Thread by @AndyHieb

I've been reading Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism"... It's been super challenging and a slog honestly (especially trying to read in bed lol) but the rewards are starting to be great

"the resulting introduction of power as the only content of politics, & of expansion as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause... had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires & secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes"

"The bourgeoisie, so long excluded from government by the nation-state and by their own lack of interest in public affairs, was politically emancipated by imperialism."

"Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism."

"The so-called accumulation of capital which gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and wealth: they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and acquisition but their beginnings; ..."

"...wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier."

"The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, ..."

"... and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption."

"Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, ..."

"...for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits."

"Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, ..."

"...and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines."

"The organic doctrine of a history for which 'every race is a separate, complete whole' was invented by men who needed ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute for political nationhood."

"If, in the early form of French aristocracy, race-thinking had been invented as an instrument of internal discussion and had turned out to be a weapon for civil war, ..."

"...this early form of German race-doctrine was invented as a weapon of internal national unity and turned out to be a weapon for national wars."

"From one political event, therefore, the decline of the nobility, [Gobineau] drew two contradictory consequences - the decay of the human race and the formation of a new natural aristocracy. ..."

"... But he did not live to see the practical application of his teachings which resolved their inherent contradictions - the new race-aristocracy actually began to effect the 'inevitable' decay of mankind in a supreme effort to destroy it."

"For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic 'survival of the fittest,' ..."

"...and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new 'science' of eugenics."

"It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the 'scramble for Africa' and the new era of imperialism..."

"...had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world."

"The Boers simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common origin of men and changed those passages of the Old Testament which did not yet transcend the limits of the old Israelite national religion into a superstition which could not even be called a heresy."

"The point, however, is that no matter whether racism appears as the natural result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about, ..."

"...it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limitation, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosenness."

"South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, ..."

"...that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics."

"African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. ..."

"...Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one's own people into the position of the master race."

"When the European mob discovered what a lovely virtue a 'white skin' could be in Africa, when the English conqueror in India became an administrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate,..."

"... when the dragonslayers turned into either 'white men' of 'higher breeds' or into bureaucrats and spies, playing the Great Game of endless ulterior motives in an endless movement; when the British Intelligence Services (especially after the first World War) ..."

"... began to attract England's best sons, who preferred serving mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of their country, the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. ..."

"... Lying under anybody's nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism."

"The pan-movements preached the divine origin of their own people as against the Jewish-Christian faith in the divine origin of Man. According to them, man, belonging inevitably to some people, received his divine origin only indirectly through membership in a people."

"It was as much easier to induce the German worker to attack the German bourgeoisie than the government, as it was easier in Russia 'to arouse the peasants against squires than against the Czar.'"

"It would be a serious error to assume that the leaders of the pan- movements were reactionaries or 'counter-revolutionaries.' ...they never made the mistake of siding with capitalist exploitation and most of them... continued to belong to liberal, progressive parties."

"[T]he Jews were the example of a people who without any home at all had been able to keep their identity through the centuries and could therefore be cited as proof that no territory was needed to constitute a nationality. If the pan-movements insisted on the secondary..."

"...importance of the state and the paramount importance of the people, organized throughout countries and not necessarily represented in visible institutions, the Jews were a perfect model of a nation without a state and without visible institutions."

"Guided by their own ridiculous superstition, the leaders of the pan-movements found that little hidden cog in the mechanics of Jewish piety that made a complete reversion and perversion possible, ..."

"... so that chosenness was no longer the myth for an ultimate realization of the ideal of a common humanity -- but for its final destruction."

"Totalitarian bureaucracy, with a more complete understanding of the meaning of absolute power, intruded upon the private individual and his inner life with equal brutality."

"Franz Kafka knew well enough the superstition of fate which possesses people who live under the perpetual rule of accidents, the inevitable tendency to read a special superhuman meaning into happenings whose rational significance is beyond the knowledge...."

"... and understanding of the concerned. He was well aware of the weird attractiveness of such peoples, their melancholy and beautifully sad folk tales which seemed so superior to the lighter and brighter literature of more fortunate peoples."

"It is true that the actual disintegration of the European party system was brought about, not by the pan- but by the totalitarian movements."

