Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism Quotes

“What is at the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated with the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, with the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacked: not by chance, in fact, the revolution called upon the ‘slaves in the colonies’ to break their fetters.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“What is at the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated with the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, with the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacked: not by chance, in fact, the revolution called upon the ‘slaves in the colonies’ to break their fetters. The common theory of totalitarianism concentrates exclusively upon the similar methods attributed to the two antagonists and, besides, claims that they derive univocally from a supposed ideological affinity, without making any reference to the actual situation or to the geopolitical context.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“On the other hand, in forging his weapons for struggle, Hitler did not limit himself to observing the socialist and Communist parties. As he denounced the incapacity of traditional bourgeois parties to influence the people, who were thus helplessly exposed to subversive influence and uprisings, Hitler resolved to learn not only from social democracy, but also from the Catholic Church which, in spite of everything, he admired for its ability to sweep up the masses and for recruiting cadres even from the poorest social classes”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“In the best of hypotheses, to insist on explaining totalitarianism through organicism or through the sacrifice of morals for the sake of the philosophy of history is equal to explaining the soporiferous effect of opium by referring to its vis dormitiva.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism

“During the passage from the first two parts of the book, [The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt], which still possess the vehemence of the struggle against Nazism, to the third, which is instead tied to the outbreak of the Cold War, the category of imperialism (a category subsuming first of all Great Britain and the Third Reich as a sort of highest stage of imperialism) is replaced by the category of totalitarianism (which subsumes Stalin’s USSR and the Third Reich). The species of the genus of imperialism do not coincide with the species of the genus of totalitarianism. Even the species that apparently remains unchanged, that is Germany, is described in the first case as originating with Wilhelm II at the earliest, and in the second case it appears as late as 1933. At least with regard to formal coherence, the initial plan appears to be more rigorous. After clarifying the genus of ‘imperialism’, in tracing the specific differences of this phenomenon, the initial plan moved on to analyse the species of ‘racial imperialism’. But how could the categories of totalitarianism and imperialism now blend together into a coherent whole? And what relationship connected them both to the category of antisemitism? Arendt’s answers to these questions seem to seek an artificial harmonisation between two levels that continue to be scarcely compatible.”
― Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism