Totalitarianism

Origins of Totalitarianism: It is important to understand how such regimes can come to fruition - for example the control of language (Orwell and propaganda) can make a huge difference as well as restraints such as prohibition. I personally believe that humans are inherently and unavoidably evil, all things we do are for some sort of person gain.

It is widely believed that we all have a personal responsibility to speak out again dictatorships and strike away from following forced orders - but then again look at some people, they would not make a choice (and from an existentialist point of view would therefore be living in bad faith, a false life) and just go along with the regime because they don't want to die or risk anything happening to them.

People would probably say that they would not conform to such things, to refuse an oppressive authority and actively say what's happening is full on wrong but to me this is exceptionally idealistic - if your own life is on the line you will do whatever you can to preserve it, in this case it would be following any order given.

Pre-WW1 and 2 we had 100 years of relative 'peace' these being the years following the Napoleonic war. Humanity had  sorted all the majority of crap that was hindering progressions and became more sophisticated, in a manner of speaking. For example, Germany had some damn fine intellectual minds they were bounding forward in terms of culture, science and so on, sometimes colloquially referred to the German century.

Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism: Totalitarianism literally means controlling every single aspect of life: Hobbes touched upon a near totalitarian state explained in his writings - life is nasty, brutish and short - people are bad and will always try to have more, regardless of who they have to hurt to get it. This meant that the state had to have some control over how much freedom people had, but this was a social contract and would never encroach on their freedom totally, so there would never be absolute control.

Hannah Arendt claims that totalitarians regimes are a complete and utter break away from all of our traditions, she then goes on to say that dictatorships and oppressive regimes can happen because of imperialism in the 19th century and this created grounds for it to happen - imperialism was established by race.

However people such as Mussolini believed that outside of the state there can be no individuals or groups of people - the state is everything and if you live in the state you are part of it - it should be everywhere, in your house and fully encompass all of your life. You must always think in a way that is consistent in the state anything else is a rebellion against the state.

The emphasis on race and not merit is a recurring theme in dictatorships - once this has been established it became very easy for dictatorships to take it up and make it their own and from this is just gets worse, always seeing one particular race as better than the other, where is the line in the sand drawn? If at all.

Following this train of thought of building on what was already there and making it your own - The Boer War and General Kitchener; this brought about the inception of concentration camps and the Nazi regime took this idea and adapted it. For a dictatorship to succeed there must be no individual. Us being individual makes it very hard to be controlled - so that we can be part of the state, not away from it, and from this the state tells us what we need to think.

Hannah Arendt says that destroying the individual will cause a state of terror. The aim is not to kill people but to break them down like dogs - the terror is not just murdering vast numbers of people it is the act of isolating people, making them feel like they have no say, right or ability to question the government. George Orwell demonstrates this in  his novel 1984 - big brother, you are always being watched, the thought police will catch you at any sight of rebellion - this feeling of always being under observation, a police state, creates mass paranoia.

This creates an ideology - people start to believe that this is the way, why not speak out against this? well because this is how things are, this is the natural order. This is drilled into the heads of people under a dictatorship and goes hand in hand with the terror and removes the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves - this provides somewhat of a defense for these people, for example well it's not my fault I was just following orders, they would've killed me otherwise, a highly weak attempt at absolution - personally I think if you make the choice then stick to your guns, don't be such a coward.

This leads to a breakdown of the stable human world and means a loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that we would not normally cross - an example is becoming numb to seeing utter devastation and strife which was frequent among concentration camp workers; one man arrived and broke down into tears at the sight and later would see it as normal and just became numb to it.

There is a certain frailty within civilisation which I agree with. It is shocking how quickly people will turn on each other if they are threatened, people go into a survival mode and will do anything they can to make sure they survive - my example would be from the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (though satirically done) it provides a decent setting - two people in a small rubber dingy lost out at sea with one source of food, a leg of meat soaked in rum. The food gets thrown overboard and they start to become paranoid of the other one eating the other in order to survive, going so far as to try and kill the other in order to eat him.

Control Language - George Orwell: Mind control is highly possible if you have control over language - what words people can and can't use, which words are prohibited and so on. Language is exceedingly important because the language you use daily is what defines you really, the words you choose and so on.

The Eichmann Trial: This was a highly important trial which concerned a German bureaucrat Eichmann whose job it was, during the Nazi regime, to make sure that the trains carrying hosts of Jewish prisoners ran efficiently and made sure they were on time. This trial served three key purposes:
1) to try him for his crimes
2) educate the population with what happened
3) to legitimise the Jewish state

Hannah Arendt was shocked by Eichmann because he was just a regular Joe, nothing exceptional or odd about him, who was following orders for the sake of self preservation. She concluded that it was not necessary to possess some sort of great wickedness to commit great crimes, simple put; if you are in danger you will do what you will to make sure you live, regardless of what this is - this is the *Banality of Evil.

Arendt takes an existentialist stance with this and says that Eichmann's biggest crime was not thinking. Thoughts and choice is crucial to existentialists because no matter what you do you have to make a choice - otherwise Sartre will accuse you of living in bad faith. In Eichmann's case he was mindlessly following and used the defense that he was abiding the law (whilst breaking the law at the same time) claiming it was his duty. When really he should have made a decision for himself

*Banality = Ordinary, can happen to literally anyone