The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Written not long after World War II concluded, Ms. Arendt had contemporary access to knowledge of the domination of two major totalitarian regimes. There may be some portion of a confirmation bias in play, but the parallels to modern regimes and in particular, the rise of a 2016 to present (2018 at this writing) movement in what would have seemed to Ms. Arendt the least likely of places – the United States – cannot be overlooked or understated. This is a dense, huge book. I cannot do it justice with a simple review, as I highlighted quite many sections and added quite many notes of my own. I’ll share a few here.
Organized into three parts, Ms. Arendt discusses the history, pseudo-rationale, and consequences of antisemitism; the effects of imperialism on the origins of totalitarianism; and detailed analysis of those two totalitarian systems she had exposure to in the early years after the war.
In “Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense”, she opens with
MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness and uprootedness of the survivors, made the “Jewish question” so prominent in our everyday political life. [and …]
More serious, because it appeals to much better people, is another common-sense fallacy: the Jews, because they were an entirely powerless group caught up in the general and insoluble conflicts of the time, could be blamed for them and finally be made to appear the hidden authors of all evil.
With anti-semitism largely out of favor, the 2016/7+ parallel in the United States would first be all Muslims, and more recently Latin Americans.
For more than a hundred years, antisemitism had slowly and gradually made its way into almost all social strata in almost all European countries until it emerged suddenly as the one issue upon which an almost unified opinion could be achieved.
Again, the recent parallel is obvious, though the speed of information transmittal is now near immediate, shrinking the anti-Muslim tendency to a much shorter timeline.
A sage observation is “Imperialism is not empire building and expansion is not conquest.” People in the US tend to point to other countries, mistaking or defining US imperialism for something else (think making the world safe for democracy…) But, imperialism can be individualistic. For example,
Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage. The individual will consider his advantage in complete isolation, from the point of view of an absolute minority, so to speak; he will then realize that he can pursue and achieve his interest only with the help of some kind of majority.
Sound familiar?
The Nazi political war machine had long been in motion when in 1939 German tanks began their march of destruction, since—in political warfare—racism was calculated to be a more powerful ally than any paid agent or secret organization of fifth columnists.
2016 is starting to seem like a laboratory….because in 1939, “Racism was neither a new nor a secret weapon, though never before had it been used with this thoroughgoing consistency.” It was used well in the years after the war, and is resurging.
Something else she couldn’t anticipate: [with respect to the Stalin successors not name-dropping him like his immortalization of Lenin by his propaganda machine] “The same is true for Hitler, who during his lifetime exercised a fascination to which allegedly no one was immune,1 and who after bis defeat and death is today so thoroughly forgotten that he scarcely plays any further role even among the neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups of postwar Germany.” Sadly, she didn’t really know any modern neo-groups…
The Totalitarianism section is disturbing not for its history, which is more or less known broader today than then, but for the parallels that are drawn today.
The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet “deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever.
Like she said then…nothing new.
The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.
Until they gain enough traction to insert themselves. And then…
The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one’s own or somebody else’s party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority.
This is us. Even more so because of the electoral college game.
The decisive differences between nineteenth-century mob organizations and twentieth-century mass movements are difficult to perceive because the modern totalitarian leaders do not differ much in psychology and mentality from the earlier mob leaders, whose moral standards and political devices so closely resembled those of the bourgeoisie.
Mob leaders. Yep.
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member.
Making more sense? And then there’s this: “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.” Damn damn damn. That’s T to a tee.
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.
She nailed it. then, and it’s true today.
ONLY THE MOB and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. Under conditions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian movements struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and share with other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing plausible to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other sources of information.
Isolating sources…banning media…hmmmm….
The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy.
They do love their conspiracies. And
The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick, and, at least in the case of Stalin, cannot be explained by the psychology of the liar whose very success may make him his own last victim.
They do double down on their lies.
There is too much here, and my bias was confirmed over and over as I read this book.
There is no doubt that the totalitarian movements attack the status quo more radically than did any of the earlier revolutionary parties. They can afford this radicalism, apparently so unsuited to mass organizations, because their organization offers a temporary substitute for ordinary, nonpolitical life, which totalitarianism actually seeks to abolish.
Be vigilant…
In a totally fictitious world, failures need not be recorded, admitted, and remembered. Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
Always vigilant.
Random (and not) Musings 