THE ORIGINS

TOTALITARIANISM

Hannah Arendt

Introduction "hy Samantha Power

•.• 0,., ,' .. ',. ':

SCHOCKEN BOOKS, NEW YORK

Introcluction copyright © 2004 by Samantha Power

Copyright © 1948 and renewed 1976 by Hannah Arcndt.

Copyright © 1951 by Hannah Arendt.

Copyright rcnewed © 1979 by Mary McCarthy West.

Copyright © 1966, 1968 by HannahArenclt.

Copyright renewecl © 1994, 1996 by Lotte Kahler.

All rights reserved uncler International and Pan-American Copyright Con-,

ventians. Publishecl in the United States by Schocken Baaks, a division of: ~' Random Hause, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random

House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a divi­

sion of Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally pttblished in slighdy different form in the United States

by HarcourtJ Inc., Orlando, in 19)1.

Schocken and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arendt, Hannah.

The origins of totalitarianism / Hannah Arendt; introcluetion by

Samantha Power.

p.em.

Originally published: Ist cd. New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1951].

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8052-4225-2

I. Totalitarianism. 2.Imperialism. }. Antisemitism. 1. Tide.

Jq80.A74 2oo4

}20·53-dc22.

www.schocken.com

Book design by Peter A. Andersen Printed in the United Stares of·America

First Edition

6 8 9 7

200}060749

To Heinrich Blücher

CONTENTS

Introduction by Sam.nth. Power ix

Preface to the First Edition xxv

I ANTISEMITISM

Pref.ce (1967) 3 I. Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense II

2. The Jews, the Nation-Stare, and the Birth of Antisemitism 21

3· The Jews and Society 74 4- The Dreyfus Affair II7

Ir IMPERIALISM

Preface (1967) li9 I. The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie 167

2. Race-Thinking Before Racism 210

3. Race and Bureaucracy 242

4- Continental Imperialism: The Pan-Movements 287

i. The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the

Rights of Man 341

III TOTALITARIANISM

Preface (1967) I. A Classless Society

2. The TotaHtarian Movement

Contents

3. Totalitarianism in Power 507

4. Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government 593

APPENDIX

"Totalitarianism" 617

"Concluding Remarks" 618

Bibliography 633

Index

viii

INTRODUCTION SAMANTHA POWER

I. Origins

Hannah Arendt dated her awakening to February 27, '933, the day the

Reichstagburned down. From the moment Adolf Hicler began using the fire

as apretext to suspend civilliberties and crush dissent, Arendt said, "I feIt

ibl ". respons e.

Arendt rook responsibility for observing, for critiquing, and for summon­

ing her generation to judgment and action. Her test for philosophy was

not its "vapors of cleverness," but its capacity to improve the human condi­

tion.2

She spent her career scavenging around in the unsavory crevices of

humanity, and analyzing the contours of the forbidding elouds of geopoli­

tics, and she could have easily chosen despair. But instead she opted to

take responsibility for illuminating that darkness. Hannah Arendt was and

remains a writer for dark times.

Born in '906, Arendt grew up in Königsberg (then part of Germany) and

attended the University of Marburg, where she studied theology, ancient

Greek literature, and, under Martin Heidegger, philosophy. She wrote her

Ph.D. dissertation on St. Augustine's concept of love, working at the Uni­

versity of Heidelberg with psychiatrist and philosopher Kar! Jaspers, who

became her mentor. Wirh the Nazi crackdown in 1933, Arendt, who was

Jewish, became politicized, collecting evidence of the persecution of Ger­

man Jews. She was arrested by the Gestapo, and upon her release, she Red to

I. Hannah Arendt, " 'What Remains? Thc Language Remains': A Conversation with Gunther Gaus,"

trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Essays 1;/ Understanding, lf)jo-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (Ncw York: Harcourt

Braee, 1994), p. 5. 1. Hannah Arendt, Men 111 Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Bmce, & World, 19158), p. 74, where

Arendt eites Irnrnanuel Kant's test for philosophical essays.

IMPERIALISM

The nation that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem 46

was apretext

used by a~l governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None

of the statesmen was aware that Hitlees solution of the Jewish problem, first

to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Germany, then to

drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them

back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an

eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how real1y to "liquidate"

all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned

out that the Jewish question, which was considered the onIy insoluble one,

was indeed solved-namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered

territory-but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the

stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the twentieth cen­

tury, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of

refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and right­

less by another 7°0,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine

within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was tben

repeated in India on a large seale involving many millions of people. Since

the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have

attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth

which were created in the image of the nation-state.

For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For

the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has

broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to

replace the older Iaws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves

into an anarchie mass of over- and lUlderprivileged individuals. Laws that

are not equal for a11 revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory

to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to

treat stateless people as legal persons and -the greater the extension of arbi­

trary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temp­

tation to deprive a11 citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent

police.

46. This was by no means only a notion of Nazi Germany, though only a Nazi amhor dared to express

ie: "Ir is tme that a refugee question will cominue to exist evcn wbcn there is 110 longer a Jewish question;

bm since Jews form such a high perccmagc of the refugees, the refugee <Iuestion will be much sim­

plitled" (Kabermann, "Das internationale Flüchtlingsproblem," in Zeitschrifi für Politik, Bd. 29,

Heft},1939)·

The Decline 0/ the Nation-State and the End 0/ the Rightr of Man

The Perplexities of the Rights of Man

The declaration .of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century

was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from

. thell on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history, should

be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had

bestowed upon certain strata of society cr certain nations, the declaration

indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had

noW come of age.

Beyond this, there was another implicati.on of which the framers of the

declaration were only half awal'e. The proclamation of human rights was also

meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were

00 langer secure in the estates to which they were born cr sure of their

equaHty before Gad as Christians. In other wards, in the new secularized and

emancipated sodety, men were no longer sure of these soeial and human

fights which until then had been outside the politieal order and guaranteed not

by government and constitution, but by soda1, spiritual, and religious forces.

Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was

that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuaIs needed protection

against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.

Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be "inalienable,') irreducible

to and undeducible [rom other rights or laws, no authority was invoked for

theif establishment; Man hirnself was their source as weIl as their ultimate

goal. No special law, moreaver, was deemed necessary to protect them

because alliaws were supposed to rest upan them. Man appeared as the onIy

sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign

in matters of government. The people's sovereignty (different from that of

the prince) was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of Man,

so that it seemed only natural that -the "inalienable" rights of man would"find

their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to

sovereign self-government.

In other wards, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, cornpletely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself withaut

reference to some targer encompassing order, when he disappeared again

into a member of a people. From the beginning the paradox involved in

3 69

IMPERIALISM

the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an

"abstract" human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived

in some kind of a social order. If a tribai or other "backward" community

did not enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet

reached that stage of civilization, thc stage of popular and national SOVer_

eignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole question

of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the

question of national emancipation; onIy the emancipated sovereignty of the

peopIe, of one 's own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As mankind , sinee the French Revolution, was coneeived in the image of a family of

nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the indi­

vidual, was the image of man.

The full impliearion of this identification of the rights of man with the

rights of peoples in the European nation-state system eame to light onIy

when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of

nation-states in thc middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart

of Africa. The Rights of Man, after a11, had been defined as "inalienable"

because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; hut it

turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and

had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to proteet

them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. Or when) as in the

ease of the minorities, an international body arrogated to itself a nongovern­

mental authority, its failure was apparent even before its measures were fully

realized; not onIy were the governments more or less openly opposed to this

encroachment on their sovereignty, but the concerned nationaHties them­

selves did not recognize a nonnational guarantee, mistrusted everything

which was not dear-cut support of their "national" (as opposed to their mere

"linguistic, religious, and ethnic") rights, and preferred either, like the Ger­

mans or Hungarians, to turn to the protection of the "national" mother coun­

try, or, like the Jews, to some kind of interterritorial solidarity.47

47. Pathetic i1lsta1lces of this exelusive confidence in national rights were the consent, before the second

World War, of nearly 7~ PC{ cent of thc GCrnlill\ minority in the halian Tyrol to leave thcir homes and

resettle i1l Germany, the voluntary repatriation of a German island in Slovenia whkh llad beeil there

sincc thc fourteenth century, or, immcdiatcly after the dose of the war, thc unanimous rejectioll by Jcw­

ish refugccs in an Iralian DP camp of an offer of mass naturalization by the Italiangovernment. In the

JJO

The Decline o[ ehe Nation-State and the End o[ the Rights 0/ Man

The stateless people were as convinced as the minorities that lass of

national rights was identieal with 10ss of human rights, that the former inevi­

tably entailed the latter. The more they were excluded from right in any

form, the more they tended to look for areintegration into anational, into

their own national eommunity. The Russian refugees were oniy the first to

insist on their nationality and to defend themselves furiously against at··

tempts to lump them together with ather stateless people. Sinee them, not a

single group of refugees or Displaced Persons has failed to develop a fieree,

violent group consciousness and to clamor for rights as-and only as­

Poles or Jews or Germans, etc.

Even worse was that all socieries fonned for the protection of the Rights

of Man, all attempts to arrive at a new bill of human rights were sponsored

by marginal figures-by a few international jurists without politieal experi­

ence or professional phiIanthropists supparted by the uncertain sentiments of

professional idealists. Tbe groups they fonned, the declarations they issued,

showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of soci­

eties for the prevention of eruelty to animals. No statesman, no politieal fig­

ure of any importance could possibly take them seriously; and none of the

liberal or radical parties in Europe thought it necessary to incorporate into

their program a new declaration of human rig):lts. Neither befare nor after

the second World War have the victims themselves ever invoked these fun­

damental rights, which were so evidently denied them, in their many at­

tempts to find a way out of tbe barbed-wire labyrinth into which events had

driven them. On the contrary, the victims shared the disdain and indifference

of tbe powers that be for any attempt of the marginal societies to enforce

human rights in any elementary or general sense.

The failure of all responsible persons to meet the ealamity of an ever­

growing body of people forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law

with the proclamation of a new bill of rights was certainly not due to ill will. N ever before had the Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the French and

the American revolutions as the new fundament for civilized societies, been a

practical politieal issue. During the nineteenth century, these rights had been,

face of the experience of European peoples between the two wars, it would be a serious miSt3ke LO inter­

pret this behavior simply as anotherexample of fanutie nationalist sentiment; these people no longer feit

sure of thdr e1ementary fights if these werc not protected by a govcrnment to whkh they belonged by

birth. See Eugene M. Kulisher, vp. eiL.

JJI

JMPERIALISM

invoked in a rather perfunctory way, [0 defend individuals against the

increasing power of the state and to mitigate the new sodal insecurity caused

by the ihdustrial revolution. Then the meaning of human rights acquired a

new connotation: they became the standard slogan of the protecrors of the

underprivileged, ~ kind of additionallaw, a right of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upan.

