Cancel culture. Transgender ideology. Antifa protests. Internet surveillance. Is an anti-religious totalitarian regime like the former Soviet Union coming soon to the United States?
Crossword covering the terminology that will be introduced when discussing the Rise of Totalitarianism with World History students. There are 36 words total. This can be used in conjunction with the Rise of Totalitarianism word search, flash cards, and quiz/worksheet.
According to Rod Dreher, the best-selling author of The Benedict Option and senior editor at The American Conservative, the answer is yes and churches must be prepared for it.
Looming in the future was Germany’s own experience with totalitarianism: the emergence in the early 1930s of a predatory police state that initiated the Holocaust and a world war, more. Totalitarianism, form of government that permits no individual freedom and seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state. Coined by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the early 1920s, the term has become synonymous with absolute and oppressive single-party government.
- Title: The Rise of Totalitarianism 1 The Rise of Totalitarianism 2. World War I and the Russian Revolution triggered off a Global Civil War; At issue crisis and transformation of the global system; A long series of intense political struggles within states and between states. Main groups of actors; political forces seeking revolutionary changes.
- The rise of extreme forms of totalitarian governments in Germany, Italy and Japan leading up to World War II are in this lesson. There is a brief description of the governments and their leaders. Students can make a foldable using the first two pages.
Dreher documents the evidence for what he labels “soft totalitarianism” and how U.S. Christians should respond in his soon-to-be released book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.
Dreher looks at cancel culture, the advance of socially liberal ideas on mainstream society, and the intrusion of information technology into private lives as evidence of this possible future.
“Back in the Soviet era, totalitarianism demanded love for the Party, and compliance with the Party's demands was enforced by the state,” he wrote in the book’s introduction.
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“Today's totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incapable with logic—and certainly with Christianity.”
The title is derived from a quote from famed Russian anti-Communist intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who uttered the phrase not long before being exiled from the Soviet Union.
Dreher explained to The Christian Post that the inspiration came after he spoke to a friend’s mother, who had lived in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia.
The woman, who had been imprisoned for her dissident political views, claimed that the social and political changes in the U.S. mirrored those of the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe.
“That struck me as really alarming. I didn't know if I believed it, but once I started talking to other people here in the U.S. and in Europe who had lived under Communism and they said, 'Yeah, this is a real thing,' it suddenly became real for me,” explained Dreher.
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the things he's most known for is saying that people in the West, they make a big mistake if they think it can't happen here, because it can.”
The Christian Post talked with Dreher on Thursday about his upcoming book. Below are excerpts from that interview.
CP: How would you say this book compares and contrasts to your best-selling earlier work, The Benedict Option?
Dreher: It is, really, a continuation of The Benedict Option.
The Benedict Option I talk about very generally the de-Christianization in the West and how Christians should respond to it in our daily lives. What Live Not by Lies does is it focuses much more intensely on one aspect of that, which is the arising of systematic oppression and marginalization and oppression of traditional Christian believers.'
This is much more focused … It’s more specific. It identifies much more particularly the problem and gives much more concrete ways of dealing with it, but it’s all part of the same crisis.
There are people who don't think at all that we're moving towards a sort of totalitarianism because they think that the sort of things that Christians believe are just wrong and weird. But I didn't write the book for them, I wrote it for Christians.'
CP: In chapter four, you focused a lot of attention on 'surveillance capitalism' and how modern information technology, including social media, are being used to control people's behaviors. Do you believe that recent efforts to curb this influence, both in Congress and elsewhere, are helping to combat this trend?
Dreher: It’s hard to say now. I’m really happy to see the congressional hearings and they ought to be bipartisan because we are all threatened by surveillance capitalism, left and right. But my fear is that the public is going to see this as being completely politicized from the right.
That's no reason for conservatives like Senator Josh Hawley not to do them and I am grateful that they’re doing it. But we need to really be careful about this and make sure that people on the left who value free speech and who value privacy are equally concerned and are equally involved in the fight to preserve that privacy.
In Europe, this is a very bipartisan concern they have there. European privacy laws are much stronger, especially on electronic privacy, and I think that we Americans really need to learn from them.
CP: On the issue of bipartisanship, in chapter nine, 'Standing in Solidarity,' you wrote about how Christians can benefit from having secular liberal allies. You cited examples of this in the former Soviet Union. In the United States today, what groups or individuals considered secular liberal would you say are sympathetic to conservative Christians resisting soft totalitarianism?
Dreher: It’s hard to pinpoint particular groups, but I’ll give you an example that I was just listening to. I’ve become a listener to the Joe Rogan podcast and I’ve been really impressed by him because he’s not a conservative, I don’t think he’s any kind of religious believer. He seems to be a left libertarian, if I had to pin him down. But he’s also got a lot of common sense. He has been very strong about the way the transgender movement, for example, is exploiting teenage girls and their anxieties.
