Overy on State Terror

Is the United States a fascist dictatorship? Of course not. But it may be small consolation; think of those bumper stickers that say “George Bush—Not as Bad as Saddam.” But reading Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) is enough to give you the chills, particularly his chapter on “States of Terror”—the development and maintenance of terror mechanisms in each of his two subject states.

For starters, Overy makes the point that for the insiders, it wasn’t really terror at all:

For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations. Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected onto the victims of discrimination and state reporession. ‘Terrorists’ were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious thorugh orchestrated programs of public vilification.

—Richard Overy, The Dictators 177 (2004)

Overy goes on to show how neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia began as a fully-developed police state. In an unsettling parallel, he shows how each dictator advanced down the road state terrorism by deploying a vivid, dramatic, but in the end entirely fortuitous disruption—in Germany, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, in Russia, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. In each case, the emerging dictator used a dramatic challenge as a hook on which to climb towards absolute power, unanswerable and outside the law.

More generally, Overy shows how state terror grows by the frog-in-a-pot approach—slowly turning up the heat so the subject doesn’t quite realize what has happened to it until it is all over and done.

Overy also shows how, particularly in German, the forces of state terror ultimately become a law unto themselves, and how (if it is any consolation) the terror forces to some extent come to devour their own. For what it is worth, he also shows how conventional estimates of deaths from internal terror (but excluded the holocaust) are perhaps exaggerated—the number more likely in thousands or tens of thousands than millions or tens of millions. Small consolation: it’s still not a road down which any citizen or polity would willingly want to go.