Totalitarianism Lecture

Totalitarianism Lecture

A totalitarianism regime is Plato Republic who is against these ideas, contract theory, idea that the powers of the State should be limited even by Hobbes and Liberalism- personal freedom of the State.

It was believed that ‘fascism is for liberty’ which the only thing that can be a real liberty is the State and nothing human or spiritual exists and has a less value outside of the State. Outside of the State there cant be neither individuals nor groups.

 Imperialism was seen as a precursor to totalitarianism because it contained many different traits which the new regime could use. One of these traits was the development of racism where you are based on your genes and not what you have done.

Our individuality makes us difficult to control and gather up into a collective movement. State terror and ideology are both used to destroy this individuality. The purpose of the terror is not to murder lots of people but to destroy their individuality and ability to act against the government even to think about the thought of acting (Orwell).

Ideology compliments the policy of terror and eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves. Orwell ‘war is peace; freedom is slavery; poverty is plenty’.

Ideology is also a type of specialist knowledge as Popper pointed out is often used as justification for the authority of rulers. It is also a way to avoid responsibility. The ideology whether natural or historical movement gives them the ‘total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present and the reliable prediction of the future’. –Origins of Totalitarianism p469

Ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality.

For Hannah Arendt (writer of the origins of totalitarianism) the first move the Nazis made on the road to the ‘Final Solution’ was to deny Jews citizenship making them stateless and removing their rights. She argues that rights are only relevant within nations not ‘natural rights’. These stateless people without any rights were perfect victims for a totalitarian regime.

The Jews were a rootless community based on race. The Nazis saw them a  rival master race and a model to be emulated and overtaken.

To be civilised human beings we need to inhabit a man-made world of stable structures. Being part of a society enables us to be civilised and gives us access to a shared reality.

Control and Language- control minds

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it.’(1984)

Orwell was horrified by the capacity of totalitarian regimes to attempt to control minds by manipulating language. Thought takes place in purely linguistic terms. Therefore if you can control language then you can control thought. Mind control may be possible through manipulation of language.

In 1984 the Ministry of Peace organises war, the Ministry of Love organises the police and the Ministry of Plenty gathers taxes. In the novel Winstons job is removing articles from the archive which contradict the current and ever changing line on the party.

Personal responsibility in a dictatorship?

In May 1960, Israeli Secret Service kidnapped Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. He stood trial in Jerusalem for crimes he committed during the ‘Final Solution’. Eichmann’s responsibility during the Holocaust had been the organisation of the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps a function he carried out efficiently.

For the Israelis the trial served three purposed: Trying Eichman for his crimes, educating the world about the nature and extent of the Holocaust and the legitmatising of the Jewish state.

For Arendt it was a shock to see Eichmann who spoke in different clichés` and was proud of being a ‘law abiding citizen’ she concluded that it was not necessary to possess such wickedness to commit great crimes. She did however agree with the judgement that Arendt be put to death but disagreed with the reasons and the way the trial went. She believed that Eichmann’s crime was non thinking and choice is crucial to the existentialist at this point.

Eichmann claimed that when making the final solution he was acting from obedience that he had derived from a particular moral concept from his reading  of Kant. Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

He attempted to explain his version of Kantianism and Arendt responds that it was outrageous and incomprehensible since Kant’s moral philosophy is closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgement which rules out blind obedience.

Satre claimed that the only thing he cannot escape is the need to choose. But the possibility of recreating oneself is frightening and people will try to avoid freedom. This is ‘bad faith’.

Arendt rejects the philosophical interpretation that Eichmann is neither perverted or sadistic. In her view he just acted according to brutal law that became normal and normalised. What was his crime according to Arendt was that he failed to think, he failed to judge and therefore failed to choose.

She believed that even if eighty million Germans had done as they did that would be no excuse for you. What had become banal was the failure to think, this is Eichmann’s crime according to Arendt. Thinking is the judgement made from the interaction with the internal plurality.

Arendt is saying that we must look at our personal judgement (thinking) rather than the law in order to know how to act. Law may turn out to be a criminal as in Nazi Germany. In which case we have a responsibility to oppose bad law even a responsibility in those conditions be defined as disobedience- indeed sometimes disobedience is exactly our responsibility and this is what Eichmann failed to grasp.