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hannah arendt's


ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM


reviewed by



PETER MCMILLAN

_______________________________________________________________

 

Peter McMillan teaches English part-time and writes part-time. Several books (fiction and non-fiction) published under his name and a pen name (Adam Mac) are licensed under the Creative Commons and available for free download as PDF books.

 

Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, has received renewed interest in a world where there is a global conflict between competing ideologies. This time it is not communism versus capitalism, nor is it Christianity versus Islam. Instead it is between democratic and authoritarian forms of government. The centers of liberal democracy in Europe and North America are showing signs of severe strain, e.g., in Hungary, Israel, the United States and even the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Accompanying what, in the early part of the 21st century, has been a turning away from democratic institutions is a parallel shift towards ethnonationalism, which can be attributed to a nativist reaction to globalization and demographic changes.

Interest in George Orwell’s 1984 has again been raised in the public consciousness, and now, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism is being found increasingly relevant. Unlike 1984, The Origins of Totalitarianism is nonfiction. It is real and it is a sociopolitical history of significant movements in the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. In it, Arendt analyzes the nightmare that happened. Passages describing what really happened in the concentration and extermination camps are as viscerally disturbing as Holocaust documentaries. It is no longer fear of what could happen but a recounting of what actually did happen with an implicit warning that what has happened once is not inconceivable in our future.

What follows is a brief commentary—in which Arendt has generous speaking parts—on the third volume, ‘Totalitarianism,’ because it is this essay that speaks most directly to the present dangers of authoritarian movements. Here it is worth noting that Arendt does not equate the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union—the two targets of her essay—with ordinary dictatorships. For Arendt, totalitarianism is an absolute state of unfreedom, characterized by total domination and destruction of the individual, i.e., of the undifferentiated masses who are not included in the totalitarian state’s organization structure. Arendt writes that

In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces, of former existence as a body and a grave. Compared with this newest invention for doing away with people, the old-fashioned method of murder, political or criminal, is inefficient indeed. The murderer leaves behind him a corpse, and although he tries to efface the traces of his own identity, he has no power to erase the identity of his victim from the memory of the surviving world. The operation of the secret police, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the victim never existed at all.

Not only to cease to exist among the living but to cease to exist among the dead—“the government eliminates them from the world of the living and exterminates their memory from the world of the dead.” This is the absolute domination and destruction of the individual.

The organizational structure of totalitarianism resembles an onion with layers of protection for the innermost leaders. But in addition to defense, the outer layers serve as the means through which power is exercised from one layer to the next and ultimately to the masses who reside on the outside.

The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions. The fellow-traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the true character of the outside world as much as it does the outside world about the true character of the movement. The front organization functions both ways: as the façade of the totalitarian movement to the nontotalitarian world, and as the façade of this world to the inner hierarchy of the movement.

Describing how the ranks of the onion’s layers are ‘chosen,’ Arendt is hardly sanguine about the criteria for selection, promotion and continuance.

Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

The conciseness of this principle of hierarchical control gets repeated in the dissident writings of the East Bloc. For example, Rudolph Bahro in The Alternative in Eastern Europe, writes of East Germany that “Subservience to those above, severe discipline towards those below, and only in the third place competence—this is the prevailing order of selection criteria.” In America, we speak of the “kiss up, kick down” business culture, which is as concise as one can put it.

But, Arendt writes, there is more. With respect to the use of propaganda to control the minds of those on the inside, there is the curious copresence of the gull and the cynic. At the innermost level, the mind is absolutely cynical but that extreme cynicism diminishes as one moves outwards from the centre. At the periphery where the front organizations meet the masses, there is near total acceptance of the propaganda—gullibility.

The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.

Of course among the masses, the propaganda is ‘truth’ for they no longer know how to distinguish between truth and falsehood and so implicitly trust the voices of authority.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.

Through total domination, the leaders are confident in their psychological assessment of the masses—assured that their ‘facts’ will be accepted as ‘truth’ if repeated often enough and consistently. Completely dependent on the messaging from their leaders, the unfreedom of the masses is manifested in their unflinching consent. And as Arendt points out, “The arbitrary arrest which chooses among innocent people destroys the validity of free consent.”

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

For Arendt, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . and the distinction between true and false . . . no longer exist.”


* * * * * * * * * * * * ** * *


While totalitarian methods have appeared in the actions of many autocracies, it is not inconceivable that another totalitarian state may one day emerge. In 2025, the question is whether America is capable of becoming the legatee of WWII Germany and 1930s Soviet Russia.

America’s history is not reassuring given America's enthusiasm for Manifest Destiny (and the means by which it was realized), its ongoing legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, its (ir)religious nationalism (despite its condemnation of Islamic nationalism as primitive) and its foreign policy exemptions from the very international norms it helped create after World War II.

The present regime in Washington, like its leader, is showing signs of recidivism. Manifest Destiny stretching to the top of the world. Racial unrest stirred up with a head-spinning about-face on policing in Black America. Christianity heralded by the most raucous and least empathetic. Foreign policy transacted as if by a criminal syndicate. Immigrants (and the immigrant-looking) dehumanized. And ordinary Americans turned into agents of government espionage.

So, is America capable of reaching the depths of depravity and brutality of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s U.S.S.R. as described and analyzed by Arendt?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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