The reason why the concept of human rights was treated as a sort of

stepchild by nineteenth-century political thought and why no liberal or radi­

cal party in the twentieth century, even when an urgent need for enforcement

of human rights arose, saw fit to include them in its program seems obvious:

dvil rights-that is the varying rights of citizens in different countries­

were supposed to embody and spell out in the form of tangible laws the

eternal Rights of Man, which by themselves were supposed to bc_ indepen­

dent of dtizenship and nationality. All human beings were citizens'of some

kind of political community; if the laws of their country did not live up

to the demands of the Rights of Man, they were expected to change them,

by legislation in democratic countries or through revolutionary action in despotisms.

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable­

even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them-whenever

people appeared who were no langer citizens of any sovereign state. Ta this

fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by

the many rccent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have

demonstrated that no one seems able to define wirh any assurance what these

general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are.

Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists

precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no üne seems to know which

rights they lost when they lost these human rights.

The first 10ss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their hornes and , this meant the lass of the entire social texture into whieh they were born and

in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world. This

calamity is far from unprecedented; in the lang memory of history, forced

migrations of individuals or whole groups of people for potitieal or economic

reasons look like everyday Occurrences. What is unprecedented is not the lass

of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. Suddenly, there was no

place on earth where rnigrants could go without the severest restrictions, no

JJ2

The Decline of the Nation-State and the End 01 the Rights 0/ Man

country where they would be assimilated, no territory where they could

found a new community of their own. This, moreover, had next to nothing

to do with any material problem of overpopulatioo; it was a problem not of

space but of political organization. Nobody had beeo awal'e that mankind,

for so long a time considered under the image of a family of nations, had

reached the stage where whoever was thrown out of ooe of these tightly

organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family of

. I th 4' natJons a tage er.

The second loss which the rightless suffered was the lass of governrnent

protection, and this did not imply just the lass of legal status in their owo, but

in all countries. Treaties of reciprodry and international agreements have

woven a web around the earth that makes it possihle for the citizen of every

country to take his legal status with hirn no matter where he goes (so that, for

instance, a German citizen under the Nazi regime might not be ahle ra enter

a mixed marriage abroad beeause of the Nuremberg laws). Yet, whoever is

no longer caught in itfinds himself out of legality altogether (thus duringthe

last war stateless people were invariably in a worse position than enemy

aliens who were still indirectly protected by their governments through inter­

national agreements). By itse1f the loss of government protection is 00 more unprecedented

than the loss of ahome. Civilized countries did offer the right of asylum to

those who, for politieal reasons, had been persecuted by their governments,

and this practiee, though never officially incorporated inra any constitution,

has functioned welt enough throughout the nineteenth and even the twenti­

eth centuries. The trouble arOse when it appeared that the new categories of

persecuted were far too IlUmerous to be handled by an unofficial practiee

destined for exceptional cases. Moreover, the majority could hardly qualify

for the right of asylum, which implicitly presupposed political or religious

convictions whieh were not outlawed in the country of refuge. The new

refugees were persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but

because of what they unchangeably were-born into the wrong kind of race

48. The few chances for reintegration open [Q the new migrants were mostly hased on their nationality:

Spanish refugees, for instance, were wekomed tO a cerrain extent in Mcxi~o. The Vnite<! States, ~n thc early twenticS, adoptcd a quota system according to which each nationahty already repre~ented In

the country reccived, so to speak, the fight 10 ieceive a number of former countrymen proportlOnate to

its numerical part in thc total population.

3JJ

IMPERIALISM

or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government (as in the case of the Spanish Republican Army).49

The more the number of rightless people increased, the greater became

the temptation to pay less attention to the deeds of the persecuting gov~ ernrnents than to the status of the persecuted. And the first glaring fact Was

that these people, though persecuted under seme political pretext were . , no longer, as the persecuted had been throughout history, a liabiIity and an

image of shame for the persecutors; that they were not considered and

hardly pretended to be active enernies (the few thousand Soviet citizens who

voluntarily left Soviet Russia after the second World War and found asylum

in democratic countries did more damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union

than miIlions of refugees in the twenties who belonged to the wrong dass),

but timt they were and appeared to be nothing but human beings wlIose very

innocence-from every point of view, and especial1y that of the persecuting

govermnent-was their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of COm_

plete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it Was the seal of their 10ss of political status.

Only in appearanee therefore do the needs for a reinforeement of human

rights touch upon the fate of the authentie political refugee. Political refugees,

of necessity few in number, still enjoy the right to asylum in many countries,

and this right acts, in an informal way, as a genuine substitute for narionallaw.

One of the surprising aspects of our experience with stateless people who

benefit legal1y from committing a crime has been the fact that it seems to be

easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than someone who

has committed an offense. AnatoIe France 's famous quip, "If I am accused of

stealing the towers of Notre Dame, I can only flee the coumry," has assurned

a horrible reality. Jurists are so used to thinking of law in terms of punish­

ment, which indeed always deprives us of certain rights, that they may find it

even mOre diffieult than the layman to reeognize that the deprivation of

Iegality, i.e., of al! fights, no longer has a connecdon with specific crimes.

49· How dangcrous ir can be to be innocent from the poim of view of the persecuting governmem

hecame very dear when, during the last war, the American government offered asylum to all those Ger_ man refugecs who wcrc threatcned by the extradition paragraph in the German-French Armistice. The

condition was, of course, that thc applicant cDuld provc that he had done something against the Nazi

regime. The proportion of refugees from Germany who were able to fulfill this condidon was very

smaH, and they, strangcly enough, were not tbe peap!e who werc most in danger.

JJ4

The Decline 01 the Nation-State and the End oi the Rigllts 01 Man

This situation illustrates the many perplexities inherent in the concept of

human rights. No matter how they have once been defined (life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness, aeeording to the American formula, or as equality

before the law, liberty, proteetion of property, and national sovereignty,

according to the French); no matter how one may atternpt to improve an

ambiguous formulation like the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one

Iike unqualified right to property; the real situation of those whom the twen­

deth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that these are rights

of citizens whose 10ss does not entail absolute rightlessness. The soldier

during the war is deprived of his right to life, the criminal of his right to

freedorn, all citizens during an emergency of their right to the pursuit of

happiness, but nobody_would ever claim that in any of these instances a 1055

of human rights has taken place. These rights, on the other hand, can be

granted (though hardly enjoyed) even under conditions of fundamental

rightlessness.

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law'and freedorn of

opinion-formulas which were designed to solve problems within given

communities-but that they no longer belong to any communhy whatso­

ever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law

exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to

oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengtllY process is their right

to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly "superfluous," if nobody

can be found to "claim" -them, may their lives be in danger. Even the Nazis

started their extermination of Jews by first depriving thcm of an legal status

(the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting thern off from the world

of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and

before they set the gas chamb~rs into motion they had carefully tested the

ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these

people. The point is that a condition of compiete rightlessness was created

before the right to live was challenged.

The same is true even to an ironical extentwith regard to the right of free­

dom which is sometimes considered to be the very essence of human rights.

There is no question that those outside the pale of the law rnay have more

freedorn of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that they enjoy

more freedorn of opinion in the internment camps of dernocratic countries

IMPERIALISM

than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a totalitari ~ .

country. But neither physical safety-being fcd by SOme state or private

welfare agency-nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their funda_

m~ntal situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their Üves is due to

charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations to

feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no

right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course'

and their freedorn of opinion is a fool'5 freedorn, for nothing they think mat~ ters anyhow.

These last points are crucial. The fundamental deprivation of human

rights 1S manifested first and above all in thc deprivation of a place in the

world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Sornething

rnuch more fundamental than freedorn and justice, which are rights of citi­

zens, is at stake when belonging to the cornrnunity into which one is born is

no langer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice,

or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a crime, his

treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not do. This

extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of human

rights. They are deprived, not of tbe right to freedorn, but of the right

to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right [0

opinion. Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and doorn are

meted out to them according to accident and without any relation whatso­ever to what they do, did, or may do.

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that

means to live in a framework where Olle isjudged by one's actions and opin­

ions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when

millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights

because of the new global political situation. The trouble is that this calamity

arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but,

on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there was no longer any

"uncivilized" spot on earth, because whether we like it or not we have reaHy

50. Even uncler the conclitions of tolalitarian terror, concentration camps sornetimes have been the only place where certain remnunts of freedorn of thought und discussion still existed. See David Roussct, Lu JOUfS de Notre Mon, Paris, 1947,pa.ssim, for freedorn of discussion in Buchenwald, und Amon Ciliga, .The Russian Emgma, Landon, 1940, p. 200, about "isles of libcrty," "the freedon~ of mind" tim rcigneJ In Same of the Soviet places of detention.

JJG

Tlle Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rigltts 0/ Man

started to live in One World. Only with a completely organized humanity

could thc loss of horne and political status become identical with expulsion

from humanity altogether. Before this, what we must caU a "human right" today would -have been

thought of as'a general characteristic of the human condirion which na

tyrant could take away. Its loss entails the lass of thc relevance of speech

(and man, since Aristotle, has been defined as a being commanding thc

power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (and

man, again since Aristotle, has been thought of as the "political animal," that

is one who by definition lives in a community), the loss, in other words, of

same of thc most essential characteristics of human life. This was to a certain

extent the plight of slaves, whom Aristotle therefore did not count among

human beings. Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights was

not that it wok liberty away (which can happen in many other situations),

but that it exclud~d a certain category of people even from the possibiHty

of fighting for freedom-a fight possible under tyranny, and even ~lllder the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any conditions of

concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin

when one peorle defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this

was bad enough), but when slavery becarne an institution in which sorne men

were «born" free and others slave, when it was fergotten that it was man who

had deprived his fellow-rnen of freedern, and when the sanction for the

crirne was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events it is possible

to say that even slaves still be10nged to some sort of human community; their

labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them within the pale of

humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in

society-more than the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but

human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, hut the 1055 of a community will­ing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calarnity which

has befallen ever-increasing nurnbers of people. Man, it turns out, can lose

aB so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man) his

human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels hirn from humanity.

The right that corresponds to this 10ss and that was never even mentioned

among thc human rights cannot be expressed in the categories of the eigh­

teenth century because they presume that rights spring irnmediately from the

"nature" of man-whereby it makes relatively little difference whether this

JJJ

! I

IMPERIALISM

nature is visualized in terms of the naturallaw or in terms of a being created

in the image of Ged, whether it concerns "natural" rights or divine Corn.

mands. 'The decisive facter is that these rights and the human dignity they

bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human bein

existed on earth; they are independent of human plurality and should remai:

valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community.

