The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Hannah Arendt

‘The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and life … so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more insight we have into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes.’fn10 It is quite apparent that very few changes are needed to express Stalin’s creed in two sentences which might run as follows: ‘The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more do we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic materialism, the greater will be our success.’

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.

There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could already ‘see the time approaching when the “art of moving the masses” will be so perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet will possess the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathematician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance,’ and it has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and there.

that objective laws of power can be discovered. Rohan’s political theory that ‘the kings command the peoples and the interest commands the king,’ that objective interest is the rule ‘that alone can never fail,’ that ‘rightly or wrongly understood, the interest makes governments live or die’ is the traditional core of modern utilitarianism, positivist or socialist, but none of these theories assumes that it is possible ‘to transform the nature of man’ as totalitarianism indeed tries to do.

‘Scientism’ in politics still presupposes that human welfare is its object, a concept which is utterly alien to totalitarianism.

precisely because the utilitarian core of ideologies was taken for granted that the anti-utilitarian behavior of totalitarian governments, their complete indifference to mass interest, has been such a shock.

Hitler was not forced by the war to throw all ethical considerations overboard, but regarded the mass slaughter of war as an incomparable opportunity to start a murder program which, like all other points of his program, was calculated in terms of millennia.

Since virtually all of European history through many centuries had taught people to judge each political action by its cui bono and all political events by their particular underlying interests, they were suddenly confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability.

The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.

The same spirit showed itself during the last months of a war that was obviously lost, when Nazi propaganda consoled an already badly frightened population with the promise that the Fuehrer ‘in his wisdom had prepared an easy death for the German people by gassing them in case of defeat.’

Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of their utilitarian content, the interests of a class or nation. The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content.

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 true their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat.

The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy.

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In both instances the same objective is accomplished: the liquidation is fitted into a historical process in which man only does or suffers what, according to immutable laws, is bound to happen anyway. As soon as the execution of the victims has been carried out, the ‘prophecy’ becomes a retrospective alibi: nothing happened but what had already been predicted.

This method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power.

The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted.

In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.

‘temporary’ defeats and failures in specific enterprises. For masses, in contrast to classes, want victory and success as such, in their most abstract form;

More important to them than the cause that may be victorious, or the particular enterprise that may be a success, is the victory of no matter what cause, and success in no matter what enterprise.

the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance.

Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics. The origin of mystery did not matter;

or in age-old superstitions which had woven legends around certain groups, as in the case of the Jesuits and the Jews.

the Bolsheviks have gradually learned the trick, although they rely less on traditionally accepted mysteries and prefer their own inventions

the plot of the Trotskyites, followed by the rule of the 300 families, to the sinister imperialist (i.e., global) machinations of the British or American Secret Services.

The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.

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convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only becaus...

Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.

the consistency-hungry masses will accept the fiction as supreme proof of their truthfulness; whereas common sense tells us that it is precisely their consistency which is out of this world and proves that they are a fabrication.

The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist,

Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.

Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices – and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.

While it has been the specialty of Nazi propaganda to profit from the longing of the masses for consistency, Bolshevik methods have demonstrated, as though in a lab...

confessions are not indispensable for punishment. ‘Confessions’ are as much a specialty of Bolshevik propaganda as the curious pedantry of legalizing crimes by retrospective and retroactive legislation was a specialty of Nazi propaganda. The aim in both cases is consistency.

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.

Qanon

The only signs which the real world still offers to the understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses – whom every new stroke of ill luck makes more gullible – are, so to speak, its lacunae, the questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumors it does not dare to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and deformed way, some sore spot.

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From these sore spots the lies of totalitarian propaganda derive the element of truthfulness and real experience they need to bridge the gulf between reality and fiction.

even the terror-sustained lying fictions of totalitarian regimes have not yet become entirely arbitrary, although they are usually cruder, more impudent, and, so to speak, more original than those of the movements.

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The lies of the movements, on the other hand, are much subtler. They attach themselves to every aspect of social and political life that is hidden from the public eye.

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They succeed best where the official authorities have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of secrecy. In the eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior ‘realism’ because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden.

Revelations of scandals in high society, of corruption of politicians, everything that belongs to yellow journalism, becomes in their hands a weapon of more than sensational importance.

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The more consistently a discussion of the Jewish question was avoided by all parties and organs of public opinion, the more convinced the mob became that Jews were the true representatives of the powers that be, and that the Jewish issue was the symbol for the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the whole system.

Exaggerated notions of Jewish world power are even older; they can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the intimate connection between Jewish business and the nation-states had become visible.

The point about the Jews themselves is that they grew prominent and conspicuous in inverse proportion to their real influence and position of power.

The partially successful conquest of the state by the nation made it impossible for the government machine to maintain its position above all classes and parties, and thereby nullified the value of alliances with the Jewish sector of the population, which was supposed also to stay outside the ranks of society and to be indifferent to party politics.

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How conscious the concerned states were of the changed situation came to light when, in 1917, the German government, following a long-established tradition, tried to use its Jews for tentative peace negotiations with the Allies. Instead of addressing itself to the established leaders of German Jewry, it went to the small and comparatively uninfluential Zionist minority which were still trusted in the old way precisely because they insisted on the existence of a Jewish people independent of citizenship, and could therefore be expected to render services which depended upon international connections and an international point of view. The step, however, turned out to have been a mistake for the German government. The Zionists did something that no Jewish banker had ever done before; they set their own conditions and told the government that they would only negotiate a peace without annexations and reparations.

The old Jewish indifference to political issues was gone; the majority could no longer be used, since it was no longer aloof from the nation, and the Zionist minority was useless because it had political ideas of its own.

The Nazis placed the Jewish issue at the center of their propaganda in the sense that antisemitism was no longer a question of opinions about people different from the majority, or a concern of national politics,fn34 but the intimate concern of every individual in his personal existence; no one could be a member whose ‘family tree’ was not in order, and the higher the rank in the Nazi hierarchy, the farther back the family tree had to be traced.fn35 By the same token, though less consistently, Bolshevism changed the Marxist doctrine of the inevitable final victory of the proletariat by organizing its members as ‘born proletarians’ and making other class origins shameful and scandalous.