The article below was published in the journal SOCIAL RESEARCH, Summer 2002.
It was prepared for a New School conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The conference took place a few weeks after the 9/11 attack, and it organizers agreed to have its concluding session consist of a discussion of the attack and what it might mean.
ON THE ORIGINS OF A NEW TOTALITARIANISM (October, 2001)
Over the past three days, we have been considering the relevance for the present time of Hannah Arendt’s monumental work The Origins of Totalitarianism, published fifty years ago, the first book of a then almost unknown forty-five year old émigré German Jewish woman, who went on to become the major political thinker of her generation. But during this conference we have, of course, all been thinking about this book in the wake of the attack upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and now in the shadow of a military operation conducted by the American government against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the terrorist network headquartered there. For the last part of this conference, we want to turn our attention directly to these events, and I have agreed to launch our discussion by extracting three themes from her book that might be particularly useful to consider while we try to think our way through to some clarity about what has happened.
The first theme has to do with novelty in human affairs. As she wrote her book, Arendt disciplined herself to a habit of political analysis that she kept to throughout the rest of her life. She made distinctions and worked to conceptualize clearly, inquiring into the historical meaning and the present usefulness of each concept she explored, starting with “totalitarianism.” Considering any current political event or question, she thought it particularly important –as Thucydides had in writing his history while the Peloponnesian War was still unfolding– to distinguish what was familiar and already conceptualized from what was new and just becoming conceptualizable, and thus discussable, part of political conversation. So when she made the claim that totalitarianism was a novel form of government, distinct from such familiar forms as tyranny, oligarchy, democracy, Arendt took it as her responsibility to say, carefully and thoroughly, what was “unprecedented” (she used this word, now one of the most hackneyed words in our political vocabulary, with utmost rigor). To oppose a totalitarian regime effectively, Arendt understood, required isolating out the features making this form of government novel, anatomizing it. Political analysis is a combination of culling lessons from the past –thinking in historical analogies—and being able to identify what is new, which will be the features that call for a new, creative response.
Our American public response to the “Attack on America” got off to a reflexive –an understandably stunned– and unthinking start as President Bush and an instantly united Congress called the attack an act of war and declared war. Pearl Harbor was evoked constantly. But it was also immediately clear that war was being declared by our state in the absence of an enemy state or even any non-state group claiming responsibility. There was no Japan behind those lethal hijacked planes, and not even any certain criminal or terrorist. So we were called upon to ready for a “war on terrorism,” which is as meaningless a phrase as “war on drugs” and far more dangerous. Then the President felt compelled to say that any state harboring terrorists was our enemy, making a futile effort to find a state –chiefly Afghanistan—to be the missing Japan, an enemy state with an army. But in the days after the “Attack on America,” many Americans came to the realizations (long common in the intelligence communities) that every state in the world (including America) harbors terrorists, whether directly supporting them or not, and that many terrorists have affinities or are actively networked across state borders and even across the borders of the specific causes and beliefs they subscribe to.
That there are interconnected terrorist cells and training programs all over the world is not news, and even an attack on the World Trade Center is not, of course, unprecedented. The weapon—suicides bearing explosives—is not new, only horrifyingly expanded to involve planes full of others, not just single kamikazes. We have seen the proud achievements of our own technology turned with logistical mastery upon us. But it seems to me that the novelty in the event will come clearer if we look at the response to the events and and consider how the response has allowed the dynamics of the contemporary terrorism to become apparent to people who are not professional students of it or in the intelligence networks.
The response after the initial reflex was without precedent on several levels. First, on the level of international politics. NATO evoked for the first time its “one, all” doctrine. America’s allies rallied immediately to engage in discussions about a co-ordinated action, and were very much more ready than the Members of Congress to be political, that is, to discuss and debate publicly what action was appropriate, not just to sign on behind the American President. States which had been in adversarial relations with the United States were pushed into co-operation, as Pakistan was, or stepped forward as volunteers unexpectedly, as did both Russia and China, the legatees of mid-20th century totalitarianisms. No one knows how or whether these new links will hold, but they raise possibilities for profound change in the world order, particularly if The United States government is able to embrace the idea of co-ordinated action among the nations that have come forward, and potentially others as well. Second, on the level of national security measures. The nation –not just the crime scene or the City of New York–became, over night, militarized in a way that it has never been, and the number of drastic security measures proposed, all challenging to existing laws and the right to privacy, went way beyond what has been typical after previous terrorist attacks.
