Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
My thoughts on “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt.
It has been a long time since a book has captured me in such totality as the Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt. Written by a Jewish German woman born in 1906, Arendt fled to Paris in 1933, and eventually New York in 1941. Published in 1951, the book analyzes the politics of the twentieth century in Europe, touching on the subjects of the background of antisemitism, the first world war, the destruction of values and flirtation with exoticism in bourgeoisie society, the isolation of peoples, and finally, fascism, naziism, and communism. This book provided me with the same amount of clarity as it does the number of questions I am left with after reading.
I oftentimes say that the twentieth century has been the most disastrous century of at least the past millennium. I say this even contrasting with the great strides humanity has made in increasing the life expectancy, average well-being of a citizen, education levels, many measures of what we consider generally positive have by leaps and bounds have changed since 1900 to the year I was born 2000.
However, it all feels avoidable. The disasters, the wars that ravaged Europe, the depopulation of provinces, forced movements of people, secret police, deranged experiments, devaluation of existing moral codes, threats of nuclear war, and so on.
Even with all these factors, Europe generally turned out alright in the end. All of Europe ,even the British Empire, lost their world power status immediately after the war, leaving only two real and a few faux winners.
As this is my first book reading into this topic, I will not blindly attempt to refute the work, critique, praise, or summarize this, anybody on Goodreads or an LLM can do that. I will instead discuss the parts of the book that has shocked me and has changed the way that I view Europe at the time.
The Forcing of the Nation State
The idea of a nation state has irrevocably taken over the western mindset. As nationalistic movements began propping up in western Europe, we began to see the creation of societies that are still easily recognizable in the modern world. During this time we saw the rise and unification of Germany in 1871, and the bloodier Italian unification ending contemporaneously.
Marking a significant shift from previous states, nation-states express a desired purpose of protecting the people and the interests of the nation, as opposed to simply ruling for the express purposes of enforcing the law, and preventing the onset of anarchy.
As such, similar to how a democracy can legitimize the tyranny of a majority, so to can a nation-state enforce the will of those that are members of the nation, against those that have found themselves on the wrong side of the border.
Prior to the nation-state system, the monarch’s duty lied in managing the different interests of different sects of society to promote stability and preventing conflict. At least this is how it should have worked in theory. In doing so, some pre-nation-state societies actually designated minority groups special privileges in the kingdom. The example that Arendt uses here is the special privileges that Jews were given, allowing them to rise to become the only people that can become financiers, mostly stemming from usury laws that prevent the christian majority to do so. This allowed many European Jewish communities to rise to comprise of the middle class, with a financial economic sector taking a large share of incomes.
Since the development of a nation state, however, these privileges have slowly been redacted, as people of the majority group were able to enjoy these rights as well. In the most pressing example, the German Empire and its predecessor state of Prussia imposed a series of Germanization campaigns against the Polish minority that were present in the eastern provinces conquered in the Partitions of Poland. Land was confiscated from Polish nobility, the German language was imposed on the population, and laws were written specifically to exclude Polish people from normal condition.
In Poland, this era is commemorated by the tale of Michał Drzymała, who skirted by the laws of the precise and legalistic Prussian authorities that have prevented him from building a home on his property by instead using a circus wagon which he moved every single day, thus causing his dwelling to not fall within the legal definition of a home.
This period of Germany is marked by a progressive shift towards an overarching national culture, while antisemitism and anti-slavic sentiments are on the rise. Nietzsche during this time famously writes against antisemitism, as he very humorously writes “my ancestors were Polish noblemen: it is owing to them that I have so much race instinct in my blood—who knows? perhaps even the liberum veto” [1].
And so the writing was on the wall. These conflicts oftentimes do not fully manifest into a final form until times begin to get tough. A shaky truce is set until it is not. In the case of Germany, it was a grand blow and subsequent depression.
Into the Darkness of Isolation
It is not uncommon for people of my age group to discuss the destruction of community in modern American, and most likely modern European life.
It’s hard to not be conspiratorial about these changes, given that we have seen many old neighborhoods in the United States outright destroyed in the twentieth century. Many of these destructions were under the movement known as “Urban Renewal”.
The most commonly spoken about cases are the destruction of downtown and inner-city black neighborhoods to build highways. These moves are oftentimes attributed to the fact that African Americans had poor representation in their governments, and thus had no effect in altering the course of the destruction.
