Totalitarianism

Key question: 'Can good people commit evil acts?' How could this happen?

• Focus on the 20th century where there was nearly 100 years of relative peace before World War One but then there were huge atrocities in Russia, China and especially Germany.
• Totalitarian Regimes-Plato's Republic- against these ideas:Contract Theory, idea that the powers of the state should be limited (even by Hobbes). Liberalism personal freedom protected by the state.
• Hannah Arendt argues that the 20th Century Totalitarian Regimes were different to anything that had come before the central purpose of Totalitarian Regimes was to destroy the individual. She was fascinated with the newness/strangeness of this new political model: ''Everything we know of Totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality- its very actions constitute a break with all our traditions.''
• But she saw the imperalism as a precursor to Totalitarianism because it contained so many traits which the new regimes could use. One such trait of imperialism was the development of racism. Once established, ways of thinking and behaving that denied rights and therefore was available for Totalitarian Regimes to adopt. ( Eg. General Kitchener's actions in Boer War).
• Our individuality makes us difficult to control and gather up into a collective movement. To destroy this individuality two methods are used:

1. State terror
2. Ideology

• The purpose of the terror isn't just to murder vast numbers of people but to also destroy their individuality and ability to act against the government- not just to act, but even the thought of acting (Orwell).
• Ideology compliments the policy of terror, it eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves.
• Ideology is also a type of specialist knowledge as Popper pointed out is often used as a justification for the authority of rulers. It is also a way to avoid responsibility.
• The ideology (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.' It frees you from common sense, blissful don't have to worry. This breakdown of the stable human world means loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set limits to what is possible.
• For Hannah Arendt the first move the Nazis made on the road to the 'Final Solution' was to deny Jewish people citizenship. Therefore making them stateless and with no 'natural rights'.
• Society is fragile and can break down very quickly. In order to be civilised human beings we need to inhabit a man-made world of stable structures. Being part of society enables us to be civilised- gives us access to a shared reality.

Control of Language

• 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, Control language, and you control thought and so mind control (may be) possible through manipulation of language.
• In the USSR - experiments with ‘linguistic reform’
  Idea was Utopian - ban words for racial difference, and this was to abolish racism. This resulted in horrible, ugly distortion into Communist-speak - all - jargon, cliches, ritual phrases, slogans. A form of language designed to prevent thought.
  
  1984:Ministry of Peace - organises war
  Ministry of Love - organises the police
  Ministry of Plenty - gathers taxes

What is your personal responsibility in a dictatorship?

• Would I collaborate?
• May 11 1960, Israeli secret service kidnapped Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and he stood trial in Jerusalem  for crimes he had committed during the 'Final Solution'. Eichmann's main responsibility during the Holocaust had been the organisation of the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps.
• For the Israelis the trial had 3 purposes:

1. Trying Eichmann for his crimes
2. Educating the world about the nature and the extent of the Holocaust.
3. Legitimising the Jewish State.

• For Hannah Arendt it was a shock to see Eichmann since he was no monster, not what she expected him to be like. He claimed to be a law abiding citizen and so it became apparent that you don't have to possess great wickedness in order to commit great crimes. She believed that he did not think while he committed the crime- didn't make a choice. This thinking is crucial for existentialists. He claimed to just follow the rules- it was his required role/duty.
• Hannah Arendt is saying that he didn’t make a choice and you can not avoid choice. He didn’t chose so he got put in this position.
• 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. 
• Arendt responds - this was outrageous on the face of it and also incomprehensible since Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgement which rules out blind obedience.
• Satre: the only thing I cannot escape is the need to choose but the possibility of recreating oneself is rightening - people will try to avoid this freedom. This is ‘bad faith’. 
  Arendt rejects the physiological interpretation - Eichmann is neither perverted or sadistic. In her view he just acted according to a brutal law that had become normal. What was his crime according to her was that he failed to think, he failed to judge 'he failed to choose’.
  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 - HA
• Arendt is saying that we must look to our personal judgement (thinking) rather than the law in order to know how to act because law may turn out to be criminal as in Nazi Germany. In which case we have 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.