Third, and more difficult to describe, is the subjective response that accumulated after the first day, the nearly unanimous claim –or feeling—that a historical chasm had opened in the world, not just in America. On newspapers and in the talk of people around the world, the headline was the same: this was “The Day The World Changed” (as The Economist’s cover put it). From Israel there were many voices chiding the Americans with “see, now you will know what it is to live with terrorism.” But these voices failed to acknowledge that this danger, this threat, to the world seemed deeper than anything posed by terrorism before, anywhere. It felt deeper even than the threat posed by the Cuban missile crisis, because an actual attack –played and replayed on the TV–not a doomsday scenario, galvanized attention. For the first time, people around the world grasped –not just theorized—that the material and social conditions of our modern lives mean that a terrorist attack of this scale, or even more deadly with biological, chemical or nuclear means, could take place at any moment. The radicality of the insecurity aroused by this attack is without precedent.
It is important to recognize that this radical insecurity is connected to the fact that this attack was not an act of war, as it was called. To call it an act of war was to make it familiar, to align it with an image of war that rules out unlimited violence (an image that also rules out as “unthinkable” a nuclear war, which would be war to the elimination of the warring parties and of any battlefield). To call the attack an act of war was to connect it wishfully with Pearl Harbor, which launched us into a world-wide but still limited war that we won. War then was considered winable and the definitions of war in place then permitted us acts of war that were, on a scale of devastation, far, far greater than what happened September 11th. Fighting totalitarian Germany and its ally Japan, our very own American planes killed hundreds of thousands of civilians with fire bombs and then atom bombs –and this was held to be justified because we were at war and trying to bring the war to a victorious end as quickly as possible. It is painful to think that our bombings of civilians then, our response to the unprecedented way in which the Nazi totalitarian regime had turned upon its own civilians –its Jewish populations and many others–were part of a world-wide erosion of the distinction between civilians and combatants. This erosion has so changed the nature of war that now there is no morally defensible way to say of a war with staggering civilian loss that you have “won.” This “Attack on America” reminds us that, since the end of World War II, all people have lived in a world in which civilians are routinely targets and any act of violence – in the context of a declared war or not– can become an uncontainable conflagration of civilians.
Further, the September 11th attack reminded us that we face an enemy against whom we cannot, form the outset, wage an army-to-army war. A terrorist network is not a state that can be attacked with a crippling missile fusillade as we did Iraq in the Gulf War. So, as it prepared for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration shifted historical analogy: the Secretary of Defense stopped talking about Pearl Harbor and started talking about a new Cold War, a long war that would, after its initial phase, take place mostly off the world’s TV screens, covertly. To a certain extent, American leaders seemed to recognize that killing or making refugees out of large numbers of civilians who are nationals of a state, Afghanistan, that is not the object of our declaration of war “against terrorism” would make America the unjustified victimizer, paving the way for yet another round and generation of terrorists of many different nationalities with yet more reasons to hate America and its allies, “the West.” Nonetheless, President Bush threatened to “eradicate” the terrorists because it is obvious that unless they are eradicated they or their proteges will strike again. But, even as he spoke, opponents of the invasion warned that these terrorist networks cannot be eradicated by military invasion, not even if all of Afghanistan were laid waste (any more than a guerilla army woven into the geographical and social fabric of Vietnam was eradicable with thousands of bombing raids). Further, if all of Afghanistan is laid waste, the war could become unlimited in the sense that other states in the region, flooded with refugees and boiling with sympathy for the victimized Afghans, would be (as the strategists say) destabilized.
Trying to make the terrorist network identifiable, the Bush administration and the media have concentrated on the figure of Osama bin Laden. He is “the mastermind.” It may or may not turn out that bin Laden directly instigated or coordinated the attack, but it is obvious already that focusing so much attention on him hands him power, fostering the growth of his reputation in the Islamic world, to which the Clinton administration gave such a boost in 1998. Bin Laden himself has made it clear in interview after interview that, were he to be killed, another and yet another bin Laden would come forth to take his place. And it is also becoming clear to the general public in this country and around the world that he and his immediate associates are part of –not the indispensable leaders of—a network of hundreds of organizations existing wherever there are Muslim populations. These groups accept as their collective name “The World Islamic Front.”