Another example, although not as well known is the case of Little Italy in Chicago against the big boss Richard J. Daley. It was commonly retorted that “Daley always hated the Italians” as he had overseen the construction of the Dan Ryan expressway, destroying the eastern side of Little Italy, including the church Holy Guardian Angel founded by Mother Cabrini herself. [2] In 1961, Daley proposed the land southwest of Harrison and Halsted, thus razing the densest portion of Little Italy. The effects of this decision are still clear. Little Italy is simply a shell of what it has been before. Walking through the streets of UIC today and you feel that the area is devoid of something. It feels like one of those neighborhoods that were built recently, on top of potentially a razed factory or old train yard. The reality is different.
A few blocks south on Maxwell Street and Halsted holds a similar story, a memory of the once famous Maxwell Street Market is now just a small commercial strip cut short by the highway. One simply cannot walk down those streets of fresh commercial buildings and parking garages and not wonder what had been there before.
The theories behind his decision still seem to be debated. Whether it was a political move to divide the ward and remove its influence, whether it was simply to remove a slum that was too close to downtown, or if he truly believed that it would serve as a prime location for a new exciting university, we can all still debate about. The effects are clear. The Italians lost their largest Chicago neighborhood. They lost not only the houses that stood up but the community built around and within them. They were forced to join those fleeing to the newfound suburbs, and had to find new homes there. In a way, they were forced to lose the Italian part of being an Italian-American, and joined the masses of people that had to form new community in the suburbs, vastly different from the ethnic ones that formed in the neighborhoods.
What will this new life be? Well that would be the quintessential boomer lifestyle that everybody loves to hate on nowadays. One would spend their mornings commuting to a factory or office space, leave their wife at home to take care of the children and make sure that the community is taken care of, while weekends are spent trimming bushes, cutting grass, small family trips, taking care of things around the house and meeting with your neighbors. This era is oftentimes criticized for its massive adherence to conformity, of which can only be possible through the distribution of influential magazines to set the standards of culture. [3]
The late Robert Putnam in 2000 published “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” as a warning about the ongoing trends that have been causing Americans to drift further away from each other. Although chiefly statistical, he brings up many organizations such as volunteer organizations, fraternities, and the namesake bowling league have all dropped in numbers over the past few decades. Putnam also warned about the degradation what he called “social capital”, that is the feeling of a sense that one is part of a community. This social capital is useful for things such as neighborhood watch groups, as neighbors who know each other will report what happens in the neighborhood. It also is a prime factor in allowing for community organizing, in the case of another highway (or our modern equivalent, data center) was being proposed nearby.
Putnam credits this decline mainly in the rise of individual and electronic entertainment, an eerily prophetic warning for what was to come, and what we know now.
We now live in a time where we are told that men and women are divided more than ever. [4] This of course is credited, but is also an outcome of, to causing terrible and short lasting relationships between young men and women. Gen Z is oftentimes called the “Loneliest Generation”, and for good reason. For being the generation that has been introduced to the mass-internet during their youth, much of their upbringing has been dominated by social media platforms of some sort. A normal upbringing is more so choosing your poison than choosing not to take one at all. This leaves us (Gen Z) vulnerable in two ways. The first being that our nonexistent social networks cause our lack of support networks, the research on the effects of loneliness is well documented so I won’t go into detail. The other more sinister part of this relates to what Arendt talks about, and has parallels in the works of Jacques Ellul [5], isolated individuals are more apt to follow a mass society. In our world, this means that people are more likely to fall to the propaganda pushed by some external force, obviously seen on all of our modern news sites, social media platforms, and universities [6].
This makes us perfect prey to a potential totalitarian calamity. As of writing, it seemed that Trump’s attempt is about to come to an end, as his disastrous war in Iran is causing his popularity to plummet, I predict like many others that his efforts will be bogged down after the upcoming midterm elections. I still make this warning however, we must be careful that somebody else with a populist outward nature and nothing but pure disdain for an average person does not get the chance to be anywhere near the White House.
The Eastern Europe We Knew
People oftentimes talk about the effects of the arbitrary European-defined borders of the postcolonial regions of the world. These include the republics in Africa, which have oftentimes packed together many different tribal people into a single political entity, while also having the effect of splitting some peoples into one. Extreme examples of outcomes from this process include the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, and the fact that modern South Africa has twelve official languages. This idea also includes the British departure from India and the carving of East and West Pakistan from the Raj. Post-ottoman borders of the Middle East also fall into this camp, effects of which we still are seeing today.
History is quickly forgotten about. Most people in the modern United States do not apply this concept to Eastern European borders in any way, oftentimes even the types of people that have ancestry from these areas (even post-war). What happened in India and Pakistan is not too far from what happened in Eastern Europe a few years prior. Applying the nation-state concept to Eastern Europe was not a decision to take lightly.
