Trad. ingl. di Per una critica della categoria di totalitarismo, in «Hermeneutica», 2002 ([in]Attualità del politico), pp. 131-166; ripreso in Manuela Ceretta (a cura di), Bonapartismo, cesarismo e crisi della società. Luigi Napoleone e il colpo di Stato del 1851, Olschki, Firenze, 2003, pp. 167-196; tr. portoghese nella rivista brasiliana «Crítica marxista», n. 17; 2003, pp. 51-79; tr. spagnola in «Deus mortalis» (Buenos Aires), n. 2; 2003, pp. 265-296 e ripresa anche in «Dialéctica» (Puebla, Messico), n. 36, inverno 2004, pp. 59-91; tr. fr. in «Actuel Marx» n. 35 (primo semestre 2004), pp. 115-146; tr. inglese in «Historical Materialism», n. 12, 2 (2004), pp. 25-55; tr. russa in corso di pubblicazione)
1. A Polysemous Category
Already in 1951, when Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, the concept of totalitarianism had been debated for decades. And yet, the meaning of the term still lacks a proper definition. Is it possible to find a way through what appears to be a maze? In this article, I shall not examine the examples in which the adjective “totalitarian,” even more than the noun that derives from it, bears a positive connotation. In other words, I shall not concentrate on the positive use of the term “totalitarian” with reference to the capacity, attributed to a religion or to any ideology or world view, to posit solutions to all of the many problems that arise from a dramatic situation, or even to answer the question on the meaning of life, a question that concerns humans in their totality. In 1958, though rejecting “legal totalitarianism,” that is, totalitarianism imposed by the law, Karl Barth extols the universalistic impulse and the all encompassing effectiveness of the Christian “message:” “The free grace of the Gospel, too, is ‘totalitarian,’ because it aims at the whole, it demands all human beings, and demands each of them totally for itself.”[1]
Here, instead, I shall focus on the political debate. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno hardly discuss the USSR. Besides dealing with the Third Reich, they analyze “totalitarian capitalism:” “Previously only the poor and savages had been exposed to the untrammeled force of the capitalist elements. But the totalitarian order has granted unlimited rights to calculating thought and puts its trust in science as such. Its canon is its own brutal efficiency.”[2] Horkheimer and Adorno consider the stages that paved the way to Nazism to be not only the violence perpetrated by the great Western powers against the colonial peoples, but also the violence perpetrated, in the very heart of the capitalistic metropolis, against the poor and outcasts locked in the workhouses. Simone Weil, another author who was in a way influenced by Marxism, holds a similar perspective. Though Weil occasionally compares Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Soviet Union, when she denounces the horror of total power, of totalitarianism, she is referring primarily to colonialism and imperialism: “The similarity between Hitler’s system and ancient Rome is so astounding that one is tempted to believe that, two thousand years later, only Hitler was able to faithfully copy the Romans.”[3] Between the Roman Empire and the Third Reich, we find Louis XIV’s unbridled and unscrupulous expansionism: “The regime he established already deserved, for the first time in Europe after Rome, the modern epithet of totalitarian;” “the dreadful destruction of the Palatinate [carried out by the French conquering troops] was not even justified by the circumstances of a war.”[4] Moving backwards from ancient Rome, Weil gives a proto-totalitarian interpretation to the biblical event of the conquest of Canaan and the annihilation of its people.
Consider some liberal thinkers. In tracing the genesis of “totalitarian democracy,” Jakob Talmon comes to the following conclusion:
If […] empiricism is the ally of freedom, and the doctrinaire spirit is the friend of totalitarianism, the idea of man as an abstraction, independent of the historic groups to which he belongs, is likely to become a powerful vehicle of totalitarianism.[5]
Clearly, Talmon’s targets are the Declaration of Human Rights and the French revolutionary tradition as a whole (not only Rousseau, but also Sieyès).
As for Hayek, “the tendencies that culminated in the creation of totalitarian systems are not confined to the countries that later succumbed to them,”[6] and they are not limited to the Communist and Nazi-Fascist movements. With regards to Austria in particular:
It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children from the tenderest age into political organizations to make sure that they grew up as good proletarians. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views. It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and the forms of address.
Hayek can therefore conclude: “The idea of a political party that encompasses all of the activities of an individual, from the cradle to the grave,” and that radiates a general Weltanschauung, this idea is associated first of all with the socialist movement.[7] Behind this movement is a much older tradition that can be found, as Hayek --the father of neo-laissez-faire-- will observe later on, in “‘social’ or totalitarian democracy.”[8] At any rate, “economic control and totalitarianism” are strictly connected.[9]
Therefore, if on the one hand colonialism and imperialism are the main (though not the exclusive) targets of criticism, on the other hand, the principal (though not exclusive) target is the revolutionary tradition that from 1789 leads to 1917, passing through the 1848 demand for the right to work and the “‘social’ or totalitarian democracy.”
At this point, a further distinction can be made. The so-called “leftist” totalitarianism can be criticized from two quite different perspectives. It can either be regarded as the product of the unfortunate organicistic ideology attributed to Marx, Rousseau, or even Sieyès (this is Talmon’s and Hayek’s approach); or it can be discussed by examining the material characteristics of the countries in which communist totalitarianism has prevailed. This is the method used by Karl Wittfogel: the “comparative study of total power” –reads the subtitle of his book—shows that this phenomenon manifests itself especially in the East, in a “hydraulic society” characterized by an attempt to achieve total control over the necessary hydraulic resources for the development of agriculture and for the actual survival of the people. In this context, far from being the forefather of communist totalitarianism, Marx is its critic ante litteram, as emerges from his analysis and denunciation of “oriental despotism,” to borrow a category used by Wittfogel in the very title of his book.[10]
However, the implication is that “total power” is not exclusively linked to the 20th century, and therefore a further distinction is necessary. While Arendt insists on the novelty of the totalitarian phenomenon, Popper comes to an opposite conclusion. According to Popper, the conflict between the “open society and its enemies” seems to be eternal: “what we now call totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.”[11]
One final remark on this: we have seen that totalitarianism can be denounced from the right or from the left. Yet, in some cases the denunciation comes from circles and figures associated with Nazi-Fascism, and it is directed exclusively to its enemies. In August 1941, during the campaign, or rather, the war of extermination against the Soviet Union, faced with a relentless and unforeseen resistance, the German General Halder explains such resistance with the claim that the enemies have carefully prepared for the war “with the absolute lack of scruples typical of a totalitarian State.”[12] Though without using the term “totalitarianism,” Goebbels explains the unexpected, unprecedented resistance that the invading army encounters in the East in a similar manner: by erasing every trace of free personality, Bolshevism “transforms men into robots,” “war robots,” “mechanized robots.”[13] The accusation of totalitarianism can even target the Western enemies of the Axis. In 1937, the aspiration of Fascist Italy to form a colonial empire of its own clashes against the hostility that comes first of all from England, and thus England is condemned for its “cold, totalitarian discrimination against all that is not simply English.”[14]
2. The Turn of the Cold War and Hannah Arendt’s Contribution
Since the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the polysemies of the debate we have briefly discussed have tended to dispel. In May 1948, Arendt denounced the “development of totalitarian methods” in Israel, referring to “terrorism” and the expulsion and deportation of the Arab population.[15] Only three years later, no room was left for criticism directed against the present-day Western world. And now more than ever, the only politically correct position is the one that targets exclusively Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union.