When the Rights of Man were proclaimed for the first time, they Were

regarded as being independent of history and the privileges which history had

accorded certain strata of society. The new independence constituted the

newly discovered dignity of man. F rom the beginning, this new dignity Was

of a rather ambiguous nature. Historical rights were replaced by natural

rights, (lnature" took the place of history, and it was tacitly assumed that

nature was less alien than history to the essence of man. The very language of

the Declaration of Independence as weIl as of the Diclaratioft des Droitr de

rHomme-"inaIienabIe," "given with birth," "self-evident truths"-implies

the belief in a kind of human "nature" which would be subject to the same

laws of growth as that of the individual and from which rights and laws

could be deduced. Today we are perhaps better qualified to judge exactly

what this human t<nature" amounts to; in any event it has shown us poten­

tialities that were neither recognized nor even suspected by Western philoso­

phy and religion, which for more than three thousand years have defined and

redefined this "nature." Bur it is not onIy the, as it were, human aspect of

nature that has become questionable to uso Ever since man learned to master

it to such an extent that the destruction of all organic liEe on earth with man­

made instruments has become conceivable and technicaUy possible, he has

been alienated from nature. Ever since a deeper knowledge of natural pro­

cesses instilled serious douhts about the existence of natural Iaws at all na-, ture itself has assumed a sinister aspect. How should one be able to deduce

laws and rights from a universe which apparently knows neither the one nor the other category?

Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature

as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have be­

come equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man can no

langer be- comprehended in terms of either category. On the other hand,

humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology, was no

The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rz.'ghts 0/ Man

more than a regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact. This new

situation, in which- "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly as­

cribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to

have fights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be

guarameed by humanity itself. Ir is by no means certain whether this is possi­

ble. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain

new declarations of human rights from"international organizations) it should

be understood that this idea transcends the presem sphere of international

law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties be­

tween sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the

nations does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be

eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world gov··

ernment is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in

reality it might differ considerabIy from the version promoted by idealistic­

minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become

a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that

right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its

parts. (Hiders motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is

only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found every­

where and which in practice will remain ineffectual only so long as oider tra­

ditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this.) A conception

of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for-for

the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number-becomes

inevitable once' the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion 01' the

law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means

solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as rnankind itself.

For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political

possibilities, that one fine day a highIy organized and mechanized humanity

will conclude quite democratically-namely by majority dedsion-that for

humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.

Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the

oidest perpiexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected

only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all

political and philosophical problems, bm which long ago caused Plato to say:

"Not man but a god must be the measure of all things." , ,

379

IMPERIAL15M

These facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, anel belated

confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed

the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appeal' to

buttress his assertion that human rights were an "abstraction," that it Was

much wiser to rely on an "entailed inheritance" of rights which one transmits

to one's children like liEe itself, and to claim one's rights to be the "rights of an

Englishman" rather than the inalienable rights of man. p According to Burke

the rights which we enjoy spring "[rom within the nation," so that nei~ ther naturallaw, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as

Robespierre's "human race," "the sovereign of the earth," are needed as " a source of law.

The pragmatic soundness of Burke' 5 concept seems to be beyond doubt in

the light of our manifold experiences. Not onIy did 105S of national riglus in

all instanc.es entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights,

as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so [ar

only through the restoration or the establishment of national fights. The

conception of human fights, based upon the assumed existence of a human

being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who pl'Ofessed to

believe in it were for the first time confl'Onted with people who had indeed lost

all other qualities and specific relationships-except that they were still

human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of heing

human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say how the

concepts of man upon which human rights are based-that he is created in the

image of God (in the American formula), 01' that he is the represenrative of

mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred demands of naturallaw

(in the Freneh formula)-eould have heJped to find a solution to the problem.

The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration

and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people

could see without Burke's arguments that the abstract nakedness of being

nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were re­

garded as savages and, afraid that they might end by being considered beasts,

51· Edmund Burkc, Riflections 0/1 d/C RevolutiOl1 1/1 Fr<l/Icc, 1790, editcd by E. ]. Payne, Everyman's Library.

p. Robespierrc, Specc!u,!$, 1917. Speech of April ~4, '793.

3 80

The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of ehe Riglus of Man

they insisted on their nationality) the last sign of their former citizenship, as

their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of

natural, their preference for national, fights comes precisely from their real­

ization tImt natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already

feared that natural "inalienable" rights would confirm only the "right of the

naked savage, .. n and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of sav­

agery. Because only savages have nothing more to fall back upon than the

minimum fact of their human origin, people ding to their natio.nality 311 thc

more desperately when they have lost the rights and proteetion that such

nationality _once gave them. Only their past with its (jentailed inheritance"

seems to attest to the fact that they still belong to thc civilized world.

If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the

implications of the inborn aud inalienable rights of man, come under exacrly

thc situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided.

Actually thc opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a

man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people tO

treat hirn as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more diffi­

cult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal, that is of a man who has

taken upon himself the responsibility for an act whose consequences now

determine his fate) than of a man who has been disallowed all common

human responsibilities. Burke 's arguments therefore gain an added significance if we look only at

the general human condition of those who have been forced out of all politi­

cal communities. Regardless of treatment, independent of liberties or oppres­

sion, justice or injustice, they have lost all those parts of the world and an

those aspects of human existence which are the result of our common labor,

the outcome of the human artifice. If the tragedy of savage tribes is that they

inhabit an unchanged nature which they cannot master, yet upon whose

abundanee or frugality they depend for their livelihood, that they live and

die withollt leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to a

common world, then these rightless people are indeed thrown back into a

peculiar state of nature. Certainly they are not barbarians; some of them,

indeed, belong to the most educated strata of their respective countries;

B. Introdllction by Payne to Burke,op. ci!.

IMPERIAUSM

nevertheless, in a world that has almost Hquidated savagery they a , ppear as the first signs of a possible regression from civilization.

The more highly developed a civilizatiotl, the more a.ccomplished the world it has produced, the more at horne men feel within the human artifice_

~he more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that

IS merely and mysteriously given them. The human being who has lost h'is

place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the

legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent

whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate onIy in

the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in an

matters of public cancern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mys~ ~eriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of Our bodies and

the talents of our rninds, can be adequately dealt wirh ooly by th~ unpre­

dietable hazards of friendship and sympathy, Or by the great and inealculable

grace of love, which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis [I want you to be],"

without beiog able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsur~ passable affirmation.

Sinee the Creeks, we have known that highly developed political Iife

breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentm~nt against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us 1S made as

he is-single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely given,

relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the pub­

He sphere, hecause the pubBe sphere is as consistently based on the law of

equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and

differentiation. Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence

is not given us, bm is thc result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we becomc equal as mem­

bers ora group on the strength of Dur decision to guarantee ourselves mutu­ally equal fights.

Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality

through organization, because man can act in and change and build a com­

mon worId, together with his equaIs and onIy with his equals. The dark

background of mere givenness, the background formed by Dur unchange­

able and unique nature, breaks into the poJitical scene as the aUen which in its

all tao obvious difference reminds us of the !imitations of human activity­

which are identical with the limitations of human equality. The reason why

The Dec!ine 0/ the Nation-State and the End 0/ the Rights of Malt

highly developed political communities) such as the ancient city-states or

modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity 1S that they hope

to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always present differences

alld differentiations which by themselves at·ouse dumb hatred, mistrust, and

discrimination because,they indicate all toD clearly those spheres where men

cannot act and change at will, i.e., the limitations of the human artifice. The "alien" is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individu­

ality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and

cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy. If a

N egro in a white community is considered a N egro and nothing else, he loses

along wirh his right to' equaHty that freedom of action which 1S specifical1y

human; an his deeds are now explained as "necessary" consequences of some

"Negro" qualitiesj he has become some specimen of an animal species, called

man. Much the same thing happens to those who have lost all distinctive

political qualities and -have become human beings and nothing else. No

doubt, wherever public life and its law of equality are completely victorious,

wherever a civilization succeeds in eliminating 01' reducing to a minimum the

dark background of difference, it will end in compiete petrifaction and be

punished, so to speak, for having forgotten that man is only the master, not

'the creator of the world. The great danger ansing [rom the existence of people forced to live out­

side the common world -is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civiliza­

don, on their natural givenness, on tbeir mere differentiation. They lack that

tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens of

some commonwealth and yet, since tbey are no longer allowed to partake

in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in much the

same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. The paradox

involved in tbe 10ss of human rights is that such loss coincides with the

instant when a person becomes a human being in general-without a profes­

sion, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to

identify and specify himself-and different in general, representing nothing

but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression

within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.

The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: first and more obvi­

ously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our political life,· our human

artifice the world which is the result of aur common and co-ordinated effort ,

JMPERIALISM

in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, way as the wild elements of

nature onee threatened the existence of man-made cities and countrysides.

Deadly danger to any civilization is 110 Jonger likely to corne from without.

Nature has been rnastered and na barbarians threaten to destroy what they

cannot understand, as tbe MongoIians threatened Europe for centuries. Even

the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not OUt~ side, our civilization. The danger is that aglobai, universally interrelated

civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions

of people into conditions whieh, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages. i4

54· This modern expulsion from humanity has much morc radieal consequences man the andent and medieval custom of out!awry. Oudawry, certainly the "most fearful fate which primitive law could inflkt," p!acing the life of the outlawed person at thc mercy of anyone he met, disappeared with the cstablishment of an cffectivc system of law enforcemem and was finally replaced by extradition treaties hetwcen the nations. Ithad hecn primarily a substitute for a police force, designed tO compel criminals 10 surrender.

The early Middle Ages seern to have hcen quite conscious of the danger involved in "civil death." Excornmunication in the late Roman Empire meant ecdesiastlcal de,uh hut left a person who had lost his membership in the church fu!! freedorn in all O!her respects. Ecclesiastic.11 und dvil death hecame identi~ cal only in (he Merovingian era, and there excommunication "in general practice (was] ljmiled 10 tem­porary withdrawal or suspension of the fights of memhership which miglu be regained." See the artkles "Outlawry" and "Excommunicatioll" in the Encyclopedia of Soeia! Seieilces. Also the article "Friedlosigkeit" in thc Sehweiter Lexiko/l.

<$> <$> <$> I II <$> <$> <$>

TOTALITARIANISM

Normal men do not know that everything is

possible. -David Rousset

TOTALITARIANISM

them. '14 The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward real­

izing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world . , which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian

country itself) induIges also in wishfuI thinking and shirks reality in the face

of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world.

This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly

strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reli­

ahle statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that

there are onIy subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliablc reports about the places of ,he Iiving dead.

