Key question – can good people do evil things? Who is
responsible?
How could it happen?
Before world war one, there had been a hundred years of
peace. After that there were many atrocities.
Totalitarianism is the control of every aspect of life,
which strips away individuality. These regimes – like Platos republic – were
against these ideas; contract theory, limited state and liberalism – freedom
protected by the state.
Hannah Arendt looked at totalitarianism and suggests that it
is a huge break away from the past. For Arendt, imperialism is what sparked the
movement because expansionism was based on racism. Things were based on what
people did/race as to whether or not they were superior.
There are two ways to achieve totalitarianism; ideology
because it makes us compliant as it provides reason. It is a specialist
knowledge and is a way to avoid responsibility. And terror which removes people
of dignity.
What is our personal responsibility in a dictatorship?
Would I collaborate?
In May 11 1960, Israeli Secret Service kidnapped Nazi
fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Eichmann’s main responsibility in the
Holocaust was the organisaton of the transport of millions of Jews to
concentration camps.
The trial served three purposes: Trying for his crimes,
educating the world about the Holocaust, and the legitimatising of the Jewish
state.
Arendt agreed Eichmann should be put to death – but disagreed
with the reasons. Arendt believed Eichmann’s crime was non-thinking…. Choice is
crucial to the existentialist point of view.
Eichmann claimed that in implementing the final solution he
was acting from obedience and that he had derived this particular moral precept
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.
--> The origins of totalitarianism - Ideology and Terror; A Novel Form of Government;
Hannah Arendt wrote the Origins of totalitarianism whilst in soviet Russia. The chapter “Ideology and Terror: a novel form of government’ outlines how ideology and terror work together to achieve totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is different from other regimes as it steps away from traditional forms of leadership, morality and laws. It uses the construct of class to create the masses that have been manipulated by one party systems ideal - their main aim; to strip away individuality.
Arendt suggests two kinds of law of which drive ideology; Law of nature (based around Darwinism and the rise of Nazi Germany) and the law of history (based on the ideas of Marx’s historical dialectic that influenced Stalin). Its these laws the provide us with positive law.
Positive Law;
‘Positive laws are primarily designed to function as stabilising factors for the ever changing movements of men.’ OT
Totalitarianism defies all positive law; even to the extreme of defying those which has established itself or which it did not care to abolish. But it operates in neither without guidance of the law nor is it arbitrary, for it claims to obey strictly and unequivocally the laws of nature or of history from which all positive laws have always been supposed to spring from.
It goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws receive the ultimate legitimation, far from wielding its power in the interest of one man. It is prepared to sacrifice everyone’s immediate interest to execution of what it assumes to be the law of history of the law of nature.
Totalitarianism's defiance of positive law claims to be a higher form of legitimacy, which – since inspired by the sources – can do away with ‘petty’ legality. Totalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way to establish rule of justice – something that the legality of positive law could not attain
Totalitarian lawfulness, denying legality and pretending to establish direct reign of justice on earth executes the laws of nature and of history without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior.
If the laws of nature and history are properly executed it is expected to produce mankind as its end product – this expectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments.
Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active, unfailing carrier of a law to which all beings would otherwise be passively and reluctantly be subject. Its defiance of all, even its own positive laws implies it believes it can do without any ‘consensus iuris’, and not reign to the tyrannical state of lawfulness, arbitraries and fear.
Terror;
Terror becomes total terror when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when no one stands in its way.
Terror is the essence of totalitarian domination. Its aim is to make it possible for the forces of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by spontaneous action. It seeks to stabilize men in order to liberate the forces.
Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; guilty is he who stands in the way of natural and historical processes.
Rulers claim to execute historical or natural laws.
Positive law in constitutions aims to erect boundaries and establish channels of communication between men whose community is in danger by whoever is born into it. The stability of laws corresponds to the constant motion of all human affairs.
Total terror uses the old instrument of tyrant but destroys it at the same time, also the lawless, fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion tyranny leaves behind.
It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom, which is simply the capacity of motion, which cannot exist without space. It accelerates the movement using history and nature. That is terrors only purpose.
Ideology;
Ideology is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the idea applies. Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historic process because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.
Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being, they are concerned with becoming and perishing with the rise and fall of cultures.
The movement of history and the logical process of this notion are supposed to correspond to each other so that what happened, happens according to the logic of one idea.
Only movement in the realm of logic is the process of deduction from premise – dialectical logic. Dialectical logic is the idea that the thesis and antithesis conflict creating something new – the synthesis. The synthesis then becomes the next thesis and history progresses. Marx uses the dialectical to illustrate the progression of class struggle into communism.
Ideologies assume one idea is sufficient to explain everything from premise. They are concerned with a forward motion – what becomes. Ideological thinking becomes independent from which it cannot learn anything new. It insists on a truer reality concealed behind all perceptible things – requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it.
The propaganda of the totalitarian movement serves to emancipate it from experience and reality. Once movements have come to power y proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims.
The emancipation from experience and reality is achieved through methods of demonstration. The preparation if victims and executioners requires inherent legality. The most persuasive, of which Hitler was most fond of, ‘you cant say A without saying B, C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. The coercive force of logicality has a source – our fear of contradicting ourselves.
If you refuse to follow the regime you have committed to, you contradict yourself. Through this contradiction, render your life meaningless; the A, which you said dominates your life through the consequences of B and C, which it logically engenders.
