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"The official SS newspaper, the Schwarze Korps, stated explicitly in 1938 that if the world was not yet convinced that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidentifiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports crossed their frontiers. And it is true that this kind of factual propaganda worked better than Goebbels' rhetoric... because the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements' cynical claim that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice... The very phrase 'human rights' became for all concerned... the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy." - Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 269.
The Origins of Totalitarianism 3
Dec. 1st, 2017 11:46 amI guess everyone has feet of clay, or a blind spot - pick your metaphor. In the case of Hannah Arendt, it seems to have been Africa. I read her chapter on "Race and Bureaucracy" and her account of the colonisation of Africa with mounting unease, realising that she was not just describing the attitudes of colonists like the Boers, but her own. (I got so cranky that I pulled the very readable African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone off my infinite "to read" shelf.)
"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*
I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)
Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)
Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.
It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)
Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:
"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)
There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".
McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.
* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]
** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)
*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(
"What made them different from other human beings," Arendt writes (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 192), "was not at all the colour of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality - compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, ghostlike. They were, as it were, 'natural' human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder."*
I'll give you another example: "Lazy and unproductive, they [the Boers] agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years... The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature." (p 194) And again: "They [the Boers] behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also roamed the Dark Continent for centuries - feeling at home wherever the horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settlement." (p 196)
Similarly, the peoples of Australia and the Americas had no "human reality": "Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans." (p 186) By contrast, "there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensibly reason for treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because everyone ought to have known what he was doing." (p 206)
Even alongside Arendt's severe criticism of the Boers, it all sounds disturbingly like justification. It also brings into question the whole definition of civilisation - of "humanity" itself. No accomplishment is enough to qualify you: not writing (the Meroitic script of Nubia, the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Berber scipt Tifinagh) nor monumental architecture (Nubia's pyramids, the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, Axum's obelisks); not settled communities, agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy; and certainly not other kinds of technology or expertise, nor a rich culture which includes law, history, religion, sophisticated art, and the kind of spoken storytelling on which Homer's work is based**. I think, for Arendt, possibly only a long literary tradition would allow any civilisation into the "humanity" club - which knocks out the overwhelming majority of human cultures, in all times and places.
It's not that the facts weren't available to Arendt; the Meroitic script, from ancient Nubia, had been deciphered, the Bantu origins of Great Zimbabwe were known. It's just that her immense expertise was focussed on Europe, and she shared the received wisdom of her time, which, as Parker and Rathbone put it, was that "Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, had no history to speak of. Not only were its societies regarded as primitive and unchanging, they were believed, due in large part to the widespread absence of literacy, to possess no collective historical consciousness." (p 3)
Where the chapter is most effective, I think, is where it talks about the people who colonised not as representatives of "civilisation", but because they themselves were outsiders:
"The superfluous men... who came rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adventurers.... The difference was not their morality or immorality, but rather than the decision to join this crowd... was no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits of civilization but simply victims without use or function." (p 189)
There's a parallel here with both those Trump voters who have been effectively excluded from American society through poverty and social breakdown, with - as Susan McWilliams wrote in The Nation - the Hell's Angels (I've just read Hunter S. Thompson's book, of which more soon); and also with Dale Beran's analysis of 4chan, when Arendt writes: "They were irresistably attracted by a world where everything was a joke", "a world of infinite possibilities for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror and laughter".
McWilliams writes that the Trump supporters' racism is partly a fuck-you to the political elites. Maybe, but as Arendt writes: "South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics." If necessary, of course, you can always declare some of the people next door to be foreigners.
* I had a nasty moment reading this and remembering another nasty moment: watching some dreadful "white jungle goddess" movie or other, in which a pith helmeted dolt panics and randomly shoots dead one of the locals, and begs the White Goddess to get him out of being punished. And, until I caught myself, I sympathised. Partly, of course, it was just because this was a speaking character vs an extra seen on screen for a few seconds. Partly, of course... it wasn't. [ETA: this was indeed "Jungle Goddess" (1943), which was MSTed. "Meanwhile, in an equally racist Tarzan movie across the way..."]
