recent origin. In the I920'S, interest in Soviet Communism centered in the ideological issues of Marxism-Leninism, the economic aspects of anticapitalism, and the political aspects of dictatorship. In those remote days, only a very few observers (such as Winston Churchill) saw in Soviet Communism more than a single-country experiment, appropriate to a backward country like Russia, but unlikely to have a profound effect on the rest of the world. Similarly, Italian Fascism was viewed in the I920's as a temporary development peculiar to Italy, rather than as the prototype of a world-wide system of thought and action challenging traditional liberal political and economic systems. The first realization that totalitarianism was a more general problem for scholarly analysis and public policy came in the I930's-more specifically, with the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany in I933. German political scientists and publicists frankly proclaimed that the totalitarian state (der totale Staat) was the highest form of political development, and the only one suitable for the German people. Shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, arbitrary arrests by the secret police, torture and murder, and the setting-up of concentration camps showed the world that the Nazis meant business, and that they were not going to waste much time in translating totalitarian theory into practice. A few years later, in the middle I930's, the mass purges in the Soviet Union together with the first reports on Soviet slave-labor camps hastened the realization that, despite certain differences, Nazism and Communism were fundamentally both totalitarian, and that this likeness was more important than the differences between the two. Finally, the German-Soviet pact of August I939, as well as the policies of the Soviet Union from September I939 to June I94I, gave rise to the popular phrase that Communism was but red Fascism. The forced entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the side of the Western democracies following the German attack in June I94i reawakened the older