TraductionTotalitarianism according to the CIA sponsored western intelligentsia (3)
William Henry Chamberlain’s selection as “theorist” of Totalitarianism made CIA was not the fruit of hazard. Chamberlain’s case is interesting for both epistemological and historiographical point of view. From epistemological point of view, Chamberlain’s case illustrates Marx’s and also Michel Foucault’s analysis of the concomitant and intrinsic relationship between knowledge and power and this Marx’s quotation remembers us that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling class ideas i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. the ideas The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas“
From historiographical point of view, Chamberlain’s case illustrates also the revisionism in history and how a ruling class can change, mould, imbibe and impose its own reading and its own vision of the past and of the history as a whole. The American century dawned with thee eclipse of the British century. With the rise of the United States as the first imperialist power after the Second World War, the revisionism in history witnessed a new and intense period of revisionism with an ideological and Manichaean interpretation leaving no room for rationale and objective reconstruction of the era beginning with the triumph of the first plebeian revolution in the history and the advent of the first political economic and ideological power clamming the rule of the masses instead of feudal and bourgeois ruling class. henceforth the reading of the history has been subjected to the texture of geopolitical conflicts and rivalry for imperialist hegemony. After the Second World War, revionnist themes and ideas began to dominate the intellectual sphere of the Western Intelligentsia on both ides of the Atlantic. It’s not to be wondered that US historiography along with its German counterpart, should be the main protagonist in the revisionist work. It is quite understandable a tendency to historiographical western revanchism. it is the history of the USSR that must be rewritten from the Bolshevik revolution to the end of the Second World War.
One can remember that before becoming CIA propagandist and renegade after the Second World War, William Henry Chamberlain witnessed the Russian revolution and wrote his seminal work ” The Russian revolution” in two volumes. For comparative study, and in order to understand Chamberlain’s intellectual volte face from a direct witness and an objective observer of the major historical event of modern history, the Russian revolution to a renegade and to an anti-communist crusader recruited by the CIA after the second World War, it will be very interesting to read his” Communism and Fascism : offspring of the War” chapter 2 included in his “America’s second crusade” with chapter VI titled Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin : genius of revolution” included in the “Russian revolution, (The Russian revolution, Volume one 1917-1918, the overthrow of the Czar to the Assumption of power by the Bolsheviks, The Universal Library, 1952, first edition 1934.) where Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin is depicted as ” a supreme genius of revolutionary leadership” and boasted indisputable and unquestionable “political greatness of the main architect of these sweeping changes” p. 121. Another illustration of William Henry Chamberlain’s turnabout was his reductionism and his oversimplification of Lenin’s thought and action and of the class struggle during the Russian revolution which had been reduced, contrary to his early and first writings related to the Russian revolution, to dictator for Lenin compared to Mussolini and Hitler, to dictatorships of the sole ruling Communist party and to jail and banishment to all the other parties opposed to the communist dictatorship.
