Seminar Paper

Totalitarianism

Chapter 13: Ideology and Terror: A New Form of Government

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Totalitarian governments strive for omnipotence, a means by which they can assert their own ideologies and models for the future upon a nation. Garnering support and realising control is achieved through an elaborate process. Gathering a substantial following is tantamount to the instigation of a successful totalitarian autocracy. Hannah Arendt considers how a population could knowingly opt to join a totalitarian state and how they are influenced.

If we consider the Nazi’s rise to political power; it is evident that many peripheral factors contributed to a peoples forsaking of a democratic Government and a shifting of their allegiances. Hitler’s cynicism echoed that of most of the nation, fed up with a weak constitution, bitter about the First World War and suffering from severe economic conditions. The beleaguered people become impressionable; seeking a new leadership, bringing with it a new set of values. But for the population to adopt such a repressive and dictatorial change they must be moulded. The classes must become the masses; furthermore obedience amongst the masses must reign supreme. Individualism must be yielded from the people and replaced with universal thinking and a ubiquitous identity.

Arendt alludes to two ways in which this is achieved. ‘State terror’; the essence of fear being created by the state, a comparative example of this is exemplified in capital punishment; people refrain from committing an act of crime through fear of extreme repercussions. The idea of state terror is to eliminate, not just the act, but even the thought of a defiant act. Secondly, the totalitarian ideology is imparted to the masses, convincing people of an escape from the burdensome constraints of conscience and common sense or as Arendt puts it ‘a suicidal escape from reality’. It entails the loss of the individual self and the ability to fully reason with one’s self; ultimately becoming ‘one man’ with the masses and part of a universal self. Subsequently, a human’s actions will not be ‘free’; opposition, sympathy and spontaneity will all be repressed, facilitating people to carry out heinous actions.

It seems incomprehensible that numerous amounts of ordinary people can lose their individualism and morality and conform to a totalitarian state. A Freudian model would claim that the irrationality of man combined with the manifestation of the aggression we suppress could be a justification for committing immoral acts. Deplorable economic or social conditions can lead to helplessness and vulnerability, rendering people very impressionable. Hitler used this malleability to manipulate and control. The successful suppression of reason, morality and conscience could be generated by scaremongering, terror and propaganda by the state.

Another idea as to why ordinary people committed atrocities with such banality was deduced from experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. He concluded that under pressure and under the the weight of authority, people act out of character and transgress their typical boundaries just to remain obedient. This striking obedience may indicate the subject projecting their responsibility onto someone else, namely the authoritarian. This theory could again be applied to Nazi Germany, but on a larger scale; an entire nation passing the responsibility of their actions to the state. 

Once mass cooperation has been achieved, what do totalitarian states intend to accomplish? Totalitarian states disregard the iuris consensus, the subjective rights of man, with the claim of making man the embodiment of the law. Totalitarian regimes therefore attempt to make every man an unfailing, faultless character of the law; unlike with the existing social contracts we are accustomed to, for example in the United Kingdom, whereby people are passively and reluctantly subjected to the law.

Positive laws are replaced by ‘total terror’. Fear of death or other repercussions leaves people powerless and renders a state independent of all opposition. With this omnipotence, the state can work towards its primary endeavours. Nazism’s objective was to produce a Germanic master race. This involved the accelerating of the movement of natural laws to a speed they would never reach independent of human intervention. Darwinistic fundamentals state that we continue to evolve into aesthetically and biologically stronger beings and that the weak will perish in a struggle of ‘survival of the fittest’. It is a belief of totalitarians that inferior, weaker beings and races delay and hinder this necessary process. Totalitarianism asserts that accelerating natural selection eliminates individuals for the sake of an entire species and that we must sacrifice ‘parts’ for the sake of the ‘whole’; parts that nature has already pronounced a death sentence for.

Arendt counters this by saying if we defy nature and eliminate everything deemed unfit to live; it will consequently be the ‘end of nature itself’. She says we cannot use the laws of nature or history as they are not ‘stabilizing sources of authority’ and that ‘man is a source unto himself’. The line between man and law, and legality and justice are very indistinct. The totalitarian rejection of positive laws and the implementation of total terror defy the voice of conscience. The apparent execution of the laws of nature do not consider right and wrong and are not representative of a social contract common to the sentiment of all men.