This position has triumphed since and during the Cold War. On March 12, 1947, Harry Truman proclaimed the “doctrine” named after him: after the victory in the war against Germany and Japan, a new phase in the struggle for freedom begins. The menace now comes from the Soviet Union: “totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”[16]
The point is clearly indicated here: one should not move backwards from the 20th century. Besides, it would make no sense to attack the socialists alongside the communists; however serious their past faults might have been, the socialists are now usually allies of the Western world. And to use an approach similar to the one that will later be proposed by Wittfogel would be misleading for two reasons. The category of “Oriental despotism” could hardly legitimize a U.S. intervention, for example, in the civil war that broke out in China (where, immediately after the proclamation of his doctrine and precisely in the name of the struggle against totalitarianism, Truman pledged to support Chiang Kai-shek.)[17] On the other hand, insisting on the actual conditions, which would explain the affirmation of “total power,” would make the condemnation of communists more difficult and less aggressive. For this reason, the deductivist approach ends up prevailing. The Cold War takes on the shape of an international civil war, one that tears apart all countries transversally: the best way for the Western world to face this war is to establish itself as the champion in the struggle against the new totalitarianism, which is labeled as the necessary and inevitable consequence of the communist ideology and program.
Where does Arendt’s contribution fit in this context? Immediately following its publication, The Origins of Totalitarianism is harshly criticized by Golo Mann:
The first two parts of the work deal with the prehistory of the total State. Here, however, readers will not find what they usually encounter in similar studies, that is, researches on the peculiar history of Germany, Italy, or Russia […] Instead, Hannah Arendt dedicates two thirds of her work to anti-Semitism and imperialism, especially English-style imperialism. I cannot follow her […] Only in the third part, which represents the goal of the whole book, does Hannah Arendt really seem to tackle the subject.”[18]
What Mann considers to be essentially off-topic are the pages dedicated to anti-Semitism and imperialism. And yet, the point was to explain the genesis of a regime like Hitler’s, which overtly aimed at creating, in Central and Eastern Europe, a great colonial empire based upon the dominion of a pure, white, Arian race, once the Jewish germ of subversion, which fueled the revolt of Untermenschen and inferior races, had been exterminated once and for all.
However, Golo Mann grasps an actual problem. How can the last part of Arendt’s book, which exclusively targets Stalin’s USSR and the Third Reich, coexist harmoniously with the first two parts, where Arendt criticizes France (for its anti-Semitism) and particularly England (for its imperialism)? England is the country that played a central and ruinous role in the struggle against the French Revolution: Edmund Burke did not limit himself to defend the feudal nobility on an internal level, but he enlarged “the principle of these privileges to include the whole English people, establishing them as a kind of nobility among nations.” This is where the genesis of racism, “the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics” must be sought.[19] Understandably, then, these unsettling ideologies take root particularly in England, where they feed off England’s obsession with “inheritance theories and their modern equivalent, eugenics.” Disraeli’s position is not very different from Gobineau’s: both are “devoted defenders of ‘race’,”[20] though only Disraeli succeeds in securing positions of such power and prestige. Furthermore, it is above all in English colonies where a power free of the limitations of the capitalistic metropolis begins to be theorized and experimented against “subject races.” Already within the English Empire there emerges the temptation to use “administrative massacres” as instruments to maintain supremacy.[21] This is the starting point to understand the ideology and practice of the Third Reich. Arendt’s portrait of Lord Cromer is rather similar to the one she will later give of Adolf Eichmann: the banality of evil seems to find its initial feeble embodiment in the British “imperialist administrator” who, in his “indifference and aloofness, in [his] genuine lack of interest in [his] subjects,” develops a “philosophy of the bureaucrat” and “a new form of governing,” “a more dangerous form of governing than despotism and arbitrariness.”[22] Arendt’s criticism of Cromer is quite harsh, but it mysteriously disappears in the third part of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The fact is that Arendt’s book is actually made up of two different layers, which were written during two different periods, and are separated by the momentous mark constituted by the outbreak of the Cold War. Still in France, Arendt viewed the book she was writing “as a comprehensive work on anti-Semitism and imperialism, and a historical investigation on what she then called “racial imperialism,” the most extreme form of the suppression of minority nations by the ruling nation of a sovereign state.”[23] At that moment, far from being a target, the USSR was rather a model. It must be credited –as Arendt observes in the fall of 1942 (after moving to the United States and following, from there, Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa) – with having “simply eliminated anti-Semitism” by means of “a right and quite modern solution to the national question.”[24] In “Zionism Reconsidered,” written in October 1945, Arendt makes an even more significant remark:
What every political and national movement in our times should give its utmost attention to with respect to Russia –namely, its entirely new and successful approach to nationality conflicts, its new form of organizing different peoples on the basis of national equity- has been neglected by friends and foes alike.[25]
I have chosen to use the italics to emphasize the overturning of position that will take place a few years later, when Stalin will be accused of purposely disjointing the existing organizations in order to artificially produce the amorphous mass that constitutes the basis for the advent of totalitarianism.
According to the third part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, what characterizes communist totalitarianism is the sacrifice, inspired and stimulated by Marx, of morals on the altar of the philosophy of history and its “necessary” laws. In January 1946, however, Arendt had expressed herself in very different terms:
In the country which made Disraeli its Prime Minister, the Jew Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, a book which in its fanatical zeal for justice, carried on the Jewish tradition much more efficaciously than all the success of the “chosen man of the chosen race.[26]
As a theorist of justice, Marx is seen here quite positively, and in sharp contrast to an English Prime Minister who formulates theories which will later be inherited and radicalized by the Third Reich.
During the passage from the first two parts of the book, which still possess the vehemence of the struggle against Nazism, to the third, which is instead tied to the outbreak of the Cold War, the category of imperialism (a category subsuming first of all Great Britain and the Third Reich as a sort of highest stage of imperialism) is replaced by the category of totalitarianism (which subsumes Stalin’s USSR and the Third Reich).
The species of the genus of imperialism do not coincide with the species of the genus of totalitarianism. Even the species that apparently remains unchanged, that is Germany, is questioned in the first case starting from Wilhelm II at the earliest, and in the second case starting from as late as 1933. At least with regards to formal coherence, the initial plan appears to be more rigorous. After clarifying the genus of “imperialism,” in tracing the specific differences of this phenomenon, the initial plan moved on to analyze the species of “racial imperialism.” But how can the categories of totalitarianism and imperialism now blend together into a coherent whole? And what relationship connects them both to the category of anti-Semitism? Arendt’s answers to these questions seem to seek an artificial harmonization between two levels that continue to be hardly compatible.
