Years of Poems and Spirits

Book: The Origins of Totalitarianism

To put it harshly, The Origins of Totalitarianism is more like a political manifesto than a scientific thesis. The locus of Arendt’s work is the Holocaust hence the applicability and reasoning are rather questionable.

Arendt is not just any Jewish survivor. A student and a lover of the preeminent 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Arendt had rightfully consider herself a member of the upper echelon of the the Western civilization before, suddenly, she was nearly cannibalized by it. Therefore, for Arendt, the most pressing question for her was “what has gone so wrong”?

In pursuit of an answer to this question, Arendt chooses to forgo the cultural and historical peculiarity of the German nation but to extrapolate a general condition which she argues could forster a monsterous extremist regime.

A central character in her definition of Totalitarianism is the movement’s global aspiration. The existence of an ideology aiming for world domination (quotes needed) is a prerequisit. Although such a framework explains well Nazism and Communism, it fails to explain racial or ethnic triggered mass hysteria. Even today, as what used to be unthinkable in America (p 420 a country least exposed to mass psychology) becomes legal (e.g. warrantless surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, etc.), what the silent majority buy into is not a desire of world domination or salvation but “homeland” security.

Does Totalitarianism exist as one of the “-ism” of the 20th century? Or even, is there a “sin test”–I know it when I see it–of Totalitarianism? If mass murder of the innocent is a inevitable outcome of a Totalitarian regime, as Arendt suggests, the evidence in the late 20th century offers little support–one can hardly say that what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia were perpetrated by totalitarian regimes.

In other words, mass murder cannot happen unless the entire society goes along with a few fanatics. In her book, the chapter on “the classless society” is the one that I can relate to the most: fanaticism is possible when there is a breakdown of social orders (class not in the traditional Marxist sense). But even a chaotic social order is a necessary condition, it is clearly not a sufficient one. For Industrialization and Republicanization (French style) were both traumatic events in history yet not all societies lived through them became radical as did the German, Russian and Chinese nations. In France, the Dreyfus case–as extensively discussed by Arendt–is a case in point: there was clearly a suffocating antisemitic sentiment at the beginning, but it fizzled as quickly as it started (quotes needed).

Therefore, given similar social conditions, given that political and psychological manipulation is innate to human beings as there are demagogues in every historical period in every society, why some nations degerated into totalitarianism, but some did not?

Or, to put the question differently, if there exists a transcendent Totalitarian model, why did it not manifest itself every where, every time? Arendt herself in the 1950 preface says that she wrote the book “out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration”. Yet even after she seems to have identified many, if not all, of those mechanics, she has yet to convince me that the existence of those mechanics along is enough to breed Totalitarianism.

After the Holocaust, man finds itself still capable of watching massacres unfold in Rwanda and Balkan, and mass hysteria reign in North Korea and, most recently, South Africa. It appears that if history is of any guidance, what Arendt labels as “hidden mechanics” are not that “hidden” compared to something deeper underlying every holocaust.

My observation is that the likelihood of Totalitarianism is negatively related to the liberal tradition of a society. The liberal tradition refers to not only the depth but also the breadth of its societal penatration. In other words, a society that features a clan of intelligentsia and a huge disparity is as illiberal as one that features an undereducated mass.