Our response, which is to prepare for a war that has a purpose that cannot be achieved by a war –-eradicating terrorism—has made clear the feature of this terrorism that is new. This is not terrorism within a state or territory designed to rectify a national injustice or to protest a government, like the terrorism of the IRA or (in the realm of fantasized national injustices) our own Nazi-imitating anti-government militias. It is not terrorism in the service of a national liberation movement, although some of the organizations involved in the “World Islamic Front” –-particularly in Egypt– do have as a goal taking over a specific state government that they feel has been corrupted. It is also not state-sponsored terrorism, although some states give it aid. And it is not “international terrorism,” in which terrorists move across and unite across state boundaries in the manner of the Red Brigade to carry out kidnappings and assassinations, to make a political statement by violent means. This is an unprecedented form of terrorism involving men of many nationalities, living in their own or other states, united by a supranational purpose that is anti-political. A second theme from The Origins of Totalitarianism points to the significance of “supranationalism” and anti-political purposes.
In the last decades of the 19th century and into the 20th century era of totalitarianisms, Hannah Arendt identified a huge tension between two basic political aspirations. On the one hand, people around the world wanted to create nation-states, that is, states uniting into a legal entity people of some homogeneity, connected by origin or what the French called nationalité. The revolutionary fervor of the 19th century focused on breaking down empires and founding limited constitutional states, secular states. On the other hand, there were many people, particularly in Europe, who wanted the newly constituted or reconstituted states to extend their political and economic reach well beyond any state border. Two forms of state-sponsored imperialism arose, to which Arendt gave the names overseas imperialism and continental imperialism. Most of the European nation-states set up colonial regimes in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, refusing any legal protections to the colonialized peoples and exploiting “the natives” and their resources ruthlessly. Meanwhile, in two regions where totalitarian regimes eventually evolved, ideologues invoked Pan-German and Pan-Slav supernations, using all the mystifications about the German soul and the Slavic soul that later fueled the Nazi programs for eliminating non-Aryans and the Stalinist mass murders, labor camps, and purges.
The tension between national and supranational aspirations took many forms. But it was clear to Hannah Arendt that totalitarianisms were the products of supranationalism triumphant. Supranationalism is not the linking of limited states into a union –a federation or confederation, a united states—it is, rather, the dissolving of limited constitutional forms into an amorphous bonding of people, a racially defined Volk or a theoretically defined world-wide proletariat, or -–we see the potential now—a religiously defined army of the devout. The ideology that fuels a supranationalist and potentially totalitarian movement calls for the elimination of elected congresses and courts and for subscribing to something vaguely energetic, like the Fuhrer’s will. Or Allah’s will as represented by his self-appointed agents, which is how Osama bin Laden and his many similars represent themselves. The aspiration of their Islamic movement is to bring down the governments that have betrayed their Muslim populations by collaborating with the secularizing infidels of the West and to make a Holy War upon those governments and peoples of the West –combatants and civilians without distinction–who have assaulted Muslims and desecrated Muslim holy sites and lands. In interviews, bin Laden has imagined a supranational unity of truly devout, uncorrupted Muslims that has no political shape or form, not even the theocratic government by clerics that has taken a national form in Iran. His image is of Allah speaking directly through the Koran to all of His dedicated soldiers, dictating every action of their daily lives–a kind of “democratic” totalitarianism.
Arendt thought that key criterion for judging whether a group or a regime was moving in the direction of totalitarianism was the kind and form of its supranationalism She would, for example, have taken the measure of Slobodan Milosevic’s government from his talk about “Greater Serbia,” a phrase he obviously and purposefully modeled on Hitler’s “Greater Germany.” The appropriation among the Serb supranationalists of the techniques of totalitarian terror –the measures of ethnic purity, the mass killings of civilians and the concentration camps—were the clearest evidence that this was a government that would have to be opposed from without, because it was dedicated to the destruction of all sources of opposition in Serbia and all the populations (especially Muslim) of the lands claimed as “Greater Serbia.” The mid-20th century model of totalitarianism that Milosevic followed, was of a state growing out over its borders, a continental imperialism driven by a state administration , with Muslims playing the role of the obsessional focal point of hatred that the Jews had played in the Nazi ideology. What we see in the terrorist networks for which Osama bin Laden and others supply the ideological rhetoric is a supranationalism that does not presume a state base to expand from. But it is totalitarian in the sense that the ideology calls for religious direction of every facet of daily life; that the ideology offers a complete explanation of world history, which is conceived as a battle of good against evil, just as it offers a complete program for the future; and that the ideology sanctions total terror. Allah’s operatives are not planning to round up populations into camps or killing centers but to create terror of the sort that we have just experienced –the extraterritorial terror that is open to men who do not have a homeland or a “Greater X.” Bin Laden speaks of “the Islamic nation,” or “the nation of Muhammad,” and this is a supranation founded on an interpretation of Scripture. There will be no earthly place for this totalitarianism. As Osama bin Laden declares in every interview, “We expect to be rewarded by Allah.”