Rather than being one single book, The Origins of Totalitarianism consists in reality of two overlapping books which, despite the adjustments later made by Arendt, fail to achieve any substantial unity. Renowned historians and historians of ideas (Carr and Stuart Hughes) reviewed the work with respect and occasionally with admiration, but they immediately noticed the disproportion between Arendt’s actual and thorough knowledge of the Third Reich, and her inaccurate understanding of the Soviet Union. In particular, they emphasized the difficulties in Arendt’s attempt to adapt the analysis of the Soviet Union (associated to the outbreak of the Cold War) to the analysis of the Third Reich (associated to the years of the great coalition against fascism and Nazism).[27]
3. The Cold War and the Later Adjustments of the Category of Totalitarianism
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt speaks of concentration camps always and exclusively in relation to the USSR and the Third Reich. What is particularly striking is the fact that Arendt does not even mention her own direct experience of this total institution: together with many other Germans who had fled Nazi Germany and had become suspicious after the outbreak of the war because they were citizens of an enemy State, Arendt had been confined for some time in Gurs. The living conditions must have been quite harsh: the common feeling –Arendt writes in 1943—was that “we had been shipped there ‘pour crever’ [to croak] in any case,” to the point that some of the inmates briefly considered the possibility of “suicide” as a “collective action” of protest.[28]
When The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, concentration camps were a sinisterly vital institution in Yugoslavia, as well, though inmates were in that case the communists who remained loyal to Stalin. More in general, in the Balkan country, dictatorship was certainly no less strict than in Eastern Europe. However, in the case of Yugoslavia, which had sided with the Western world after the break with the USSR, “many aspects of despotism” could be recognized, but nothing more than that, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles affirmed in 1953.[29] Dulles’ position is somehow confirmed by Arendt’s silence with regards to this point.
Further proof of the impact of the Cold War can be brought forth: “Mussolini, who was so fond of the term ‘totalitarian state,’ did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule.” Arendt compares Fascist Italy to Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal.[30]
The accusation of totalitarianism spares Spain, Portugal, and Yugoslavia itself, but it strikes or grazes even unexpected countries:
The chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there is almost inexhaustible material to feed the power-accumulating and man-destroying machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass man’s typical feeling of superfluousness –an entirely new phenomenon in Europe, the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth of the last 150 years—has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life.[31]
It is worth pointing out the fact that, despite its parliamentary regime, India was at the time allied with the USSR!
According to Arendt, what characterizes communist totalitarianism is the sacrifice, inspired and stimulated by Marx, of morals on the altar of the philosophy of history and its “necessary” laws. The same argument presented in The Origins of Totalitarianism reappears in a contribution, dated March 1949, by Dean Acheson, the United States Secretary of State during the Truman administration: NATO is the expression of the Atlantic and Western community, a community united “by common institutions and moral and ethical beliefs” against a world that won’t hearken to the reasons of morals, indeed, a world inspired by the “Communist belief that coercion by force is a proper method of hastening the inevitable.”[32]
Nevertheless, despite the substantial concessions to the ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, something of the original plan for The Origins of Totalitarianism continues to survive even in the third part of the book. What is immediately noticeable here is the distinction between Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and Stalin’s strictly totalitarian regime. Breaking off with the czarist politics of oppression against minority nations, Lenin organized as many nationalities as possible, promoting the rise of a national and cultural awareness even among the most backward ethnical groups, which for the first time succeeded in organizing themselves as autonomous cultural and national entities. Something similar occurred with the other forms of social and political organization, as well: trade unions, for example, achieved an organizational autonomy they had never possessed in czarist Russia. All of this represents an antidote to the totalitarian regime, which presupposes a direct, immediate relationship between a charismatic leader on one side, and an amorphous, atomized mass on the other. The articulated structure built by Lenin was systematically dismantled by Stalin, who, in order to establish his totalitarian regime, had to disorganize the masses, so as to make them the object of the charismatic, undisputed power of the infallible leader.[33]
How can the shift from Lenin to Stalin be explained? And why was the articulated, organized society that had emerged out of the revolution unable to oppose the systematic tactics of disarticulation and disorganization that led to the imposition of the totalitarian regime? According to Arendt, “there is no doubt that Lenin suffered his greatest defeat when, with the outbreak of the civil war, the supreme power that he originally planned to concentrate in the Soviets definitively passed into the hands of the party bureaucracy.”[34] The shift toward a totalitarian regime, then, was not the inevitable result of an ideological original sin (Marx’s history of philosophy); it was, first and foremost, the result of specific historical circumstances which directly questioned the responsibility of the Western powers, of the countries that had a consolidated liberal tradition and that were committed to fueling, in any possible way, the anti-Bolshevik civil war. Incidentally, it is unclear how the association, made by Arendt in the third part of her book, between Bolshevism and Nazism can still hold: it was Lenin, not Stalin, who founded the Bolshevik party. And above all, the accusation against Marx is hardly justified. Yet, according to Arendt, in his political strategy Lenin was guided more by his instinct as a great statesman than by Marxist ideology as such. In reality, the steps taken to emancipate national minorities were preceded by a long, complex debate that revolved precisely around the national question examined from a Marxist perspective.
The change between the initial project and the actual composition of The Origins of Totalitarianism involves a fluctuation on a methodological level, as well. On the one hand, Arendt indulges in a deductivist interpretation of the totalitarian phenomenon, one clearly similar to that of the liberal authors we have already mentioned: she interprets Stalin’s totalitarianism as the logical, inevitable consequence of Marxist ideology. On the other hand, Arendt is forced to make reference to the peculiar historical conditions that explain the advent of Stalin’s totalitarian regime: civil war, international aggression by the Entente powers (though Arendt does not mention it), the undoing of organizational structures, etc. The distinction between Leninism and Stalinism, between revolutionary dictatorship and the subsequent totalitarian regime, interrupts the strict, merely ideological line of continuity established by Hayek and Talmon in order to connect Marx to totalitarianism.
