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?