** Here I'm putting aside the complicated question of the African-ness of Ancient Egypt; I don't even need it to make my point. (Actually, I've seen a few Black people on Tumblr worry that Egypt gets too much attention, to the detriment of the other great civilisations of Africa.)
*** I remember reading - this must have been when I was writing Hummer, so forever ago - a chapter about some women of native heritage, perhaps in rural Mexico, ooh-ing and ah-ing over how much darker than them a Black woman on TV was. You might think they'd be natural allies, said the chapter, subject to the same colourism. But the women were able to console themselves that at least they weren't that black. :(
The Origins of Totalitarianism 2
Nov. 4th, 2017 08:50 pmI read Chapter Six, "Race-thinking Before Racism", which describes the development of racism as a philosophy or "science" at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Opinions about race predated this, of course, but now racism became an ideology.
Two ideologies have "essentially defeated" the rest, writes Arendt: "the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." Both have been adopted by states, by intellectuals, and by the masses. Why do ideologies persuade? Not because of science or history. "Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine." For example, Arendt points to how the idea of progress guided late Nineteenth Century scientific thought, rather than being a product of scientific research. "The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow citizens."
In the early Nineteenth Century, this ideology was the attempt of "certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin." IIUC this was a flop, so there was a switch from language to what we'd call genetics, a "naturalistic appeal... which addressed itself to tribal instincts". All Germans were related by blood, and were of "pure, unmixed stock". At this stage, though, it's only the precursor of racism: there are supposedly separate "races", but they're still equal.
In France, by contrast, the idea was that the French aristocracy descended from the rightful conquerors and were a different "race" to their inferiors. Eventually one such aristocrat, Arthur de Gobineau, puts forward the view that the aristocracy is doomed, and so are Western civilisation and humanity itself; this is "due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dominant." (The Victorian fiction I've read is nervous as hell about this.) What to do? eugenics, of course.
(What an unpleasant thing to realise that the Ernst Haeckel who did those bewitching biology illustrations was also a raving racist.)
In conclusion, Arendt remarks: "It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the 'scramble for Africa' and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism."
Two ideologies have "essentially defeated" the rest, writes Arendt: "the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races." Both have been adopted by states, by intellectuals, and by the masses. Why do ideologies persuade? Not because of science or history. "Every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine." For example, Arendt points to how the idea of progress guided late Nineteenth Century scientific thought, rather than being a product of scientific research. "The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow citizens."
In the early Nineteenth Century, this ideology was the attempt of "certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin." IIUC this was a flop, so there was a switch from language to what we'd call genetics, a "naturalistic appeal... which addressed itself to tribal instincts". All Germans were related by blood, and were of "pure, unmixed stock". At this stage, though, it's only the precursor of racism: there are supposedly separate "races", but they're still equal.
In France, by contrast, the idea was that the French aristocracy descended from the rightful conquerors and were a different "race" to their inferiors. Eventually one such aristocrat, Arthur de Gobineau, puts forward the view that the aristocracy is doomed, and so are Western civilisation and humanity itself; this is "due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dominant." (The Victorian fiction I've read is nervous as hell about this.) What to do? eugenics, of course.
(What an unpleasant thing to realise that the Ernst Haeckel who did those bewitching biology illustrations was also a raving racist.)
In conclusion, Arendt remarks: "It is highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth century, if the 'scramble for Africa' and the new era of imperialism had not exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world. Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help to racism."
The key to reality
Nov. 1st, 2017 05:32 pm"Ideologists who pretend to possess the key to reality are forced to change and twist their opinions about single cases according to the latest events and can never afford to come into conflict with their ever-changing deity, reality. It would be absurd to ask people to be reliable who by their very convictions must justify any given situation." — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p 174)
Yep, I'm back in the saddle. I can only understand half or two-thirds of what Arendt is saying, because I lack the historical knowledge, but it's still like being hit in the head with successive jolts of electricity. The most important message, for me, so far, overall: racism is an idea, like any other, and someone had to come up with it, and they did so for specific reasons. Also crucial: understanding at last what an ideology is - the "key to reality".
Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: lessons from Hannah Arendt (GA, 2 February 2017) This quotes Arendt expert Professor Griselda Pollock: "She [Arendt] talks of the creation of pan movements, these widespread ideas that overarch national, political and ethnic elements – the two big pan movements she talks about are bolshevism and nazism. There is a single explanation for everything, and before the single explanation, everything else falls away. She gives a portrait of how you produce these isolated people, who then become susceptible to pan ideologies, which give them a place in something. But the place they have is ultimately sacrificial; they don’t count for anything; all that counts is the big idea."
Trump: The Choice We Face (New York Review of Books, 27 November 2016) Whether those who deal with Trump should be guided by "realism" or morality. Read this one.
Yep, I'm back in the saddle. I can only understand half or two-thirds of what Arendt is saying, because I lack the historical knowledge, but it's still like being hit in the head with successive jolts of electricity. The most important message, for me, so far, overall: racism is an idea, like any other, and someone had to come up with it, and they did so for specific reasons. Also crucial: understanding at last what an ideology is - the "key to reality".
Totalitarianism in the age of Trump: lessons from Hannah Arendt (GA, 2 February 2017) This quotes Arendt expert Professor Griselda Pollock: "She [Arendt] talks of the creation of pan movements, these widespread ideas that overarch national, political and ethnic elements – the two big pan movements she talks about are bolshevism and nazism. There is a single explanation for everything, and before the single explanation, everything else falls away. She gives a portrait of how you produce these isolated people, who then become susceptible to pan ideologies, which give them a place in something. But the place they have is ultimately sacrificial; they don’t count for anything; all that counts is the big idea."
Trump: The Choice We Face (New York Review of Books, 27 November 2016) Whether those who deal with Trump should be guided by "realism" or morality. Read this one.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
May. 1st, 2017 11:24 pmI've made it through five chapters of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Now the library's gone and recalled it! I must snavel my own copy; it's a challenging read, and I'm going to need to re-read at least some of it. I've stuck loads of coloured sticky bookmarks in it, so what I want to do before returning it is quickly jot down which pages caught my attention and why.
Arendt traces the historical reasons for the position of the Jewish people in Europe, and how it changed, first with the appearance of nation-states in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, then the French Revolution, and lastly the rise of imperialism. (14-15) One important element was a lack of interest in / involvement in politics, which contrasts with the "ficitious role of a secret world power" which antisemites still asign to the Jewish people (20-21, 24-25).
The earliest antisemitic political parties in Germany characterised themselves as "above all parties", which to me recalls the boasts of fascist politicians that they are not politicians. Previously, writes Arendt, only the state and the government had claimed to represent the whole nation, and not parties or classes; the antisemitic parties aspired "to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state." (38-39)
Some damn interesting and intricate stuff about "vice" - about how socialites welcomed gay men and Jewish people into their circles because they saw them as representing thrilling naughtiness. "They did not doubt that homosexuals were 'criminals' or that Jews were 'traitors'; they only revised their attitude towards crime and treason. The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime... The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess." There may be a connection here to the lionisation of organised criminals in pop music, and perhaps to the "Social Negroes" that Tom Wolfe writes about in "Radical Chic" IIRC. (ETA: according to Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell's Angels were in demand at fashionable parties.)
Arendt talks at length about the mob. I need to re-read what she has to say, as I'm not clear I genuinely understand who they are. (106-)
She analyses the rise of imperalism at some length - the critical change IIUC being the merging of the state with private economic interests. (eg 126-7). Was it in Inga Clendinnen's book "The Aztecs: an Interpretation" where I first encountered the idea that the Aztec civilisation depended on constant warfare and expansion, and therefore they couldn't have lasted much longer, even if the conquistadors hadn't arrived - that they would have run out of peoples to conquer? Arendt paints a similar picture of the endless expansion required by imperialism, which could only end in catastrophe: "The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours." (145)
Finally for now, this interesting remark: "The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his own class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own." (154)
Arendt traces the historical reasons for the position of the Jewish people in Europe, and how it changed, first with the appearance of nation-states in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, then the French Revolution, and lastly the rise of imperialism. (14-15) One important element was a lack of interest in / involvement in politics, which contrasts with the "ficitious role of a secret world power" which antisemites still asign to the Jewish people (20-21, 24-25).
