9. Violenc and totalitarinism Flashcards
What is the dual state?
Fraenkel, who practised law in pre-Hitler Germany, finds that the Nazi régime consists, in fact, of two distinct states – one “normative,” the other “prerogative.” In the first the administrative and judicial bureaucracy operate according to rules; in the second the Party, and more particularly the Gestapo, operate free of any ultimate legal restraint. The second, of course, possesses complete power arbitrarily to supersede the first at any or all points.
Where does totalitarian come from?
“The words totalitarian and totalitarianism are derived from the Italian totalitario and totalitarismo. They were first used as a play on words, a veritable conundrum, in an article entitled Majority and Minority by Giovanni Amendola which appeared in Il Mondo, May 12, 1923” (Bruno Bongiovanni)
What was the term totalitarian originally referring to?
“Amendola coined the adjective «totalitario» to describe the true nature of the «winner-take-all» electoral system, which in those days was being debated in Italy’s lower house of parliament. “ (Bongiovanni)
What was the totalitarian spirit?
“The totalitarian spirit, a threat to liberalist civilization, was for Amendola, and for the moment limited to Italy, a passing over to another age, or even the advent of a new paradigm, a historical turnover, which was here and there so utterly regressive, of political and civil forms of cohabitation” (Bongiovanni)
When was the term totalitarian extend to mussolini?
“In an article that appeared in La Rivoluzione Liberale on January 2, 1925, the day before Mussolini’s famous watershed speech, Lelio Basso closed the semantic circle and coined the noun totalitarismo, synonym of the dictatorial manner of whoever, once having monopolized military power, scoops up all remaining power to transform it into a tool to be used by a single party that proclaimed itself interpreter of the unanimous will” (Bongio)
How did mussolini describe his movement in 1925?
“It was somewhat like his January 3, 1925 outburst, when he took personal responsibility for what had happened, since the Matteotti incident. «You say we are ‹totalitarian›? Well, that’s right. We are ‹totalitarian›.»” (Bongio)
How did Amendola use the term totalitarian in 1926?
“In July 1925, Giovanni Amendola, just before the attack and beating that led to his death on April 7, 1926 at a clinic in Cannes, used the adjective «totalitario» to compare Fascism and Bolshevism, intended as the total overturning of the foundations upon which the public life of European nations had rested for over a century” (Bongio)
How did Arendt see totalitarinism?
“Hannah Arendt, despite being an heir to the great debate of the 1930s and early 1940s, actually denied the totalitarian nature of Italian fascism, which was considered a mere authoritarian regime that had let itself become involved, and was eventually destroyed, by the alliance with Hitlerism. According to Arendt, totalitarianism was indeed a category that incorporated only National Socialism (beginning in 1937– 1938) and Stalinist Bolshevism – beginning in 1928 and continuing until Stalin’s death” (Bongio)
What sort of states are there in totalitarian regimes?
“Alongside a state that was indubitably authoritarian and a destroyer of freedom, though still based on laws (Normenstaat), there was another discretionary state founded upon the arbitrariness and the uncontested implementation of absolute political decision. This second state was in reality a non-state, a corrosive and destructive element situated within the heart of the law-based state” (Bongio_
How did the dual states develop?
“Indeed, as the war situation worsened, the discretionary non-state tended to assume more weight until it progressively suffocated and crushed the state. At the center of the Nazis’ Bewegung was not the state at all, but the German Volk, Hitler’s master race, while at the center of the much more backward and archaic Bolshevism was the party, presided over by a cast with plebeian origins that had taken over the state, having survived with difficulty the great peasant revolution (1918 –1933) and the great purges (1934– 1939).” (bongio)
How does Gerhard Beiser describe both national socialism and communism?
“Both, the national socialists one as well as Soviet communism, “were regimes with wide popular backing”; those in power imparted the “sense of moral certainty” and appeared in “moral garb”. The enthusiasm that was shown by large portions of the population in the effected countries for dictatorial systems and their ideologies led people in the 1920s and 1930s to draw analogies between ideologies and classical religions. Just as Bertrand Russell already in 1920 considered bolshevism to be a new religion, John Maynard Keynes said in 1925 that, like other religions, Leninism also had no scruples; Carl Christian Bry labelled communism a “religion in disguise” in 1925, Richard Karwehl, a minister from Hannover, spoke of national socialism in terms of “political messianism,” in 1931, Franz Werfel spoke of “religion or replacement religion,” and the Methodist Bishop John L. Nuelson from the U.S.A. wrote in 1938, “Hitlerism cannot be understood when one simply understands it as a political or social movement. It is a religion. It is certainly not a Christian religion, but a religion all the same. […] Hitlerism is certainly not just a religion; rather it is an organized church.””
