This week's HCJ lecture has taken us away from the money-spinning world of economics into the darker, more sinister realm of Totalitarianism. There was two main questions that we had to take out of the lecture and the 3rd would be answered watch the film adaptation of George Orwell's classic novel "1984". We were given the answer to these two questions:
1. How could it happen (The Origins of Totalitarianism)?
2. What is your personal responsibility (Eichmann in Jerusalem)?
In the answer to the first question the German, Hannah Arendt, refers us to the reading for this week’s upcoming HCJ seminar with The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt's book examines the two major political movements of influences that swept central and Eastern Europe during World War 2: Nazism and Stalinism. Ardent described Totalitarianism as "Everything we know of Totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality." This reflects the movement where the masses were dominated and brainwashed by the strong and powerful.
These can be reflected in the works of Hume where the dangers of seeing this problem stop short of calling them causes. Ardent believed in utter individuality and spontaneity of people creating an entirely new system. A Totalitarian regime believes that "everything is possible" and so seek ultimate power, however the price of total power is destruction and the eradication of humanity.
Our individuality though makes us difficult to control and to gather people up to form a collective movement. So the ways to form this group is through the processes of state terror and ideology. The essence of a Totalitarian government is "total terror", which can be expressed through the Nazi movement and Adolf Hitler's reign of complete and utter terror over the German population and his persecution and genocide of the Jewish race across Europe.
The purpose of terror is not just mass murder E.G Holocaust/The Final Solution, but is to destroy individuality and ability to act against the government. Genocide is not the only part of the movement; it is the key manifestation of the movement. Two examples of this is The Final Solution and the Holocaust of the Jewish population, which was implemented by the Nazi's as the main solution to the final and complete extinction of Jewish people across the world with the use the concentration camps as the catalyst for this plan.
On the opposite side of the eastern front there was severe uprising throughout the Soviet army during the winter of 1940, which led to mutiny between the Stalin regime and the Soviet troops. Stalin's solution to this was the mass murder of the troops who he saw as traitors in his ultimate plan to gain control of the eastern front against the Germans.
Ideology compliments terror policy as it eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience even amongst the executioners themselves. Ideology also frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality. This will break down stable humans world, which means the loss of institutional and psychological barrier limits and emphasises the phrase against that "everything is possible."
This again was expressed through the Nazi's stripping the Jews of identity and were seen as the perfects victims for a Totalitarian regime. Arendt highlights the fragility of civilisation and how quickly whole groups of people can fail through the cracks, even at the time in Europe. For they’re to be civilised humans, we need to be part of a world full of stable structure and to be part of a society, in order to enable us to become civilised.
Imperialism was a vital element as the disruption of structures created the victims and the masses of which Totalitarian focuses upon as it was the first references to racism and expresses how it was your genetics, not your actions that determined your race in life. In Alan Ryan's "The Moderns", he explains that It was the concentrated actions of individuals, this rather the logical extensions of mass society where meaning is provided through ideology, where isolated humans are vulnerable to total manipulation through the collapses of both public and privacy.
This brings us on to the answer of the second question of what is your personal responsibility and this can be exemplified in 1960 when the Israeli SS captured the Nazi fugitive, Adolf Eichmann. He stood trial in Jerusalem for crimes committed in "The Final Solution" where Eichmann's responsibility was to organise the mass transport of the Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps.
The trial served three purposes:
1. Trying Eichmann for his crimes.
2. For educating the nature and extent of the Holocaust.
3. The legitimatising of the Jewish state.
Arendt was a reporter on the trial and was chocked to see Eichmann who spoke mainly in clichés and explained how he was only following Hitler's instruction as a "Law abiding citizen." She concluded that it was not necessary to pscess great wickedness to commit great crimes as evil as the Holocaust. She agreed that Eichmann's crimes was non-thinking and criticised his obedience and his inability to think. This is what Arendt believed that a non-thinking human is capable of carrying out genocide.
Eichmann claimed that his implementation of The Final Solution was acting from obedience and the readings of Kant. Kant's Categorical Imperative is expressed in how according to Marxism whereby you can make it a universal law. Arendt felt that Kant's theory blanks at blind obedience and that Eichmann changes the Categorical Imperative to be one should act in a way that Hitler himself would do the same.
Eichmann's greatest crime was he forgot to think as it is the judgement made from the interaction with internal plurality. Arendt's ide of freedom is how we act in society and how we exercise our freedom. We must ultimately look at our own judgement, rather than follow the law in order to know how to act.
This brings me on to the screening, which followed the lecture, which was the film adaptation of George Orwell's 1984. The film shows how a totalitarian super state controlled its citizens through constant surveillance and control. However, the film expresses the private thoughts of Winston Smith and his disobedience to the super state.
He convert's with his female counterpart, Julia and they start to meet in private and express sexual pleasures, which are outlawed and banned in order to create the perfect utopian super state, where no one thinks and follow's the every command of "Big Brother." They are eventually found out and arrested, but for Smith this is the worst possible outcome as he is brainwashed and tortured by O'Brien (I am not going to even comment on this as my name has been used for evil I tell you.... EVIL!!!).
He is subjected to the worst kind of tortured until he accepts the followings of "Big Brother". This proves the main points of Totalitarians through state terror (The Thought Police) and Ideology (Big Brother). It also expresses Arendt's of us looking at our own judgement, but in a totalitarian form this is not possible, but it is in modern society as our own judgement and thought processes help us establish our own mind and identity.
