SEMINAR PAPER / The Origins of Totalitarianism

HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF JOURNALISM
SEMINAR PAPER

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM
BY HANNAH ARENDT.

This seminar paper’s intention is to summarise and analyse Hannah Arendt’s book on Totalitarianism published in 1951. Arendt’s work compiles the elements and origins of totalitarianism, puts them into context and explains their history and methodology thoroughly. Nazism and Stalinism are the two main totalitarian movements which the book is focused on and how throughout the 20^th century it has served as a philosophical analysis of totalitarianism.

Analysis on Chapter 13
Ideology and Terror: A Novel form of Government

Summary

In this chapter, Arendt determines the roots of the ideology and methodology of Totalitarianism. Her interpretation of totalitarianism is the following.

1.      Hannah Arendt determines that Totalitarianism is a different form of oppression, specifying that it does not necessarily mean it’s a dictatorship or a tyranny a government that is totalitarian rather that shares similar values: “total domination is not only more drastic but that totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship.”

2.      It establishes a connection with the masses in which there is a shift of ‘power’ and ‘influence’. The source and true power will always remain in the governing body but nonetheless the feeling of community is trying to be created in order to make the people feel that it is their power that matters. Oppression through absolute mass manipulation: “totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police,”

3.      Totalitarianism is but the fusion of certain criteria in oppressed terror channelled towards a population that it’s controlled. This control and this modus operandi have a source and have a ‘natural’ process, which it’s a metamorphosis of several oppressive political factors as well as violent instruments of tyranny and despotism. However there is a concept of collision between both ideas, there can be no blank nature of totalitarianism if its creation implies a fusion of preconceived ideas. “Which borrows its methods of intimidation, its means of organization and its instruments of violence from the well-known political arsenal of tyranny, despotism and dictatorships, and owes its existence only to the deplorable, but perhaps accidental failure of the traditional political forces—liberal or conservative, national or socialist, republican or monarchist, authoritarian or democratic. Or whether, on the contrary, there is such a thing as the nature of totalitarian government, whether it has its own essence and can be compared with and defined like other forms of government such as Western thought has known and recognized since the times of ancient philosophy.”

4.      Totalitarianism is a relatively new concept. “If we apply these findings, whose fundamental idea, despite many variations, did not change in the two and a half thousand years that separate Plato from Kant, we are tempted at once to interpret totalitarianism as some modern form of tyranny, which is a lawless government where power is wielded by one man. Arbitrary power, unrestricted by law, yielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other these have been the hallmarks of tyranny throughout our tradition.”

5.      An analysis on the certain violent methods of totalitarianism to destroy the unnecessary and weak.

6.      Rule by fear. Totalitarianism destroying humanitarian morality and redefining or turning into ‘obsolete’ ideas of notions such as empathy. “Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; "guilty" is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process which has passed judgment over "inferior races", over individuals "unfit to live," over "dying classes and decadent peoples." Terror executes these judgments, and before its court, all concerned are subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the system and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.”

7.      Very arbitrary man made law. Emphasis in the control of man over mankind and the masses, the power lies on the men who have decided to abuse it.

8.      An objectivist education without convictions, and aggressive form of interpretation shared by all but enforced and chosen by one.

9.      Alternative to deism, subjective theology that is only based in an ideology of the totalitarian government.

10.  A redefinition and shaping of logic, a pattern of new sense in rationality.

11.  Explanation of Totalitarian rules in which enforced compulsion against man’s thoughts takes place. A philosophical explaination to an aggressive submission based on the countless interactions that disable one’s abilities to introspect and determine whether the information one is receiving is incorrect or if one is simply against it.

12.  Lastly establishing a paradigm between isolation, loneliness and solitude. Different restrictions, physical and emotional that are side effects (in the slightest form) of a totalitarian control, a mass that is isolated, of a lonely education and evoking man’s feeling of solitude within himself, a very deep introspective of emotional side effects of a conditioning form of oppression that seeks to unite man, once separated from himself. “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others. Apart from a few stray remarks—usually framed in a paradoxical mood like Cato's statement (reported by Cicero, De Re Publico, I, 17): numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset, "never was he less alone than when he was alone," or. rather, "never was he less lonely than when he was in solitude"—it seems that Epictetus. the emancipated slave philosopher of Greek origin, was the thirst to distinguish between loneliness and solitude.”

Commentary

This chapter represents a perfect symbiosis between an analysis that dwells with the most superficial of characteristics and yet the deepest of introspective of emotion and ideological response. Hannah Arendt may have not considered herself more than a political theorist but her interpretations and synchronization to both classical and modern forms of philosophy made her an eloquent and outstanding philosopher.

