I. The mental states of totalitarian movements

At the heart of the totalitarian ideology is a conspiratorial view of history:

The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy. Concentration on antisemitic propaganda had been a common device of demagogues ever since the end of the nineteenth century, and was widespread in the Germany and Austria of the twenties. The more consistently a discussion of the Jewish question was avoided by all parties and organs of public opinion, the more convinced the mob became that Jews were the true representatives of the powers that be, and that the Jewish issue was the symbol for the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the whole system.

The actual content of postwar antisemitic propaganda was neither a monopoly of the Nazis nor particularly new and original. Lies about a Jewish world conspiracy had been current since the Dreyfus Affair and based themselves on the existing international interrelationship and interdependence of a Jewish people dispersed all over the world. Exaggerated notions of Jewish world power are even older; they can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, when the intimate connection between Jewish business and the nation-states had become visible.

In a like manner, during the early 20th century Americans of breeding, including those in the southeast, scorned openly racist opinions, and professed to agonize over "the unfortunate tensions" between the races, as if there was some reciprocity between the African Americans being lynched, and the European Americans who lynched them; and in the same era, Western Europeans scorned the antisemitism of the rabble, while availing themselves of their racial notions about Jews as a class. Both might claim that "some of their best friends were Negroes/Jews," while availing themselves of racist privilege and historical/economic quackery (and thus did the expression become ridiculous).

Hannity allows Alan Colmes on his show as a punching bag and pet, a voodoo doll whose presence allows him (Hannity) to humiliate liberals by proxy; however, in his book, liberals are stripped of any right to speak for themselves, and instead declared objective enemies regardless of opinions they actually have. As with all conspiracy theories, there is no possibility of falsification, and the more outlandish the theory is, the more popular it becomes.

The point about the Jews themselves is that they grew prominent and conspicuous in inverse proportion to their real influence and position of power. Every decrease in the stability and force of the nation-states was a direct blow to Jewish positions. The partially successful conquest of the state by the nation made it impossible for the government machine to maintain its position above all classes and parties, and thereby nullified the value of alliances with the Jewish sector of the population, which was supposed also to stay outside the ranks of society and to be indifferent to party politics. The growing concern with foreign policy of the imperialist-minded bourgeoisie and its growing influence on the state machinery was accompanied by the steadfast refusal of the largest segment of Jewish wealth to engage itself in industrial enterprises and to leave the tradition of capital trading.
[Ibid., XI]

II. Forms of Organization and Outreach

The core of the early totalitarian movement is the mob; in comparatively stable societies, this includes men whose life ceased to be functional when they were discharged from an army; it includes petty thugs; it includes ruined businessmen. Gradually, it may absorb those who are fascinated by the extreme point of view, or even embarrassed by their own hesitation to go to extremes. If society is crumbling, it's bracing to believe this is some chiliastic event that will culminate in some great revelation; hence, the attraction of the intellectual to an emphatically anti-intellectual ideology.

The totalitarian movement is also surrounded by front groups, or organizations whose members are not [necessarily] members of the totalitarian movement, but sympathizers with it. Hence, people who might not be Nazis, but merely members of the [far more moderate] Steel Helmet Party, chastized the Weimar Republic when it jailed Adolf Hitler for his 1923 putsch. According to Arendt, this served two purposes: (a) the front groups presented a more moderate face of the totalitarian movement to the rest of the public, and they (b) insulated the members of the movement from the degree of opposition they suffered among the general population. Both effects tended to allow the totalitarian movement to survive and recruit more "normal" people, until of course it no longer had any use for the front movements. However, even after that, the conspiratorial ideology of the movement continued to replicate mini-movements within the movement/party/ruling junta.

III. Characteristics of the Totalitarian State

Arendt takes issue with application of the term "state" to whatever it is the totalitarians create in power. She points out that the totalitarians in power create a dualistic order, which is amorphous and fluid.

The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be. According to this rule, the Soviets, recognized by a written constitution as the highest authority of the state, have less power than the Bolshevik party; the Bolshevik party, which recruits its members openly and is recognized as the ruling class, has less power than the secret police. Real power begins where secrecy begins. In this respect the Nazi and the Bolshevik states were very much alike; their difference lay chiefly in the monopolization and centralization of secret police services by Himmler on one hand, and the maze of apparently unrelated and unconnected police activities in Russia on the other.
[Ibid., XII]

IV. Use of terror as a Tool of Control

By terror, Dr. Arendt means a "reign of terror," as under Maxmilian Robespierre, when the wave of executions lost virtually any shred of common sense, and became a sort of heat engine. However, Dr. Arendt regards the reign of terror as mild compared to what occurs under totalitarianism:

Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for "objective enemies" begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes. Under the pretext of building socialism in one country, or using a given territory as a laboratory for a revolutionary experiment, or realizing the Volksgemeinschaft, the second claim of totalitarianism, the claim to total domination, is carried out. And although theoretically total domination is possible only under the conditions of world rule, the totalitarian regimes have proved that this part of the totalitarian utopia can be realized almost to perfection, because it is temporarily independent of defeat or victory. Thus Hitler could rejoice even in the midst of military setbacks over the extermination of Jews and the establishment of death factories; no matter what the final outcome, without the war it would never have been possible "to burn the bridges" and to realize some of the goals of the totalitarian movement.

CONCLUSION: Arendt regarded life in the camps as the culmination of the totalitarian experience: a life without memory, in which violence, at last, is stripped of its ideological content.

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. Compared with this, all other experiments are secondary in importance-including those in the field of medicine whose horrors are recorded in detail in the trials against physicians of the Third Reich-although it is characteristic that these laboratories were used for experiments of every kind. 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, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other.

[...]

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 w behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov's dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted animal.

Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment is at all possible, and therefore they are not only "la societe la plus totalitaire encore réalisée" (David Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total domination in general.
[Ibid., XII.iii]

In the end, as the totalitarian movement betrays everything, it falls silent and confines itself to violence.

(Part 6)

ADDITIONAL READING: "totalitarianism" entry by Frater219 at Everything₂. The article is immensely helpful.

I was also very pleased with "The Politics of Holocaust Representation: the Worldly Typologies of Hannah Arendt," Ned Curthoys, 2000/2001. This includes some criticisms that surprised me; for example, Arendt mentions (On Revolution, end of Chapter II) "Nothing could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous." I took this, in the context it appears, to mean that Dr. Arendt is speaking of attempts to replace the political order with one designed a priori to eliminate the "social question." In other words, rather than resolve poverty as an administrative issue, as has been done in Scandanavian countries, to resolve it through a Standestaat (state that exists to serve a victorious class, in this case, the proletariat).

Curthoys seems to think Arendt therefore believes "...Arendt's consistent desire to separate politics from social issues such as wealth redistribution, equal access to education, housing, desegregation of schooling, or the feminist desire to make the private realm political, and other issues that left liberal politics hold dear, is untenable, elitist, and naive." I don't know exactly why he thinks Arendt thought this, because his footnote refers to S. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 1996. As I have only read The Origins of Totalitarianism and On Revolution, I'm reluctant to contradict Benhabib, but (a) Arendt's opinions naturally changed over time, and (b) in the passages I've read where Arendt expresses an opinion on the matter, she appears to be criticizing not the role of politics in the social sphere, but vice versa: in other words, the attempt by political activists to alter political machinery permanently to achieve social goals. For example, the use of the demonstration as a tool of political pressure, in my view, has serious flaws and is not a happy matter. For an alternative view to Curthoy's, please see "Hannah Arendt" at the Jewish Virtual Library.