"Fascism with a human face"

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz

The last book I read in 2024 was The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz. It was written in 1953, coincidentally the year Stalin died. Miłosz was a Polish poet who had lived an underground life during the dark days of Nazi occupation. He was an inhabitant of that area of central Europe that Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands. (Snyder recommended The Captive Mind in On Tyranny, which is why I read it.) Poland was caught between the hammer of Nazi Germany and anvil of the Soviet Union. Miłosz lived an underground existence during the Nazi years, studying at an underground university (educating Poles was outlawed by the Nazis), and even published a volume of poetry in 1940—thought to be the first clandestine book published during the Nazi occupation. The idea that such books even existed is inspiring to me.

After the war, Miłosz became a cultural attaché for the new communist government of Poland. Over the course of several years, he witnessed the Stalinist pall descend over Poland. He became afraid that Poland’s deliverance from Nazi terror had been into the hands of Soviet terror. He was in France on a diplomatic mission in 1951 and defected. The Captive Mind was his justification for defecting. Miłosz gives many valuable lessons for people faced with imminent tyranny. Like us.

Miłosz has a very literary take on the communist takeover of Poland. Most of his ominous examples come from the Polish literary world. They may seem obscure to an American like me, but Miłosz universalizes them by introducing the concept of “ketman”. Ketman is apparently a Persian word. The Digital Dictionaries of South Asia define “kitman” as “Concealing, keeping in; concealment”, which more-or-less matches Miłosz’s concept of “ketman.”

Miłosz’s concept of ketman comes from the writings of proto-Nazi French diplomat, Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau was a diplomat in Persia and from Persians he learned about the concept of “ketman”—when a person who doubted the truth of Islam pretended to be outwardly devout while having a secret inner life. The example Miłosz gives is Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) who was known to observe all proper Muslim practices in public and to engage with Islamic judges wherever he went (in medieval Iran). This example is somewhat correct—Ibn Sina was a rationalist, and there were many who opposed this activity. Another example is Abu Mansur Daqiqi (who lived in the Samanid empire in the mid-10th century). He was instrumental in reviving Persian poetry after the Arab invasion of the 7th century, but he is rumored to have been a secret believer in Zoroastrianism.

The obvious analogue is when a Polish intellectual like Miłosz acts like a faithful communist, while concealing a secret anti-communist on the inside. Miłosz investigates the kind of ketman practiced in the newly communist Poland like an anthropologist. He speaks of “national ketman”, in which a socialist intellectual puts on a show of being pro-Russian, but secretly is opposed to Stalinism. Obviously the Polish government wanted to root this out, referring to this belief as “Titoism”—which is why the belief had to be hidden.

The ketman of revolutionary purity was a type of ketman practiced in Russia—the belief that Stalin had betrayed the ideologically pure Lenin; that mass terror, the GULAG system, etc., were evils to be tolerated until the end of the war. These people had a brutal surprise at the end of the war when Stalin continued his repressions.

Aesthetic ketman feels like the kind of ketman I would practice. While you have to publicly support the aesthetic program of the “center” (as Miłosz refers to the ideological masters of the Soviet Union), you fill your private life with works of art from earlier ages, like Shakespeare plays.

In these conditions, aesthetic Ketman has every possibility of spreading. It is expressed in an unconscious longing for strangeness which is channeled toward controlled amusements like theater, film, and folk festivals, but also into various forms of escapism. Writers burrow into ancient texts, comment on and re-edit ancient authors. They write children's books so that their fancy may have a slightly freer play. Many choose university careers because research into literary history offers a safe pretext for plunging into the past and for conversing with works of great aesthetic value. The number of translators of former prose and poetry multiplies. Painters seek an outlet for their interests in illustrations for children's books, where the choice of gaudy colors can be justified by an appeal to the naive imaginations of children. Stage managers, doing their duty by presenting bad contemporary works, endeavor to introduce into their repertoires the plays of Lope de Vega or Shakespeare --that is, those of their plays that are approved by the Center.

