4 — What goes around, comes around

Arendt doesn’t just make a plea for human rights, she warns that racism (in her theory, expressed as antisemitism and imperialism) is the germ of a deadly sickness: “the nation-destroying and humanity-annihilating power of racism”.

German troops in combat with the Herero people, one of the forgotten genocides of the 20th century

Arendt was one of the first people to draw a line between two major, previously disparate strands of history: the horrors of totalitarian regimes in Europe and the brutality of colonial regimes.

Imperialism she says, harmed not only their victims, but also the states that perpetrated it.

For her, bureaucratic states built by one race to dominate another, the mass population transfers, the famines, the concentration camps, the massacres, gassing, bombing and general callous indifference to human life that characterised European Imperialism in the 100 years prior to WWII were an origin for totalitarian states:

“Two new devices for political organisation and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism. One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination.”

In summary, imperialism was the meeting of racism and bureaucracy. It sharpened and honed racism into a scientific, bureaucratic way of running a state. It gave it gave it the “appearance of national respectability or the seeming sanction of tradition”.

This racism in foreign policy found its way into domestic culture and politics through the conduit of antisemitism, a phenomenon Arendt traces through European history to understand how the Nazis were able to make it a political weapon.

Stolpersteine, memorials for individual victims of the Shoah outside their former homes. Photo credit: flickr_Joop van Dijk

For Arendt, antisemitism illustrates how a state that gives rights to everyone by law can be undermined by racist nationalism that wants to gives them only by birth (as in, birth into a specific race of people, from which Jews, Muslims or other outsiders can be excluded).

This sort of racism, Arendt warns, can “stir up conflict” in every country, which is why it she calls it a powerful weapon for the division and destruction of European nation-states.

5 — How hatred goes mainstream

But how did the racism and cruelty of the colonies go mainstream? That is the part of Arendt’s analysis of mob rule is getting her noticed today.

Her book is essentially a warning of the destructive potential to state and society of politics based on hatred of certain groups (Jews then, Muslims today).

“Hatred … began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere.”

She writes compellingly, and scornfully, about how the elites participate in the erosion of values and the legitimisation of extreme views.

I’m quoting this bit at length — I think it will ring a bell:

“There is no doubt that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened respectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilisation, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it…. The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability… …it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values. and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate.”

In other words, people who complain about “political correctness” and Aziz Ansari’s “We don’t have to pretend to be racist anymore” people.

It is not as if totalitarian leaders hide their opinions, she writes:

“For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”

More specific in totalitarian propaganda, she adds, than direct threats and crimes against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings. Sound familiar?

Finally, she identifies the knack of avoiding fact-checkers by making grand promises about the future, to avoid being proved wrong:

“…by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits.”

6 — Loneliness: “the common ground for terror”

It is the third part of Arendt’s book that everyone is talking about today, which describes totalitarianism, for example:

But the book ends on an unexpected, startling note — loneliness.

If, for Arendt, belonging to a community is vital to having rights, its absence is also an opportunity for mass movements to mobilise “the masses” who belong to no class or political opinion:

“The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”

Arendt does not believe racism comes naturally, but needs people who are uprooted and feel they have no place in the world. Hating Jews (or today, Muslims, migrants or any foreigner) can become “a means of self-definition” that “restored some of the self-respect they had formerly derived from their function in society”.

So by touting anti-semitism, the Nazis offered isolated individuals “futile feelings of self-importance and hysterical security”.

Arendt believes that people were primed for the appeal of totalitarian leaders because they were isolated from any community — political or otherwise:

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Cyber cafe. Photo credit: flickr_Conor

In the age of social media, where digital connections are replacing political ones, this is perhaps the most important warning of Hannah Arendt’s crucial book.

In conclusion:

I’ll leave you with a final word from Hannah Arendt, that essentially summarises The Origins of Totalitarianism: