What does it take to resist totalitarianism?
In the years following the Holocaust, German-Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) devoted herself to this question. Arendt believed that trying to understand how and why the Holocaust had happened was an essential task in order to prevent history from repeating itself.
Arendt is perhaps best known for Eichmann in Jerusalem, her report on the 1961-62 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, in which she identified “the banality of evil.”[1] By using this phrase, Arendt was not diminishing the evil that was perpetrated, but rather emphasizing how horrific evil can be made ordinary and be perpetrated by ordinary people. In Arendt’s assessment, Eichmann was no evil mastermind. Instead, he committed terrible crimes in his capacity as a very ordinary, rather unimpressive administrator.
Arendt was troubled by the fact that ordinary people en masse accepted, participated in, and normalized the actions of the Nazi regime. Arendt compared the ease with which one morality was exchanged for another with a change in table manners:
It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.[2]
Previously held moral standards apparently held no actual weight when faced with these new circumstances. The majority of the German people found it easier to change their moral ideas and go along with the new regime than to resist it.
Much of Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s trial centered on the question of what it means for an individual to be held accountable for crimes committed in a state where crimes have been made lawful. Eichmann’s lawyers tried to assert that he was merely a “cog” in the Nazi machine and therefore could not be held responsible for his part in it. Eichmann himself said he had been obeying orders.[3] Yet Arendt insisted that even a “cog” or a subordinate has a choice whether or not to participate in what is happening:
In the courtroom, these definitions are of no avail. For to the answer: “Not I but the system did it in which I was a cog,” the court immediately raises the next question: “And why, if you please, did you become a cog or continue to be a cog under such circumstances?”[4]
Arendt reminds us that even within totalitarian rule, we are not left without agency but still have a choice whether or not to participate in what is happening.
And there were some—a few—who chose not to participate. Arendt was just as interested in understanding what it was that enabled these few to do so:
The nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds… To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.[5]
Significantly, Arendt saw no evidence that merely holding certain beliefs or moral standards was enough to enable people to resist the evil around them. This kind of “automatic” response was inadequate to actual conditions. Instead of being guided by adherence to an external moral code, those who refused to comply were guided by a much deeper integrity—the question of whether or not they could, quite literally, live with themselves if they acted in certain ways.
Arendt’s insights are worth reflecting on now, as we find ourselves in a similar set of circumstances, in which moral frameworks have been exchanged and crimes have been made lawful. The genocide in Palestine continues to be funded and fueled by Christian Zionists and governments in the West. Religious leaders in the United States have openly supported and enabled the Trump administration and its crimes. State-sanctioned police and security forces violently remove unhoused persons and deport and detain individuals without cause. As Christians, what will enable us to live with integrity and faith in this moment? We know from history that simply holding Christian beliefs or moral frameworks was not enough to enable most Christians to resist Nazism in Germany.
In uncertain times, it is natural to turn to guides who tell us what to do or think—whether church communities, pastors or priests, politicians, teachers, commentators, or influencers on social media. But ultimately each of us has a personal responsibility to discern what is right, a responsibility that we cannot abdicate, especially when faced with conditions such as those Arendt described.
Jesus criticized the crowds following him for not practicing this kind of discernment, for not engaging with current conditions or recognizing what was required of them:
“When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?’”[6]
In a society in which religious leaders have exchanged moral frameworks for those that are more politically expedient and in which crimes have been made lawful by the state, judging what is right can be a lonely and a very risky endeavour. Are we able to interpret the present time? What can we do—or fail to do—and still live with ourselves?
Image: Hannah Arendt auf dem 1. Kulturkritikerkongress, Barbara Niggl Radloff, Munich Stadtmuseum collection.
[1] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006).
[2] Hannah Arendt, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” in Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 43.
[3] Eichmann in Jerusalem, 25.
[4] “Personal Responsibility,” 31.
[5] “Personal Responsibility,” 44.
[6] Luke 12:54-57.
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