"If we consider the difference between the continental multi party and the British two-party system with regard to their predisposition to the rise of movements, it seems plausible that it should be easier for a one-party dictatorship to seize the state machinery in countries..."

"...where the state is above the parties, and thereby above the citizens, than in those where the citizens by acting 'in concert,' i.e., through party organization, can win power legally and feel themselves to be the proprietors of the state either of today or of tomorrow."

"Thus they could win the help of those upper-class and business elite who mistook the Nazis for the older groups they had themselves frequently initiated and which had made only the rather modest pretense of conquering the state machine for one party. ..."

"... The businessmen who helped Hitler into power naively believed that they were only supporting a dictator, and one of their own making, who would naturally rule to the advantage of their own class and the disadvantage of all others."

"This was the situation between the two wars when every movement had a greater chance than any party because the movement attacked the institution of the state and did not appeal to classes."

"For in the face of the movements, the differences between the parties had indeed become quite meaningless; the existence of all of them was at stake and consequently they banded together and hoped to maintain a status quo that guaranteed their existence. ..."

"...Hindenburg became the symbol of the nation state and the party system, while Hitler and Thälmann competed with each other to become the true symbol of the people."

"Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened -- afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo."

"The point, of course, is that the European status quo could not be preserved and that it became clear [...] that Europe had been ruled by a system which had never taken into account or responded to the needs of at least 25% of her population."

"[European statesmen] thereby admitted -- and were quickly given the opportunity to prove it practically with the rise of stateless people -- that the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; ..."

"... the nation had conquered the state, national interests had priority over law long before Hitler could pronounce 'right is what is good for the German people.'"

"One is almost tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments used their sovereign right of denationalization"

"Prior to the last war, only totalitarian or half-totalitarian dictatorships resorted to the weapon of denaturalization with regard to those who were citizens by birth: ..."

"... now we have reached the point where even free democracies, as, for instance, the United States, were seriously considering depriving native Americans who are Communists of their citizenship."

"The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in [...]international relationships, was being abolished."

"Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of 'national security,' had [...]established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU, so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police."

"That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, ..."

"...was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees."

"For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without [it] the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and under-privileged individuals."

"The rights of man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable -- even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them -- whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state."

"Civilized countries did offer the right of asylum to those who,for political reasons, had been persecuted by their governments, and this practice,though never officially incorporated into any constitution,has functioned well enough throughout the 19th and even in our century..."

"...The trouble arose when it appeared that the new categories of persecuted were far too numerous to be handled by an unofficial practice destined for exceptional cases. ..."

"...The new refugees were persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but because of what they unchangeably were -- born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government."

"The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law & freedom of opinion..."

"... --formulas which were designed to solve problems _within_ given communities--but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever."

"Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice"

"Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. ..."

"We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights."

"Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. ... The term masses applies only where we deal with people..."

"...who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interests, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions."

"The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. ..."

"... The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party. ..."

"... The second ... was that these politicly indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backwards setting for the political life of the nation."

"[T]he totalitarian movements can rightly claim that they were the first truly anti-bourgeois parties; ..."

"...none of their 19th century predecessors nor the pan-movements ever involved their members to the point of complete loss of individual claims and ambition, or had ever realized that an organization could succeed in extinguishing individual identity permanently."

"The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown of the party system ..."

"... [T]he first signs of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from the younger generation ..."

"...and the loss of the silent consent and support of the unorganized masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition."

"The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. ..."

"... The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."

"Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, & unalterable loyalty of the individual member."

"What is more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society."

"Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with the pre war age and subsequent attempts at restoring it... is to overlook how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie."

"The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability."

"In the growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions ... those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself."

"Propaganda ... is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government."

"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself"

"The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, ..."

"...is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic."

"The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90% of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. ..."

"...Nazism as an ideology had been so fully 'realized' that its content ceased to exist as an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak; destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all the fanaticism of believers."

"Hitler was the first to say that each movement should divide the masses which had been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members. ... "

"... [H]e based this division upon a more general philosophy according to which most people are too lazy and cowardly for anything more than mere theoretical insight, and only a minority want to fight for their convictions."

"The front organization functions both ways: as the facade of the totalitarian movement to the non- totalitarian world, and as the facade of this world to the inner hierarchy of the movement."

"[T]he function of the elite formations is the very opposite of the of the front organizations: while the latter lend the movement an air of respectability and inspire confidence, ..."

"... the former, by extending complicity, make every party member aware that he has left for good the normal world which outlaws murder and that he will be held accountable for all crimes committed by the elite."

"The supreme task of the Leader is to impersonate the double function characteristic of each layer of the movement--to act as the magic defense of the movement against the outside world; and at the same time, to be the direct bridge by which the movement is connected with it..."

"This thorough identification of the Leader with every appointed subleader and this monopoly of responsibility for everything which is being done are also the most conspicuous signs of the decisive difference between a totalitarian leader and an ordinary dictator or despot."

"Just as the danger of a military dictatorship arises when the army no longer serves but wants to dominate the body politic, ..."

"... so the danger of totalitarianism arises when the conspiratory sector of a revolutionary party emancipates itself from the control of the party and aspires to leadership.""

"The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism"

"[T]otalitarian organization adds the position of one man who has monopolized the knowledge [that all happenings are scientifically predictable according to the laws of nature or economics] and whose principal quality is that he 'was always right and will always be right.'..."

"To a member of a totalitarian movement this knowledge has nothing to do with truth and this being right nothing to do with the objective truthfulness the Leader's statements which cannot be disproved by facts, but only by future success or failure."

"It is this freedom from the content of their own ideologies which characterizes the highest rank the totalitarian hierarchy. These men consider everything and everybody in terms of organization, and this includes the Leader who to them is neither an inspired talisman..."

"...nor the one who is infallibly right, but the simple consequence of this type of organization; he is needed, not as a person, but as a function, and as such he is indispensable to the movement."

"Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement; ..."

"...it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination."

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. ..."

"...The point is rather that our bewilderment about the anti-utilitarian character of the totalitarian state structure springs from the mistaken notion that we are dealing with a normal state after all--a bureaucracy, a tyranny, a dictatorship-- ..."

"...from our overlooking the emphatic assertions by totalitarian rulers that they consider the country where they happened to seize power only the temporary headquarters of the international movement on the road to world conquest, ..."

"... that they reckon victories and defeats in terms of centuries or millennia, and that the global interests always overrule the local interests of their own territory."

"Above the state and behind the facades of ostensible power, in a maze of multiplied offices, underlying all shifts of authority and in a chaos of inefficiency, lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and supercompetent services of the secret police."

"The modern dream of the totalitarian police ...[is] that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; ..."

"...and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; ..."

"...such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all."

"The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police; the only strictly guarded secret in a totalitarian country, the only esoteric knowledge that exists, concerns the operations of the police and the conditions in the concentration camps."

"[T]rue understanding of totalitarian domination ... stands or falls with the existence of these concentration and extermination camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power."

"Thus the fear of concentration camps and the resulting insight into the nature of total domination might serve to invalidate all obsolete political differentiations from right to left ..."

"...and to introduce beside and above them the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.""

"The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are as much of an attraction as a warning. ..."

"... Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man."

"No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, ..."

"...shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination."

"Underlying the Nazi's 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 Bolshevik's 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 which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself."

"Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some suprahuman force, Nature or History."

"The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology..., is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption..."

"...as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the strait jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power."

"[A]ll ideologies contain totalitarian elements, but these are fully developed only by totalitarian movements, and this creates the deceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character.""

"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."

"Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it can mobilize man's own will power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its material and knows neither birth nor death."

"Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. ..."

"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 ... and the distinction between true and false ... no longer exist."

"Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality ... is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution..."

"...and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time."

Fin

This has been selected quotations from a Trump-era American reading of Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Fantastic book full of impassioned reason that culminated in an astonishing chapter on concentration camps as the "true central institution of totalitarian organizational power."

The background on the "political emancipation" of the bourgeoisie by imperialism, opening up the quest for never- ending wealth, was eye-opening.

And many interesting comparisons to today, and warnings we can draw.

Though we're nowhere near totalitarianism...

...the failure of the US party system to represent large segments of society and the emergence into broad daylight of the mass white nationalist "movement", the plight of refugees and "rightless" immigrant groups and the erosion of the right of asylum...

...and the isolation and loneliness of our time makes it prudent for us to look back to these historical precedents for perspective, even as we grapple with our current watershed moment in history, the nascent age of global networks.

@threadreaderapp unroll