Because of this policy, the results of the totalitarian experiment are only

partiaHy known. Although we have enough reports from concentration

camps to assess the possibiIities of total domination and to eatch a',glimpse

into the ahyss of the "possible," we do not know the extent of character

transformation under a totalitarian regime. We know even less how many of

the normal people around us would be willing to accept the totalitarian way

of life--that is, to pay the price of a considerably shorter life for the assured

fulfillment of all their career dreams. It is easy to realize the extent to which

totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the

needs of the new homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know how

many of them, if they are further exposed to a constant threat of unemploy­

ment, will gladly acquiesee to a ((population poliey" that consists of regular

elimination of surplus people, and how many, onee they have fully grasped

their growing ineapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly con­

form to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility~ In other words, while we know the operation and the specifie function of

the totaHtarian secret police, we do not know how weil or to what an extent

the "secret" of this secret sodety corresponds to the secret desires and the secret compIicities of the masses in Our time.

124. Thc Nazis were weil aware of the protcetiv€: wall of incredulity Wllich surrouilded thcir cnrcrprisc. A secret rcpOrt eo Rosenberg about thc massacrc of 5,000 Jews in 1943 stares cxplicidy: "lmaginc only that these occurrcnces would becomc known 10 the othcr side und exploited by thern. Most likely such propaganda would have no effec! only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to believe it" (Nati Conspiracy. I, 1001).

Totalitarianis11l in Power

Total Domination

The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as

the lahoratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that

everything is possihle is heing verified. Compared with this, a11 other experi­

ments are secondary in importance-including those in the field of medicine

whose horrors are reeorded in detail in the trials against the physicians of the

Third Reich-although it is characteristic that these laboratories were used

for experiments of every kind.

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and dif­

ferentiation of human beings as if alt of humanity were just one individual,

is possilile only if each anel every person can be reduced to a never-changing

identity of reactions, so that each of these hundles of reactions can be

exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate something

that does not exist, namely, a kind of human spedes resembling other animal

species whose onIy ('freedorn" would consist in "preserving the spedes.,,125

Totalitarian domination attempts to achieve this goal hetb through ideo­

logical indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror

in tbe camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formations are ruth­

lessly used become, as it were, the practical application of the ideological

indoctrination-the testing ground in which the latter must prove itself­

while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is supposed to furnish

the utheoretical" verification of the ideology.

The camps are meant not onIy to exterminate people and degrade human

bcings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifi­

cally controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human be­

havior and of transforming the human personaHty into a mere thing, into

something that even animals are not; for Pavlov's dog, which, as we know,

was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a per­

verted animal.

Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because

spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not

1~5. In ehe TisclJgespriiche, Hitler mentionsseveral·times that he "[strives] for a conditioll in which each

individual knows that 11e Jivcs aod dies for the preservarion of his specics" (p. 349)' See also p. 347; "A fly lays mil!ions of eggs, aU of which perish. But (he flies remain,"

565

TOTALITARIANISM

only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping

aIive. It is only in the concentratio~l camps that such an experiment is at a11

. possible, a'nd therefore they are not only "la .mciEte la plus totalitaire encore

realisie" (David Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total domination in

general. Just as thc stahility of the totalitarian regime depends on the isola_

tion of the fictitious world of the movement from the outside world, so the experiment of total domination in the conce~tration camps depends on seal­

ing off the latter against the world of all others, the worId of the living in

general, even against the outside world of a country under totalitarian rule.

TI;1is isolation explains the peculiar unreaHty and lack of credibility that

characterize a11 reports from the concentration camps and constitute one of

the main difficulties for the true understanding of totalitarian domination)

which stands or falls with the existence of these concentration and extermi_

nation camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.

There are numerous reports by survivors. u6 The more authentie they are,

the less they attempt to communicate things that evade human understand_

ing and human experience-sufferings, that is, that transform men into

"uncomplaining animals.,,'l

7 None of these reports inspires those passions of

outrage and sympathy through which men have always been mobilized for

justice. On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration

camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned

to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard

to his Own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality. U8

126. The best reports on Nazi conCentration camps are David Rousset, Le.r JOllrs Je Notre Mort, Paris,

1947; Eugen Kogon, op. cie.; Bruno Bettelheim, "On Dachau and Buchenwald" (from May, 1938, 10

April, 1939), in No{i Corupirocy, VII, 824 ff. For Soviet concentration camps, see the excellcnt collection of reports by Polish survivors published under the tit\e T/u Dark SiJe of tlu: Moon; also David J. Damn, op. cie., though his reports are sometimes less convincing because they come from "prominent" pcrson_ alities wno are intem on drawing up manifestos and indielments, 127, Thc Dark .$ide of (he Moon; the imroduction also stresses this peculiar lack of communication; "They record but do not communicate."

128. See especially Bruno Bettelheim, op. ci!. "It seemed as if I nad become convinced that these horrible and degl'ading experiences somehow did not happen to 'me' as subject but to 'llle' as an object. This expcricnce was corroboratcd by thc statements of other prisoncrs, , .. It was as if I watched things happening in which I only vague\y participated., . , 'This cannot he ttue, such things jU5t do not hap­pen! , .. Tlte prisoners lIad tO cOllvince themselves that Ihis was real, was really happening and not just a nighnnare. They were never wholly successful."

566

I !

I ,

Tocalitarianism in Power

This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own

experience onIy reveals what the Nazis always knew: that men determined

to commit cdmes will find it expedient to o~ganize them on the vastest,

most improbable scale. Not onIy because this renders a11 punishments pro··

vided by the legal system inadequate and absurd; but because the very

immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their

innocence witb all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the vic­

tims who tell the ttuth. The Nazis did not even consider it necessary to keep

this discovery to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book

in which he stated that to be successful, a He must be enormous-which did

not prevent people from believing hirn as, sirnilarly, the Nazis' prodama­

tions, repeated ad nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated like bed­

bugs (i.,., with poison gas) prevented anybody from not believing them.

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by

means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us there lurks such a liberal,

wheedling us with the voice of cammon sense. The road to totalitarian dom­

ination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find

nurnerous analogies and precedents. The extraordinarily bloody terror dur­

ing the initial stage of totalitarian rule serves indeed the exclusive purpose of

dcfeating the opponent and rendering aU further opposition impossible; but

total terror is launched only after this initial stage has been overcome and the

regime 110 longer has anything to [ear from the opposition. In this context it

has been frequently remarked that in such a case the means have become the

end, but this is after all only an admission, in paradoxical disguise, that the

category "the end justifies the means" no longer applies, that terror has lost

its "purpose," that it is no langer the means to frighten people. Nor does the

explanation suffice that the revolution, as in the case of the French Revolu­

tion, was devouring its own children, for the terror continues even after

everybody who might be described as a child of the revolution in olle capacity

or another-the Russian factiolls, the power centers of party, the army, the

See also Rousset, op. eit., p. 213. " ... Those who haven't seen it with their own eyes can't believe it.

Did you yourself, before you came here, take the rumors about the gas chambers seriously? "No, Isald, " ... YOll see? \Vell, they're alllike you. The lotof them in Paris, London, New York, even ar Birke­

llau, right outside the crematoriums , , , still illcreduJous, five minUles before thcy were sent down lnto

the cellar of the crematorium .... "

TOTALITARIANISM

bureaucracy-has lang since been devoured. Many things that nawadays

have became the specialty of totalitarian government are onIy too welt known

from the study of history. There have almost always been wars of ~ggres_ sion; the massacre of hostile populations after a victory went unchecked until

the Romans rnitigated it by introducing the parcere suhjectis; through cen_

turies the extermination of native peoples went hand in hand with the colo­

nization of the Americas, AustraHa, and Africa; slavery is one of the oidest

institutions of mankind and all empires of antiquity were based on thc labor

of state-owned slaves who erected their puhlic buHdings. Not even concen_

tration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for

the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the twentieth century,

and continued to be used in South Africa as weIl as India for "undesirable

elements"; here, too, we first find the term "protective custody" whir:b was

later adopted by the Third Reich. These camps correspond in many r~spects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule; they were

used for "suspects" whose offenses could not be proved and who could not

be sentenced by ordinary process of law. All this clearly points to totalitarian

methods of domination; a11 these are elements they utilize, develop, and crys­

tallize on the basis of the nihilistic principle that <leverything is permitted,"

which they inherited and already take for granted. But wherever t~ese new

forms of dornination assume their authentically totalitarian structure they

transcend this principle, which is still tied to the utilitarian motives and self­

interest of the ruiers, and try their hand in arealm that up to now has been

completely unknown to us: the realm where "everything is possible." And)

characteristically enough, this is precisely the realm that cannot be limited by

ehher utilitarian motives 01' self-interest, regardless of the latter's content.

What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that

"everything is permitted," which was already contained in the nilleteenth­

century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and

"normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible.!29 We attempt

to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply sur­

pass our powers of understanding. Wc attempt to classify as criminal a

thing which, as we all feel, no such category was ever intended to cover. What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with

129. The first to und erstand this was Rousset in his [Jllivers COllutUratirmnuire, 1947.

568

Totalitarianism in Power

the mass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of

concentration'-camp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very

thing that rnust be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without

the dcstruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche, character, and indi­

viduality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only through

the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate.!30

The end result in any

case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psychological1y under­

stood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise intelligibly human

world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All statements of com­

mon sense, whether of a psychological or sociological nature, serve onIy to

encourage those who think it "superficial" to "dweIl on horrors."l)!

If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential insti­

tution of totalitarian ruIe, "dwelling on horrors" would seem to be indispen­

sable for the understanding of totalirarianism. But the recollection can no

more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. In both these

genres there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience;

instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much aware of the ter­

rihle ahyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living dead

th~t they cannot supply anything more than aseries of remembered occur­

rences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to their

audience. Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by

such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those

who are consequently f~ee from the bestial, desperate terror which, when

confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes everything that is

not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors. Such though ts

are useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization

of political passions. A change of personality of any sort whatever can no

more be induced by thinking about horrors than by thc real experience of

horror. The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions separates hirn as radi­

cally as mental disease from everything within hirn that is personality or

character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he finds his person­

ality or character unchanged, just as he had left it.

Just as the horror, or the dwe1ling on it, cannot affect a change of charac-

IJO. Rousset,op. eil" p. 587.

'}I. See Gcorges Bataille in Crid'lue, Jalluary, 1948, p. 72.

