Arendt's concept and description of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Jerome Kohn

In the camps Hitler and Stalin fully realized modernity's "contempt for reality," for what is given and not self-made, going far beyond the cynical and nihilistic notion that "everything is permitted" to the "insane" proposition that "everything is possible." Arendt understood the camps as "laboratories" in which "experiments" were conducted to test that proposition, and what those experiments demonstrated was that "the omnipotence of man" can be bought at the price "of the superfluity of men." In the camps human beings were made into one utterly predictable "living corpse," a body permanently in "the process of dying." Men and women were reduced "to the lowest common denominator of organic life," rendered "equal" in the sense of being interchangeable, an inhuman "equality" that stands in the sharpest possible contrast to political equality. If political equality is an equality of peers, the achievement of a plurality of distinct individuals who of their own will join together to generate the power required to affect the course of their world, then the "equality" of the camps is of undifferentiated human beings deprived of every relation to anything like a world: in Arendt's words, "to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all."

Human existence, according to Arendt, is in part conditioned and in part free, but in the camps terror corroded the part that is free. Unlike fear that is intelligible in its relation to an object in the world, or to the objectivity of a threatening world, terror conditions human beings in much the same way that the behavior of animals can be conditioned by electric shock. Systematically starved men and women were conditioned to behave inhumanly in the hope of being fed, much as Pavlov's dog (to Arendt a "perverted" animal) was conditioned to salivate not when it was hungry but when a bell was rung. (15) In the contrived, inhuman, but rationally consistent nonworld of the camps, "innocence is beyond virtue and guilt is beyond crime": the categories of innocence and guilt, right and wrong, virtue and vice, and almost everything else that since time immemorial has been associated with the specific nature of human beings ceased to make sense. As yet, at least as far as is known, the totalitarian camps are the only places on earth where the dehumanization of man was scientifically implemented and systematically carried out, not for any comprehensible purpose but for its own sake.

When compared with its "insane end-result," the assault on human nature in the camps was methodological and threefold. The "first, essential step" was the destruction of juridical or political man by disfranchisement; second, the moral person was destroyed by rendering his or her conscience impotent; and third, the "unique identity" of the individual was obliterated by annihilating the human capacity for spontaneity in thought and action. Disfranchisement means the elimination of every legal status, including that of ordinary criminals. Human beings are subjected to torment not only unfit for any conceivable crime but also unconnected to anything they have done; they are punished for having been born a Jew, for being the representative of a dying class, for being "asocial," or mentally ill, or the carrier of a disease. New categories would have to be invented when old categories became exhausted, or victims would have to be selected randomly, as in fact they were in Stalin's "more perfect" system. The arbitrariness of the choice of victims aims at destroying "the civil rights of the whole population," and that destruction is carried out neither by indoctrination nor brainwashing, for it is not "consent" (which implies the possibility of dissent) that is wanted but only "discipline." The destruction of juridical or political man "is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely."