The Origins Of Totalitarianism Quotes
"The end of the war did not spell the end of totalitarian government in Russia. On the contrary, it was followed by the Bolshevization of Eastern Europe."
"Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
"It is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism."
"The masses do not inherit, as the mob does—albeit in a perverted form—the standards and attitudes of the dominating class, but reflect and somehow pervert the standards and attitudes toward public affairs of all classes."
"The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."
"The massing of individuals produced a mentality which, like Cecil Rhodes some forty years before, thought in continents and felt in centuries."
"The propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious."
"The fanaticism of totalitarian movements, contrary to all forms of idealism, breaks down the moment the movement leaves its fanaticized followers in the lurch."
"Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization."
"The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown of the party system."
"The postwar elite, on the other hand, was only slightly younger than the generation which had let itself be used and abused by imperialism for the sake of glorious careers outside of respectability, as gamblers and spies and adventurers, as knights in shining armor and dragon-killers."
"The elite went to war with an exultant hope that everything they knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down in its 'storms of steel' (Ernst Jünger)."
"Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with the prewar age and subsequent attempts at restoring it is to overlook how justified disgust can oe in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie."
"War, with its constant murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the 'great equalizer' and therefore the true father of a new world order."
"In the early years of his career, when a restoration of the European status quo was still the most serious threat to the ambitions of the mob, Hitler appealed almost exclusively to these sentiments of the front generation."
"The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their brilliant and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awkward and pompous 'scientific' proofs of the imperialist elite."
"The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest."
"The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error."
"The success of totalitarian propaganda, however, does not rest so much on its demagogy as on the knowledge that interest as a collective force can be felt only where stable social bodies provide the necessary transmission belts between the individual and the group."
"The attraction which the totalitarian movements exert on the elite, so long as and wherever they have not seized power, has been perplexing because the patently vulgar and arbitrary, positive doctrines of totalitarianism are more conspicuous to the outsider and mere observer than the general mood which pervades the pretotalitarian atmosphere."
"The member of a militant group is wholly identified with the movement; he has no profession and no private life independent of it."
"The totalitarian movements attack the status quo more radically than any of the earlier revolutionary parties."
"The whole history of the Nazi party can be told in terms of new formations within the Nazi movement."
"The military value of the totalitarian elite formations, especially of the SA and the SS, are frequently overrated."
"The artificial creation of civil-war conditions by which the Nazis black-mailed their way into power has more than the obvious advantage of stirring up trouble."
"The Leader represents the movement in a way totally different from all ordinary party leaders; he claims personal responsibility for every action."
"The totalitarian movements have been called 'secret societies established in broad daylight.'"
"The means by which Stalin changed the Russian one-party dictatorship into a totalitarian regime... was the liquidation of factions, the abolition of inner-party democracy."
"Nazi totalitarianism started with a mass organization which was only gradually dominated by elite formations."
"Totalitarian movements have proved time and again that they can command the same total loyalty in life and death which had been the prerogative of secret and conspiratory societies."
"The absence of a ruling clique has made the question of a successor to the totalitarian dictator especially baffling and troublesome."
"Under totalitarian conditions, knowledge of the labyrinth of transmission belts equals supreme power."
"The multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure the dictator's complete independence of all his inferiors."
"The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence."
"The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs."
"Constant removal, demotion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent the development of experience."
"The radicalization began immediately at the outbreak of war."
"The remarkable thing about this process is that it was by no means checked by such a shattering defeat as Stalingrad."
"The jealously guarded crime monopoly of the SS was abandoned and soldiers were assigned at will to duties of mass murder."
"Totalitarian regimes really conduct their foreign policy on the consistent assumption that they will eventually achieve their ultimate goal."
"The fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings."
"The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power."
"Power, as conceived by totalitarianism, lies exclusively in the force produced through organization."
"The structurelessness of the totalitarian state, its neglect of material interests, its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian attitudes in general have more than anything else contributed to making contemporary politics well-nigh unpredictable."
"Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule."
"The totalitarian movements which, during their rise to power, imitate certain organizational features of secret societies and yet establish themselves in broad daylight, create a true secret society only after their ascendancy to rule."
"The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior."
"The concentration and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that everything is possible is being verified."
"Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions."
"The concentration camp as an institution was not established for the sake of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economic function of the camps has been the financing of their own supervisory apparatus."
"This atmosphere of madness and unreality, created by an apparent lack of purpose, is the real iron curtain which hides all forms of concentration camps from the eyes of the world."
"Concentration camps can very aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of a life after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell."
"All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed."
"It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties."
"The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fantasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world."
"The films which the Allies circulated after the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not dispelled by pure reportage."
"Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment."
"The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment."
"The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man."
"The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plausible the propagandistic claim of the movement that the institution exists for asocial elements."
"The ultimate goal, partly achieved in the Soviet Union and clearly indicated in the last phases of Nazi terror, is to have the whole camp population composed of this category of innocent people."
"Contrasting with the complete haphazardness with which the inmates are selected are the categories, meaningless in themselves but useful from the standpoint of organization, into which they are usually divided on their arrival."
"The camps and the murder of political adversaries are only part of organized oblivion that not only embraces carriers of public opinion such as the spoken and the written word, but extends even to the families and friends of the victim."
"Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total."
"Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity."
"The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person are numerous and we shall not attempt to list them."
"What makes a truly totalitarian device out of the Bolshevik claim that the present Russian system is superior to all others is the fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the logically impeccable conclusion that without this system people never could have built such a wonderful thing as, let us say, a subway."
"The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth."
"The uselessness of the camps, their cynically admitted anti-utility, is only apparent."
"Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man."
"The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident."
"The elementary rules of cogent evidence, the truism that two and two equals four cannot be perverted even under the conditions of absolute loneliness."
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century."
"The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality."
"It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside all relationships with others."
"By destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated."
"But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only 'message' which the end can ever produce."
"Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom."
"Ideologies always 'proclaim their infallibility.'" - Adolf Hitler
"Their claim to be infallible is the decisive difference between Stalin and Trotsky, and Lenin."
"Hegelian dialectics provide a wonderful instrument for always being right."
"Hitler's 'phenomenal untruthfulness,' his 'indifference to facts,' his dismissal of the 'real state of affairs.'"
"The Bolsheviks during the Stalin era somehow accumulated conspiracies."
"The German people consist for one third of heroes, another third of cowards, and the rest are traitors." - Adolf Hitler
"The mass-meeting is the strongest form of propaganda."
"Propaganda is not 'the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. It is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.'"
"The highest possible development of the power of the State is to prepare for the dying out of the State." - Stalin
"If the party and the NKVD now require me to confess to such things they must have good reasons for what they are doing."
"Eventually the Okhrana will wield a power far superior to the power of the more regular authorities."
"My duty as a loyal Soviet citizen is not to withhold the confession required of me."
"There was little in the SS that was not secret. The greatest secret was the practices in the concentration camps."
"A large part of the work exacted in the concentration camps was useless, either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned."
"The social conditions of life in the camps have transformed the great mass of inmates...into a degenerate rabble, entirely submissive."
"The guards as well as the prisoners became 'conditioned' to the life in the camp and were afraid of returning to the outer world."
"Victim and executioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps is the brotherhood of abjection."
"The main concern of the new prisoners seemed to be to remain intact as a personality."
"Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic life, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history."