I was just listening to his newest podcast, in which he talks about how difficult it is to have a common sense conversation with anybody these days because everybody is so ramped up and so ideological.
Somebody like Joe Rogan, … [also] comedian Bridget Phetasy.
I wouldn’t listen to these people normally, but listening to them both, they sound like they’re leftish, but they’re normal people and they don’t like this cancel culture any more than I do.
People like that are the kind of people I could find common cause with.
CP: As you know, this is election season. If President Donald Trump wins reelection in November, do you believe that this will help stem the rise of soft totalitarianism?
Dreher: I think it may slow it somewhat. I think it’s possible it could even accelerate it because the left will be even that much more angry, but that’s not a reason not to vote for Trump, mind you. But the thing I try to encourage my readers to keep in mind is whether you vote for Trump or against Trump, these processes that are in place now, these trends that are going on throughout the culture, they would be very hard for any president to stop.
Our problem is not primarily political, it's cultural and it's spiritual. We can get the right guy in the White House, the right people on the federal bench, and that’s important, but no president is going to be able to compel universities and corporations and institutions to stop with the identity politics.
This is the sort of long-term fight that Christians have got to be prepared for and we also have to keep in mind that for a lot of millennials and Generation Z Americans, they don’t have faith, it’s a very secular generation and they overwhelmingly accept the identity politics side of all these issues.
We have to radically change the way we think about church, and I think it’s absolutely true that you don’t need to be a prophet to see what’s coming and also to know that one election, two elections, are not going to solve it.
This is one of the reasons that we Christians are in so much trouble today is for the past 30, 40 years we have placed way too much emphasis on politics as the answer to our problems and not culture. Well, we’ve lost the culture and we’re losing our children. If we don’t start taking radical steps right now, to build resilience and build networks of resilience, the soft totalitarians are going to roll right over us.
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Estimated Reading Time: 10 min As a Jewish woman born in Hanover, Germany in the early 20th century, the rise of Nazism played a decisive role in Hannah Arendt’s life. In 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, Arendt fled from Germany to the relative safety of France where she worked for an organisation which helped rescue Jewish children from Eastern Europe. While living in France she became interned in a detention camp, but managed to escape and make her way to the US in 1941. It was here that she wrote her fascinating book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she attempted to understand and come to terms with the horrors of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Arendt’s thought-provoking work on totalitarianism stimulated a wide ranging debate on the factors that led to the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and earned her a reputation as a major thinker in the field of political philosophy. While her theories have been the subject of some criticism and controversy, they have seen something of a revival in recent times given the widespread concerns about the rise of right-wing, populist movements in the US and Europe. The summary below briefly captures some of her thoughts on totalitarian regimes, their chief characteristics, and how they rise to power.
What are the characteristics of “totalitarianism”?
Rather than provide us with an explicit definition of totalitarianism, Arendt chooses to develop our understanding of this political phenomenon through her unfolding account of the Nazi regime in Germany and Stalinist Russia. While it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of Arendt’s narrative here, there are some key points in her text that are worth highlighting.
Resources Totalitarianism On The Rise Toward
First, Arendt is keen to stress that, for her at least, the term “totalitarianism” does not simply refer to a system of authoritarian government or single party rule. In her own words:
“Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship.” 1
So what is it that distinguishes totalitarian regimes from other forms of political dictatorship? According to Arendt, one key distinction is the sheer scale of cruelty and mass murder they inflict upon on the population. Indeed, she even goes so far as to argue that a fully developed system of totalitarian rule is not possible in countries with small populations as they simply “do not control enough human material to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in population”. 2 In Nazi Germany, for example, she suggests that the totalitarian system was only fully realised once the country conquered new lands during the Second World War. It was this expansion east, she argues, that furnished the Nazis with the large masses of people that made the extermination camps possible.
In addition to the unprecedented scale of human suffering, Arendt suggests a number of other distinguishing features that, together, form the essence of totalitarianism. A crude summary of these is as follows:
- the destruction of the country’s previous social, legal and political traditions;
- the replacement of the political party system – not with a single party dictatorship but – with a mass movement;
- the organisation of the masses along the lines of an ideological doctrine which is unintelligible to outsiders i.e. it has no basis in fact or common sense;
- the demand for total, unrestricted and unconditional loyalty of the individual member to the mass movement;
- a shift in the centre of power from the army to a secret police;
- the use of propaganda and indiscriminate terror to indoctrinate people into the ideology of the movement, leaving individuals unable to argue or think for themselves or even experience their own experiences; and finally
- the establishment of a foreign policy which is explicitly directed towards world domination.
