60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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).