The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part One: Antisemitism

Chapter 1. Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense

Chapter 2. The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of Antisemitism

Chapter 3. The Jews and Society

I. Between Pariah and Parvenu

Boerne wrote with a great deal of bitterness: ‘Some reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon me for it, but all think of it.’

II. The Potent Wizard

Disraeli, who never denied that ‘the fundamental fact about (him) was that he was a Jew,’ had an admiration for all things Jewish that was matched only by his ignorance of them.

II. Between Vice and Crime

When Marcel Proust himself half Jewish and in emergencies ready to identify himself as a Jew, set out to search for ‘things past’, he actually wrote what one of his admiring critics has called an apologia pro vita sua .

The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer horrified by by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime. [...] The best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and general weariness, had burst like an abscess. The outcasts and the pariahs upon whom society called in its predicament were, whatever else they might have been, at least not plagued with ennui and, if we are to trust Proust's judgment, were the only ones in fin-de-siècle society who were still capable of passion. Proust leads us through the labyrinth of social connections and ambitions only by the tread of man's capacity for love, which is presented in the perverted passion of Monsieur de Charlus for Morel, in the devastating loyalty of the Jew Swann to his courtesan and in the author's own desperate jealousy of Albertine, herself the personification of vice in the novel.

[...] it is true that to the recoding onlooker the behavior of the Jewish clique showed the same obsession as the behavior patterns followed by inverts. Both felt either superior or inferior, but in any case proudly different from other normal beings [...]

Chapter 4. The Dreyfus Affair

Part Two: Imperialism

Chapter 5. The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie

The three decades from 1884 to 1914 separate the nineteenth century, which ended with the scramble for Africa and the birth of the pan-movements, from the twentieth, which began with the first World War. This is the period of Imperialism, with its stagnant quiet in Europe and breath-taking developments in Asia and Africa.

I. Expansion and the Nation-State

II. Power and the Bourgeoisie

III. The Alliance Between Mob and Capital

Export of money and foreign investment as such are not imperialism and do not necessarily lead to expansion as a political device. [...] Only when they demanded government protection of their investments (after the initial stage of swindle had opened their eyes to the possible use of politics against the risks of gambling) did they re-enter the life of the nation. In this appeal, however, they followed the established tradition of bourgeois society, always to consider political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of the individual property.

Chapter 6. Race-Thinking Before Racism

I. A ‘Race’ of Aristocrats Against a ‘Nation’ of Citizens

II. Race Unity as a Substitute for National Emancipation

III. The New Key to History

IV. The ‘Rights of Englishmen’ vs. the Rights of Men

Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed n the civilized world.

Chapter 7. Race and Bureaucracy

I. The Phantom World of the Dark Continent

II. Gold and Race

III. The Imperialist Character

Legends made [man] master of what he had not done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo.

Chapter 8. Continental Imperialism: the Pan-Movements

I. Tribal Nationalism

II. The Inheritance of Lawlessness

III. Party and Movement

The speed with which the German and Austrian Pan-Germans rallied to Nazism has a parallel in the much slower and more complicated course through which Pan-Slavs finally found out that the liquidation of Lenin's Russian Revolution had been thorough enough to make it possible for them to support Stalin wholeheartedly.

Chapter 9. The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man

I. The ‘Nation of Minorities’ and the Stateless People

[...] at the Conférence pour la Codification du Droit International at the Hague in 1930, it was only the Finnish government which maintained that ‘loss of nationality... should never constitute a punishment... nor be pronounced in order to get rid of an undesirable person through expulsion.’

II. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.

Part Three: Totalitarianism

Chapter 10. A Classless Society

I. The Masses

[...] experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.

The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party. On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public opinion had ever been able to show, namely that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.

[...] the first signs of the breakdown of the Continental Party system were not the desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from the younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the unorganised masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition.

To change Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into full totalitarian rule, Stalin has first to create artificially that atomized society which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical circumstances.

Lenin seized at once upon all the possible differentiations, social, national, professional, that might bring some structure into the  population, and he seemed convinced that in such stratification lay the salvation of the revolution. He legalized the anarchic expropriation of the landowners by the rural masses and established thereby for the first and probably last time in Russia that emancipated peasant class which, since the French Revolution, had been the firmest supporter of the Western nation-states.

II. The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite

Chapter 11. The Totalitarian Movement

Chapter 12. Totalitarianism in Power

I. The So-called Totalitarian State

II. The Secret Police

III. Total Domination

The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think our world in utilitarian terms.

Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

Chapter 13. Ideology anf Terror: A Novel Form of Government

If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.

[...] all ideologies contain totalitarian elements, but these are fully developed only by totalitarian movements, and this creates the deceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character. [...] there appear three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking.
First, in their claim to total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes [...]
Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience [...]
Thirdly [...] they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain methods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it [...]

Trotsky: ‘We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being right.’