Not by chance, this distinction is one of the targets of Golo Mann’s criticism. Another, even more relevant, target is represented by the first two parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism in their entirety. Besides the reservations Mann expresses in his review, his conversation with Karl Jaspers (which Mann quotes in Erinnerungen und Gedanken) is particularly eloquent. Here, Mann urges Jaspers to move away from the heretical positions held by his disciple:
“Do you believe that English imperialism, and especially Lord Cromer in Egypt, has something to do with the totalitarian State? Or French anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus case?” “Is that what she wrote?” “Certainly; she devotes three chapters to it.” Blindly trusting his dear friend, he [Jaspers] had recommended her book, which he himself had only read briefly.[35]
Golo Mann is right. With regards to totalitarianism, Jaspers is unquestionably more orthodox than Arendt. And Arendt herself ends up yielding to the influences of the criticism directed against her, as emerges particularly in her essay, On Revolution. Here, Marx is regarded as the author of the “most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very center of human endeavor.” The result is catastrophic:
This development led Marx into an actual surrender of freedom to necessity. He did what his teacher in revolution, Robespierre, had done before him and what his greatest disciple, Lenin, was to do after him in the most momentous revolution his teachings have ever inspired.[36]
“The fanatical zeal for justice” which Arendt wrote about in 1946 and which had for the most part disappeared only five years later has now completely vanished, and not only with regards to Marx. The most relevant shift is another: the line of continuity that leads from Marx to totalitarianism (passing through Lenin) is now smooth and even. Behind Marx is the influence of the French Revolution, which Arendt condemns as well, thus moving further away from The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The change in Arendt’s position, now atrophied into Talmon and Hayek’s deductivist approach, is now clear, as is the triumph achieved by Golo Mann. Beyond the concessions granted to Mann by Arendt, what prevails today is a reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism that seems to take into account the ideological preoccupations he expressed. Indeed, concerning the debate on totalitarianism, is there anyone today who still remembers Lord Cromer and his “new form of governing,” “a more dangerous form of governing than despotism”? Who mentions the temptation to use “administrative massacres,” a temptation that follows the history of imperialism like a shadow? Who discusses the category of imperialism anymore? Of the two parts that make up Arendt’s book, the one commonly used and examined is the less valid section, the one more burdened by immediate ideological and political preoccupations. In his review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Golo Mann summarizes his criticism as such: “It is all too subtle, too intelligent, too artificial […] In short, on the whole we would have preferred a more vigorous, more positive tone.”[37] Indeed, the theory of totalitarianism later became less “subtle,” more “vigorous” and more “positive,” fully meeting the needs of the Cold War. A product of organicism, or of right-wing or left-wing holism, and somehow inferable a priori from this poisoned ideological source, totalitarianism (in both its opposite configurations) explains all of the horror of the 20th century: such is today the predominant vulgata.
4. The Theory of Totalitarianism and the Selection of 20th Century Horrors
This vulgata does not even attempt to investigate some of the major catastrophes of the century, though it nevertheless insists on explaining them. Let us move backwards from the October Revolution, which is supposed to constitute the starting point of the totalitarian era. How, then, should World War I be regarded, with its total mobilization, its total regimentation, its executions and decimations even within one’s own camp, its ruthless collective punishments that included, for instance, the deportation and extermination of the Armenians? And even earlier, how should the Balkan wars and their massacres be viewed? And still proceeding backwards, what interpretation should be given to the tragedy of the Herero, who were judged to be unfit as a servile work force and who, in the early 20th century, were sentenced by an explicit order to be annihilated?
Now, rather than backwards, let us move forward from World War I and the October Revolution. Just over two decades later, concentration camps appeared in the United States, as well, where, in compliance to an executive order issued by F.D. Roosevelt, all American citizens of Japanese origins, including women and children, where locked in concentration camps.
At the same time, in Asia, the war led by the Empire of the Rising Sun took on some particularly horrifying aspects. With the rape of Nanking, massacres became a kind of sport and pastime: who will be fastest and most efficient in beheading the prisoners? The de-humanization of the enemy now reaches a rare and perhaps “unique” level: rather than on animals, vivisection experiments are conducted on the Chinese, who also serve as a living targets for Japanese soldiers training for bayonet attacks. De-humanization extends also to the women who, in the countries invaded by Japan, suffer a brutal sexual slavery: they become comfort women, forced to “work” at frantic pace to provide pleasure to the war-exhausted occupying army, and often eliminated as they become worn-out or sick.[38]
The war in the Far East, where the Japanese torture their English and American prisoners and even use bacteriological weapons against the Chinese, comes to an end with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carried out despite the fact that Japan has reached the end of its resources and is preparing to surrender: for this reason, some American authors have compared the annihilation of the civil population in the two helpless Japanese cities to the extermination of the Jews carried out by the Third Reich in Europe.
None of this is present in Arendt’s book. Japan hardly appears in the analytical index: the war in Asia is only briefly mentioned to denounce China’s totalitarianism, and not even limited to the Communist party, but extended to the whole country, behind which, as we have seen, Arendt sees the influence of “Oriental despotism.” Beyond the impact of the Cold War –in the meantime Japan has joined the anti-totalitarian front—all the limits of the category of totalitarianism emerge here.
And the said category can provide no plausible explanation even for the tragedies it directly discusses. The “final solution” is immediately preceded by two steps. During World War I, it was czarist Russia (a country allied with the Entente powers) that promoted the mass deportation, from the borderland, of the Jews, who were suspected of being disloyal to a regime that oppressed them. After the collapse of czarism and the outbreak of the civil war, it was the white troops (supported by the Entente) who unleashed the hunt against Jews, labeled as the secret inspirers of the “Judaic-Bolshevik” revolution: the massacres that ensued –as historians emphasize—seem to foreshadow precisely the “final solution.”[39]
5. An Arbitrary, Inconclusive Deductivism
If the omissions that characterize the modern-day theory of totalitarianism are astounding, what is clearly untenable is the deductivist approach to which this theory appeals. In the communism proposed by Marx, State, nation, religion, social classes, all of the elements that constitute a meta-individual identity disappear; it makes no sense to speak of organicism and to derive, from this supposed original sin, the annihilation of the individual within the totalitarian system. And with regards to the sacrifice of morals on the altar of the philosophy of history, this motif had previously been refuted or at least drastically problematized in January 1946 by Arendt, who had portrayed Marx as a sort of Jewish prophet with a thirst for justice.
The deductivist approach reveals itself to be arbitrary and inconclusive even in reference to the Third Reich. If we leaf through the genealogical tree of Nazism as it is commonly viewed by the most authoritative historians, we inevitably encounter Houston Stewart Chamberlain: according to Ernst Nolte, Chamberlain is a “good liberal” who “waves the flag of individual freedom.”[40] Indeed, we are dealing with an author who maintains that Germanism (which in the final analysis is synonymous with the Western world) is characterized by the resolute rejection of “monarchic absolutism” and any view of the world that would sacrifice the “individual” for the sake of the community. Not by chance, Locke is seen as the “one who re-elaborated the new German Weltanschauung;” and as for previous examples, one would be William of Ockam, and another, even before him, Duns Scoto, who held that the “individual” constituted the “only reality.”