569

TOTALlTARIANISM

ter in hirn, cannot make men better or worse, thus it cannot become the basis

of a political community 01' party in a narrower sense. The attempts to huild

up a European elite with a program of intra-European understanding based

on the common European experience of the concentration camps have

foundered in much the same manner as the attempts following thc first \Vorld

War to draw political cünclusions from the international experience of the

front generation. In hoth cases it turned out that the experiences themselves

can communicate no more than nihilistic banalities. IJ2 Political consequences

such as postwar pacifism, for example, derived from the general fear of war,

not from the experiences in war. Instead of producing a pacifism devoid of

reality, the insight into the structure of modern wars, guided and mobilized

by fear, might have led to the realization that the only standard for a neces_

sary war is the fight against conditions under which people no lünger wish to

live-and our experiences with the tormenting hell of the totalitarian camps

have enlightened us on1y too wen about the possibility of such cünditions.'33

Thus the feal' of concentration camps and the resulting insight into the

nature of tota1 domination rnight serve to invalidate all obsolete political dif­

ferentiations [rom right to left and to introduce beside and above them the

politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely:

whether they serve totalitarian domination 01' not.

In any event, the fearful imagination has the great advantage to dissolve

the sophistic-dialectiea1 interpretations of politics which are aIl based on the

superstition that something good might result [rom evil. Such. dialectical acro­

batics had at least -a semblance of justification so long as the würst that man

could inflict upon man was murder. But, as we know today, murder is only a

limited evil. The murderer who kills a man-a man who has to die anyway­

still moves within the realm of life and death faroiliar to us; hoth have indeed

a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even if it is not

always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and does not

pretend ruat his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces, they are

(P, Rousset's book contains many such "insiglns" ioto human "nature," based chiefly Oll the observation

that after a while the mentil!ity of the inmates is sCilrccJy distinguishable [rom that of the camp guards,

I3J. In order to avoid misundersrandings it may he appropriiHe 10 add rhill with the invention of the

hydrogen bomb thc wilole war question has undergone another decisive change, A discussion of this queslion is of course beyond the theme of this book.

Totalitarianism in Power

those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the persons who

loved his victim; he .destroys a Iife, but he does not destroy the fact of exis­

tence itself.

The Nazis, with the precision peculiar to them, used to register their opera­

tions in tbe concentration camps under the heading "under cover of the night

(Nacht und Nehel)." The radicalism of measures to treat people as if they had

never existed and to make them disappear in the literal sense of the ward is fre­

quently not apparent at first glance, because both the German and the Russian

system are not uniform but consist of a senes of categories in wruch people are'

treated very differently. In the case of Gel'many, these different categories

used to exist in the same camp, but without coming irrto contaet with each

other; frequently, the isolation between the categories was even stricter than

the isolation from the outside world. Thus, out of racial considerations, Scal1-

dinavian natiollals during rue war were quite differently treated by tbe Ger­

mans than the members of otber peoples, although the former were ourspoken

enemiesof the Nazis. The latter in turn were divided into thosewhose j'exter­

minadon" was immediatelyon the agenda, as in the cas'e of the Jews; or could

be expected in the predictable future, as in the case of the Poles, Russians, and

Ukrainians; and into those who were not yet covered by instructions abollt

such an over-all j'final solution," as in the ease of the French and Belgians. In

Russia, on the other hand, we must distinguish three more or less independent

systems. First, there are the authentie forced-Iabor groups that live in relative

freedom and are sentenced for limited periods. Secondly, there are the concen­

tration camps in which the human material is ruthlessly exploited and the mor­

tality rate is extremely high, but which are essentially organized for labor

purposes. And, thirdly, there are the annihilation camps in which thc inmates

are systematieally wiped out through starvation and neglect.

The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the

fact that the inrnates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively

cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror

enforces oblivion. Here, murder is as impersonal as the sql.lashing of agnat.

Someone may die as the result of systematie torture Of starvation, or because

the camp is overcrowded and superfluous human material must be liqui­

dated. Conversely, it may happen that duc to a shortage of new human ship­

ments the danger arises rhat the camps become depüpulated and that the

TOTALITARIANISM

order is now given to reduce the death rate at any price. l34 David Rous!?et

called his report on the period in a German eoncentration camp "Les jours de

Natre Mori, " and it is indeed as if there were a possibility to give perma­

nence to the process of dying itself and to enforce a eondition in which both

death and life are obstructed equally effectively.

It is the appearanee of some radical evil, previollsly unknown to us, that

puts an end to the notion of developments and transformations of qualities.

Here, there are neither poHtical nor historical nor simply moral standards

but, at the most, the realization that something seems to be involved in mod­

ern polirics that actually should never be involved in poHties as we used

to understand it, namely aB or nothing-aB, and that is an undetermined

infinity of forms of human Iiving-together, or nothing, for a victOl'Y of the

concemration-camp system would mean the s<:tme inexorable doorn for hu­

man beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would mean the doöm of the human race.

There are no paralleis to the life in the eoncentration camps. Its horror can

never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands

outside of life and death. It can never be fuHy reported for the very reason

that the survivor returns to the world of the Hving) which makes it impossi­

ble for hirn to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had

a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of

the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead) is

such that it is as though they had never been born. The~efore all paralleIs cre­

ate confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in

prisons and penal eolonies) banishment) slavery, all seem for a moment to

offer helpful comparisons, but on eloser examination lead nowhere.

Forced labor as a pllnishment is.Iimited as to time and intensity. The con­

viet retains his rights over his body; he is not absolutely tortured and he is not

absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world

to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not

exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has

134· This happened in Germany coward the end of 1941, whcreupon Himmle! served notke to i111 camp commandi1ms "ta reduce the dearh rate at all costs." For it hi1d mrned out that of the 136,000 new

arrivals, 70,000 wcre already dead on reaching thc camp or died immedii1tely thereaCter. See Na{' COll­

spiracy, IV, Annex rr.~Later rcports from Soviet Russii1n camps unanimously confirm timt after 1949-

that is,.when Stalin was still alive-the dealh rate in the concentratiOll camps, which prevjous!y Imd

Totalitarianism in Power

been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration­

camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence thc protection of their

fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had adefinite priee and as property

adefinite value. The eoncentration-camp inmate has no priee, because he can

aiways be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never

seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous,

although in times of aeute labor shortage, as in Russia and in Germany dur­

ing the war, he is used for work.

The concentration camp as an institution was not established for the sake'

of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economie function of the

camps has been the financing of their own supervisory apparatus; thus from

the economic point of view tbe concentration camps exist mostly for their

own sake. Any work that has been performed could have been done much

better and more cheaply under different conditions.'J'i Especially Russia~ whose concentration camps are mostly described as forced-labor camps be­

cause Soviet bureaucracy has chosen to dignify mem with this name, reveals

most clearly rhat forced labor is not the primary issuc; forced labor is the

normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedorn of move­

ment and can be arbitrarily drafted for work to any place at any time. Thc

incredibility of the horrors is close1y bound up with their economic useless­

ness. The Nazis carried this uselessness to me point of open anti-utility when

in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling

stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported

reached up 10 (io per cent of the inmates, was systematkally lowered, presumably duc tO a general and

acme bbor shortage in the Soviet Union. This improvement in living conditions should not bc confuscd

with the crisis of the regime OIfter Stalin's death which, characteristically enough, first made itself felt in

the concentradon camps. Cf. Wilhe1m Starlinger, Gre/l{eJl der Saujetmadll, Würzburg, 1955.

135. See Kogon, ap. cit., p. 58: "A large part of the work exacted i~ the concentration camps was useless,

either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned that ithad co be done over two or thfee limes."

Also Bettelheim, ap. cil., pp. 831--831: "New prisoners particularly were forced to perform nonsensi­

cal rasks .... They felt debased ... and preferred even harder work when jt produccd somcthing use­

fu!. ... " Even Dallin, who has huilt his whole hook on the thesis that the purposc of RU$sian camps is 10

ptovidc cheap labor, is forccd to admit the ine{ficiency of camp labor, ap. eil., p. lo).-The CUfrent

theories abollt the Russian camp system as an economic measure for providing a cheap labor supply

would stand clearly refuted if recent rep0rTs on mass amnesties and the abolition of concentration

camps should prove 10 bc true. For ir the camps !lad served an important cconomic purpose, the regimll

cerlainly could not havc afforded their rapid liquidation withollt grave consequences for [he whole

economic system.

TOTALITARIANISM

millions of people back and forth.'" In the eyes of a stricdy utilitarian world

the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole e"nterprise an air oE mad unreality.

This atmosphere of madness and unreality, created by an apparent lack of

purpase, is the real iran curtain which hides a11 farms of concentration camps

from the eyes of the world. Seen from outside, they and the things that hap­

pen in them can be described only in images drawn from a life after death,

that is, a life removed from earthly purposes. Concentration camps can very

aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic Western con­

ceptions of a IiEe after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell. To Hades corre_

spond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in nontotalitarian

countries, for getting undesirable elements of alI sorts-refugees, stateless

persons, the asocial, and the unemployed--out of the way; as DP camps,

which are nothing other than camps for persons who have become sup~rflu­ous and bothersome, they have survived the war. Purgatory is represented

by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic

forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of

camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and

systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.

All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in

them are treated as if they no Ion ger existed, as if what happened to them

were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and

some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a

while between life and death before admitting them to eternal peace.

It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality

of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ulti­

mately makes extermination look Iike a perfecdy normal measure. Every­

thing that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse,

maHgnant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fan­

tasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, how­

ever, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete witb all

sensual data of reality but lacks that structure ?f consequence and responsi-

'36. Apart from the millions of people whom the Natis fransported 10 the extermination camps, they con~ stantly anempted new colonization plans-transported Germans from Germany or the occupied terri­

tories to the East for colonization purposes. This was of course a serious handicap for militaryactions

and economic exploitation. For the Ilumcrous discussions on these subjccts and the constant conßict

Totalitar(anism in Power

bility without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data.

The result is that a place has been established where men ean be tortured and

slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of

all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more man a ')7 eruel game 01' an absurd dream.

The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere after the

war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not dis­

pdled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures are

just about as convincing as snapshots of mysterious substances taken at spir­

itualist seances.138

Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and

Auschwitz with ~he plausible argument: 'IWhat crime must these people have

committed that such things were done to them!"; or, in Germany and Aus­

tria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation, and general hatred: "Too bad

that they've stopped gassing the Jews"; and everywhere with the skeptical

shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda.

If the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average person because it

is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those who know from their own

irnaginings what they themselves are capable of doing and who are therefore

perfecdy willing to believe in the reality of what they have seen. Suddenly it

becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagi­

nation had banished to arealm beyond human competence can be manufac­

tured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of

their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of

destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in

any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the

power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can real­

ize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open.

between the Nazi civilian hierarchy in the Eastern occupied territories und the 55 hicrarchy see espe­

cially Vol. XXIX of Trial of fhe Major War Criminais, Nuremberg, 1947·

137. Bettelheim, cp_ dr., notes that die guards in the camps embraccd an attitude toward thc atmosphere

of unreaHty similar 10 timt of the prisoners themse1ves.