What does erligion give to people?
“Religion provides a cultural system that gives meaning, including conceivability, symbols and rituals in the form of communicative actions. With its help, cognitive and emotional, two central possibilities of dealing with contingencies are practiced and therefore direct human behavior in this world. On the one hand, religion satisfies man’s need for retribution, for restitution and retribution for what was withheld from him and repayment for what was done to him.” (Besier)
What did communism and National socialism do?
“Communism and national socialism have competed with the model of a Christian revelation religion, as they promise to minimize the contingencies of human life – seen as primarily caused by repression – through an enormous political restructuring, and, in so doing, to reveal or even to devaluate the function of classical religion: system stabilization. “ (Besier)
What was marxism leninism?
“This holistic understanding of “scientific theory” as a formula to save the world, which originated in the 19th century, especially in regard to its semantics, made Marxism-Leninism seem to be nearly a “secular”, a “political religion.”” (Besier)
Why did people turn to national socialism?
“In national socialism, according to Varga, those declassed compensated for the loss of their “social honor” with a new “experience-group” -based doctrine, which appeared most utile to organize the disintegrating society. “As religious historians have long known, such despair constitutes the most important condition of every conversion and every new religion.” “ (Besier)
What did national socialims and communism both seek to do?
“Though all their differences, according to an editorial in the Manchester Guardian from August 5th, 1936, what was constitutive for both dictatorships was that they undertook the arrogant as well as impossible attempt to establish heaven on earth.” (Besier)
Voigt on religion
“Voigt states for both Lenin and Hitler a prevailing thought-reductionism as well as an absolute setting of a few norms, whose absolute claims on reality were realized through extreme violence: classes and class struggle for the one and race and folklore for the other. Voigt ascribes rational religious traditions to Marxism and irrational mysticism to National Socialism. The former destroys Christendom, the latter corrupts it.
How does Maier see relion and politics?
“On the one side they exhibited “phenomena similar to religions,” on the other they behaved in ways that are decidedly “anti-church” and “anti-religious.” “We have, therefore, both,” writes Hans Maier in the introduction to the second volume, “a pronounced religious language, many formalities of religious and church history and at the same time an anti-religious face of modern totalitarianism.”” (Besier)
Who could avoid the sacralization of politics?
“Almost no one was able to evade the fascination of creating a new society and a new, self-transcendent men, being allowed to dream of a redeemed existence, unless one was excluded from these final aspirations because of one’s blood line and was hence not allowed to take part in the revolution of life. “ (Besier)
Where can we see the sacralisation of politics?
“Most symbolic for the decision to leave the old behind and start a new reality was the announcement of a new calendar. The personality cult that was borrowed from religious tradition and revolved around a revolutionary superhuman, who one could thank for the own exaltation, was at its highest in Lenin’s case, whose followers tried to make him “immortal” by mummifying him” (Besier)
Where are some of the similarities between NS and USSR?
“One can not only see analogies here to religious history, but also between dictatorships. “Even though they are contrary in their contents, national socialist and Stalinist ideologies converged by justifying every sacrifice during their realization and the ability to commit in disregard of humanity. In this sense, they were connected as functional equivalents.” Hildermeier notes an entire list of common religious characteristics, such as the cadre’s “need for deliverance,” the establishment of rituals and celebrations, the creation of symbols, the staging of cultural worship as well as the justification of destitution and cruelty.” (Besier)
How is communism like a religion?
“the historian Marcin Kula carried out a systematic examination of communism as a “political religion.” The author describes the analogies between the communist movement and the church. “Similarly to the church, the communist actions proceed according to a specific dogma.” Communism and religion pursue similar goals: the creation of a new man and of a community. The newly built socialist cities like Nowa Huta had a religious meaning: Places without sin should arise. Lenin and Stalin were stylized as secular saints; Lenin was almost worshipped religiously. He was depicted in house altars as a young, mature man. A real cult of relics developed around deceased great communists. Like the Christians consider Jesus’ grave and the basilica to be central holy places, the communists have an equivalent in Lenin’s mausoleum. “ (Besier)
What is communisms catechism?
