The Totalitarian Way and the Tragedy of Our Blindness

November 8, 2008

In meeting with totalitarian leaders, we have helped them to advance their proposition that the world pursues a conspiracy against their movement. How so? Since the main tenet of a totalitarian state is this belief in a united conspiracy of the nontotalitarian states against the totalitarian regime, the negotiations are perceived by the totalitarian leader as reparations. Far from dissuading the leader from his complaint of victimhood, we only encourage that complaint. We make him feel that the conference is precisely for the purpose of redressing his grievances. We fail to understand his psychology.

Not merely that the leader of such a regime secretly sees our conferring with him as a sign of weakness on the part of the nontotalitarian conferees; the larger point here is that, in addition, the totalitarian leader sees his fictitious theory confirmed that his movement is the victim of united, global persecution. But, we ask, how could we have failed to get through to him, with our rational arguments about the commonwealth of nations?

We must understand that there is a part of the global reality which is wholly given over to implacable hostility to reality, given over to the creation of a fictitious world, a reality which is only flight from reality. This part of reality is, of course, the totalitarian movement. It was not failures of intelligence data, for example, that lowered our guard against the 9/11 attacks, but rather our incapacity to acknowledge this alternate apprehension of reality, this reality-as-denial-of-reality. We believed, incredibly, that they were like us. Thus the recriminations in the intelligence community and in the world of political spin are off-track.

Only a leader of a nontotalitarian country would be mollified by concessions or by negotiations. A leader from a totalitarian country, on the other hand, is the opposite of mollified—he is spurred on in his conspiracy theories by the “reparations,” and by the apparent international recognition as a member state. For the nontotalitarian world to fail to see this psychological type is tragedy. When we treat these monstrous leaders as if they were from the nontotalitarian world, we hurt ourselves. Rationality cannot reach them. They live in a world of their own making, having convinced themselves cynically of the most amazing lies possible. Their supreme lie is that they are a normal nation, and they take pains to appear as such. Hence, to meet with them and to take them seriously is only to confirm their fictitious, hellish world in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world at large. Their efforts towards total domination will now be redoubled.

The astonishing, inexpressible cruelty of such regimes is explained by the concept of utopia. As Hannah Arendt and David Rousset have pointed out, the elite in totalitarian states believe not only that everything is permitted (since we have lost the belief in a Last Judgement), but also that everything is possible. This experiment in the infinity of the possible is their utopia, conducted in the concentration camps. We, on the other hand, do not so believe, and that disbelief of ours forms “a protective wall of incredulity” for the totalitarian state.

The totalitarian movement is not dead, it is in preparatory or in full-blown mode in several countries. Far from our considering the war in Iraq as arbitrary, as merely “Bush’s War,” we are then justified in feeling real gratitude to our soldiers, and in feeling immense pride in our America, which for the third time has sacrificed greatly to rid the world of the most horrific regimes imaginable.

T.D.