A historical reconstruction of the “cultural origins of the Third Reich” cannot ignore Arthur de Gobineau, either: the author of Inequality of Human Races celebrates the “liberal traditions of the Aryans,” who long resisted against the “Canaanean monstruosity,” that is, the idea of “homeland.” And if in this context we also include Julius Langbehn, as George Mosse among others suggests,[41] we can notice his even stronger profession of individualistic faith, or rather, his celebration of the “Holy Spirit of individualism,” the “German principle of individualism,” this “stimulating force, fundamental and original of every Germanism.” The countries that represent a model for this are for the most part the classic countries of the liberal tradition. If Gobineau dedicates his book “to His Majesty, George V,” Julius Langbehn celebrates the English people as “the most aristocratic of all peoples” and “the most individual of all peoples.” Analogously, Gustave LeBon (an author quite admired by Goebbels) contrasts, in a constant and positive manner, the Anglo-Saxon world to the rest of the planet.[42]
But why should we go so far, after all? Let us read Mein Kampf. Hitler harshly criticizes a vision of the world which insists on attributing a “creative, culture-creating force” to the State, and not only belittles the value of race, but it is also guilty of “underestimation of the individual,” or rather, of “individuals.”[43] The “progress and culture of humanity” rests first and foremost “on the genius and energy of one’s personality;”[44] thus, we must never lose sight of “individual men,” of the “individual ” (Einzelwesen) in their irreducible peculiarity, [45] in their “thousands of the finest differentiations.”[46] Hitler proffers himself as the authentic, coherent defender of the value of “personality,” of “subject,” the “creative power and ability of the individual personality,” the “idea of personality” in constrast to the “democratic mass idea,” which finds its most obvious and repulsive expression in Marxism.[47] If Marxism denies “the value of personality,” the Nazi movement “must promote respect for personality by all means; it must never forget that in personal worth lies the worth of everything human; that every idea and every achievement is the result of one man’s creative force.”[48]
Of course, Nazism also appeals to choral unity in the struggle against the enemy; but this is a motif used, for obvious reasons and in various manners, by the ideology of war in all of the countries involved in the Second Thirty Years’ War. It would be necessary to examine the stages through which the celebration of the “individual,” “personality,” and the “single” is transformed, in a conscious or surreptitious way, in order to extol a culture or a people truly capable of grasping these values, and consequently hierarchizing peoples and condemning “races” considered to be intrinsically and irremediably collectivistic.[49] However, this dialectic also manifests itself within the liberal tradition, and at any rate it cannot be described by means of the categories of organicism or holism.
In the best of hypotheses, to insist on explaining totalitarianism through organicism or through the sacrifice of morals for the sake of the philosophy of history is equal to explaining the soporiferous effect of opium by referring to its vis dormitiva.
6. Totalitarianism and One-Party Rule
Let us now put aside the cultural origins of totalitarianism and concentrate on its characteristics. These should consists of a “[State] ideology, a single party typically led by one man, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly, and a centrally directed economy.”[50] Of the last two characteristics –as the authors of this definition admit—the first is perhaps associated to the nature of the State as such, and the second can also be found in Great Britain, which at the time (in 1956) was profoundly marked by nationalization and labor social reforms. We should therefore concentrate on other characteristics. Is a communications monopoly exclusively linked to a “totalitarian dictatorship”? As it is perhaps well known, during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson created a Committee on Public Information that provided 22,000 news columns to the press each week, withholding everything that was considered susceptible of favoring the enemy. Is it a “terroristic police,” then, what peculiarly defines totalitarianism? It almost seems as if the two authors of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy were unaware of the history of the country to which they moved. The Espionage Act of May 16, 1918, states that a person can be sentenced to up to twenty years in prison for using “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag […] or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States.” Renowned American historians have highlighted the fact that the measures launched during World War I aimed “at eliminating even the slightest traces of opposition.” And violence from above mingles with violence from below, a violence tolerated and even encouraged by authorities which consists in a ruthless hunt for anyone who may be suspected of insufficient patriotism.[51]
As for the “single party typically led by one man,” what we witness here is the parallelism and confusion between two problems which are considerably different. With regards to the role of the leader, a comparison may be interesting. In 1950, at the outbreak of the war in Korea, while President Truman does not hesitate to intervene independent of Congress,[52] Mao is instead forced to confront and defeat a strong opposition from the Politburo, an opposition against which he is initially in the minority.[53] The fact remains that, unlike the United States, China is led by a one-party rule, and that such characteristic is typical of totalitarian regimes. Besides holding the monopoly of political action, the one-party is an army-party and at the same time, especially in the case of communists, a Church-party. Is this enough to confirm the validity of the theory of totalitarianism?
On the contrary, if this theory exclusively targets communism and Nazism, it was already refuted by Hayek, who rightfully included the socialist parties into the confrontation. Indeed, in deprecating the incapacity of the bourgeois press to influence the “large masses,” and in declaring that a lesson should be learned from the insurrection campaigns launched by “Marxism,” Hitler makes reference first of all to “Social Democratic press” and to the “agitators” (public speakers and journalists) of Social Democracy.”[54]
However, Hayek too is guilty of remaining tied to empirical observation, without questioning the reasons for the phenomenon (the army-party and the Church-party) he has recognized and criticized. The socialist parties aim at breaking the bourgeois monopoly of communications, and therefore they promote the publication of party organs, the organization of schools for the training of officials, etc. This problem does not concern the bourgeoisie, since the latter can count on the control of the school apparatus and the great information organs, as well as on the direct or indirect support from the Churches and other associations and branches of civil society. The anti-socialist legislation launched by Bismarck forces the party to adapt to the conditions of illegality, and brings about the aspiration to break the bourgeois monopoly of violence. This dialectic had already developed during the French Revolution. The bourgeoisie tries to maintain the monopoly of violence by imposing censorial clauses even regarding enlistment in the National Guard. Thus, on the opposite side, parties also become organizations for struggle.
This dialectic reaches its highest point with czarist Russia. In developing his party ideology, Lenin has in mind the model of German Social Democracy, but he strengthens its centralized structure even more in order to contrast czarist autocracy and a police regime that is particularly watchful and brutal. Understandably, then, the Bolshevik party reveals itself to be, more than any other, prepared for the permanent extraordinary circumstances that, from World War I on, characterizes Russia and Europe. For this reason, the Bolshevik party becomes a model not only for the communists, but also for their antagonists. As Nikolai Bukharin observes at the XII Congress of the Bolshevik Party in April 1923:
More than the representatives of any other party, the Fascists have embodied and put into practice the experience of the Russian Revolution. If we consider them from a formal perspective, that is, from the perspective of the strategy of their political methods, we see a perfect application of Bolshevik tactics, and specifically, of Russian Bolshevism, in the form of a rapid concentration of forces and a vigorous action carried out by a steady and compact military organization.[55]
The proximity which for Hayek was synonymous with ideological and political closeness is here synomymous with antagonism. To the attempt, on the part of labor parties, to break the bourgois monopoly of violence, the bourgeoisie responds by breaking the socialist and communist monopoly of the revolutionary parties: this is Bucharin’s interpretation.