If we turned Hannah Arendt’s criteria about supranationalism upon ourselves, we should note that before September 11th, the Bush administration was engaged in a domestic policy of eroding civil liberties and undermining the separation of Church and State, two of the elements of totalitarianism that Arendt outlined as she noted that elements of totalitarianism can exist in many contexts without ever crystalizing into totaliatrianism, just as elements of totalitarianism can come into existence in fighting totalitarianism, which is what happened in America at the mid-century with McCarthyism. The Administration was also engaged before September 11th in a foreign policy that many commentators mistook for isolationism in the familiar American nationalistic manner. This involved withdrawing from established treaties and environmental accords and from cooperation in the venue of the United Nations. But this unilateralist policy, it seems to me, would be much more accurately described as an antipolitics, an attack upon existing alliances with the intention of clearing a path for a renewal and continuation of the American oversees imperialism, which is largely economic. Our oversees imperialism, which had such an expansionary heyday in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, is precisely what Osama bin Laden sees as the enemy of Islam. This is “the crusader-Jewish alliance” that raids Muslim countries for oil, displaces Muslim populations, desecrates Muslim shrines, and backs corrupt regimes like that of the Saudi royal family or of Mubarak in Egypt or Suharto in Indonesia. The supranationalist element that our leadership and the leadership of the terrorist network share is the proclivity to think in totalizing world-historical good versus evil dualisms: the East Versus the West. This dualism is equated either with spiritual virtue versus spiritual corruption or with authoritarian hatred of freedom versus love of freedom, depending on who is doing the name-calling and blaming.
The third theme that Arendt concentrated on in The Origins of Totalitarianism concerned what she called “superfluous people.” When the 19th and early 20th century European nation-states reached out imperialistically they did so on the backs of “superfluous people.” They shipped overseas huge numbers of laborers who were unemployed and unemployable in Europe to do the work of colonialization, and they sanctioned methods of exploitation that then rebounded upon the colonializers themselves as a spirit of “everything is permitted” lawlessness. In the course of the economic upheavals of the 1920’s and 1930’s, further, huge numbers of people fell into poverty and alienation, becoming susceptible to the redemptive promises of fascist ideologues. Those who did not belong in and were not protected by any nation-state, who were superfluous in the nation-state system, could be allured with the idea that they were racially superior Aryans or the idea that they constituted the vanguard of History.
Across the whole of the world that was colonialized in the 19th century, where post-colonial states have grown up bearing the legacy of colonialization, there are people who feel themselves to be superfluous in Arendt’s sense –that is, they are uprooted, alienated, impoverished, without state protection or stateless as refugees. The Palestinians are the paradigmatic superfluous population, the population whose displacement has been continuous since 1948. In the milieus from which the troops of the interconnected Muslim terrorist groups come, Israel is viewed as the persecutor of the Palestinians, but also, further, as a terrorist state striving to fulfill its ideology of “Greater Israel” by instigating all of the American attacks upon Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, by organizing what bin Laden calls the “crusader-Jewish alliance.” People made superfluous subscribe to views of the world in which there is a conspiracy behind the scenes of every insult, and Israel is that for the superfluous Muslims. The current Israel hatred, which has a history of real grievance, of course, also takes up where the murderous mid-century anti-Semitic historical fantasies left off; every supranationalist ideology needs such a focal point of hatred.
It is very difficult now that the “Attack on America” has taken place to argue that the only realistic way to diffuse the hatred of Israel and of America as Israel’s ally that is building across the Muslim world is to work to remedy the social and political conditions that foster the superfluity of the Muslim oppressed and displaced populations. Which would mean not supporting the governments (and in the case of our ally Israel, not supporting the settlement policies) that are creating those superfluous populations; and it certainly means not creating any further superfluous populations by conducting a “war on terrorism” with huge civilian casualties and new refugee populations We have been so dreadfully attacked, and we have gone so far –and the Bush Administration is threatening bellicosely to go even further—down the road of war impacting Muslim populations, that it is hard to suggest that we take a longer and deeper view. But we can see the origins of a potential totalitarianism, a new variant, revealed, and we have crucial choices to make about how to respond to what we see.