It is perhaps point (6) which underlines one of the most disturbing features of totalitarian regimes: that they find a way of colonising people’s minds, “dominating and terrorising [them] from within”. As Arendt explains, this system of internalised terror – which is more sophisticated than external acts of physical violence – can erode an individual’s ability to think for themselves or make moral judgements about what is right or wrong. In its extreme form, it can create a sense that oneself no longer matters, and that the collective aims of the movement are more important than any individual interests or desires. As Arendt puts it these “fanaticised members” can then no longer be reached by rational argument as “identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience, even if it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death”. 3
So how do totalitarian regimes rise to power?
In her attempt to answer this important question, Arendt exposes what she believes to be a dangerous myth: that leaders of totalitarian movements get into power on the basis of conspiracies or via support from small sections of society. In her view these explanations deny the uncomfortable truth that totalitarian regimes and leaders command and rest upon mass support right up until the end. For example, she maintains that Hitler and Stalin could not have sustained their leadership through the endless crises and intra-party struggles that occurred under their watch without the confidence of large swathes of the population. Nor, she argues, can totalitarian leaders’ popularity simply be attributed to their clever use of propaganda, because invariably they “start their careers by boasting of past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones”. 4
According to Arendt, totalitarian regimes can arise in “socially atomised” societies where there is a mass of politically indifferent people who cannot be held together by any sort of class consciousness or shared economic interest.
If this is the case, then how can we make sense of their rise to power? According to Arendt, totalitarian regimes can arise in “socially atomised” societies where there is a mass of politically indifferent people who cannot be held together by any sort of class consciousness or shared economic interests. The term “social atomisation” is used here to refer to a weakening of the social bonds between people – the communal relationships between families, friends, neighbours and colleagues – that are essential to a functioning society. Once these bonds have been weakened, Arendt explains we are left with aResources Totalitarianism On The Rise Documentary
mass of lonely, isolated and vulnerable people who have no sense of belonging or reason for existence. If you add into this mix a widespread political apathy, where people have become disengaged from the political process (they do not vote or take an interest in public affairs) then the result is toxic: people cannot easily be integrated into political parties, trade unions or professional organisations that represent their common economic interests and democracy can simply no longer function.In Weimar Germany, Arendt describes how the country’s military defeat in World War One, and the mass unemployment and hyperinflation that followed, provided the catalyst for the weakening of social bonds and the breakdown of the class system. It also resulted in a rapid increase in the number of dissatisfied and desperate people who were full of contempt for their current political rulers who seemed unable to provide any answers to their troubles:
“The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganised structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently the most responded, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.” 5
It was this social isolation and political apathy, that Arendt argues, more generally, provides fertile ground for a “strong man” to seize power, who targets and recruits from the politically indifferent masses by offering a fictional story or ideology which claims to explain the source of all societal problems. In Nazi Germany, this strong man was of course Adolf Hitler, and the story he put forward was of a Jewish world conspiracy, whereby the Jews controlled society and wished to take over the world. According to Hitler’s narrative, the Jews were entirely to blame for Germany’s economic decline and were the cause of all the German people’s woes.
As Arendt explains, this fictional story did not need to stand up to the scrutiny of opposing political parties in Germany because the masses had become indifferent to their arguments. Moreover, the people were receptive to this fictional account of the world because it offered them an escape from a reality they could no longer bear – their atomisation, their loss of social status and communal relationships. And although the story had no basis in truth, Arendt argues that the masses were attracted to its simplicity – its ability to completely explain their current circumstances – and its internal consistency, whereby each invented “fact” followed on logically from the previous:
“What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part . . . Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction.” 6
So what can we learn from Arendt’s theories about the rise of totalitarian regimes?
Arendt’s work teaches us many things: that we should be wary of leaders who offer us compelling but simplistic explanations for the problems of our times; that we should always be concerned about political apathy in all its forms and its potential to undermine the legitimacy of our democratic society; that enthusiastic and civic debate – where we think, argue and resolve our differences together – can help strengthen our social bonds and protect us from the loneliness and isolation that makes us vulnerable to tyrannical rule. Most of all, Arendt’s work provides us with an important reminder that we should never be complacent about the potential for the re-emergence of the political forces that led to the rise of totalitarianism and the catastrophic loss of life in the early 20th century.
Notes and Further Resources
The Origins of Totalitarianism is often described as being one of the most important books of the twentieth century. As well as providing an insight into the development of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes, it examines the history of Anti-Semitism in Western and Central Europe and analyses the roots and consequences of European imperialist expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To support and complement your reading of Arendt’s work, we would recommend the following additional resources:
- Margaret Canovan’s two books: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought. These books are not readily available on Amazon but should be found in most good public libraries (you can use the links we have provided to perform a search of your local library).
- The BBC Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” recently covered Hannah Arendt’s broader work and this is currently available for download here.
- Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada is a fictional book which provides an insight into the experience of living under totalitarian rule in Nazi Germany. It captures the absolute fear the regime instilled in people that kept them from engaging in any form or rebellion.
You can also find more video resources at our Mind Attic YouTube channel playlist.