'38. Ir is of some imponance to realize that a11 pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as

they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops matched in. There were 110

death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipmem had already been dis~

mantlcd. On thc other hand, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their

special horror-namely, the sight of thc human skeletons--was not at all typical for the Gerrnan con­

centration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvarion. The condition of

the camps was a result of die war evems during the final months: Himmler had ordered tlle evacuation

TOTALITARIANISM

These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying, 1~9

seem to express more than adesperate attempt at saying what is outside the

realm of hu·man speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern rnasses as

radically from those of previous centuries as the l~ss of faith in a Last ]udg­

ment: the worst have lost theil' fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable

as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort

which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had

longed for and of the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of

Marx's classless society ~ave a queer resemblance to the Messianic Age, so

the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medievaI

pietures of Hell.

Thc one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional con­

ceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an ab~olute

standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the

human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable wirh the ever­

lasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which

asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer

so inhumanly? Henee also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man

ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which

concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such

"punishment" can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.

In comparison wirh the insane end-result----concentration-camp society­

the process bywhich men are prepared for this end, and the methods by which

individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent and logical.

The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and

politically intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and, what

is more important, the silent eonsent to such unprecedented conditions

are the products of those events which in aperiod of political disintegration

suddenly and unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings

homeless, stateless, outlawed, and unwanted, while millions of human be­

ings were made economically superfluous and socially burdensorne by un­

employment. This in turn could onIy happen because the Rights of Man,

of aJl extermio.ation camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vasdy overcrowdcd, und he was no longer in a position!O assure the food supply in Germany. 139. Timt !ife in a concentration camp was simp!y a dragged-out process of dying is stressed by Rousset, op. eil., passim.

5ß

Totalitarianism in Power

whieh had never been philosophieally established but rnerely forrnu­

lated, which had never.been politically secured but merely proc1aimed, have,

in their traditional form, lost all validity.

The first essential step on the road to total domi~ation is to kill the juridi­

cal person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain cate­

gories of people outside the proteetion of the law and forcing at the same

tiine, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world

into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the con­

centration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its

inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in whieh adefinite crime

entails a predictable penalty. Thus criminaIs, who for other reasons are an

essential element in concentration-camp society, are ordinarily sent to a

camp onIy on completion of their prison sentence. Under all circumstances

totaHtarian domination sees to it that the categories gathered in the camps­

Jews, carriers of diseases, representative's of dying classes-have already

lost their capacity for both normal or crlminal action. Propagandistically this

means that the "protective custody" is handled as a "preventive police mea­

sure,,,qo that is, a measure that deprives people of the ability to aet. Devia~

tions from this rule in Russia must be attributed to the catastrophic shortage

of prisons and tO adesire, so far unreaHzed, to transform the whole penal 1,1'

system into a system of concentration camps. The indusion of criminals is necessary in order tO make plausible the pro­

pagandistic claim of the movement that the institution exists for asocial ele­

ments.I.!l Criminals do not properly belong in the concentration camps, if

only because it is harder to kill the juridical person in a man who is guilty of

some crime than in a totally innocent person. If they constitute a permanent­

category among the inmates, it is a concession of the totalitarian state to the

'40' Maunz, op. eit., p. )0, insists timt criminals should never bc sent to the camps for the time of their

regulilr scntenccs. 14'. The shortage of prison spilce in Russia has been such that in the year 1925-1926, only 36 per cent of

all court sentences could be carried out. Sec Da!lin, op. ci"t., p. 158 Cf. 14 2. "Gestapo and SS have a!ways attached great importance to mixing Ihe categories of inmatcs in the camps. In no camp have [he inmates bc!onged exc1usivcly tO one category~ (Kogon, op. eit., p. 19)'

In Russia, il has illso been customary from the beginning to mix politica! prisoners and criminals. Ouring the first ten years of Soviel power, the Left political groups cnjoyed certain privileges; on!y with

the ful! devc!opmcnt of the totalitadan character of the regime "after the end of the twenties, the politi­

cals were even officially treated as inferior to the eommon criminals" (Dallin, op. cu., p. 177 ff.).

5yy

TOTALITARIANISM

prejudices of society, which can in this way most readily be accustomed.to

the existence of the camps. In order, on the other hand, to keep the camp sys­

tem itself ili.tact, it is essential as long as there is a penal system in the country

that criminals should be sent to the camps only on completion of their sen­

teace, that is when they are actually entitled to their freedom. Under no cir­

cumstances must the concentration camp hecome a calculable punishment

for definite offenses.

The amalgamation of criminals with all other categories has moreover the

advantage of making it shockingly evident to all other arrivals that they have

landed on the lowest level of society. It soon turns out, to be sure, that they

have every reason to envy the lowest thief and murderer; but meanwhile the

lowest level is a good beginning. Moreover it is an effective means of camou­

flage: this happens only to criminals and nothing worse is happenin~ than

what deservedly happens to criminals.

The criminals everywhere constitute the aristocracy of the camps. (In

Germany, during the war, they were replaced in the leadership by the Com­

munists, because not even a minimum of rational work could be performed

under the chaotic conditions created by a criminal administration. This was

merely a temporary transformation of concentration camps into forced­

Iabor camps, a thoroughly atypical phenomenon of limited duration. 143)

What places the criminals in the leadership is not so much the affinity hetween

supervisory personnel and criminal elements-in the Soviet Union appar­

ently the supervisors are not, like the 5S, a special elite trained ta commit

crimes 144_ as the fact that only criminals have been sent to the camp in con­

nection with some definite activity. They at least know why they are in a con­

centration camp and therefore have kept a remnant of their juridical person.

For the politicals this is only subjectively true; their actions, insofar as they

were actions and not mere opinions or someone else 's vague suspicionsJ

or accidental membership in a politically disapproved group, are as a rule

143' Rousset's book suffers from his overestimation of thc influence of tllc German Communists, who

dominated the intcrnal administrmion of Buchcnwald during thc war.

'4.1. See for instance the tcslimony of Mrs. Buber-Neumann (former wife of ehe German Communist

Hcinz Ncumann), wlto survived Soviet and German concentration camps: "The Russians never ...

evinccd thc sadistic streak of the Nazis .... OUt Russian guards werc dcccm mcn and not sadists, but

thcy faithfuUy fu!filled the requircmentsof the inhuman system" (U,ulcr 111'0 Dictators).

Totalitarianism in Power

·not covered by the normal legal system of the country and not juridically

defined.141

Tc the amalgam of politicals and criminals with which concentration

camps in Russia and Germany started out, was added at an early date a third

element which was soon to constitute the majority of all concentration-camp

imnates. This largest group has consisted ever since of people who had done

nothing whatsoever that, either in their own consciousness or the conscious··

ness of their tormenters, had any rational connection with their arrest. In

Germany, after 1938, this element was represented by masses of Jews, in

Russia by any groups which, for any reason having nothing to da with their

actions, had incurred the disfavor of the authorities. These groups, innocent

in every sense, are the most suitable for thorough experimentation in disfran­

chisement and destruction of the juridical person, and therefore they are

hoth qualitatively and quantitatively the most essential category of the camp

population. This principle was most fully realized in the gas chambers which,

if only because of their enormous capacity, could not be intended for indi­

vidual cases but onIy for people in general. In this connection, the following

dialogue sums up the situation of the individual: «For what purpose, may I

ask, do the gas chambers exist?"-"For what purpose were you born?,,146

lt is this third group of the totally innocent who in every case fare the worst

in the camps. Criminals and politicals are assimilated to this category; thus

deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their having done some­

thing, they are utterly exposed to the arbitrary. The ultimate goal, partly

achieved in the Soviet Union and clearly indicated in the last phases of Nazi

terror, is to have the whole camp population composed of this category of

innocent people. Conrrasting with the compiete haphazardness with which the inmates are

selected are the categories, meaningless in themselves but useful from the

standpoint of orgaruzation, into which they are usually divided on their

arrival. In the German camps there were criminals, politicals, asocial ele­

ments, religiolls offenders, and J ews, all distinguished by insignia. When the

145. Bruno Bcttdlleim, "Behavior in Extreme Situations," inJoumalof Almormalalld Sodal PsychoJogy,

VoL XXXVllI, No. 4, 1943, describes the self-estcem of thc criminals and the political prisoners as com­

pared with those who have not done anything. The latter "were least ahle to withsland the initial shock,"

the first to disintcgrate. Bettelhcim blames this on their middle-dass origin.

146. Roussct, op. eit., p. 7l;

TOTALITARIANISM

French set up concentration camps after the Spanish Civil War, they imme.di­

ately introduced the typical totalitarian amalgam of politicals whh criminals

and the innocent (in this ease the stateless), and despite their inexperienee

proved remarkably inventive in creating meaningless eategories of inmates.'47

Originally devised in order to prevent any growth of solidarity among the

inmates, this technique prüved particularIy valuable because no one eould

know whether his own category was better or würse than someone else's. In

Germany this eternaHy shifting though pedanticaHy organized edifice was

given an appearanee of solidity by the fact that under any and all circum­

stances the J ews were the lowest category. The gruesome and grotesque part

of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these categories, as

though they represemed a last authentie remnant of their juridical person.

Even if we disregard all other cireumstances, it is no wonder that a CDmmu­

nist of 1933 should have come out of the camps more Communistic than

he went in, a Jew more Jewish, and, in France, the wife of a Foreign

Legionary more eonvinced of the value of the Foreign Legion; it would seem

as though these categories promised some last shred of predictable treat­

ment, as though they embodied some last and hence most fundamental

juridical identity.

While the classification of inmates by categories is onIy a tactical, organi­

zational measure, the arbitrary selection of victims indicates the essential

principle of the institution. If me concentration camps had been dependent

on the existence of political adversaries, they would scarcely have survived

the first years of the totalitarian regimes. One oniy has to take a look at the

number of inmates at Buchenwald in the years after 1936 in order to under­

stand how absolutely necessary the element of the innocent was for the con­

tinued existence of the camps. "The camps would have died out if in making

its arrests the Gestapo had considered onIy the principle of opposition,,,148

and toward the end of 1937 Buchenwald, wirh Iess than 1,000 inmates, was

elose to dying out until the November pogroms brought more than 20,000

new arrivals.149

In Germany, this element of the innocent was furnished in

vast numbers by the Jews after 1938; in Russia, it consisted of random groups

of the population which for some reason entirely unconneeted with their

'47. For conditions inFrench concemration camps, see Arthur Koestler, Scum of dw Earrh., 1941.

