Thread by @NoriSpauwen

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Helaas weer zo actueel, 72 jaar na dato.

“The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves.”

Dit boek, deze denker.. moest tijdens de oorlog als Joodse Duitsland ontvluchten naar New York. En had vervolgens 5 jaar na de oorlog dit enorme boek geschreven waarin ze tot het diepste niveau analyseert hoe #totalitarisme ontstaat en wat je ertegen kan doen.

Mindblowing. Lees!

"Hatred began to play a role in public affairs everywhere. Now everybody was against everybody else, and most of all against his closest neighbors - the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles."

"Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics. The constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost national rights, made it possible for persecuting governments to impose their values upon their opponents."

No paradox of contemporary politics is fulled with a more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who insist on regarding as inalienable those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries

/ and the situation of the rightless themselves."

"That the Nazis met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries that they occupied, 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 & refugees."

"The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (formulas which were designed to solve problems *within* given communities) but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever."

"It would a mistake to forget, that the totalitarian regimes, so long as they are in power, command and rest upon mass support until the end. Hitler's rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule, and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained leadership, if they had not..

.. the confidence of the masses.(..)
For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and totalitarian leaders usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and outlining their future ones."

"The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet deeds of violence with the admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever."

"The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed"

"Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Their most conspicuous characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional loyalty of the individual member. Such loyalty can only be expected from the completely isolated person.

"It is in the moment of #defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease *at once* to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives."

"They will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement."