Lecture 4: Totalitarianism and Hannah Arendt

This week’s lecture was not, as I expected, about fascism and scientific racism, but instead it was about phenomology in relation to totalitarianism and the Holocaust. Although I suppose it was quite fitting to remember the atrocities of the holocaust and those that have fought for democracy/freedom on November 11th.

To start, a definition of phenomology:

An objective analysis of subjective phenomena that can only be known at that moment in time. In plain English this means, before we can think about a set of ideas about, for example, philosophy, we have to think about what philosophy is and why it is a thing. There are also the basic questions; ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, ‘why am I here’, ‘why am I me and not you’? It is a technical philosophy on thinking in the modernist school of phenomology, supported by the work of Jasper and Hediegger as well as Hannah Arendt. Heidegger was married to Arendt and was a Nazi. He wrote ‘Being and Time’ which would have been much more powerful had he not been a Nazi. His aim was to get rid of the enlightenment by asking why things are as they are, for everything. Phenomology also has a connection to Hegel, however the events of the early 20th Century discredited the phenomology movement.

Hannah Arendt; a mid 20th Century academic, writer and philosopher associated with the communist movement and writing in the wake of the holocaust which was a huge shock and setback for the communist movement.

The history behind Hannah Arendt’s ideas:

The Final Solution, for the Nazis, was to use sophisticated systems to murder over 6 million people over the course of just 2 and a half years. If they hadn’t been stopped, they would have aimed to kill every ‘inferior race’ world-wide. There were 4 main stages in the systematic genocide; 1) lock them in a building and set it on fire so that they burnt to death. 2) deport them, firstly to Madagascar, then Uganda, then Siberia (to go in with Stalin’s unwanted peasants), then to holding camps and ghettos. 3) to shoot them in the street (however bullets were valuable and they quickly ran out so more efficient methods were needed). 4) Either work them to death in labour camps or if they weren’t dying quick enough, round them up into gas chambers.

The whole system worked as a commercial exploitation of ‘sub-human’ races such as the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals…. This went so far as using the hair that was shaved from their heads in the production of fabric, the gold from their teeth as currency and the calcium from their bones. Films such as ‘Shoah’ (1973) show that people in Germany knew. Ordinary people were part of these atrocities, whether it be by organising the trains for transportation of the people to camps, or making tea for the people that organised the trains, even just by not standing up to this genocide, people were compliant and therefore involved in the atrocities. For instance; the Channel Islands were 100% co-operative, showing no resistance whatsoever, does this mean that they are partly to blame?

Hannah Arendt argues that the holocaust is the fault of everyone involved, that it was normal and that Hitler must not be used as a scapegoat simply because he was the ‘ hypnotist’ leadership figure who is now dead and therefore easy to blame. She said that there is no superhero, no scapegoat, for something that they were all complicit in. By doing their jobs, people were involved and therefore partly to blame.

This is linked to her belief in the ‘banality of evil’; it starts with discrimination because they are different, then it becomes them being a problem, then you have to do something about the problem, then you have to be more efficient in solving the problem. It is similar to the phrase ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. Even by meaning well you may, in fact, be doing harm. This can be clearly seen in the development of the genocide to the Final Solution. Hannah Arendt argued that compared to Fascists, Communists are liberal in an enlightened sense; instead of prison they try to reform criminals; by sending Kulaks to Siberia, Stalin intended to reform them so that they could eventually return to society.

The actual events which emerged in Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ in 1956 suggest that this was not the case. It revealed the crimes of Joseph Stalin, meaning that the world no longer saw him as a ‘nice’ dictator. The mass genocide of the Kulaks amongst other peasant or farmer minorities was revealed. They were either shot on the spot or deported to death camps in Siberia. They were welcomed to leave if they did not like it in the prison, but all that faced them outside was thousands of miles of snow and ice, with the occasional tree, so their choice was death or death. Again, it was a case of economic gains from keeping them for labour. Thousands of Kulaks died in a 5 year battle to dig the White Sea Canal with their bare hands, faced with machine guns if they stopped. The speech also revealed that Stalin had gone insane by the outbreak of war with Germany; just a couple of weeks before the Germans invaded, he ordered a meeting of his commanding officers where, in a paranoid rage, he shot them all. It also came out that the Russian economy was dependent on slave labour; they became addicted to it and when they ran out of Kulaks to deport and use for labour they would arrest and frame innocent people whose jail time would be spent in a labour camp. All of this caused an outcry and came as a shock to the communist movement whose moral force lost integrity and it led to a re-evaluation of Marxism.

In the 1960s this re-evaluation could be seen in the New Left which Hannah Arendt was a part of. They were trying to come to terms with ‘the God that failed’ and the atrocities carried out under communist rule that had come to light. This new group’s leader was Ralph Milliband who set up the Institute for Workers Control. The group was mainly made up of Trotskyites who said that Stalin was not communist enough and did not stick to Communist ideals which is why his dictatorship went wrong.

The 1930s and 1940s showed communist heroics and led to a worship of Stalin, which was later blown apart by Khrushchev’s revelations, for instance the Battle of Stalingrad showed communism beating fascism.

The 1950s saw leftist heroism with Sartre and Camus being very influential. The French Revolution and emergence of existentialism meant that people finally confronted the reality of collaboration; the reality that it was not all Hitler, but also the people that carried out his orders. This period also saw the Cold War and much Anti-Communism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The 1960s saw the New Left take off, for example in America with the sexual politics of the women’s liberation, gay liberation, black liberation, disability rights and ‘PC’ language, (although this owed more to Nietzschean individualism than to socialism). The ‘60s also saw the Liberal Elite who were detached and avante garde, regarding individuality as having no connection to the organised working class. This was seen as a phenomenon of the Western world. Maoist type communist also evolved into something strange and violent, further smudging the name of Communism, with atrocities in countries such as Nepal, Cambodia, Peru and Zimbabwe.

Hannah Arendt’s Ideas:

Arendt said that World War 2 was too horrific to talk about, bringing in Freudian ideas of repression and coping mechanisms such as scape-goating. She said that this was because, deep down, they all knew that everyone was complicit. She argued that people need to think for themselves and never submit irrationally to authority; if it goes against your morals to do something, don’t do it just because you are told. Don’t just follow the herd; THINK.

Another of her ideas was the ‘banality of evil’ which came from the trial of Eichmann, the man known as the architect of the holocaust, who stood there as a normal man, not a raving lunatic, and said he was just doing his job. He wrongly argued that Kantean philosophy taught him to obey the boss no matter what, to always please and do his duty. Arendt argued that ‘collaboration is death’ meaning that by collaborating, he murdered. This links to Neo-Kantianism and its ideas about the moral law and the categorical imperative.

She emphasises that we must THINK rather than simply obeying. She said ‘no thinking person could have done what Eichmann did’, which is true. But the question is, when do we draw the line between the moral good for humanity and the good of ourselves? After all, we live in a world where it is survival of the fittest.