148. Kogon, op. eit., p.6. 149· See Na(i Conspiracy, IV, 800 ff.

580

Totalitarianism in Power

actions had fallen into disgrace.150

But if in Germany the really totalitarian

type of concentration camp with its enormous majority of completely "in­

nocent" inmates was not established until 1938, in Russia it goes back to

the early' thirties, since up to 1930 the majority of the coneentration-camp

population still consisted of criminals, counterrevolutionaries and "politicals)~

(meaning, in this case, members of deviationist factions). Since then there

have been so many innocent people in the camps that it is difficult to classify

them-persons who had some sort of contact with a foreign country] Russians

of Polish origin (particularly in the years 1936 to 1938), peasants whose

villages for some economic reason were liquidated, deported nationalities,

demobilized soldiers of the Red Army who happened to belong to regiments

that stayed too long abroad as occupation forces cr had become prisoners

of war in Germany, etc. But the existence of a politieal opposition is for a

concentration-camp system only apretext, and the purpose of the system is

not achieved even when, under the most monstrous terror, the population

becomes more or less voluntarily co-ordinated, Le., relinquishes its politica1

rights. The aim of an arbitrary system is to destroy the dvil fights of the

whole population, who ultimately become just as outlawed in their own coun­

try as the stateless and homeless. The destruction of a man's rights, the killing

of the juridical person in hirn, is aprerequisite for dominating hirn entirely.

And this applies not onIy to special categories such as criminals, political oppo­

nents, Jews, homosexuals, on whom the early experiments were made, but to

every inhabitant of a totalitarian state. Free consent is as much an obstaele to

total domination as free opposition.l')t The arbitrary arrest which chooses

among innocent people destroys the validity of free consent, just as torture­

as distinguished from death--d.estroys the possibility of opposition.

'50. Beck and Godin, op. eit., state explicitly tllat "opponents constituted only a relatively small propor­tion of the [Russian] prison population" Cp. 87), and that there was no connection whatever between "a

man's imprisonment and anyoffense" (p. 95). '51. Bruno Betteloeim, "On Dachau and B\lchenwald," woen discussing [he fact that most prisoners "made their peace with the values of the Gestapo,'" emphasizes that "chis was not the result of propa­ganda ... ehe Gestapo insisted that it would prevent them from expressing toeir feelings anyway"

(pp. 834-8n). Himmler explicitly prohibited propaganda of any klnd in the camps. "Education consists of disci­

pline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis." "On Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police," in Naliona/-po/ilisclur Lehrgang der Wehrmacht, T937. Quoted from Na{i CO/l­

spiracy, IV, 616 ff.

TOTALITARIANISM

Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to

certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intel­

lectual or ~rotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented "crimes," would

render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no

opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above a11 it would

make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not

fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totali­

tarian domination. The so-called WVolkrnutren" of thc Nazis, constantly fluc­

tuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow) and the

eternally shifting party Hne of the Soviet Union which, being retroactive,

alm ost daily makes new groups of people available for the concentration

camps, are the only guarantee for the continued existence of the concentra­

don camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of mil:;.

The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of

the moral person in man. This 1S done in the main by making martyrdom, for

the first time in history, impossible: I'How many people here still believe that

a protest has even historie importance? This skepticism is the real master­

piece of the 5S. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted a11 human

solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left,

there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be post­

poned is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one 's own death.

In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hun­

dreds of thousands of us here, allliving in absolute solitude. That 1S why we

are subdued no matter what happens. ul52

The camps and the murder of political adversaries are ooly part of orga­

nized oblivion that not only embraces carriers of public opinion such as the

spoken and the written ward, but e:x-tends even to the families and friends of

the victim. Grief and remerhbrance are forbidden. In the Soviet Union a

woman will sue for divorce immediately after her husband 's arrest in order

to save me lives of her children; if her husband chances to come back, she

will indignantly turn hirn out of the house. ln The Western world has hith­

erto, even in its darkest periods, granted the slajn enemy the right to be

remembered as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all men

151. Rousset, 0p. eil., p. 464.

153. See the report of Sergei Ma!akhov in Dallin, op. eit., pp. 20 [f.

582

Totalitarianism in Power

(and only men). Ir is only because even Achi1les set out for Hector's funeral,

only because the most despotie governments honored the slain enemy, only

because the Romans allowed thc Christians to write their martyrologies,

onIy because the Church kept its hereties alive in the memory of men, that a11

was not lost and never could be lost. The concentration camps, by making

death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner

is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a

sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth

nothing belonged to hirn and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a

seal on the fact that he had never really existed.

This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man's

conscience whieh teIls him that it is better 1'0 die a victiIU than to live as a

bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph

when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist

escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable

and equivocaL When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and

thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he

is in every sense responsible, to their deaths; when even suicide would mean

the immediate murder of his own family-how is he to decide? The alterna­

tive is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder.

Who could salve the moral dilemma of the Greek momer who was allowed

by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be kil1ed?';4

Through the creation of conditions under wh ich conscience ceases to be

adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organ­

ized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to

the victims and thus made really total. The 55 implicated concentration­

camp inmates--criminals, politicals, Jews-in their crimes by making them

responsible for a large part of the administration, thus confronting them with

the hopeless dilemma whether to send their friends to their deaths, or to help

murder other men who happened to be strangers, and forcing them, in ~ny

event, to behave like murderers.I}\ The point is not only that hatred is

diverted from those who are guilty (the capos were more hated than the 5S),

154. See AlberI Camus in T1'IiteA Yenr, '947· 15'i. Rousset's book, op. cit., consists largely of discussions oE Ihis dilemma by prisoners.

TOTALITARIANISM

but that the distinguishing line between persecutor and persecmed, between

the murde~er and his victim, is constantly blurred.1j6

Onee ·the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevehts

men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the indi­

vidual, his unique identity. In a sterile form such individuality can be pre­

served through a persistent stoici5m, and it i5 certain that many men under

totalitarian rule have taken and are each day still taking refuge in this

absolute isolation of a personality without rights or consdence. There is 110

doubt that this part of the human person, precisely because it depends so

essentially on nature and on forces that cannat be comrolled by the will, is

the hardest to destroy (and when destroyed 1S most easily repaired).lj7

The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person are

numerous and we shall not attempt to list them. They begin with tl-:'.' mon­

strous conditions in the transports to the camps, when hundreds of human

beings are packed into a cattle-car stark naked, glued to each other, and

shumed back and forth over the coumryside for days on end; they continue

upon arrival at the camp, the well-organized shock of the first hours, the

shaving of the head, the grotesque camp clothing; and they end in the utterly

unimaginable tortures so gauged as not to kill the body, at any event not

quickly. The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to manipulate the human

body-with its infinite possibilities of suffering-in such a way as to make

it destroy the human perso'} as inexorably as do certain mental diseases of

organic origin.

It is hete that the utter lunacy of the emire process becomes most appar­

ent. Torture, to be sure) is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian police

and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk. This type of

torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim) has certain limitations: either

the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed. To this rationally con­

ducted torture another, irrational, sadistic type was added in the first Nazi

concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo. Carried on for the

156. Bettelheim, op. eie., descrihes the process by which the guards as weil as the prisoners became "con­ditioned" to [he life in the camp and were afraid of returning to the outer world.

Rousset, thcrefore, is right when he insists that the truth is that "victim and cxecutioner are alike ignobJe; the Jesson of thc camps is the brotherhood of ahjection" Cp. j88).

1')7. Bettelheim, op. eil., describes how "the main concern of the new prisoners seemed to be to remain intact as a personality" while the problem of the old prisoners was "how 10 live as weil as possible within thecamp."

Totalitarianism in Power

most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and was not systematic, but de­

pendecl on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The mortality was so

high that onIy a few concentration-camp inmates of 1933 survived these

first years. This type of torture seemed to be not so much a calculated politi­

cal institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal and abnormai e1e··

ments, who were thus rewarded for services rendered. Behind the blind

bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resentment against all

those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better off than them-

. selves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams, were in their

power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the camps, strikes

us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling.'i8

The real horror began, however, when the 5S took over the administra­

tion of the camps. The old spontaneolls bestiality gave way to an absolutely

cold anel systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy

human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps

were no langer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men

who reaHy belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became

true: they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men

were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS. Ij9

The killing of man's individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal parts

Ij8. Rousset, op. eit., p. 390, reports an 55-man haranguing a professor as folIows: "You used to be a professor. Weil, you're no professor now. You're no bigshot any more. You're nothingbut a little rum now. Just as lüde asyou can be. I'm the big fellow now." 159. Kogon, ap. cit., p. 6, speaks of the possibility that the camps will be maintained as training and experimental grounds for the $5. He also gives a good report on the differencc between the early camps administered hy the SA and the later ones under the 55. "None of these first camps had more than a thousand inmates .... Ufe in them beggared all description. The aecounts of the few old prisoners who survived those years agree that there was scarcely allY form of sadistic perversion that was not practiced by the $A men. But they were an acts of individual bestiality, there was still no fully organi7.ed cold sys­lern, embradng masses of men. This was the accomplishment of the 55" (p. 7).

This new mechanized system ease<.! the feeling of responsibility as much as was humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day several hundred Russian pIlsoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole without seeing the victim. (See Ernest Feder, "Essai sur la Psychologiede la Terreur," in Synthius, Brussels, J946.) On the other hand, perversion was artific:ially produeed in othel"wise normal men. Rousset repotts the following from a 55 guard: "Usually I keep on lütting IlJUill ejaculate. I have a wifc and three children in Brcslau. I uscd to be perfecdy normal. That's what they've made of me. Now when they give me a pass out of here, I don't go home.l don't dare look my wife in the face" {p. 27J).-The documents from the Bider era contain numerous testimonials for the average normality of tllOse entrusted with carrying out Hitler's program of extermination. A good coUecdon is found in Leon PoHakov's "The Weapon of Antisemitism," published by UNESCO in Thi!

585

TOTALITARIANISM

by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident apremise for a11 human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness, crc_

ates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political

person and the despair of the moral person. It is this horror that gives rise to

the nihilistic generalizations whiCh maintain plausihly enough that essen_

tially all men alike are beasts.160

Actually the experience of the concentration

camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of

the human animal, and that man's ~'nature" is onIy "human" insofar as it

opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man.

After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the juridical person,

the destruction of the individuality is almost always successful. Conceivably

some laws of mass psychology may be found to explain why mHlions of

human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas

chambers, although these laws would explain nothing else but the destruc­

tion of individuality. It is more significant that those individually condemned

to death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them,

that there were scarcely any serious revolts) and that even in the moment of

liberation there were very few spontaneous massacres of 55 men. For to

destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man's power to begin some­

thing new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on

the basis of reactions to environment and events.161

Nothing then remains

but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in

Third Reich. London, 19i5. Most of the men i~ the units used for these purposes were not vo!umeersbut had been drafted from the ordinary police for these special assignments. But even trained 55-men found this kind of duty worse than front-Hne nghting. In 11is report of a mass exeeution by the S5, an eye­witncss gives high praise to this troop which had been so "idealistic" that ie was ahle to bear "the entire extermination without the help of liquor."

