Totalitarianism

The key question here is: Can good people do evil things?

Totalitarian Regimes e.g Plato's Republic have control over every aspect of life, people's individuality is totally stripped away. Against these ideas are: contract theory, idea that the powers of the state should be limited (even by Hobbes), and liberalism, personal freedom protected by the state: "A life of liberty, in the pursuit of happiness and property".

Hannah Arendt argued that 20th century totalitarian regimes were different to anything that had come before, the main purpose of the regime is to utterly destroy the individual.

Mussolini - "Fascism is for liberty".
The doctrine of Fascism: The state is everything. "outside the state there can be neither individuals or groups. Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Hannah Arendt thought that imperialism that had come before made totalitarian happen, it contained many traits which the new regimes could use. For example one trait is racism, within the racist movement you are superior based on your genes, not on anything you have done.

Our individuality makes us difficult to control, and gather up into a collective movement.  There are two methods to destroy this individuality: Terror and Ideology 

The purpose of terror is not to just murder vast numbers of people but also to destroy their individuality and ability to act against the state. Ideology eliminates the need and capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves. Orwell: war is peace; freedom is slavery; poverty is plenty. Ideology is also a type of specialist knowledge, as popper pointed out it is often used as a justification for the authority of rulers, and to avoid responsibility.

Ideology frees you from common sense and reality, you don't think you follow. When you are cut away from common sense anything can become possible. The norms are imposed on you from the state which sets limits to what is possible.

Hannah Arendt states that the first move Nazi's made on the road to the 'Final solution' was to deny Jews citizenship by making them stateless and removing their rights. These stateless people were perfect victims for a totalitarian regime. She highlights that the state is fragile, how quickly groups and whole people can fall through the cracks even in the heart of Europe. To be a civilized human we need to inhabit a man-made world of stable structures. We need these to give us access to common sense and a shared reality.

Control Language
Orwell was horrified by the capacity of totalitarian regimes to attempt to control minds, by manipulating language. Thought takes place in purely linguistic terms; to control language is to control thought. This therefore meant that mind control may be possible through manipulation of language.

Personal Responsibility in a dictatorship - Would I collaborate? 
On 11th May 1960 Israeli Secret Service kidnapped Nazi figurative Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. He stood trial in Jerusalem for crimes he had committed during the "final solution". Eichmann's main responsibly during the Holocaust was to organise the transportation of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps.

The Eichmann trail served three purposes:
1. Trial him for his crimes
2. Educate the world about the nature of the holocaust
3. Legitimise the Jewish state

For Arendt it was a shock to Eichmann, he spoke in endless cliches: proud of being a "law abiding citizen". She concluded that it was not necessary to possess great wickedness to commit great crimes. Arendt agreed with the judgement that he should be put to death, but disagreed with the reasoning, she believed Eichmann's crime was not thinking. He didn't make his own choices and choice is crucial an existentialists point of view. Eichmann did not choose, he simply followed the state. Eichmann followed Kant's categorical imperative, he invoked duty in an effort to explain his version of Kantianism.

As Satre states, the only thing you cannot escape is choice. What had become banal was the failure to think, Aredt is saying that we must look to our personal judgement and think in order to know how to act rather then follow the law. Sometimes disobedience is exactly our responsibly, and this is what Eichmann failed to realise.