60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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128 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness noted that in The Origins of Totalitarianism (hereafter referred to as Origins) Arendt uses the term ‘extermination’ rather than ‘genocide’ whereas the latter term appears in a qualifi ed form in her 1963 work, Eichmann in Jerusalem (hereafter referred to as Eichmann). Nonetheless, since Hitler’s totalitarian regime was genocidal by any defi nition of that term it will not be necessary to address this question here. Conversely, Gerlach’s notion of ‘the totalitarian model’ is far more contestable, most especially in regard to its alleged accountability for the state-centric focus of genocide scholars. Arendt’s analysis of the state in totalitarian societies was informed, inter alia, by Carl Schmitt’s seminal theory of ‘total dictatorship’, fi rst systematically articulated in his 1933 work Staat, Bewegung, Volk. At the close of an introductory analysis of the novel totalitarian movements that emerged in the wake of the First World War, Arendt, arguing that ‘the “totalitarian state” is a state in appearance only’ (Arendt 1979: 266), cites one of Schmitt’s most important and prescient insights: The [Nazi] Movement…is State as well as People, and neither the present state…nor the present German people can even be conceived without the Movement (Schmitt in Arendt 1979: 266). Schmitt anticipates by several years Hitler’s own pronouncements in this regard. In his address of 15 September 1935 to the Nuremberg Party Rally Hitler proclaimed: Whenever the formal bureaucracy of the State proves itself unfi tted to solve a problem, there the German nation will bring into play its own more lively organisation… any problem which the State through its essential character is unable to solve will be solved by means of the Movement. For the State itself is but one of the forms of the organisation of the völkisch life; it is set in motion and dominated by the immediate expression of the völkisch vital will, the Party, the National Socialist movement… (Hitler in Noakes and Pridham 1984: 237). Arendt adopts Schmitt’s above formulation as a keystone of her own theory of totalitarianism, rejecting the notion that the Nazi regime was a ‘state’ by any conventional defi nition of that term (Arendt 1979: 266, 392-419) and least of all Max Weber’s ‘classically modernist defi nition of the state as “the legitimate monopoly over the use of violence within recognized and bounded territory”’ (Benhabib 2002: 540).
do we need an alternative to the concept of genocide? 129 Arendt’s view of the antithetical relation between the ‘stable structures’ of the state and what she understands by a totalitarian system of government (see, for example, Arendt 1979: 391, 398, 412) derives from her analysis of the institutional plurality of totalitarian government, which by cultivating competing claims to political competency and creating a multiplicity of competing institutional centres of power undermines any eff ective challenge to dictatorial control. In Arendt’s words, ‘[t]he multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure the dictator’s complete independence of all his inferiors’ (Arendt 1979: 409). 3 Hence: What strikes the observer of the totalitarian state is certainly not its monolithic structure. On the contrary, all serious students of the subject agree at least on the co-existence (or the confl ict) of a dual authority, the party and the state. Many, moreover, have 3 Gerlach elsewhere acknowledges what he terms the ‘idea of “polyocracy” – namely, the radicalising eff ects of overlapping competences, competition, and power struggles between diff erent institutions and party agencies’ (Gerlach 2004: 289). He also cites three other ‘pillars of interpretation’ that supposedly underpinned ‘the framework of interpretation’ of the Nazi genocide during the 1980s; namely, ‘Nazi ideology’; ‘the way in which bureaucratic organizations worked and their effi cacy’; and ‘hierarchical structures, that is, orders and obedience’ (Gerlach 2004: 289). It is not entirely clear if Gerlach is suggesting that these four pillars were part of an integral framework of interpretation. In any event the polycratic interpretation of the Nazi dictatorship does not appear consistent with either the notion of a hierarchical system of autocratic order or with an effi cient and conventionally ordered bureaucratic organisation. Gerlach, moreover, dismisses ‘pure Nazi ideology’ as a ‘questionable notion anyway’ (Gerlach 2004: 287) and he argues that the idea that ‘ideology was the prime cause of the Holocaust…does not appear useful’ (Gerlach 2004: 292). However, since Gerlach does not defi ne either ‘ideology’ or ‘pure Nazi ideology’ it is not clear what he means by a ‘questionable notion’. Nor is it clear how ideology may have ‘caused’ the Nazi genocide. Arendt argues that totalitarian ideology is ‘quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the “idea” is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same “law” as the logical exposition of its “idea”’ (Arendt 1979: 469). Accordingly, the ‘Nazi movement, far from organising people who happened to believe in racism, organized them according to objective race criteria, so that race ideology was no longer a matter of mere opinion or argument or even fanaticism, but constituted the actual living reality, fi rst of the Nazi movement, and then of Nazi Germany’ (Arendt 1954: 351; see 362). In other words the leaders of totalitarian movements made the novel discovery that ideologies can serve as ‘organizational principles’ (Arendt 1979: 249). In my view Christopher Browning is nonetheless right to argue that Hitler’s ‘anti-Semitism was both obsessive and central to his political outlook. For him the “Jewish question” was the key to all other problems and hence the ultimate problem’, moreover providing the regime ‘with a spur and a direction for ceaseless dynamism and movement… Given the dynamics of the Nazi political system, a ratchetlike decision-making process permitted bursts of radicalisation periodically alternating with tactical pauses but never moderation or retreat’ (Browning 2004: 10-11).
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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