After all, the time sequence established by Hayek is schematic and inaccurate. In other circumstances, it was the socialists who had to learn from their antagonists. In Italy, while the trade unions and political organizations of the working classes were systematically crushed by the fascist assault (on the eve of the March on Rome, that is, of the coup d’etat by the king and Mussolini), in an attempt to organize a defense, Guido Picelli (then a socialist) felt the need to break away with the legal tradition:
We now need new methods. To contrast the armed forces we need armed forces too. Therefore, we need to form, in Italy, the “proletarian red army.” Unfortunately, events have proved enough, and the few of us had maintained this from the very beginning: fascism can be beaten on the same ground of violence upon which fascism itself dragged us first. The Christian resignation advocated by the leaders of the reformist method have made the enemy bolder, and undone our organizations […] Proletarians need a new method of defense and battle: “its army.” Our forces must organize and discipline themselves voluntarily. Workers must become soldiers, proletarian soldiers, but “soldiers” nonetheless […] In order to attack us, the bourgeoisie did not create a party that would have been inadequate, but an armed organ, its army: fascism. We must do the same. [56]
Above all, what is arbitrary is the point of departure indicated by Hayek. We can easily move backward from the starting point he indicated (the formation of socialist parties). Once again, we are in the presence of a dialectic that had already emerged during the French Revolution: if the people’s Jacobinic sections represented the answer to bourgeois, land-owning monopoly of the National Guard, the jeuness dorée was the bourgeois, land-owning response to the people’s monopoly of the organized revolutionary party. From this clash, the dominant class that professed liberalism was only apparently absent: the proto-fascist organization that formed in France in the early 20th century served as “auxiliary police” for the power and the dominant class.[57]
A similar dialectic develops also with regards to the trade unions. Obviously, the capitalists –as Adam Smith had already noted—do not need it.[58] And yet, the trade unions inspired by Marxism and more or less radical opposition movements are followed by trade unions inspired by the Church and, later on, by others still, inspired by the fascist and Nazi movement. Finally, even the “unions” of capital are born.
In its drawing together and assimilating two “facts” (the socialists’ and communists’ appeal to the army-party and the Church-party on the one hand, and the same appeal by the fascists and Nazis on the other), Hayek’s interpretation reveals itself to be affected by positivistic superstition. And it is precisely this superstition that, in the final analysis, constitutes the foundation of the current theory of totalitarianism. Following Hayek’s logic, we could even draw Roosevelt and Hitler together: indeed, the “fact” is unquestionable that both resorted to tanks, war planes and ships!
On the other hand, in forging his weapons for struggle Hitler did not limit himself to observing the socialist and communist parties. As he denounces the incapacity of traditional bourgeois parties to influence the people, who are thus helplessly exposed to subversive influence and uprisings, Hitler resolves to learn not only from Social Democracy, also from the Catholic Church which, in spite of everything, he admires for its ability to sweep the masses and for recruiting cadres even from the poorest social classes.[59] What the Führer especially praises is a religious order: “It was with Himmler that the SS became this extraordinary militia, devoted to an idea, faithful unto death. In Himmler I see our Ignatius of Loyola.”[60] Already celebrated by Joseph de Maistre as the only organization capable of standing up to revolutionary freemasonry,[61] and later used as a model by Cecil Rhodes for his imperialistic idea of “rule through secrecy”[62] –as Arendt points out--, the Jesuit order is finally viewed as the organization of capable, disciplined, and committed cadres needed by the counterrevolutionary civil war of the 20th century. Should we then associate masonic lodges, Societas Jesu, and Schutz Staffeln?
7. Racial State and Eugenics: The United States and the Third Reich
We would be providing a very poor definition of the Third Reich if we limited ourselves to highlighting its totalitarian character, making particular reference to the phenomenon of the one-party rule. With regards to leaders of a one-party dictatorship, it would not be difficult at all to put Hitler side by side with Stalin, Mao, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Ataturk, Tito, Franco, etc., but this pedantic exercise is quite inadequate as a concrete historical analysis. And even if we separate the two “totalitarian” leaders Stalin and Hitler from the “authoritarian” Mussolini, whose power was limited by the presence of the Vatican and the Church, we still won’t have made much progress. More than an actual advancement, this argument would represent a drift: from ideology we have inadvertently moved to a completely different sphere, to realities and facts that are independent and preexisting from the ideological and political choices of fascism.
With regards to the Third Reich, it is quite difficult to make a definite and concrete statement on it without mentioning its racial and eugenic programs. And these programs lead us to a very different direction from the one proposed by the category of totalitarianism. Immediately after his rise to powe, Hitler made sure he clarified the distinction, even on a juridical level, between the position of the aryans and those of the Jews and the few Mulattos who still lived in Germany (at the end of World War I, colored troops belonging to the French army had taken part in the occupation of the country). In other words, a major point of the Nazi program was that of building a racial State. And what were, at the time, the possible models for a racial State? Even more so than South-Africa, the first example was the Southern United States. Still in 1937, Alfred Rosenberg made explicit reference to South-Africa: it should well remain “in the hands of northeners” and whites (thanks to appropriate “laws” not only against “indians,” but also “blacks, mulattos, and Jews”), and it should serve as a “solid bulwark” against the menace of a “black awakening.” However, the main point of reference was represented by the United States, this “wonderful country of the future,” which had the merit of formulating the well-thought-out “new idea of a racial State,” an idea that should now be put into practice, “with youthful vigor,” by expelling and deporting “the blacks and the yellows.”[63] We only need to take a look at the Nurnberg legislation to recognize analogies with the situation that was taking place on the other side of the Atlantic: clearly, in Germany it was first of all Germans of Jewish descent to occupy the place of African-Americans. “In the United States,” –Rosenberg writes in 1937—“the Negro question is on top of all crucial questions;” and once the absurd principle of equality has been eliminated concerning the blacks, there is no reason why they should not reach “the same resolution for the yellows and Jews, as well.”[64] Even for his plan to build a German continental empire, Hitler has in mind the United States model, which he praises for its “extraordinary inner strength:”[65] Germany is called upon to follow this example, expanding to Eastern Europe as to a sort of Far West and treating the “indigenous people” in the same way as the redskins were treated.[66]
We come to the same conclusion if we examine eugenics. As is well known, with regards to this new “science” the Third Reich is indebted to the United States, where eugenics, which was invented during the second half of the 19th century by Francis Galton (a cousin of Darwin’s), became very popular. Well before Hitler’s rise to power, on the eve of World War I, a book is published in Munich, Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States of North America), which, already in its title, points to the United States as a model for “racial hygiene.” The author, Géza von Hoffmann, vice-consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Chicago, extols the U.S. for the “lucidity” and “pure practical reason” it has demonstrated in confronting, with the necessary energy, a very important problem that is instead so often ignored: to violate the laws that forbid sexual intercourse and interracial marriages could be punished with up to ten years in prison, and not only the people responsible for the act, but also their accomplices, can be condemned.[67] Even after the Nazi rise to power, the ideologues and “scientists” of race continue to claim: “Germany, too, has much to learn from the measures adopted by the North-Americans: they know what they are doing.”[68] It should be added that this is not a unilateral relationship. After Hitler’s rise to power, the most radical followers of the American eugenic movement look up to the Third Reich as a model, and even travel there on an ideological and research pilgrimage.[69]
It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the Nazi regime, should the argument of the one-party dictatorship be more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi discourse derive. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and successfully exported to the United States. But there are even more sensational examples. Rosenberg expresses his admiration for American author Lothrop Stoddard, credited with coining the term Untermensch, which already in 1925 stands out as the subtitle of the German translation of his book, The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man published in New York three years earlier.[70] As for the meaning of the term he coined, Stoddard clarifies that it indicates the mass of “savages and barbarians” who live inside or outside the capitalist metropolis, who are “essentially uncivilizable and incorrigibly hostile to civilization,” and who must necessarily be dealt with once and for all.[71] In the United States as in the rest of the world, it is necessary to defend “white supremacy” against “the rising tide of color:” what incites the colored people to revolt is Bolshevism, “the renegade, the traitor within the gates” which, with its insidious propagande, reaches not only the colonies, but even “the ‘black belts’ of our own United States.”[72] The extraordinary success of these theories is quite understandable. Even before receiving Rosenberg’s enthusiastic comments, Stoddard had already been praised by two American presidents (Harding and Hoover), and he was later welcomed and honored in Berlin, where he met not only the most renowned representatives of Nazi eugenics, but also the highest officials of the regime, including Adolf Hitler,[73] who had already begun his campaign to decimate and subjugate the Untermenschen.
