Total Totalitarianism (geddit?)

The penultimate lecture this year (i.e. before Christmas, we sure as hell aren't done in this year of Uni) focused on the subject of Totalitarianism and both the lecture and the seminar had a heavy focus towards Hannah Arendt's book, Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's approach is like Hume's, she doesn't believe things follow a simplistic order, she believes in causality. Totalitarian regimes believe that everything is possible, they sound positive, but the regimes seek out power of which the inevitable price is destruction of human plurality. To destroy individuality, two methods were used; state terror and ideology. The essence of a totalitarian government is 'total terror', they need to destroy not only the people who are acting out but also the thought to act. Ideology eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves so for example the Nazi's who actually ran the concentration camps and were directly involved with murdering on a daily basis, their excuses stretch to just following orders and the totalitarian ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality. Ideology and state terror break down normal social and psychological barriers that set limits on what is possible.

Hannah Arendt sees genocide as logical for a totalitarian state as it is an extension of the trajectory of mass society where meaning is provided by ideology. Genocide isn't an exercise of power for totalitarianism, power grows from a group of people, but it is key to enforcing ideology and is part of the social contract for totalitarian states. Totalitarian states also need a victim, so in the case of the Nazi's, making the Jews stateless and rights-less made them perfect victims. There is no real end to Totalitarianism in Arendt's eyes, the law of killing would continue and remain a law even if all humanity was subject to it.

One case in the world of Totalitarianism that it is worth looking at is the Eichmann case, a series of articles published originally in the New Yorker about a man named Eichmann who was a Nazi and who took part in the holocaust. It poses the question, would you collaborate? Captured by the Israeli Secret Service in Australia in 1960, he was a bureaucrat, involved in the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps which he carried out with zeal and efficiency. Eichmann spoke in court in endless cliches, saying how he was proud of being a "law abiding citizen", distancing himself from his actual crime. This shocked Arendt to see how ordinary he was, this helped her to see the banality of evil. Whilst she agreed in the decision to put Eichmann to death, she did not believe his greatest crime was his part in the holocaust, but that his greatest crime was non-thinking. No thinking man could carry out genocide she reasoned, and although Eichmann claimed he was acting from obedience and his reading of Kant, Arendt refuted this arguing that Kant is all about judgement. You cannot argue that Kant's categorical imperative is any use here as although Kant was all about following the law so society could continue, even if 80 million Germans had done as he did, that would not excuse him for Arendt.