Review by Bill Doughty
Seventy-five years ago, in her preface to the first edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt warned of the rise of authoritarianism. She decried the complacency of people in accepting and even supporting antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.
Her preface to her first edition, written in 1950, describes dark clouds of pessimism just five years after World War II and in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The dark clouds in these excerpts (from the preface) sound familiar today:
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity…”
“Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center … than balanced judgment and measured insight.”
“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation…”
“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”
“And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives)…”
Applebaum puts Arendt’s warnings against authoritarians in context, including those who lie, grift, and threaten to invade neighboring nations as well as promote inequality in society.
The world has experienced an increase in inequality, xenophobia and extremism in recent years. That combination has led to a rise in autocracies, kleptocracies, and oligarchies over free-thinking, people-powered, and liberal democracies.
According to Applebaum, the rule of power and force wants to overtake public order and rule of law. Even the antisemitism and imperialism Arendt writes about, along with totalitarianism, is on the rise. Unfortunately, complacency, submission, and blind obedience have allowed those anti-freedom (what Arendt calls “evil”) forces to take hold. Applebaum writes:
“And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda— just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: ‘Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.’
Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from ‘real life’ to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn't created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly ‘connected,’ loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where ‘globalization' has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The twentieth. century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.”
Military leaders have long studied the wisdom of Hannah Arendt and other thinkers. Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is on the DOD Overdrive Professional Reading List. It was listed on the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings site as a recommended book in 2008. In 2013, retired U.S. Army General, Stanley McChrystal, discussed his book, "My Share of the Task: A Memoir,” at the Hannah Arendt Center.
