HCJ4: Totalitarianism

The lecture focused on 3 aspects of Totalitarianism: How it can happen, the language used to control the population and the personal responsibility that people have in these regimes.

How can it happen?

One of the first Totalitarian regimes was Plato's republic, it was against the state having limted power and that there should be any sort of social contract theory.

After nearly 100 years of peace after the French Revolution, huge atrocities took place in countries that were considered to be civilised such as China, Russia and the philosophical powerhouse that was Germany. Society was supposed to be cultured and sophisticated and past terror would never be repeated, but people that thought that were clearly wrong.

The real kick-start for these regimes was the imperial nature of the 19th century, one example is the British Empire, it controlled around 1/4 of the Earth's total land mass by the early 1920s. The Nazis were influenced by the actions undertaken in the empires, some of those served as inspiration for the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, including the camps of General Kitchener in the Boer War.

The key features of a Totalitarian regime: Ideology, a dynamic/charismatic leader, control of individuality and some form of inforcement (msot likely violent). "Everything in the state, nothing outside the state" - Mussolini.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century in her book 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. She said that the ideology of the regimes gives them "the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present and a reliable prediction of the future". For HA, the first mvoe of the Nazis was to stop the Jews from being free. She was shocked by the actions of the modern day Totalitarian states and said that they were nothing like those in the 19th century. She also highlights that civilisation is fragile.


Control language and control minds

George Orwell was horrified by how much leaders could control their own population with language. A key quote from 1984 relating to language is "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

If a Totalitarian leader can control the language in their regime, he can control his people's thoughts. Therefore, mind control is possible if you can control language. A leader can abolish certain words and phrases and essentially make their own 'super-language', this was done in Soviet Russia to a degree. The main idea of controlling language is to control people's thoughts and even their actions, therefore destroying individuality.


What is my personal responsibility?

We looked at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who was in charge of the transport for the Jews going to the concentration camps. Although he didn't kill anyone directly, his actions ultimatley led to millions of Jews being murdered. He was put on trial for what he did was sentenced to death.

This raises the question of how much responsibility a Totalitarian leader has. Take Soviet Russia as an example. Although Stalin never killed anyone directly, he ordered KGB officers to kill millions of Russians during the time known as the Purges (or Terror). It was his actions that led to his people being killed, but there is the argument that he had no personal responsibility as he didn't actually shoot or torture anyone. This can also relate to people under the control of Totalitarian regimes, if someone was to do nothing to stop the actions of Stalin, does that person have any responsibility for what happened?

Coming back to Eichmann, Hannah Arendt was shocked to see someone like Eichmann - a seemingly boring man who spoke in cliches and had no characteristics to suggest that he could commit such unspeakable acts. HA called it the "benality of evil". She thought that Eichmann's worst crime was not thinking before doing what he did and simply following orders. Eichmann followed Kant's Catergorical Imperative: 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.'

Satre said that if we just follow along and don't make a choice, then we are living in bad faith. We msut make a personal judgement rather than following the law when making decisions.