Our World, Part 1: Hannah Arendt Describes Totalitarianism

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

This article is a book review of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. It was published by Harcourt in 1966. This will launch a Gumshoe series of reviews on the subject of “total control from the top,” that will look also at satanism and communism.

I had not realized that Arendt is one of the great greats. Everybody knows she is the author of The Banality of Evil, which reflects her 1960 attendance at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. And maybe you have seen her books On Revolution and On Violence. I plan to get ahold of them soon.  I unluckily experienced a half-century delay in appreciating her, due to my prejudice, circa 1974.

Was this a prejudice against Jews? Hell, no. I lived in Manhattan and a friend of mine was taking Arendt’s course at the New School for Social Research. She invited me to sneak into class with her and watch the lady professor (not all that common in those days, you know). Well, the lady professor was wearing a house dress, such as my mother wore all the time — but strictly at home. I do believe that that my little brain figured that if Arendt did not have her couture down pat, her lecture wasn’t good.  (Stupid, eh?)

Anyway, last week (February 2024) I happened to be at the laundromat.  I started to read Totalitarianism, just to pass the time and lo and behold, I was stunned. Every page is exciting. In fact, every footnote is beautiful. Accordingly, I failed to paying attention to the ‘dry cycle’ and so my clothes went a bit overtime. Now they are shrunk. But who cares? Couture is not everything, right? (True story)

The Forward Gaze That a Totalitarian Leader Must Use

Hannah Arendt found a major commonality of Communism and Nazism. Namely, they each claim that there is a force moving history in a certain direction. For Hitler it was the perfection of the German race. For Stalin, the ascendance of the workers (what a joke!). She noticed that this liberated the two leaders from having to justify what they did, or even explain it in any moral terms. It was like a strong wind pushing us forward and we had to go with it.

I don’t mean she took those two leaders at their word. No doubt she knew, better than most, that Hitler and Stalin had no “ideology” — it was but a means of controlling society.

Hannah lived from 1906 to 1975, so she did not see the new and more weird type of totalitarianism that the globalists are imposing on us in the 21st century. Yet her analysis, which is printed below, has many interesting points. She speaks of the terror under Hitler and Stalin as being more or less “equal opportunity” — every member of society had reason to fear arrest or execution.

I should note that we rarely have a philosopher dealing with contemporary politics, like Arendt. She studied under Heidegger, and every page of this book shows her awareness of history and “mass phenomena.” Note: Arendt did not get into the specifics of how human emotions allowed the totalitarian leader to get away with murder.  But later in this series, Mattias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, will have something to contribute to that.

Excerpts from Chapter 4 of Arendt’t Totalitarianism (1968) [All is verbatim, but abridged, with headings inserted by me.]

Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government

(p 158) Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as tyranny and dictatorship. … it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. … Totalitarian government transformed classes into masses [and] shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination.

[As for 20th century] totalitarian governments, … they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict their course of action.

Motion

(p 161) In the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement. When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the Bolsheviks talk about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men; they are movements in themselves.

Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks’ belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx’s notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement ….

Marx’s class struggle [is the] expression of the development of productive forces which in turn have their origin in the “labor-power” of men. Labor, according to Marx, is not a historical but a natural-biological force—released through man’s “metabolism with nature” by which he conserves his individual life and reproduces the species.

In these ideologies, the term “law” itself changed its meaning: from expressing the framework of stability within which human actions and motions can take place, it became the expression of the motion itself.

Terror and “Lawfulness”

Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.

… 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.

… The rulers themselves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or natural laws…. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some supra-human force, Nature or History. [Gahd, what a cover-up.]

Terror as the execution of a law of movement whose ultimate goal is not the welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake  of the species, it sacrifices the “parts” for the “whole.”

… By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them. …Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties nor does it … succeed in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space. …

(p 164) Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It [gives] forces of nature or history an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered…. But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of man….

Lawfulness sets limitations to actions, but does not inspire them; the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one should do. [Note: Arendt is not speaking for herself here!]

(p 166) The consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Ideologies

Ideologies—isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything, and every occurrence, by deducing it from a single premise—are a very recent phenomenon…

(p 167) Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures, even if they try to explain history by some “law of nature.” The word “race” in racism does not signify any genuine curiosity about the human races as a field for scientific exploration, but is the “idea” by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.

(p 170) What distinguished these new totalitarian ideologists from their predecessors was that it was no longer primarily the “idea” of the ideology —the struggle of classes and the exploitation of the workers or the struggle of races and the care for Germanic peoples—which appealed to them, but the logical process which could be developed from it.

According to Stalin, neither the idea nor the oratory but “the irresistible force of logic thoroughly overpowered [Lenin’s] audience.” Marx thought [the power] “like a mighty tentacle seizes you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat.”

Only when the realization of the ideological aims, the classless society or the master race, was at stake, could this force show itself. In the [meantime], the original substance upon which the ideologies based themselves … to appeal to the masses—the exploitation of the workers or the national aspirations of Germany—is gradually lost.

“Devoured by Logic”

… The workers lost under Bolshevik rule even those rights they had been granted under Tsarist oppression and the German people suffered a kind of warfare which did not pay the slightest regard to the minimum requirements for survival of the German nation. It is in the nature of ideological politics —and is not simply a betrayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power—that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the “idea” … is devoured by the logic with which the “idea” is carried out.

To the extent that the Bolshevik purge succeeds in making its victims confess to crimes they never committed, it relies chiefly on this basic fear and argues as follows: …”The Party is always right (in the words of Trotsky: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.”).

…. The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind’s submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men….

Isolation and Separation from Reality

(p 171) The compulsion of total terror … which, with its iron band, presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them, … prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving.

Just as terror, even in its merely tyrannical form, ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them, for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought.

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 (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

(172) It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pre-totalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together, “acting in concert” (Burke); isolated men are powerless by definition. [Wow.]

… Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact.

Postscript: The 2006 book Hitler Was a British Agent, by New Zealand spy Greg Hallett, makes a reasonable case that the missing year of Adolf’s life (1912-1913) was spent at Tavistock in London, where he got all the training to do this and that.