A prominent feature of the regimes was the way in which they moved from political revolution to cultural transformation. The Third Reich under Hitler sought to establish a set of norms which allowed only Aryan racial concepts to be expressed. 'Decadent influences' in the arts, by which the Nazis principally meant Jewish works, were to be expunged from German culture. In the USSR, Stalin and the Party asserted that Soviet communism would produce a new type of human being, homo Sovieticus. Decadent bourgeois values, therefore, no longer had any in place in the new state that was being forged; creative artists were required to produce works wholly relevant to the needs of the workers.
Mao took up that theme in China in his Cultural Revolution, which set out to destroy all remnants of China's artistic past. A major theme in his writings was that culture could not be separated from politics; it was an all-embracing phenomenon. It followed that if the arts were to continue as genuine expressions of Chinese communist culture they must carry no taint of the bourgeois past. State censorship became vital. This was the logic of his assault on the 'Four Olds' (see page 133), a form of nihilism intended to clear the way for an entirely new Chinese culture.
Noticeably in all the regimes, there was a complete dismissal of the liberal concepts of open artistic expression and intellectual freedom. In Nazi and communist society, such principles were regarded as an unacceptable indulging of the individual at the expense of the greater social good.
World History
