Among the latter is an absolute resentment that imposes on people the
Posted in General on 05. Oct, 2010
Among the latter is an absolute resentment that imposes on people the duty to foul streets with litter and worse, throw up on doorsteps, uproot park benches and saplings, and generally charge through life determined to disrupt and disorder things. To impose freedom on others is to oppress them; to force equality on them is to treat them as inferior.” Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun, he says, is not democracy; “to impose it by force is to undermine it,” an observation that brings to mind Aldous Huxley’s wise maxim that liberty is something not given but taken.There are certain absolutes in our own society that are reminiscent of the absolutism which fuelled fascist and communist totalitarianism, in that an underlying motive is to inflict conformity or pain on one’s fellows. Whereas the US government claims to be entrusted with the mission of imposing its values – “freedom, democracy and free enterprise” – over the face of the globe, “this agenda is frightening.” Where it was tried in the past, “in each case, the protagonists may have been sincerely convinced that their cause was superior to all others, and yet brought blood and tears to the rest of the world … alien to a true democracy.”In a thoughtfully argued preface to the English edition of Hope and Memory, written in October 2002, Todorov explicitly questions America’s post-totalitarian role, exercised as “the crudest manifestation of power”. Totalitarian thinking, Todorov says, is “far more widespread than totalitarian states”.And although, as he asserts, “totalitarianism now belongs to the past”, its great 20th-century rival, democracy, is far from being in the clear; “a political culture entirely subservient to the economic sphere [as in the US] is …
Why get bogged down in discussion when you know where to go and what to do?” Might is right (Iraq echo!). Thirdly, totalitarianism has no place for neutrality: you’re either for us or against us; “difference” is seen as “opposition”, which is at least partly why domestic opposition to the US invasion of Iraq was ruthlessly harried and therefore, initially, so muted. Strong traces of absolutism are to be detected there, along with the kind of vocabulary used by Hitler and Stalin to dehumanise “the enemies of liberty” (“Axis of Evil”, etc) This makes the enemy’s elimination “more acceptable”. Secondly, the totalitarian framework justifies violence both as a law of life and survival and by being “the right of the possessors of scientific truth. We must not forget that Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were wished for and loved by the masses … Today, people’s relationship to transcendence is no less necessary than it ever was, but to ward off any future aberration, it must be kept out of political life.”The author’s persuasive reasoning often directs us to scrutinise our “greatest democracy” and former scourge of totalitarian ideologies: the United States.
He triumphantly noted: “Obit anus, abit onus” (The old woman dies, the burden departs) We can’t wash our hands of totalitarianism like that. With people increasingly desirous of “connecting themselves to the absolute”, as Todorov puts it, we cannot simply write off totalitarianism as a failed experiment.”Unlike democracy, totalitarianism claims to meet these deeper needs, and for that reason it was freely chosen by the peoples involved. Some of us may feel as Schopenhauer did about an elderly seamstress who died some years after he had attacked her and been ordered to pay quarterly sums in compensation. We may like to appeal to “memory”, Todorov says, but our behaviour “does not show greater wisdom than that of our forebears”.
A European intellectual renowned for his clarity, insight and breadth of ideas, Todorov focuses this work (brilliantly translated from the French by David Bellos) on totalitarianism as the major innovation of the 20th century, its struggle with democracy and the effects of that conflict on our lives and consciousness.Totalitarian tendencies have certainly not perished with the fate of fascist and communist regimes in Europe. Viewers responded by giving an extreme right-wing party with an explicitly racist ideology deriving in part from the Nazi programme up to 15 per cent of the popular vote in presidential and parliamentary elections.