That one wanted to eliminate all personal motives and passions during the "exterminations" and henee keep the eruelties to a minimum is revealed by the fact timt a group of doctors and engineers entrosted with handling the gas installations were making constam improvements that were not only designed to raise the productive capacity of the corpse factories but also [0 accelerate and ease the agony of death.

160. Tllis is very prominent in Rousset's work, "The sodal conditions of life in the camps !lave trans­formed the great mass of inmates, beth the Germans and the deportces, regardless of their previous sodal position <lnd educ<ltion ... into a degencrate rabble, entirdy submissive to the primitive reflexes of the anima! instinct" {p. 18J}.

161. In this context also belangs the astonishing rarity of suicides in the camps. Suicide occurred far more oflen before arrest and deportation than in the camp ilself, which is of course partly explaincd by

586

[ Totalital'ianism in Power

Pavlov's experiments, which all react with perfect reliahility even when

going to their own death, and which da nothing but react. This is the real tri­

umph of the system: "111e triumph of the 55 demands that the tortured vic­

tim allow hirnself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce

and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is

not for nothing. Ir is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the SS men

desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its

victim before he mounts the scaffold ... is incomparably the best for keeping

a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these

processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The man

who sees this says to himself: 'For them to be thus reduced, what power must

be concealed in the hands of the masters: and he turns away, ful1 of bitter­

ness but defeated." 162

If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the

common-sense assertion that they are utopian and unrealizable, it develops

that the society of the dying established in the camps is the only forni of soci­

ety in which it is possible to dominate man entirely. Those who aspire to total

domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere existence of indi­

viduality will always engender, and track it down in its most private forms,

regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seern. Pavlov's clog,

the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle

of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of

reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model "citizen" of a

totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside

of the camps.

The uselessness of the camps, their cynically admitted anti-utility, is onIy

apparent. In reality they are more essential to the preservation of the regime's

power than any of its other institutions. Without ~oncentration camps, with­

out the undefined fear they inspire and the very well-defined training they

offer in totalitarian domination, which can nowhere else be fully tested with

tbc fact that every attempt was made to prevent suicides which are, after a11, spontaneous acts. From the statistical material for Buehenwald (Na{l' Corupiracy, IV, 800 ff.) it is evident mat scarcely more [han one·half per cent of the deaths could be traced to suicide, timt frequently there were only two suicides per year, although in the same year the total number of deaths reached },)I6. The feports [rom Russian camps mention the same phenomcnon, ce, for instance, Starlinger. op. eil., p. J7.

162, Rousset,op. eil., p. 'i25·

TOTALITARIANISM

all of its most radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire its

nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in compiete apa­

thy. The clominating and the dominated wou!d on!y too quick!y sink hack

into the .. old bourgeois routine"; after early ~'excesses," they would succumb

to everyday life with its human laws; in short, they would develop in the

direction which a11 observers counseled by common sense were so prone to

predict. The tragic faIlacy of a11 these prophecies, originating in a world that

was still safe, was to suppose that there was such a thing as one human nature

established for all time, to identify this human nature with history, and thus

to declare that the idea of total domination was not only inhuman but also

unrealistic. Meanwhile we have learned that the power of man is so great that

he really can be what he wishes to be.

ft is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power.

Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single excep­

tion, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life. In the realm of for­

eign affairs new neutral territories must constantly be subjugated, while at

horne ever-new human groups must be mastered in expanding concentration

camps, or, when circumstances require, liquidated to make room for others.

The question of opposition is unimportant borh in foreign and domestic

affairs. Any neutrality, indeed any spontaneously given friendship, is from the

standpoint of totalitarian domination just as dangerous as open hostility, pre­

cisely because spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is the greatest of aB

obstacles to total domination over man. The Communists of non-Communist

countries, who fled or were cal1ed to Moscow, learned by bitter experience

that they constituted a rnenace to the Soviet Union. Convinced Communists

are in this sense, which alone has any reality today, just as ridiculous and just

as menacing to the regime in ~ussia, as, for example, the convinced Nazis of

the Röhm faction were to the Nazis.

What makes conviction and opinion of any sort so ridiculous and danger­

ous under totaIitarian conditions is that totalitarian regimes take the greatest

pride in having no need of them, or cf any human help of any kind. Men,

insofar as they are more than anima] reaction and fulfillment of functions,

are entirely superfluaus to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives not

toward despotie rule over men, but toward a system in which men are super­

fluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of con­

ditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity.

588

Totalicarianism in Power

Precisely because man's resources are so great, he can be fuHy dominated

onIy when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.

Therefore character is a threat and even the most unjust legal rules are

an obstacle; but individuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man

from another, is intolerable. As lang as all men have not been made equal1y

superfluous-and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps­

the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved. Totalitarian states

strlve constantly, though never with compIete success, to establish the super ..

ftuity of man-by tbe arbitrary selection of various groups for concentra­

tion camps) by constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass liquidations.

Common sense protests desperately that the masseS are submissive and that

a11 this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous; if they were

capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: The appara­

tus seems superfluous to you only because it serves to make men superfluous.

The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of

modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of

the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life

in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which

exploitation is practiced withollt profit, and where work is performed with­

out product, is a place where sense1essness is daily produced anew. Yet,

within the framework of the totalitarian ideology) nothing could be more

sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should be

killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to

contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler), no

one should waste his time trying to re-educate them. Seen through the eyes

of the ideology, the trouble with the camps is almost that they make too

much sense, that the execution of the doctrine is tao consistent.

While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying

the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of

common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense

which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to have

found the key tO history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Over

and above the senselessness oE totalitarian society is enthroned the ridiculous

supersense .of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harrnless, uncritical,

and arbitrary opinions onIy as long as they are not believed in seriously.

TOTALITARIANJSM

Onee their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of

logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiaes, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsoriIy onee the first premise is aceepted.

The insanity of such systems lies .not only in their first premise but in the

very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all

isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion

withom regard for spedn.c, varying factors, already harbors the first germs

of totalitarian contempt for reaHty and factuality.

Cornmon sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless against this ideo­

logical supersense, since totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world of

no-sense. The ideological contempt for factuality still contained the proud

assumption of human mastery over the world; it is, after all, contempt for

reality which makes possible changing the world, the erection of ,qle human

artifice. What destroys the element of pride in the totalitarian contempt for

reaHty (and thereby distinguishes it radically from revolutionary theories

and attitudes) is the supersense which gives the conrempt for reality its co­

gency, logicality, and consistency. What makes a truly totalitarian device

out of the Bolshevik claim that the present Russian system is superior to all

others is thc fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the logically

impeccable conclusion that without this system people never could have buHt

such a wonderful thing as, let us say, a subway; from this, he again draws the

logical conclusion that anyone who knows of the existence of the Paris sub­

way is a suspect because he may cause people to doubt that one can do things

only in the Bolshevik way. This leads to the final conclusion that in order to

remain a loyal Bolshevik, you have to destroy the Paris subway. Nothing

rnatters hut consistency.

.With these new structures, buHt on the strengrh of superscnse and driven

by the motor of logicality, we are indeed at the end of the bourgeois era of

profits and power, as weil as at the end of imperialism and expansion. The

aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from lust for power, and if it

feverishly seeks to expand, it does so neither for expansion's sake nor for

profit, but only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to

prove that it5 respective supersense has been right. It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of compiete consis­

tency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what

we eommonly eall human dignity. For respeet far human dignity implies the

Totalitarianism in Power

recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects) as builders

of worlds or cobuHders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the

explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course

of a11 events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from

the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so

new that nobody ever foresaw it.

What totaIitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of

the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of sodety, but the

transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the

laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shameful­

ness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run

them according to strictly "scientific" standards; it is the concern of a11 men.

Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not the issue,

nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake, and even

though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing man but only

in destroying hirn, by creating a society in which the nihilistic banality of

homo homini lupus is consistently realized, one should bear in mind the neces­

sary limitations to an experiment which requires global control in order to

show conclusive results. Until now the totalitarianbelief that everything is possible seems to have

proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove

that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without

knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.

When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unfor­

givable absolute evil which could no Ion ger be understood and explained by

the evil motives of self-inrerest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for

power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love

could not end ure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the

death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes of

their executioners, so this newest 5pecies of criminals is beyond the pale even

of solidarity in human sinfulness.

It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive

of a "radical evil," and this is true both for Christian theology, which con­ceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as weIl as for Kant, the

only philosopher who, in the word /radical Böse} he coined for it) at least

roust have sU5pected the existence of this evil even though he immediately

59l

TOTALITARIANISM

rationalized it in the coneept of a "perverted ill will" that eould be explained

by comprehensible motives. Therefore, we actually have nothing to fall back

on in order to u~lderstand a phenomenon that nevertheless eonfronts us with its overpowering reality 'and breaks down all standards we know. There is

only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical eviJ has

emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally

superfluDus. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superflu_

ousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all

the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive Or

dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of thc corpse facto_

ries and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness

everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered

superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian tei~s. Politi­

cal, sodal, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with

totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The implied

ternptation is weIl understood by the utilitarian common sense of the masses , who in most countries are tao desperate to retain much fear of death. The

Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation

which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of

economically superfluous and sodally rootless human masses, are as much

of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may weIl sUl'Vive the

fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong tcmptations which will come

up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, sodal, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

4

IDEOLOGY AND TERROR: A NOVEL FORM OF GOVERNMENT

In the preceding chapters we emphasized repeatedly that thc means of total

domination are not only more drastic but that totalitarianism differs essen­

tially from other farms of political oppression known to us such as despot­

ism, tyranny, and dictatorship. Wherever it rose to power, it developed

entirely new political institutions and destroyed all sodal, legal, and political

traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition

or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government

always transform~d classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by

one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of

power from the army to the police, and established a foreign poliey openly

directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have

developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totali­

tarian, they started to operate according to a system of values so radically

different from all others that none of our traditionallegal, moral, or com­

mon sense utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms

with, or judge, or predict their course of action.

If it is true that the elements of totalitarianism can be found by retracing

the history and analyzing the political implications of what we usually call

the crisis of our century, then the conclusion is unavoidable that this crisis is

no mere threat from the outside, no mere result of some aggressive foreign

policy of either Germany or Russia, and that it would no· more disappear

with the death of Stalin than it disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany.1t

may even be that the trae predicaments of our time will assume their authen­

tie form-though not necessarily the cruelest-only,when totalitarianism

has become a thing of the past.

It is in the line of such reflections to raise the question whether totalitarian