Chapter Review: The Totalitarian Movement

Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975

The Totalitarian Movement is chapter 11 in Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. This chapter focuses on two topics, totalitarian propaganda and totalitarian organization.

1. TOTALITARIAN PROPAGANDA: Arendt argues that propaganda is a tool totalitarian ideology uses to deal with the outside world, not just within the movement itself:

The essential point is that the necessities for propaganda are always dictated by the outside world and that the movements themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate. Conversely, indoctrination, inevitably coupled with terror, increases the strength of the movements or the totalitarian government’s isolation and security from outside interference. Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of “psychological warfare”; but terror is more. . . . . Where the rule of terror is brought to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely; it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany. Propaganda, in other words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the other hand, is the very essence of its form of government.

The scientific basis of propaganda: The Nazis learned from how American businesses applied propaganda to market to the public. Those methods were incorporated into totalitarianism propaganda methods. Totalitarian propaganda emphasized the “scientific” basis of its claims in the same way that business marketing propaganda did in the US. That was the way to reach and persuade the masses. Arendt argues:

“Science in the instances of both business publicity and totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. . . . Totalitarian propaganda raised scientificality to and its technique of making scientific statements in the form of predictions to a height of efficiency of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking, there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can reveal its merits.”

The latter assertion is quite insightful. Positing claims in terms of future performance does tend to deflect from flaws in arguments the propagandist does not want people to even think about, much less discuss. That tactic is highly effective, and both politicians and marketers still use it to this day. In the case of politicians, their track record is dismal, just barely better than random guessing and much worse than validated computer algorithms.

The infallible leader: Arendt argues that totalitarian leaders cannot admit any error because they are the center of everything. The difference between a totalitarian leader and everyone else is that the leader has much more power and an unfettered willingness to use it to make his mistakes go away, even if the consequences are mass murder and mass destruction:

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. . . . . Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring about as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat.

She argues that the irrational infallible leader illusion rested on (1) appeal to always correct forces of history and nature that will always manifest themselves, even in the face of short-term defeat and ruin, and (2) the leader was literally a powerful social institution where he was the only person who knew what he was doing. Sociology reveals that social institutions are powerful shapers of perceptions of reality, morals and even thinking: “society not only controls our movements, but shapes our identity, our thought, and our emotions.” Social institutions are therefore, to a significant extent, “structures of our own consciousness.”

Leader infallibility arises once the totalitarian is in power and cannot be challenged any longer:

The method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive . . . . . Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such. . . . . What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system [social institution] of which they are presumably part.

Which contemporary politicians do ‘extreme contempt for facts’ remind us of?[1]

2. TOTALITARIAN ORGANIZATION: Arendt argues that the forms of a totalitarian organization were “completely new”, which is an extremely rare thing in politics where almost nothing is new. The origins of new forms of political organization are unclear, but Hitler was an early proponent and maybe he was the source or one of the sources of the social and political power that this new organizational concept could deliver to the leader.

The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn between party members and sympathizers. . . . . We do not know who first decided to organize fellow travelers into front organizations, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses . . . . . a decisive force in itself. . . . . Hitler was the first to say each movement should divide the masses which have been won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members. . . . . Hitler, consequently, was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members strictly limited. . . . . The ingeniousness of this device during the movements’ struggle for power is that the front organizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of outside normalcy which wards off the true impact of true reality more effectively than mere indoctrination. . . . . The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called fanatics; through them the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.

Not only were sympathizers organized into groups or societies to look like parts of regular societies, such as teachers for Hitler, lawyers for Hitler, policemen for Hitler, coal miners for Hitler, and if it existed, sociologists for Hitler (a group that would have later been exterminated because sociology is by its nature completely inimical to totalitarianism because its function is to see through social lies), these groups served to continually isolate party members from reality. In other words, the fellow travelers in front organizations worked on two fronts to serve two different goals. One was to make the pre-power movements look normal to the outside world. The other was to insulate party members from the real world, freeing them to form increasingly radical and murderous groups of party members based in part on their increasing levels of detachment from reality and all moral concerns.

Arendt commented: “They [party members] are so well protected against the reality of the nontotalitarian world that they constantly underestimate the tremendous risks of totalitarian politics.”

Digression – A personal speculation: At this point, one can see what Senator Joseph McCarthy was so fearful of in the 1950s. He had a point. His tactics were illegal, immoral and ineffective, but at least there was a solid reason for fear and an instinctive response in self-defense. In view of Arendt’s version of history, it would seem that one could argue what Russia and China are doing today in their relentless attacks on democracy and personal freedoms is vaguely akin to what Hitler and Stalin did in their time. Societies and communications technology would seem to make the route to power that worked for Hitler and Stalin probably not possible today.

So instead, enemies of democracy and freedom turn to the most effective modern propaganda techniques possible, social media and propaganda or fake ‘news’ sources. Building front organizations may not be so effective today due to, e.g., the ease of fact checking. That said, one must look very, very carefully at groups who support President Trump. Although Trump does not have the intellect or work ethic to be a totalitarian, but he very much would like to be an authoritarian dictator. The parallels between Trump’s tactics and immorality and those of Hitler and Stalin are not trivial.

Rotting the status quo from within – duplication of social institutions: In the critical, short period of time when social institutions and norms finally fall to the totalitarian, front groups served as pre-existing institutions to replace the existing groups and institutions. Professional organizations were quickly replaced by the front groups. Front groups of lawyers, doctors, and most everyone else were ready to step in and act as if nothing had changed, when in fact everything had changed.

The important factor for the movements is that, even before they seize power, they give the impression that all elements of society are embodied in their ranks. (The ultimate goal of Nazi propaganda was to organize the whole German people as sympathizers.) . . . . . This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining actively existing institutions and in the “decomposition of the status quo”, which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force. . . . . The practical value of the fake organizations came to light when the Nazis seized power and were ready at once to destroy the existing teachers’ organizations, with another teachers’ organization, the existing lawyers’ clubs with a Nazi-sponsored lawyers’ club, etc. They could change overnight the whole structure of German society – and not just political life – precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within its own ranks.

Footnote: 1. President Trump, Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, and others.

B&B orig: 2/3/19