Hannah Arendt was a product of a highly developed Jewish intellectual culture that existed in Europe prior to the rise of Hitler’s Reich. She was able to flee and come to the United States in 1941. Her former lover, Martin Heidegger, succumbed and was one of the intellectual class that supported Hitler. (Such a class also flourished in the US, but was forced underground by events. It is still with us. Current Bush family scions stem from ardent Hitler supporters.) She later rekindled that affair in secret, as love overcomes all.
Arendt was a disciplined thinker who wrote in hard prose that requires concentration and patience. She will carry on about an idea, develop it and then, in one sentence finish its expose’ with startling clarity. So it is that she tells us after several pages of her essay called “Ideology and Terror” (1953)* that terror in a totalitarian society serves the same purpose as “honor in a monarchy, [and] virtue in a republic.” What is needed is what Montesquieu called a “principle of action”, or a reason to move forward.
Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of Nature or History with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered; eventually its force will always prove more powerful than the most powerful forces engendered by the actions and the will of men.** But it can be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom – irrelevant and arbitrary as they may deem it – is identical with the fact that men are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and die can only be regarded as an annoying interference with higher forces. Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new beginning.
This impulse is not new in American society. Terror was the principle weapon by which early American settlers eliminated the natives already inhabiting the lands. Tyranny did not arrive here a newborn, but existed throughout all for recorded history, from Roman conquests to Christian inquisitions. Freedom of thought cannot exist in a totalitarian regime.
In such a situation, a lawful government cannot last long, as
lawfulness sets limitations on actions, but does not inspire them; the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one should do.
So to preserve our Republic, Franklin told us, required “eternal vigilance,” and he surely knew it could not last.
9/11 is seen by most as a great defining moment in American history, but I disagree. It is more an Reichstag-like accelerator that was applied to a process long underway. The Enabling Act was reborn as USAPATRIOT. My limited outlook cannot see long before what I see as the defining moment in the destruction of the American Republic, World War II.
It is a ‘given’ that we had to fight that war, that it was a “good war”, and that our forebears were the “greatest generation.” But just as a thought experiment, imagine that none of that is true. The Nazi regime was indeed totalitarian, and mobilized the German people towards world domination. But prior to that time, the French had spawned horrible crimes on humanity, and Bertrand Russell observed that “while the English upper class had a monopoly of political power, it was just as bad as Stalin.” So German evil had its forebears, and was nothing new.
So the war was not about good vs evil, black vs white, but rather old evil vs new evil, which had to be destroyed. And indeed, old evil, in the form of Russian tyranny, did indeed destroy the Nazis, otherwise the Americans would not have invaded Europe. Some evidence to support this comes in the form of the hundreds of German military officers and scientists that were quietly integrated into the American military system after the war, used to put down rebellions in Greece and other places, and marshaled off to South America to help manage our back-yard tyrannies. We never pursued them. We did not have to. We always knew where they were. We put them there. We did not conquer Nazism, but merely brought it into the fold. Simon Wiesenthal was on his own.
Had we not fought that war, if German evil had been allowed to destroy its British and French forebears, and if we had watched from the sidelines, how would the world be different? Not by much, in my view, as the struggle was never among countries, but rather among forces that are always with us and that would still be with us in other forms.
Enough – this is merely the introductory portion of Arendt’s essay, and from here she moves on the help us understand the role of ideology in advance of tyranny, and how “logic” defines the authoritarian personality. If anyone wants to add their two bits to this analysis of her work, please, help the boy. I’m in over my head.
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*Part of her much larger work, Origins of Totalitarianism
** It was custom at that time to refer to all persons as “men” in writing.
Piece of Mindful 
If there is a gold standard, you’ve struck platinum. These works will surely be banned if too many people read them. Not to worry, reading is now limited to 140 characters.
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I suspected as much.
140 on the nose. Well done!I took it over to Word – not counting spaces, it is 142.LikeLike