Some Thoughts on Totalitarianism and White Supremacy
I finally finished Hannah Arendt's political classic "Origins of Totalitarianism." Here are my initial thoughts.
I just finished my book! Finally! I've been working on this classic tome from political theorist Hannah Arendt since late last summer. I was flying through it, despite it being a tough read... and then DJT lost the 2020 election and it didn't seem quite as urgent anymore. So, the last couple of chapters actually took me the longest to finish. But I’m done! Here are some initial thoughts:
There are so many lessons to learn from the experiences of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It's also fascinating seeing Arendt’s descriptions, written immediately after the Second World War, in use by some totalitarian dictators today. In particular, I think of North Korea, but China, under Xi Jinping, is increasingly looking not just like a dictatorship but like a totalitarian one as well. Russia, though moving in that direction is not necessarily a totalitarian state, at least not if Arendt's work is right. She makes a distinction between a tyranny driven by a dictator and his wishes and a totalitarian state, which consumes the individual altogether, including all those in power, eliminating anything and everything that makes the individual unique, making it a cog in the broader ideological machine. That is, totalitarianism is not merely the overtaking of a country by a dictator run as a personal fiefdom, as is the case in many African dictatorships, but instead the subsuming of ALL facets of social, political and economic life, including the ability to think and have conversations with one's self, to the needs of the ideology at play.
In a totalitarian political system, you exist to serve the system, nothing more: whatever happens to you, for you, with you, is necessary for that system to move towards its final goal.
This book also helped me realize that many millions of Germans and Russians had no interest in the system. Many didn't even know what was happening, they were just trying to survive, to eat, sleep, and work, just like the rest of us. Indeed, that's the thing about brainwashing - you don’t realize you've been brainwashed until you're on the other side – just ask any cult survivor. The old adage about 10 Nazis being around the table even if only one of the Germans around the table is active, is, I think, only part of the story. For the most part, regular, everyday Germans just did what they had to do to make it to the next day. They many never have met a Jewish person, but they still lived and participated in a system that counted those people as inferior, and while that makes them culpable, it also means something that they literally could not do otherwise than what they did. If they didn’t rat on their neighbour, their other neighbour would rat on them for not turning in the first neighbour, making every hostile action towards other people a self-preserving action. You simply cannot do otherwise, because to do otherwise is to find yourself at the end of the firing squad. So total was the process of brainwashing, and so strong was the impulse of personal survival that many Germans simply did not have the mental capacity to think any differently.
This is what bugs me about much western reporting of places like North Korea - it fundamentally misunderstands adherence to the system as a belief in the system, as if somehow millions of North Koreans willfully believe Kim Jung Un to be a deity of some kind. They don't willfully believe anything: they just know it to be true, the same way that we know 2+2=4 to be true. It’s as true as any mathematical axioms, because that’s how total the system is in its brainwashing. Interestingly, western audiences are starting to wake up to this kind of thinking, suddenly faced with the reality that they live in a system so completely invested in the supremacy of white people that they literally don’t realize they’re participating in it until it is pointed out to them. Like the many Germans who just went about their daily business, watching as Jewish people were taken all around them without necessarily even realizing that their neighbours, formerly their friends, were being sent to the ovens, yesterday’s white people didn’t realize that the reason they could move into the nice house in the suburbs was because the city brain trust had already determined that Black people couldn’t live there. They just knew they didn’t want to live with Black people around, and so they moved to a location that, unbeknownst to them, was essentially set up to be segregated. Likewise, the average white person who went about their day in 1950 did not realize that when Indigenous people were sent to residential schools, that they were being sent to their death. Just as in the German case, while this does not take away culpability, it does suggest people emmeshed in totalitarian systems, like white supremacy, could not do any different, simple because they did know know any different.
Of course, we know differently now. And when we learn something, we are responsible for what we do with that new information. When we learn that we’re swimming in white supremacy, do we immediately stand up and look for ways to oppose that system? Or are going to be just like the other Germans around the table who, upon learning from their Nazi friend the terror of the camps, just kept drinking beer and laughing?
Who do we want to be?
People who give in to totalitarian ideologies?
Or people who want justice for all and are actively willing to pursue it, even if it means putting one’s self in harm’s way?
Who will I be?
For me, that’s the takeaway from this important text:
When I learn that I am participating in a totalitarian system, I have the obligation to try and break it, even if it costs me my life.