Kakistopias

... Nothing quite encapsulates the contrasting image of the new humanity in the two dictatorship more completely than two famous statues designed to adorn the German and Soviet pavillions at the Paris World Fair in 1937...

In 1936 the expressionis Russian artist Vera Mukhina was invited to create a gigantic sculpture to stand atop the soviet pavillion. The result was Worker and Collective Farm Woman. Cast in stainless steel, the statue was a representation of the new man and the new woman. Oversize, beautifully proportioned, youthful, the two figures press forward, arms aloft, clothed in workwear, the man with a hammer, the woman with a sickle. They gaze steadfastly in front of them, their faces intense and ardent. It is a statue of communist worker-heroes in the march.





By contrast, the monumental statues in Hitler's Germany were male, soldierly and obstrusively physical. One of the best known was Joseph Thorak's Comradeship, which was chosen to stand outside the German pavillion, directly opposite the Soviet one... ..Two enormous naked male figures, modeled of so-called 'Aryan' man with bulging muscles and chiselled faces, stand defiantly side by side, one clasping the hand of the other in expression of a unique comradely bond between race brothers and soldiers companions. Their countenances are grim, unrelenting and proud; here is no forward movement, only implacable defence. There is no female companion, but instead a powerful homoeroticism. It is a statue of racial warriors

Richard Overy-The Dictators

En estos tiempos de confusión política, cuando los fascistas llaman fascistas a los estalinistas y los estalinistas, estalinistas a los fascistas (que cada cual dé nombres, que ejemplos no faltan), hay pocos textos como el anterior que recuerden sin género de dudas cuales eran las diferencias radicales entre las dos eutopias convertidas en kakistopias.

Porque el comunismo, aunque desembocase en exterminio y explotación, aunque se revelase una estructura hueca y podrida, soportada sólo por sus propias mentiras y mantenida por el terror absoluto, era una utopía para toda la humanidad, sin distinción de sexos, razas o credo.

Mientras que el nazismo era una utópía para un sólo sexo, para una sola raza, para un solo credo, el de los señores, mientras que al resto de la humanidad sólo le correspondía la esclavitud, si sus amos les respetaban la vida, o el exterminio, si no les consideraban necesarios.