Monday, March 19, 2007
Totalitarianism #5: The future of totalitarianism
In her preface to Part III, Arendt writes that she was articulating and elaborating questions “which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life: What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?” (xxiv). What questions, if any, does your generation have to ask about totalitarianism? Does Arendt’s writing offer any guidance for your questions, or your answers, related to totalitarianism? Or, with the dismantling of the Soviet Union , the rise of the international economic system, and global communications, is Arendt’s theory dated? Find some specific portion of Arendt’s study that either, and evaluate whether in today’s world it is illuminating or irrelevant.
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It is difficult to foresee a situation in which the totalitarianism of Germany could be replicated in today's Europe. It seems that the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was borne out of the post-WWI intellectual environment where nihilism and despair dominated: "To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had baned, regardless of theory or content and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society's humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy" (331).
Recognizing that there are many working parts and nuances to this argument and that Islamic radicalism does not equate totalitarianism, much of the same rhetoric exists in public discourse and commentary regarding young, Muslim men who become terrorists, particularly the resort to violence and the loss of "place" in the modern world.
Arendt's totalitarianism is still relevant--if, at the very, very least, to consider the extreme example of abolishing freedom: "Quite apart from its origin in Roman history, authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to restrict or limit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination, however, aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in general, and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter how tyrannical."
-- Rahul
One question that immediately springs to mind is this: how can the totalitarian "secret police" operate effectively in the Internet Age? With Internet access reaching more and more of the world's population -- and with innovative means to evade censoring governments -- the idea of a secret police creating "a gigantic single sheet [that] could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population" (433). As communications circumvent the government-controlled apparatus of the postal service and as user-generated content allows citizens to keep tabs on government crackdowns (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E), the secrecy of the secret police erodes as their task becomes impossible. Unless a totalitarian regime controls the means of communication and media, the free spread of information online will hamper totalitarian schemes.
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