Part 2 of 3
The ever-growing Big-Tech and government policing of language, opinions, and scientific information in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, accompanied by a level of censorship not seen since World War II, has greatly reduced and impoverished the public discourse and seriously undermined trust in science, politics and the community.
In 2020 and 2021, mostly well-meant yet often ill-advised government-imposed Corona measures such as lockdowns, mask-mandates, entry-requirements to public facilities and Corona vaccine mandates have further massively limited the unimpeded human interaction that any society needs to retain and strengthen its social fabric. All these externally imposed developments contribute from different directions to human beings, especially the young, increasingly and ever more lastingly being deprived of those ‘normal social relationships’ Hannah Arendt speaks of. Seemingly lacking alternatives, this in turn leads large groups of the population – most of them not even realizing it – into the arms of totalitarian ideologies. These movements, however, in the words of Arendt, “demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member (..) [since] their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race.”
The final goal of totalitarianism, she explains, is the permanent domination of human beings from within, thus involving each and every aspect of life, whereby the masses have to be kept constantly in motion since “a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist.” Without in any way wishing to downplay the gravity and urgency of these issues in and of themselves, or the need as a society to devise ways to deal with existential threats arising from them, Corona political and media narratives are examples of such an ideological totalitarianism that wants to completely control how human beings think, speak and act in that area of life, whist keeping them in perpetual anxiety through well-planned regular dramatic news updates (One tool being used for this successfully throughout the world is the constant well-rehearsed press conferences by grave-looking ministers in suits behind Plexiglas and flanked by experts and state flags), instrumentalized heartbreaking stories and calls to immediate action (“measures”), dealing with (perceived or real) new threats to their person, to their cause and to society as a whole. Fear is the main driving force behind keeping this perpetual anxiety and activism going.
The role of the elite
Hannah Arendt then goes on to explain what is a disturbing phenomenon of totalitarian movements, it being the enormous attraction it exerts on the elites, the “terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count amongst its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members. This elite believes that what is required for solving the acute problems society is currently faced with is the total destruction, or at least the total redesign, of all that was considered common sense, logic and established wisdom until this point.
When it comes to the Corona crisis, the well-known capacity of the human body to
build natural immunity against most viruses it has already encountered is no longer deemed relevant in any way by those imposing vaccination mandates, rejecting foundational principles of human biology and established medical wisdom.
To achieve this total overhaul for the sake of complete control, the elites are willing to work with any people or organization, including those people, called “the mob” by Arendt, whose features are “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” A good example of this is the West’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party. Although the flagrant corruption and human rights abuses – including the genocidal
campaign against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – perpetrated by this institution of repression throughout history until today are well-documented, as is its role in covering up the 2019 outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Wuhan perhaps resulting from a lab leak, most countries in the world have become so dependent on China that they are willing to look the other way and cooperate with a regime that is willing to trample on all that liberal democracy stands for.
Hannah Arendt describes another disturbing element that is part of what she calls the “temporary alliance between the mob and the elite” and that is the willingness of these elites to lie their way into obtaining and retaining power through “the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts.” At this point it is not a proven fact that governments and their allies are lying about statistics and scientific data surrounding Covid-19; however, it is clear that there exist many serious inconsistencies that are not or not sufficiently being dealt with.
Throughout the history of totalitarian movements and regimes the offenders have been able to get away with much because they understood very well what is the primary concern of the simple man or woman going about their daily business of making life work for their families and other dependents, as masterfully expressed by Arendt: “He [Göring] proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.” And: “[n]othing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.”
We all long for security and predictability and hence a crisis makes us look for ways to obtain or retain security and safety, and when necessary, most are willing to pay a high price for this, including relinquishing their freedoms and living with the notion that they might not be told the whole truth about the crisis at hand. It should be no surprise then that considering the potential lethal effect the Coronavirus can have on human beings, our very human fear of death has led most of us to part without much of a fight with the rights and freedoms that our fathers and grandfathers fought so hard for.
Also, as vaccine mandates are introduced around the globe for workers in many industries and settings, the majority is complying not because they themselves necessarily believe they need the Corona vaccine, but only because they want to reclaim their freedoms and keep their jobs so they can feed their families. The political elites imposing these mandates know this of course and make smart use of it, often even with the best of intentions believing that this is necessary to deal with the crisis at hand.
Totalitarian propaganda
The most important and ultimate tool used by totalitarian movements in the non-totalitarian society is to establish real control of the masses by winning them over through the use of propaganda: “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.”As Hannah Arendt explains, both fear and science are extensively used to oil the propaganda machine. Fear is always propagated as directed towards somebody or something external that poses a real or perceived threat to society or the individual. But there is another even more sinister element that totalitarian propaganda historically uses to cajole the masses into following its lead through fear and that is “the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints against all who will not heed its teachings (..)”, all the while claiming the strictly scientific and public benefit nature of its argument that those measures are needed. Both the deliberate instrumentalization of fear and the constant referral to “follow the science” by political actors and the mass media in the Corona crisis has been extremely successful as a propaganda tool.
Hannah Arendt freely admits that the use of science as an effective tool of politics in general has been widespread and not necessarily always in a bad sense. This is of course also the case where it concerns the Corona crisis. Even so, she continues, the obsession with science has increasingly characterized the Western world since the 16th century. She sees the totalitarian weaponization of science, quoting the German philosopher Eric Voegelin, as the final stage in a societal process where “science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.”
Science is employed to provide the arguments for the justification of societal fear and for the reasonableness of the far-reaching measures imposed to “confront” and “exterminate” the external danger. Arendt: “The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy (..)”
How many such prophecies have we not heard since the beginning of 2020 and that have not come to pass? It is not at all relevant, Arendt continues, whether these “prophecies” would be based on good science or bad science, since the leaders of the masses make it their primary focus to fit reality to their own interpretations and, where deemed necessary, lies, whereby their propaganda is “marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such.”
They do not believe in anything that is related to personal experience or what is visible, but only in what they imagine, what their own statistical models say, and the ideologically consistent system they have built around it. Organization and single-mindedness of purpose is what the totalitarian movement aims at for obtaining full control, whereby the content of the propaganda (whether fact or fiction, or both) becomes an untouchable element of the movement and where objective reason or let alone public discourse no longer play any role.
Until now, respectful public debate and a robust scientific discourse have not been possible when it comes to the best way to respond to the Corona pandemic. The elites are keenly aware of this and use it to the advantage of forwarding their agenda, that instead it is radical consistency that the masses long for in times of existential crisis, as it (initially) gives them a sense of security and predictability. Yet this is also where the great weakness of totalitarian propaganda lies, since ultimately “(..) it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”
Today we see this exacerbated, as I already mentioned above, through a fundamentally flawed understanding and use of science by the powers that be. Former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, a well-known epidemiologist and biostatistician specializing in infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety,
notes what is the correct application of science and how this is lacking in the current narrative: “Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth.”
We are now very far removed from this concept in a public climate where science has been politicized into a truth factory that tolerates no dissent, even if the alternative viewpoint merely outlines the numerous inconsistencies and falsehoods that are part of the political and media narrative. The moment however, Arendt points out, this system error becomes clear to the participants in the totalitarian movement and its defeat is imminent, they will at once cease to believe in its future, from one day to the other giving up on that for which they were willing to give all the day before.
A striking example of such an overnight abandonment of a totalitarian system is the way in which most apparatchiks in Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1991 turned from hardline career Communists into enthusiastic liberal democrats. They simply abandoned the system they were so faithfully part of for many years and found an alternative system that circumstances allowed them to now embrace. Therefore, as we know from the rubble heaps of history, every effort at totalitarianism has an expiry date. The current version will also fail.
II. Dehumanization at work
During my over 30 years of studying and teaching European history and the sources of law and justice, a pattern has emerged about which I already published in 2014 under the title “Human rights, history and anthropology: reorienting the debate.” In this article I described the process of “dehumanization in 5 steps” and how these human rights’ violations are not generally being perpetrated by ‘monsters,’ but for a large part by ordinary men and women – helped by the passive ideologized masses – who are convinced that what they are doing or participating in is good and necessary, or at least justifiable.
Since March 2020 we have been witnessing the global unfolding of a serious health crisis leading to unprecedented government, media and societal pressure being exerted on whole populations to acquiesce in far-reaching and mostly unconstitutional measures limiting people’s freedoms and in many cases through threats and undue pressure violating their bodily integrity. During this time, it has become increasingly clear that there are certain tendencies to be seen today that show some similarities to the sort of dehumanizing measures employed as a rule by totalitarian movements and regimes.
Endless lockdowns, police-enforced quarantines, travel restrictions, vaccine mandates, the suppression of scientific data and debate, large-scale censorship, and the relentless deplatforming and public shaming of critical voices are all examples of dehumanizing measures that should have no place in a system of democracy and the rule of law. We also see the process of increasingly relegating a certain part of the population to the peripheries whilst singling them out as irresponsible and undesired because of the “risk” they pose to others, leading to society gradually excluding them. The President of the United States expressed pointedly what this means in a major live-televised policy speech:
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing. But just don’t take it from me; listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds, taking their final breaths, saying, “If only I had gotten vaccinated.” “If only.”” – President Joe Biden
September 9, 2021
The five steps
Those peddling political rhetoric today that sets up the “vaccinated” against the “unvaccinated, or vice versa, are going down a very dangerous road of demagoguery that has never ended well in history. Slavenka Drakulic, in her analysis of what led to the 1991-1999 Yugoslav ethnic conflict, observes:” (..) in time those ‘Others’ are stripped of all their individual characteristics.
They are no longer acquaintances or professionals with particular names, habits, appearances and characters; instead they are members of the enemy group. When a person is reduced to an abstraction in such a way, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.”
Looking at the history of totalitarian movements eventually leading to totalitarian regimes and their campaigns of state-controlled persecution and segregation, this is what happens.
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