The earliest antisemitic political parties in Germany characterised themselves as "above all parties", which to me recalls the boasts of fascist politicians that they are not politicians. Previously, writes Arendt, only the state and the government had claimed to represent the whole nation, and not parties or classes; the antisemitic parties aspired "to become the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take possession of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state." (38-39)
Some damn interesting and intricate stuff about "vice" - about how socialites welcomed gay men and Jewish people into their circles because they saw them as representing thrilling naughtiness. "They did not doubt that homosexuals were 'criminals' or that Jews were 'traitors'; they only revised their attitude towards crime and treason. The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime... The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess." There may be a connection here to the lionisation of organised criminals in pop music, and perhaps to the "Social Negroes" that Tom Wolfe writes about in "Radical Chic" IIRC. (ETA: according to Hunter S. Thompson, the Hell's Angels were in demand at fashionable parties.)
Arendt talks at length about the mob. I need to re-read what she has to say, as I'm not clear I genuinely understand who they are. (106-)
She analyses the rise of imperalism at some length - the critical change IIUC being the merging of the state with private economic interests. (eg 126-7). Was it in Inga Clendinnen's book "The Aztecs: an Interpretation" where I first encountered the idea that the Aztec civilisation depended on constant warfare and expansion, and therefore they couldn't have lasted much longer, even if the conquistadors hadn't arrived - that they would have run out of peoples to conquer? Arendt paints a similar picture of the endless expansion required by imperialism, which could only end in catastrophe: "The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours." (145)
Finally for now, this interesting remark: "The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his own class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own." (154)
Stuffs learned from Hannah Arendt 1
Dec. 9th, 2016 12:43 pm"The Origins of Totalitarianism" explores the history of antisemitism, imperialism, and the rise of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. I'm reading it because of that series of Tweets going around which explains that fascists say not what is true, but what would have to be true for them to take the steps they plan - for example, claiming that millions of non-citizens voted in the US election, as a precursor to (further) voter suppression.
1. The difference between totalitarian governments, which aim to control every aspect of their subjects' lives, and merely authoritarian governments, which are tyrannical but allow some freedom; for example, evidence of the end of totalitarianism in the USSR was 'the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts', albeit underground. (pp xxxvi-xxxvii) Also, IIUC, totalitarian regimes make a 'claim to global rule' (xxi), and therefore, 'total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.' (p xxviii) (Is this the goal of North Korea? If so, we're lucky they just don't have the means to put that claim into practice.)
2. "... the fact that totalitarian government... rests on mass support is very disquieting. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars as well as statesmen often refuse to recognize it, the former by believing in the magic of propaganda and brainwashing, the latter by simply denying it... secret reports on German public opinion during the war... shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets - massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc - and, second, the "extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions"... this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime." (p xxiii) My mind went at once to the general support amongst Australians for our mistreatment of refugees. Perhaps our government can drop its efforts to keep it out of sight.
1. The difference between totalitarian governments, which aim to control every aspect of their subjects' lives, and merely authoritarian governments, which are tyrannical but allow some freedom; for example, evidence of the end of totalitarianism in the USSR was 'the amazingly swift and rich recovery of the arts', albeit underground. (pp xxxvi-xxxvii) Also, IIUC, totalitarian regimes make a 'claim to global rule' (xxi), and therefore, 'total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.' (p xxviii) (Is this the goal of North Korea? If so, we're lucky they just don't have the means to put that claim into practice.)
2. "... the fact that totalitarian government... rests on mass support is very disquieting. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars as well as statesmen often refuse to recognize it, the former by believing in the magic of propaganda and brainwashing, the latter by simply denying it... secret reports on German public opinion during the war... shows, first, that the population was remarkably well informed about all so-called secrets - massacres of Jews in Poland, preparation of the attack on Russia, etc - and, second, the "extent to which the victims of propaganda had remained able to form independent opinions"... this did not in the least weaken the general support of the Hitler regime." (p xxiii) My mind went at once to the general support amongst Australians for our mistreatment of refugees. Perhaps our government can drop its efforts to keep it out of sight.