Her definition of Totalitarianism is well addressed, her historical research in the previous chapters gave her the right ideas to establish certain propositions such as Totalitarianism being the collective concentration of several forms of oppression united under a violent methodology of control and aggressive self-centred education, and yet the possibility of having found the ‘nature’ of this despotic form of government that was created upon itself, the development of various decisions to control the masses based on a fundamental criteria of control and tyranny.

Nevertheless, its intentions are clear. The masses have to controlled, but not only controlled through a modus operandi which is self-evidently oppressive but rather subtle through certain forms of manipulation. Manipulation is a key tool in Totalitarianism, and when it comes to assessing Totalitarianism and the power of manipulation as the shaper and crafter of a united governed culture Nazism and Stalinism collided greatly. The intention of the following examples is to fulfil the historical context that the previous chapters of the book were using to assess Totalitarianism; Adolf Hitler was a mastermind of manipulation and so was his right hand Joseph Goebbels. Their use of propaganda, speeches, rallies, unified sentiment of pride and glory with modern technologies and a rightful exploitation of such gave the means for the national-socialist party to manipulate thoroughly a strong spirited but weak and poor German society. Whereas Stalin, though persuasive as he was he did not control Russia so much through his charisma but rather than his furious and intolerant power, his imprisonment methods, his ruthless army and secret police, which leads to the alternative form of Totalitarianism which to a certain degree is the core essence of this form of oppression, Rule by fear:

Totalitarianism has been found to be, according to Hannah Arendt as a new concept of oppression, regardless of its origins as a fusion of many or a new concept, the principal theory is that Totalitarianism is new, however its methods may not all be new such as a the simple fear factor; Ruling by fear has been man’s main initiative of domination against a weaker subjugate, the fear to retaliation and consequent punishment by the subject in power has been and will always be the most efficient source of persuasion, and many civilizations before ours knew this. It is inherent in man-kind to sustain power through fear.

Arendt follows to discuss more specific matters like the destruction of morality, the creation of newer forms of logic, the idealisation of a different cause. All these methods are of an extremely aggressive nature, being aware that education on its own is a passive-aggressive form of interpretation and knowledge shaping, preconceived ideas from other sources being constantly repeated to the masses until they embrace, accept and understand them can be of grievous consequences when the aim is not to proliferate the subjectivism and self-development of one self but rather follow the strict passion and doctrine of one governing body. One objective truth that is spread evenly and unilaterally across a nation, fundamentalism based in the opinions of few who are willing to enforce any type of punishment upon those who decide to reject it.

Totalitarianism defies not only the humanitarian, liberal empathy that it’s also inherent in human kind but also its nature, and the laws of nature. The liberation from the weak, the destruction of the impaired is of the essence; The third Reich was keen and eagerly pleased to get rid of the handicapped community euthanizing thousands of people, expressing the ideas that this was their law of nature, this was the best option for the community, a community that sought productivity beyond any attachment to its own citizens, where anyone weaker than a certain standard was expendable. Stalinism was not far from this concept using their own people in the Second World War having no regard whatsoever to the individual citizens who were seen as shield for bullets designed to kill more Russian people. The defence in Stalingrad was accomplished after several million people were massacred by both German and Russian troops alike; a fearful soldier that ran from his troops was more likely to get killed by his staff sergeant (in communist ranking system) than by a German soldier. Ultimately we are discussing the ideas that individualism was rejected, and that did not exclude any measure that included killing your own citizens. Arendt narrates a nature similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche’s superhuman theory, a theory so passionately embraced by Adolf Hitler, which she did not mention but I myself see so much resemblance in. Nietzsche’s ideas, and the way Hitler indoctrinated his government upon, reflect that perhaps Arendt’s idea of Totalitarianism having its own nature was correct, the fusion and evolution of different ideas interpreted by different men led to transform a passion for power into Totalitarianism using tools of other propositions by other thinkers.

Arendt’s final contemplation on human loneliness and solitude is remarkable, she escalates through totalitarian repression of emotion and isolation to a Greek tragic, into a question that started long before Totalitarian states, propositions of where does one find his place, where does one abandon solitude? And once this solitude is abandoned does that imply that there shall be no feeling of loneliness? Regardless if this man or men are isolated from another group. The separation of the individual first from his own feelings and sentiments, then from his group, society or culture and this culture being isolated on its own, this classification process is a contemporary form of the Roman-Egyptian Agora, the circles of the ‘self’ beyond one’s self.

Arendt’s conclusion transcends the initial encounter of this chapter from specific introspective political theory into the most relevant and rational philosophical proposition, and it reminds readers that regardless of the oppressive form of government that may rule one’s physical body, one’s education, we shall leave this world the same way in which we have arrived; alone. An excellent analogy using a ‘tragic’ sense of introspection of man’s lonely path of solitude enforced by a contemporary form of emotional dis-attachment.