Totalitarianism

How can good people do evil things?

Totalitarianism is all about control. Hannah Arendt argued that the 20^th century totalitarian regimes were utterly different from anything that had come before. “Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality”. Everything is in the state, the state controls everything and there is nothing outside of it. The aim is to completely strip away any individuality, you are all one thing. Arendt saw imperialism as a predecessor to totalitarianism because it contained so many traits that new regimes could use. One trait of imperialism was racism, undermining their individuality to undermine their humanity. The concentration camps used by the British were the model that the Nazis used.

You destroy people’s individuality as it makes them hard to control. There are two methods to destroying peoples individuality:
1) State Terror- destroys their ability to act against the government.
2) Ideology – Eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience.

Ideology is also a type of specialist knowledge and is also used a justification for the authority of rulers. It is a way to avoid responsibility and gives people “the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future”. Ideology frees you of common sense and reality. The breakdown of the stable human world means the loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set a limit to what is possible.

For Arendt the first move the Nazis made on the road to the “Final Solution” was to deny Jews citizenship. Remove their rights, you remove their humanity. Nazis saw Jews as a rival master race, a model to be emulated and over taken.

Totalitarianism highlights the fragility of civilisation and how quickly groups and people can fall through the cracks, even in the heart of Europe. To be civilised human beings we need laws, freedom, rights and shared experience.

If you control language you can control thought. Thought takes place in purely linguistic terms and mind control is possible through the manipulation of language, e.g. George Orwell 1984 “newspeak”. This is demonstrated in modern day through the implementation of “PC” language which prevents negative connotations.

What is your responsibility in a totalitarian regime? Would you collaborate? An example of this is the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was a Nazi fugitive who stood on trial in Jerusalem. His main responsibility during the Holocaust was to organise the transport for millions of Jews across Europe to concentration camps. For Arendt it was a shock to see Eichmann as he was proud to be a law-abiding citizen. This just highlights the point that you don’t have to be an evil person to do evil things, Arendt called this the “banality of evil”. Arendt believed that Eichmann’s greatest crime was not thinking. She holds the existentialist view that he had a choice to make and he didn’t make it, as far is Sartre is concerned Eichmann was acting in bad faith by not choosing. Eichmann was just doing his duty and following the categorical imperative of Kant; he was just following the rules. If everyone else is doing it that’s no excuse, you have to choose, you have to think. You cannot giveaway your responsibility by following the law. Sometimes disobedience is our responsibility.