Arendt's concept and description of totalitarianism

Social Research, Summer, 2002 by Jerome Kohn

Next, the ability to make a conscientious choice is eliminated. Prisoners are made to choose not between good and evil but between evil and evil. When a mother is forced to choose one of her children to be murdered in order to save the life (or postpone the death) of another, she is implicated in the crime committed against her. Martyrdom is not possible since the camps are what Arendt called "holes of oblivion," places completely cut off from the outside world in which a martyr's story might be told, remembered, and become an example for others. The dead are immediately forgotten "as if they had never existed," their deaths as superfluous as their lives had been. Finally, the concentration of human beings, massing them together and binding them in terror's "band of iron," destroys every relation to and distinction from one another. They are submitted to torture, not to learn what they know but to so hurt them that they become bundles of insensate flesh. Their spontaneity is, as it were, wrung from them: rendered incapable of acting or thinking, they drift "`like dummies to their death,'" (16) no more than living fuel for the engines of destruction. In the slave labor camps of the Gulag, with their supposed economic rationale, (17) the laborers are starved or frozen to death, at once replaced by others whose lives and deaths are made no less superfluous than those of their predecessors.

To grasp the evil of totalitarian criminality requires a mental perspective in which the experience of being superfluous--the loneliness of not belonging to the world, the sense of the futility of living--is reflected. That experience was forced by terror on those condemned to die, but Arendt saw further that the functioning of the "laboratories" of extermination depended on the changed nature of the condemners. She was of course aware of the gulf in terms of human suffering that separates the two, but her point was that the condemners themselves were superfluous as human beings. S.S. officers were selected by photographs, by "objective" racial characteristics rather than by interviews in which their inclination or disinclination, their psychological suitability or unsuitability for the horrendous tasks they were called upon to perform, could be assessed. It was never a question of what the S.S. believed: their only law was the logicality of the ideology as set forth in the Fuhrer's will. When their chief, Himmler, told the members of the S.S. that the), must become "superhumanly inhuman," that is, cease being human, if they were to carry out the "great task that occurs but once in two thousand years," he intended clearly to extirpate their capacity to think and act spontaneously. In this telling sense, according to Arendt, the destroyers were as subjectively innocent as those they destroyed. Probably more than any other single factor, the failure of "the Rights of Man," "formulated" and "proclaimed" in the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century but never "politically secured" or "philosophically established," allowed a form of government to appear that, although made by men, destroyed humanity, and in which indifference toward death was the only common experience: "We did not care if we died today or only tomorrow, and there were times we cursed the morning that found us still alive," Eichmann said.