Facing Totalitarianism

The American Enterprise Online ^ | February 28, 2006 | William Tucker

[neverdem]

Last week, I saw Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, the story of a 21-year-old German girl and her brother who were executed for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets during the last days of the Third Reich.

It’s a well-wrought film, brooding in its implications of totalitarianism. The offenses were no more than the average college student indulges in these days. Yet the Nazis’ desperate struggle to retain control over people’s thoughts made it necessary to execute dissenters.

In the climactic scene, the brother pleads to a room full of generals witnessing his trial. “The war is lost,” he tells them. “We are wasting lives. Everyone in this room knows this.” The nervous generals shuffle their feet in discomfort, but the hyperactive ayatollah-like judge screams and shouts and imposes the death penalty.

It’s a particularly apt lesson as we face another implacable foe whose main strength is the overwhelming subservience of its people.

In Escape from Freedom, published right at the outset of World War II, psychiatrist Erich Fromm gave an unforgettable portrait of the attractions of totalitarianism. The appeal of Nazism, he wrote, was that it freed people from the burdens of modern life. Since the Enlightenment, the great development in Europe had been the rise of individual freedom. In politics, people now had control over their governance. In economics, they had wide latitude in seeking their fortunes. In religion, family, and society, the traditional bonds that kept people in subservience to others had been broken.

Yet this freedom created a terrifying new phenomenon—personal isolation. “Freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence,” Fromm wrote, “at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.”

The appeal of Nazism was that it allowed individuals to submerge themselves in the myth of the state. Nazism controlled every aspect of life and demanded complete obedience, and many people were more than willing to comply. In Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer tells a story from the early days of the war. After Dunkirk, Shirer relates, as Hitler attempted to bomb England into submission, the Germans were instructed not to listen to British radio broadcasts. One night the British shot down a plane piloted by the son of a woman in his neighborhood. The BBC broadcast the boy’s name, announcing he had been taken captive. Several of the woman’s neighbors rushed to assure her that her son was alive. The woman turned them in to the SS for listening to British broadcasts.

Such loyalty to the state creates a populace that may not be terribly good at day-to-day activities such as creating an economy or making a living, but is primed for tasks of warfare. As in Sophie Scholl, the fanatics rule, while people with common sense or a little humanity are trampled.

The Muslim world lives with the same fanaticism. With Islam, however, we are not faced with a population like the Germans, who were rebelling against the Enlightenment, but with a society that has never experienced it. There is nothing in Islam that creates individual freedom. Imams hold enormous sway over popular opinion and dissent is practically unknown. Allah rules all. The masses gathered in city squares chanting “Allah, use us to your will” are professing their loss of personal identity. The ranks of martyrs will be filled for a long, long time.

Thus, there is a certain naivete to President George Bush’s fervent hope that democracy can rule the Middle East. We are projecting out of European-American experience. In Moslem countries, religion fits the Western definition of totalitarianism—a system that yokes the political, religious, and cultural institutions of society into one.

Personally, I like the strategy for a “Long War” issued earlier this month by the Defense Department. The Pentagon envisions a ten-year period in which we will not engage in any more full-scale invasions but will attempt to keep foreign governments out of the hands of fanatics and defeat terrorism through smaller, clandestine operations.

This may seem like a long forced march for a country that thought we might have reached the “end of history” with the defeat of the Soviets. In fact, history is much longer. Western Civilization has always been threatened by the “Scythiains” on its borders. The openness that American society has achieved is rare in history. It gives us an unmatched superiority in technical and cultural achievement, but not all our neighbors are going to adopt it.


William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.

[neverdem]

Standing Up To Terror

[Cornpone]

"anti-Hitler leaflets"

Would those be like satirical cartoons of the great poobah Mohammed?

[Lurker]

There is nothing in Islam that creates individual freedom

Not only is there nothing that creates (or allows for it) individual freedom is forbidden under islam. There is only the freedom to surrender oneself completely to the ravings of a murderous syphilitic pedophile. If one doesn't, then one is an apostate.

Bin Laden said it: "I won't be happy until all of my followers are living in caves." Think about that for just a moment.

Here's a guy who thinks it's not just acceptable but absolutely required for the entire world to be sent back quite literally to just after the stone age.

There's only one way to deal with an ideology (and that's what islam is) like that. It's got to be destroyed. It's every bit as lethal to western societies as nazism, communism, or Imperial Japan was.

L

[Carry_Okie]

In Escape from Freedom, published right at the outset of World War II, psychiatrist Erich Fromm gave an unforgettable portrait of the attractions of totalitarianism.

He should know. Eric Fromm gave birth to modern feminism, a key element of Cultural Marxism. He was also a member of the Frankfurt School which included Herbert Marcuse, and Abraham Maslow. All three were Antonio Gramsci's misbegotten ideological stepchildren.

[Solar Wind]

The story told by the film "Sophie Scholl" is riveting. On the film's website they show transcripts of the hand typed leaflets. http://zeitgeistfilms.com/scholl_html/flash.html

Mr Sol

[TheSarce]

White Rose references ping.

[Iris7]

This Tucker fellow looks to have unraveled the situation about one level deep. Many more levels exist.

American foreign policy under our President has been high statecraft indeed.

[highlander_UW]

The appeal of Nazism was that it allowed individuals to submerge themselves in the myth of the state. Nazism controlled every aspect of life and demanded complete obedience, and many people were more than willing to comply.

And yet the democrats fail to see that they're trying to recycle this same "myth of state"!

We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." -Hillary Clinton

[oh8eleven]

Bin Laden said it: "I won't be happy until all of my followers are living in caves."

Not unlike the philosophy espoused by the lunatic enviro-whackos. Great Evil minds think alike.

[BykrBayb]

Thanks for the ping.

Excerpt from THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert J. Lifton:

Perhaps the most moving of all expressions of opposition in Nazi Germany involved three medical students and a few additional students from other faculties at the University of Munich, in the dramatic White Rose resistance group. Over several months during 1942 to 1943, the group issued bold leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime and its immoral behavior (“For Hitler and his followers there can be no punishment on this earth which will expiate their crimes”), and calling for the German people to overthrow the regime and restore their good name. The leaflets also declared: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will give you no rest.” The students were eventually discovered and condemned by a Nazi “people’s court”; most were beheaded. Significantly, one of the group’s leading figures, Hans Scholl, had been inspired by a sermon of Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster, condemning the “euthanasia” program, and is said to have responded, “At last somebody has had the courage to speak out.”⁵⁹

59. Richard Hanser, A Noble Treason: Students Against Hitler (New York: Putnam, 1970), pp. 187, 22, 117, respectively.