Hannah
Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
The concept of totalitarianism was first
developed in the 1920s, after the World War I by the Weimar German jurist, and
later Nazi academic, Carl Schmitt, and Italian fascists. The term Totalitarian
was come from Italian word
totalitario, totalità. That means by Totality. Totalitarianism is a political
system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to
regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.
Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all encompassing
propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state controlled mass
media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality
cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass
surveillance, and widespread use of terror. A distinctive feature of totalitarian
government is an elaborate ideology, a set of ideas that gives meaning and direction
to the whole society.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism,
Hannah Arendt argued that Nazi and State communist regimes were new forms of
government, and not merely updated versions of the old tyrannies. According to
Arendt, the source of the mass appeal of totalitarian regimes is their
ideology, which provides a comforting, single answer to the mysteries of the
past, present, and future. For Nazism, all history is the history of race struggle;
and, for Marxism, all history is the history of class struggle. Once that
premise is accepted, all actions of the state can be justified by appeal to
Nature or the Law of History, justifying their establishment of authoritarian
state apparatus.
In addition to Arendt, many scholars
from a variety of academic backgrounds and ideological positions have closely
examined totalitarianism. He agrees, however, that totalitarianism seeks to
mobilize entire populations in support of an official state ideology, and is
intolerant of activities which are not directed towards the goals of the state.
Totalitarianism government system has become the decline of the nation state
and the end of the rights of man. Everything was controlled by the state
authority and the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject
to an absolute state authority. It takes people inside the prison within their
own state. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they
had left their state they became stateless. Denationalization became a powerful
weapon of totalitarian politics, and the constitutional inability of European
nation states to guarantee human rights to those who had lost nationally
guaranteed rights, made it possible for persecuting governments to impose their
standard of values even upon their opponents.
I.
The “Nation of Minorities” and the Stateless People
There is no better proof to regulate the
nationality problem in Eastern and Southern Europe through the establishment of
nation states and the introduction of minority treaties. Settled national
tradition could not handle the new problems of world politics had became
questionable. Nation states could be established by the methods of the Peace
treaties was simply preposterous. Many peoples in single states called some of
them state people and entrusted them with the government, silently assumed that
others were equal partners in the government. Those people to who states were
not conceded, no matter whether they were official minorities or only
nationalities. Everybody else that true freedom, true emancipation, and true
popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation,
that people without their own national government were deprived of human
rights. There was no country on earth in which they enjoyed the right to
residence.
II.
The Perplexities of the Rights of Man
State has policy and rules to govern the
people in a way to give protection and security upon the state and people. It
suppressed the freedom of people. All the societies are formed to protection of
the Rights of Man. The state where, the Right of Man is difficult to cultivate
is Totalitarian Governmental system. The Declaration of the Rights of Man at
the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. Man had
hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being that
carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger
encompassing order. Every state has creating the limitation and boundaries of
people to cultivate their freedom. So, Social, spiritual, and religious forces
keeps them in limitation. In the process of being civilization, we human being
approach the several cultural and spiritual aspect in society. It keeps
themselves in limited source.
No
matter how they have once been defined life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, according to the American formula; or as equality before the law,
liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty, according to the
French. No matter how once may attempt to improve an ambiguous formulation life
the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one like unqualified right to
property; the real situation of those whom the twentieth century has driven
outside the pale of the shows that these are rights of citizens who loss does
not entail absolute rightness. This situation illustrates the many perplexities
inherent in the concept of human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to
freedom, but of the right to action. Whether we like it or not we have really
started to live in one world. Our
political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through
organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world,
together with his equals and only with his equals. Man is only the master, not
the creator of the world.
Janak
Tamang
Prof.
Dr. Shital Dahal (Green)
Seminar
on City, Citizen, Migrant, Refuges & Rights
M.Phil.
18th Sep, 2016