“Communism also has its own catechism, namely the ABC’s of Communism by Nikolai Bukharin and Jevgenii Preobrashenskii.” (Besier)
If communism is a religion, why did it fail?
“One could say that one reason why communism perished was, that people simply no longer believed in it.”
How does the individual see themself in a totalitarian regime?
“The uprooted, modern man of the crowd no longer trusts his own judgment and becomes a victim of totalitarian propaganda and its ideologically-fictional world view. He has to believe in this artificial world view without own thought and without any personal spontaneity, if he does not want to risk being shut out. Those who resist this universal ideology are exposed to the state apparatus and to the secret police. The latter’s central device is but the concentration camp; such camps characterize the terror, as the essence of the total state” (Besier)
What are 6 things all dictatorships have?
“[Carl Joachim] Friedrich’s concept was based on six “decisive characteristics” that “all dictatorships have in common: an ideology, a party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly on the media and news and a centrally controlled economy.” Only where all of these characteristics of the ideal type model are present together, constitute a “syndrome,” one can refer to the governmental system as a “totalitarian dictatorship.” The doctrine of a dictatorship wanted to encompass the entire life and all areas of society and pretended for its followers the vision of a utopian final state in this world.” (Besier)
Did the public support totalitarian regimes?
“Moreover “research on perpetrators” underlined, that it were not only scrupulous incumbents, but rather a large portion of the German society that were either directly or indirectly involved in the massacres. Without their readiness to support, the national socialist system, an ineffective conglomeration of organizations often acting controdictorily, would not have been able to accomplish its goals. The majority of the German public so willingly followed the “charismatic leadership” of Hitler, that polycratic structures for the execution of the leader’s will and the national socialist ideology were not necessary.” (Besier)
What are some distinct totalitarian characteristics?
“According to Aron the “totalitarian phenomenon” emerges in various societies, but admittedly with distinct characteristics. He also names important characteristics: the single party, the “absolute” ideology as the “official truth of the state,” a state monopoly on violence and the media, a far-reaching control of the economy and a comprehensive politicization, i.e. the “ideological dressing-up of all ideological mistakes and, as its final consequence, a terror of police as well as ideology.” Aron observed the most noticeable peculiarity of these characteristics in the national socialist state between 1941 and 1944 and under Stalinism between 1934 and 1938 as well as between 1949 and 1952.” (Besier)
What is Aron’s minimal criteria of totalitarian?
“Due to the increasing amount of empirical material, Aron reduced his concept of totalitarianism in the late 70s and 80s to two elements: a “merging of state and society and the implementation of an official ideology that commanded the obedience of all.” “ (Besier)
What was the role of violence for the nazis?
“Between 1928 and the summer of 1932 Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP marched to a series of impressive electoral triumphs at the local, regional, and national levels that carried them from the fringes of German political consciousness to the very threshold of power. During these years, the NSDAP had assiduously cultivated a public image as an aggressive, brawling, combative party determined to confront the Marxist left not only at the ballot box but in the streets. Directed overwhelmingly against the Social Democratic and Communist left, political violence had been a staple of Nazi mobilization strategy and had paid handsome dividends since 1928.” (Childers and Weiss)
Was nazi violence before 1933 unrelenting?
“The Nazis had selected their targets for terrorism carefully. The party tended to avoid direct confrontation with the state - the police and especially the military - and, until the fall of 1932, violent encounters with the parties and paramilitary organizations of the conservative right were infrequent. In their use of violence, the NSDAP had trod a very fine line between what Richard Bessel has aptly described as “roughness and respectability.”” (Childers and Weiss)
Why were political losses occuring in the view of the nazi leadership?
“Less than three months after their greatest electoral victory, the National Socialists suffered a potentially crippling setback in Reichstag elections in the first week of November…In the aftermath of the November fiasco, the NSDAP was gripped by a crisis provoked in no small part, Nazi strategists believed, by the party’s - but especially the SA’s - embrace of political terrorism. What had gone wrong? Had political violence, an integral part of Nazi mobilization strategy throughout the party’s dramatic rise, at last backfired?” (Childers and Weiss)
What were the elections of 1932 like?
