I will open my possibly confusing blog about Totalitarianism (a word in which I still cannot pronounce or spell correctly, ahh the wonders of Microsoft Word) with the same quote that Brian used to open our lecture;
“Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality”
Totalitarianism is a form of political oppression, but it differs from other forms such as Dictatorship and Communism because
Totalitarianism destroys the social, legal and political structures that the original state leaders had in place. Instead, Totalitarianism replaces these ‘structures’ with its own set of values and belief systems. They did this to irradiate any personal thought and replace it with their single ideology. Totalitarian states prefer members of society that have no intention of thinking for themselves, and would rather someone tell them what the right thing to believe was.
Hitler’s Nazi regime is a great example of this Totalitarian way of ruling. Hitler used the totalitarian characteristic of citizens playing different roles in society; if the state says some citizens are enemies, it is the responsibility of the other citizens to determine who these people are and irradiate them. The Nazi party relied highly on the power of the people. When the Nazi’s were first seeking out the Jewish throughout Germany, very few of the Nazi’s doing the ‘searching’ were trained members of the Hitler army, majority of them were regular people that had been sucked into Hitler’s immoral beliefs about the Jews. Hitler’s regime was ultimately designed and fixated upon his fascination of Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Hitler really wanted to speed up the evolution process and create the perfect race, which he called the
Aryan Ideal. Hitler believed that by getting rid of the undesirable races in Germany, he was making the rest of Germany stronger.
The true reason Hitler’s regimes worked in Germany were due to the struggles that Germany were suffering at the time. Before Hitler came into power in Germany, they had recently lost a lot of money to other countries from their failure in WW1, putting Germany into a great depression. The population of Germany were looking for a way out or possibly something to blame their failures on. Hitler provided this. No matter how extreme he was being, the people of Germany were so desperate they would believe anything, and I think Hitler knew that, he made his campaign at the opportune moment. And those who didn’t like Hitler’s regimes were executed. It could be argued that citizens in Germany had no real choice. Did they want to live? Or were they ok with dying for what they believe in? Well, I suppose that is down to how strong the individual is.
This brings me to Hannah Arendt. Arendt attended the political trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a Nazi fugitive that was captured by the Israeli Secret Service. Eichmann was one of the Nazi soldiers responsible for initiating the
Final Solution. He was put on trial in Israel and was sentenced to death by the court. Whilst watching Arendt said she understood why Eichmann did it. He claimed he was only doing what he was told because he had a family at home to feed. Personally, I think no matter whether you have a family at home or not, being in that way is not acceptable to any degree and a truly strong person would say no this wrong. I guess you’d only know how to react if you were put in that situation. Let’s hope none of us have to experience that.