One more term should be examined. We have seen how Hitler looks to the white expansion in the Far West as a model. Immediately after invading Poland, Hitler proceeds to dismember it: one side is directly incorporated into the Great Reich (and the Poles are expelled from it); the rest constitutes the “general Governatorate,” within which, as General Governor Hans Frank declares, the Poles live as in “a sort of reservation” (they are “subject to German jurisdiction” without being “German citizens”).[74] The American model is copied here in an almost pedantic manner.
At least in the beginning, the Third Reich planned to also establish a Judenreservat, a “reservation for the Jews,” once again based upon the model of the reservations where Native-Americans were segregated. Even when the expression “final solution” first emerged, it was not in Germany, but in the United States, though it was referred to the “Negro question” rather than the “Jewish question.”[75]
In the same way as it is not surprising that “totalitarianism” found its most concentrated expression in the countries involved in the Second Thirty-Years’ War, so it is not surprising that the Nazi attempt to build a racial State drew its inspirational motifs, its categories and key terminology, from the historical experience that possessed the richest heritage of these elements, namely, the historical experience accumulated by white Americans in their relationship with Native Americans and African Americans. Clearly, one should not lose sight of all the other differences, in terms of government, law, limitation of state power (with regards to the white community), etc. The fact remains that the Third Reich represents the attempt, through total war and international civil war, to create a regime of world-scale white supremacy under German hegemony, by resorting to eugenetic, sociopolitical, and military measures.
What constitutes the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated to the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, to the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacks: not by chance, in fact, the revolution calls upon the “slaves in the colonies” to break their fetters. The common theory of totalitarianism concentrates exclusively upon the similar methods attributed to the two antagonists, and besides, it makes them derive univocally from a supposed ideological affinity, without making any reference to the actual situation or to the geopolitical context.
8. Toward a Redefinition of the Category of Totalitarianism
The main flaw of the category of totalitarianism is that it transforms an empirical description tied to specific characteristics into a general logical deduction. It is easy to recognize similarities between Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany; starting from those, it is possible to construct a general category (totalitarianism) and to highlight the presence of this phenomenon in the two countries. However, to transform this category into a key to explain the political processes that took place in the two countries is an unjustifiable leap. The arbitrariness of this move should be evident, for two main reasons. We have already discussed the first: surreptitiously, the analogies between the USSR and the Third Reich with regards to one-party dictatorship are considered to be the decisive ones, whereas the analogies on the level of eugenics and racial politics (which would lead to very different associations), are ignored or eliminated.
Let us now concentrate on the second reason. Even if we focus on the one-party dictatorship in the two countries, why should we make reference to the two ideologies rather than to the similarity between the political situation (the permanent extraordinary circumstances) or the geopolitical context (the peculiar vulnerability) that the two countries are forced to face? I strongly believe that the totalitarian phenomenon is determined not only by ideologies and political traditions, but also, and quite powerfully, by the objective situation.
In this respect, it may be useful to reflect on the origin of the term “totalitarianism.” Two years after the outbreak of the October Revolution, in the aftermath of World War I, the criticism of “revolutionary totalism” (revolutionärer Totalismus) emerges.[76] The use of the adjective seems to imply a different kind of totalism from the revolutionary one. While it points directly to a species (“revolutionary totalism”), the genus (totalism) calls to mind, though indirectly, a different species, that of warlike totalism. Indeed, the noun used (which precedes the later term, “totalitarianism”) is placed immediately after an adjective which, from 1914 on, begins to resound in an obsessive way. There is talk of “total mobilization” and, a few years later, of “total war” and even “total politics.”[77] “Total politics” is the politics that can face up to “total war.” Isn’t this, too, the actual meaning that should be attributed to the category of “totalitarianism”? Both Mussolini and Hitler explicitely declared that the movements and regimes they led were born out of war; and war inevitably determines the revolution that broke out against these movements, as well as the political regime that resulted from it.
If this is the case, to associate the USSR and Hitler’s Germany as the expressions par excellence of totalitarianism becomes even banal: where else should the political regime that corresponds to total war have revealed its fundamental characteristics if not in the two countries that were at the center of the Second Thirty-Years’ War? It is not at all surprising that the institution of the concentration camp took on a much more brutal shape here than, for example, in the United States, which was protected by the ocean from the threat of invasion, and which suffered losses and devastations that were much less significant than those suffered by the other countries involved. About one-hundred-and-fifty years earlier, on the eve of the launch of the new federal constitution, Alexander Hamilton had explained that the limitation of power and the establishment of the government of laws had been successful in two insular-type countries which were protected by the sea from the threat of rival powers. If the Union were to fail and a system of States similar to the one in Europe were to emerge from its ruins –warned Hamilton—, in America, too, a permanent army, a strong, central power, and even absolutism would have appeared. In the 20th century, even though it continues to represent an element of protection, the insular position is no longer an insurmoutable obstacle: following the total war against the great European and Asian powers, the United States, too, witness the rise of totalitarianism, as demonstrated by the terroristic legislation that aims at crushing any and all oppositions, and above all, by the emergence of the most typical institution of totalitarianism, the concentration camp.
It could be argued that, in comparison to the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, concentration camps in France and in the United States were much tamer (though it would be superficial and irresponsible to see them as a mere trifle). Regardless of this, the fact remains that, in order to be adequate, a theory must be able to explain the emergence of this institution in all four countries, including those that enjoyed a liberal system, and it must clarify to what extent the differences are due to a diversity in the ideology or to a diversity in the objective situation and in the geopolitical context. A truly adequate theory must also explain the concentration camps in which the liberal Western world as a whole segregated native people in the colonies (for centuries the target of total war). And, in more general terms, it must explain why, since the outbreak of World War I, even in liberal countries, the State was endowed, in Weber’s own words, with “a ‘lawful’ power over the life, death, and freedom” of its citizens. Far from providing an answer, the current theory of totalitarianism cannot even formulate the problem.