Eastern Europe in the interwar period was a result of the splitting up of the dead empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia (for their own reasons), and the Ottomans. Nation-states were created in a somewhat arbitrary process, where maps were drawn up of different ethnicities and languages, and a state was built around those chosen people. Some new states were carved up for people that have never even had a historical state to look back to, as is the case for Latvia and Estonia, or had their ruling class absorbed into another, as was the case with Lithuania. Other nationalities were packed into a new state with their new neighborhoods and told to be friends, as was the case in Yugoslavia.
The problem however is that Eastern Europe generally comprised of a very mixed and diverse population. Many Germans populated villages in Poland, Hungary, and what is now Ukraine. Hungarians suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of their border as well, and the “Jewish Question” lingered throughout, as Jews lived as minorities in many Eastern European cities.
The stage is set. Let the games begin.
Czechoslovak forces attacked Poland over territorial disputes. Poland in 1919 took over the city of Vilnius from Lithuania - a city comprised of 56% Poles, 36% Jews, and 2.3% Lithuanian [7]. Poland also declared war against Bolshevik Russia. Thousands of so called “stateless peoples” had moved and sought refuge in any country that would take them, these include Armenians, White Russians, and the Jews.
Germany recently kicked out of the world powers club threatened and invaded Sudentenland, threatened to take back the Free City of Danzig, and began constructing the “Berlinka” [8] from Berlin to Königsberg (Kaliningrad) with plans to go through the Polish Corridor.
These wars oftentimes follow from the creation of a power vacuum as the previous order collapsed within the span of a few years, and new states formed and disappeared. The grand solution to many of these conflicts after the war simply just to relocate ethnic groups from the territories that were lost in their countries to the territories they have in their “ethnic countries”. This is the stage of Eastern Europe where you see things like the expulsion of Germans from the USSR and from Königsberg, the replacement of Germans in East Prussia and Danzig with Poles, Poles that oftentimes have come from the lost territories in Western Belarus, Lithuania, Volhynia and Lviv, Ukraine. Other examples include the resolution of Trieste and the population of Italians living in the previously Venetian cities in the Yugoslav coast.
Reading the book made me feel like I was just reading a list of injustices. The point that I am trying to make here is not a lesson on interwar politics, but to heed a warning to other regions of the world where nationalism is rearing its ugly head. These nation-states however stable as they may be in Europe are not in any way natural, and we must remain conscious of that fact.
Europe has pacified itself immensely after the war. The largest European conflicts since 1945 were mainly ethnic conflicts that don’t reach outside of the boundaries of the parties, and some political conflicts (usually in Eastern Europe). We unfortunately forget the pains it takes to get here, and in my opinion, pains that were not worth it.
Final Thoughts
The Origins of Totalitarianism is the best book that I’ve read potentially within the past year. Its insights kept me up at night and provided me a view of most critically the interwar period that lead to the absolute chaos and failed political experimentation that occurred in the twentieth century. In the collapse of the old European order, nothing new that was good came out. The culmination of nationalism, economic woes, and new methods of effective propaganda allowed these ideologies to form.
I take this book mainly as a warning, when things start to collapse we must always be careful to keep the institutions that make our societies workable. Every point in history will always be different, but as technology gets better by the day, the effectiveness of total control only increases. There will be a day where those who do not comply will simply get a drone called to track and shoot them, far more effective than a human agent with a gun.
As for myself personally, writing this essay makes me realize how little I actually do know about history, even though it is much more than an average person, it is still not enough to provide me a sufficient answer of “how did this happen and can this happen again?”. For this, I think I will continue reading Poland’s history quickly until I get to the interesting parts.
Footnotes
[1] Ecce Homo Friedrich Nietzsche. The “Liberum Veto” was a right granted to the polish nobility (szlachta) that allowed a general veto over any legislation in the Sejm. I find this extra humorous in the irony that this veto power is oftentimes considered one of the key factors that have brought the downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
[2] https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/littleitaly/
[3] For those who are interested in reading more about “Way of Life Propaganda” i.e. the kind of propaganda that is set to influence the behavior of people to make them follow a way of life, I would suggest reading “Propaganda” by Jacques Ellul.
[4] For an example, see this 2025 NBC article Young men and women are taking the ‘gender gap’ to staggering new levels. I haven’t actually read the article, but I feel like the headline will do enough to drive the point.
[5] See his 1973 work Propaganda
[6] In the case of universities, I do not simply mean the common right wing argument of “Universities only hire left wingers!” My claims are for something more sinister than that. See this 2017 article about CIA backed conferenced designed to lure Iranian scientists. Universities have backers, they have stakeholders and they have funders. The university will choose these interests over the direct interests of the students, who relatively have little negotiating power.
[7] Srebrakowski, Aleksander, Polacy w Litewskiej SRR “Poles in the Lithuanian SSR”