The role of the totalitarian system
The totalitarian Nazi system was difficult to resist, either physically or psychologically. It used force and propaganda. It indoctrinated children. It induced people to participate in activities that committed them to the Nazi world view: political meetings, youth groups, mating to create “pure Aryan” Germans, the boycott of Jewish stores. Learning by participation resulted in increasing acceptance of and identification with the system. The system offered carrots as well as sticks. Followers could experience both the specialness of being a member of a superior race and the earthly wellbeing offered to “good” Germans.
Inner resistance was difficult to maintain while outwardly conforming and participating. Families were divided, spouses in conflict, and children set against parents. Children and adolescents in the Hitler youth groups were encouraged to spy on and report their own parents. The human need for consistency made outward conformity lead to inner change. It is difficult to maintain a divided self without support from others. Only within a resistance group or some other support network was it possible for most. The system also set a frame for action. Even Pastor Grueber, whom the court at Nuremberg lauded as one of the just men of the world, worked only to ease the Jews’ suffering while accepting the fact of their fate.
Nevertheless, resistance was possible: it stopped the policy of euthanasia, for example. Members of the Catholic church, relatives of victims, and other Germans spoke out. In the summer of 1941, certain groups – lawyers, church authorities – submitted a formal complaint to the government, and in August 1941 the bishop of Münster attacked these killings from his pulpit. After more than a year of rising public clamor and 70,000 to 100,000 dead, the program was discontinued.27 Few voices, however, were raised against the mistreatment of the Jews.
Perhaps the most profound effect of a successful totalitarian system is the lack of dissenting voices that offer a perspective different from that cultivated by authorities or engender inner conflict or sympathy with victims. Neither German citizens nor leaders were awakened to conflicts between their traditional values and the acts they observed or perpetrated against Jews and others. However, the reactions that stopped the policy of euthanasia suggest that even a totalitarian system is more effective when its actions are consistent with the culture, for example, when it turns against already devalued groups. Perhaps lack of preparation of the population through increasing mistreatment of victims was also a reason for the outcry against euthanasia.
Some writers make it appear that evil and its executors in the totalitarian state are basically different from evil deeds or perpetrators elsewhere. In discussing Arendt’s book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for transporting Jews to killing centers, Bettelheim writes:
This, then is a book about our inability to comprehend fully how modern technology and social organization, when made use of by totalitarianism, can empower a normal, rather mediocre person such as Eichmann to play so crucial a role in the extermination of millions. By the same incongruity, it becomes theoretically possible for a minor civil servant – say a lieutenant colonel, to keep the parallel to Eichmann – to start the extermination of most of us by pressing a button. It is an incongruity between the image of man we still carry – rooted though it is in the humanism of the Renaissance and in the liberal doctrines of the eighteenth century – and the realities of human existence in the middle of our current technological revolution. Had this revolution not permitted us to view the individual as a mere cog in the complex machinery – dispensable, a mere instrument – and the state to use him as such, Eichmann would never have been possible. But neither would the slaughter at Stalingrad, Russia’s slave labor camps, the bombing of Hiroshima, or the current planning for nuclear war. It is the contradiction between the incredible power technology has put at our disposal, and the insignificance of the individual compared to it....
. . . this is not the latest chapter in antisemitism but rather one among the first chapters in modern totalitarianism.... A more complete understanding of totalitarianism requires that we see Eichmann as basically a mediocrity whose dreadful importance is derived from his more-or-less chance position within the system.28
Bettelheim blames modern totalitarianism and technology for the Holocaust. But large-scale murder was not discovered by totalitarian systems, and human beings without special creativity and talent have normally been the instruments of destruction. Those who assembled Christians in ancient Rome to throw them to the lions did not need to possess greatness. In the Middle Ages, priests who identified witches to be burnt had no great vision or intellectual powers that made them and their evil deeds extraordinary. The disappearance and murder of thousands of people in Argentina was perpetrated by an “authoritarian” rather than totalitarian system. The “autogenocide” in Cambodia made limited use of advanced technology.
Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception. While Hannah Arendt’s views are consistent with this, her concept of the “banality of evil” is misleading: it lessens, or diminishes, evil. It is an expression of wishful thinking, in the same class as the concept of “incomprehensible evil.” The latter enhances evil by romanticizing it and giving it mythic proportions; the former diminishes it. Great evil arises out of ordinary psychological processes that evolve, usually with a progression along the continuum of destruction.
What is or is not acceptable to do very much depends, for humans, on the perspective they hold. The most kind of the most brutal actions can appear reasonable and justified to people, depending