9. Performative Contradiction and the Ideology of War in the Current Theory of Totalitarianism
Marx sowed the seeds of the communist totalitarianism he influenced: this theory is present in Arendt’s work ever since the Cold War, and it has now become an integral part of the current theory of totalitarianism. However, to paraphrase a famous expression used by Weber with regards to historical materialism, the theory of the non-innocence of theory is not a taxicab one can get in and out of at will. So, what role did the common theory of totalitarianism and the banner of the struggle against totalitarianism play in the massacre that in 1965 took the lives of hundreds of thusands of communists in Indonesia? And with regards to Latin America’s contemporary history, its darkest moments are not tied to “totalitarianism,” but to the struggle against it. Just to give an exanple, a few years ago, in Guatemala, the Truth Commission accused the CIA of having strongly helped the military dictatorship to commit “acts of genocide” against the Mayas, who were guilty of sympathizing with the opposers of the regime supported by Washington.[78]
In other words, with its silence and eliminations, hasn’t the common theory of totalitarianism itself turned into an ideology of war, of total war, one that has helped to increase the horror it supposedly condemns, thus falling into a tragic performative contradiction?
Nowadays we constantly hear denunciations, directed toward Islam, of “religious totalitarianism,”[79] or of the “new totalitarian enemy that is terrorism.”[80] The language of the Cold War has reappeared with renewed vitality, as confirmed by the warning that American Senator Joseph Lieberman has issued to Saudi Arabia: beware the seduction of Islamic totalitarianism, and do not let a “theological iron curtain” separate you from the Western world.[81] Even though the target has changed, the denunciation of totalitarianism continues to function with perfect efficiency as an ideology of war against the enemies of the Western world. And this ideology justifies the violation of the Geneva Convention, the inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, the embargo and collective punishment inflicted upon the Iraqis and other peoples, and the further torment perpetrated against the Palestinians. The struggle against totalitarianism serves to legitimize and transfigure the total war against the “barbarians” who are alien to the Western world.
(Translated by Marella and Jon Morris)
[1] In Pombeni, 1977, pp. 324-5. My italics.
[2] Horkheimer-Adorno, 2002, pp. 43 and 67-8.
[3] Weil, 1990, pp. 218-19.
[4] Weil, 1990, pp. 204 and 206.
[5] Talmon, 1960, p. 4.
[6] Hayek, 1986, pp. 8-9.
[7] Hayek, 1986, p. 85.
[8] Hayek, 1960, p. 55.
[9] Hayek, 1986, Ch. VII.
[10] Wittfogel, 1959.
[11] Popper 1966, vol. 1, p. 1.
[12] In Ruge-Schumann, 1977, p. 82.
[13] Goebbels, 1991, vol. 2, pp. 163 and 183.
[14] Scarfoglio, 1999, p. 22.
[15] Arendt, 1989, p. 87.
[16] In Commager, 1963, vol, 2, p. 525.
[17] See Mao’s argument against the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson (the speech is dated August 28, 1949).
[18] Mann, 1951.
[19] Arendt, 1958, pp. 176 and 160.
[20] Arendt, 1958, pp. 176 and 183.
[21] Arendt, 1958, pp. 131, 133-4, and 216.
[22] Arendt, 1958, pp. 211, 212, and 213.
[23] Young-Bruehl, 1984, p. 158.
[24] Arendt, 1989, p. 193.
[25] Arendt, 1978 c, p. 149.
[26]Arendt, 1978 a, p. 110.
[27] Gleason, 1995, pp. 112-3 and 257, note 30.
[28] Arendt, 1978 b, p. 59.
[29] In Hofstadter, 1982, vol II, p. 439.
[30] Arendt, 1958, pp. 308-9.
[31] Arendt, 1958, p. 311.
[32] In Hofstadter, 1982, vol. II, p. 428.
[33] Arendt, 1958, pp. 318-19.
[34] Arendt, 1958, p. 319.
[35] Mann, 1991, pp. 232-3.
[36] Arendt, 1963, pp. 58-59.
[37] Mann, 1951.
[38] Cf. Chang, 1997; Katsuichi, 1999; Hicks, 1995.
[39] For the general overview of the 20th century, see Losurdo, 1996, and Losurdo, 1998.
[40] Nolte, 1978, p. 351.
[41] Mosse, 1964, passim.
[42] For the analysis of Gobineau, Langbehn, Chamberlain, and LeBon, see Losurdo, 2002, ch. 25 § 1.
[43] Hitler, 1971, pp. 382-3.
[44] Hitler, 1971, p. 345.
[45] Hitler, 1971, p. 421.
[46] Hitler, 1971, p. 442.
[47] Hitler, 1971, pp. 443-5 and passim.
[48] Hitler, 1971, pp. 65 and 352.
[49] Cf. Losurdo, 2002, ch. 33, § 2.
[50] Friedrich-Brzezinski, 1968, p. 21.
[51] Cf. Losurdo, 1993, ch. 5 § 4.
[52] Chace, 1998, p. 288.
[53] Chen, 1994, pp. 181-86.
[54] Hitler, 1971, pp. 528-29.
[55] In Strada-Kulesov, 1998, p. 53.
[56] In Del Carria, 1970, vol 2, p. 224.
[57] Nolte, 1978, pp. 119 and 146-48.
[58] Smith, 1981, p. 67 (Book I, ch. VIII).
[59] Hitler, 1971, pp. 481-82.
[60] Hitler, 1952-54, vol. I, p. 164.
[61] Maistre, 1984, p. 205.
[62] Arendt, 1958, p. 214.
[63] Rosenberg, 1937, pp. 666 and 673.
[64] Rosenberg, 1937, pp. 668-69.
[65] Hitler, 1971, pp. 153-54.
[66] Cf. Losurdo, 1996, ch. 5, p. 6.
[67] Hoffmann, 1913, pp. IX and 67-8.
[68] Günther, 1934, p. 465.
[69] Cf. Kühl, 1994, pp. 53-63.
[70] Rosenberg, 1937, p. 214.
[71] Stoddard, 1925 a, pp. 23-4.
[72] Stoddard, 1925 b, pp. 220-21.
[73] On all of this, see Kühl, 1994, p. 61; President Harding’s flattering comment is quoted at the beginning of the French translation of Stoddard’s text, 1925 b.
[74] In Ruge-Schumann, 1977, p. 36.
[75] See Losurdo, 1998, pp. 8-10.
[76] Paquet, 1919, p. 111. Nolte (1987, p. 563) drew attention to this.
[77] Ludendorff, 1935, pp. 35 and passim; clearly, the motif of total mobilitization is particularly tied to Ernst Jünger.
[78] Navarro, 1999.
[79] Friedman, 2001.
[80] Spinelli, 2001.
[81] In Dao, 2002, p. 4.
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