“With four national elections and contests in virtually every state as well, 1932 was a year of almost constant campaigning. Each of those campaigns was accompanied by a rising spiral of violent clashes, usually between the storm troopers of the NSDAP, the SA, and the various street organizations of the KPD and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner. Political rallies routinely resulted in bottle- and chair-throwing melees, while the use of knives, guns, clubs, brass knuckles, and other weapons resulted in death or injury for hundreds. Indeed, in the final ten days of the July Reichstag campaign alone, the Prussian authorities reported over three hundred acts of political violence, in which twenty-four people were killed and almost three hundred more were injured. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed to have lost seventy “martyrs”. “ (Childers and Weiss)
What did the SA resort to after electoral victories failed to get them to power?
“In the first week of August, frustrated SA units, severely disappointed by the party’s failure to seize power following the 31 July elections, unleashed a massive terror campaign all over East Prussia and Silesia. The wave of bombings, shootings, and arson began on 1 August in Konigsberg. Acting on their own initiative, groups of SA men, convinced that only revolutionary action could now thrust the NSDAP into power, went on a binge of political violence that terrorized an entire city. Within hours the wave of terror spread beyond the capital, engulfing the entire province. On 2 August, Silesia also erupted in violence, as SA units, acting for the most part on orders from their regional and district leaders, went on the offensive against a wide variety of targets.” (Childers and Weiss)
What began to happen to members of the SA before 1933?
“Throughout the late summer and early fall, symptoms of SA disaffection were widely reported. Morale in many SA units was low, and even reports of defections to the KPD and other radical formations had begun to circulate.” (Childers and Weiss
What were the SA increasing dissafected with?
“Disaffection with the party’s policy of “legality” and its emphasis on electoral campaigning had grown steadily within the SA over the year and by late summer had become a potentially serious problem. “The mass of SA [men] don’t fully understand the repeated postponements of [decisive action],” the Untergruppe Hessen-Darmstadt reported in September. “They are pressing for the attack. To them, an open fight is preferable to this constant voting (WdhlereO), which in the final analysis leads to nothing, or at least to very little.” (Childers and Weiss)
What was the attitude to legality within the rank and file?
“The September report from Stuttgart echoed these sentiments, adding that “a portion - probably the greater portion [of the rank and file SA men] - say to hell with legality.”’ The Karlsruhe SA was just as emphatic, stating simply that “no one [in the ranks] believes in the path of legality.”” (Childers and Weiss)
Why did the nazis lose middle class support?
“The findings of the party’s grassroots political network strongly suggested that the NSDAP had lost significant ground with elements of the middle-class electorate in November. Several reasons were given, but reports from all over the country insisted that SA terrorism in the late summer and early fall had contributed greatly to this decline” (Childers and Weiss)
What did Gau leaders say about SA violence?
“In discussing the party’s poor showing in November, Gau officials in Silesia, for example, noted that “above all, the great number of terroristic acts perpetrated by the SA must be mentioned here…. Today dozens of SA men are sitting in prison for these deeds .. ., and, needless to say, the awareness of SA attacks has hardly encouraged a desire to get out to the polls in a large segment of the voters.”” (Childers and Weiss)
Who did SA leaders criticise, showingt the split in the party?
“It is indicative of the magnitude of that conflict that at a meeting of the Nazi leadership in Munich on 8 November, SA leaders reportedly responded to charges of undermining the campaign effort by lashing out at Hitler’s policy of legality, claiming that it, not the SA, was losing support for the NSDAP” (Childers and Weiss)
Who did people not mind violence by the SA being used against?
” Yet, in their bloody confrontations with the Communists or Social Democrats, the Nazis sought to tread a fine line, appealing to both a middle-class desire for “law and order” and a widespread antipathy toward the left. As long as Nazi violence was clearly directed against the Communists, as long as the party could present itself as the victim of leftist terror - a common refrain in Nazi self-representation - it could count on sympathetic coverage in much of the bourgeois press.” (Childers and Seiss)
What solved the split in the party between leaders and the SA?
“Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, at a time when the NSDAP’s electoral popularity was clearly ebbing and SA patience was severely frayed, provided the party with the opportunity to resolve the interrelated strategic dilemmas that had surfaced in the fall campaign. With the NSDAP at last in power, the stormtroopers could be unleashed, allowing Hitler to meet the SA’s desire for radical action and to do so under a cloak of pseudo-legality.” (Childers and WEiss)
How could violence be portrayed after 1933?
“Nazi violence against the left, embraced wholeheartedly by the traditional right, could now be portrayed as necessary for the protection of the state and public order, allowing many of those who had wavered or defected in November to revive the fatal illusion that the NSDAP was merely a nationalist party with limited ambitions and could be safely entrusted with Germany’s future” (Childers and Weiss)