The painters who seek an outlet through children’s illustrations reminded me of the Russian artist, Ilya Kabakov, whose brilliant children’s book illustrations (his day job in the Soviet Union) powerfully informed his secret life as a conceptual artist. Kabakov’s practice of aesthetic ketman allowed him to live a private artistic life.

Miłosz describes other forms of ketman present in the Polish People's Republic. All these people practicing ketman sustained Stalinism by carving out a space for living productively within its realm while retaining something of their non-Stalinist soul.

Then Miłosz launches into a series of biographies of literary artists in the new Polish People's Republic, all of whom practiced ketman to one degree or another. He assigns these figures Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. All four of these persons were actual Polish literary figures. Miłosz knew them all personally, which gives his judgments on them poignancy.

Alpha was Jerzy Andrzejewski, who was a Catholic writer before the war, and became (like Miłosz) an underground writer during the Nazi occupation, where he and Miłosz were friends. After the war, he chose to ally himself with the new government (as Miłosz did) and even denounced his earlier Catholic works. He became a dutiful Communist literary worker, even adopting the hated Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”. According to Miłosz, alpha became to be known as “the respectable prostitute.”

Beta was Tadeusz Borowski, a young poet that Miłosz met at an underground reading during the Nazi times. His father was a victim of the early Soviet state—forced into slave labor to work on the White Sea Canal. His first book was published in a clandestine edition of 165 copies in 1942. He was captured by the gestapo in 1943 while looking for his fiance (who had also been captured). He spent the remainder of the war in Auschwitz, moved briefly at the end to Dachau, where he was liberated by American soldiers. His stories of the Nazi camps are considered classics. (Based on Miłosz’s description of then, I instantly ordered a copy of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, a collection of his Auschwitz stories.) After the war, Miłosz describes him as a propagandist for the new Polish communist regime, but says he became disillusioned. Towards the end of his life, he started talking to friends about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian avant garde poet who became an active propagandist for the new Soviet regime. Mayakovsky grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union and committed suicide in 1930. Borowski complained to friends that he had “stepped on the throat of his own song.” Borowski committed suicide in 1951.

Gamma was Jerzy Putrament, a novelist who became a literary editor and politician. Basically, he is the type of artist who uses his status within a regime to rule over other artists. (These people exist everywhere—who else populates grant panels?) Delta was Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, a writer of absurd, humorous poems and sketches. His work was denounced as “petit bourgeois” in 1950, and he died of a heart attack in 1953.

Being an artist himself, Miłosz is very concerned with the Center’s artistic policy, especially socialist realism. The average inmate in the GULAG couldn’t give a shit about “socialist realism”, but artistic demands from a tyrant weigh heavily on a poet like Miłosz . He is especially worried because his choice was to either practice some form of ketman and keep his artistic soul hidden from the Center, or else to go into exile. Exile is especially unwanted because it means leaving his public behind, people who can read Polish-language literature. When Franco took over Spain, many of Spain’s literary artists brought their talents to Spanish-speaking America. But there’s only one Poland, and if Poland goes Communist, that’s it for writers like Miłosz. The kind of artists who are unwilling to find some level of accommodation with the new regime.

The quote in the title is from Susan Sontag. She gave a famous talk in 1982, in response to the Solidarity uprising in Poland. She wrote:

I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is fascism–successful fascism, if you will. What we have called fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown-that has, largely, failed. I repeat: not only is fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies–especially when their populations are moved to revolt–but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face.

This was quite a shock to the lefty crowd that had come to hear her. But the reason I want to call attention to it is that we seem to be about to enter a new age of overt American fascism. The leaders of this movement—Russell Vought, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, etc.—hate democracy and freedom. They will attempt to impose their twisted beliefs on the USA just as much at the Communist did in Poland after 1945. And if they are successful, there will be a lot of MAGA-style ketman behavior.

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