With the rise of totalitarianism governments had experienced an increase of control the likes in which they have never seen before. During the 1920s and 1930s, governments in Eastern Europe transitioned from liberalistic governments into totalitarian dictatorships. The events of World War II brought to light the kinds of atrocities that a totalitarian government was capable of doing to its people. With the knowledge of the Holocaust, many people decided to investigate how such an event was able to occur. Research of why the Holocaust happened is still being conducted today, even though research for this subject has been going on since the 1950s. Over time, one can see how new information has changed the interpretation of how totalitarian
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The concept of obedience is an important aspect in a totalitarian regime. Without obedience a government will not be able to exercise total control of its people. In this regard, people do agree that totalitarian governments did strive for complete obedience from its people; the only disagreement is on how much real control they actually had on its society. For early examiners, like Arendt, they thought that regimes such as Nazi Germany exercise complete obedience of its people. She thought that the favored German population gladly contributed to the horrendous acts that their government inflicted on the less desirable. Her reasoning for this phenomenon is that “This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known: that men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale” (120). However, as …show more content…
When analyzing the rhetoric of the Nazis party we find it filled with racism and anti-Semitism. In this regard, both Arendt and McKay are in agreement. McKay points out that Germany’s totalitarian government fashion their foreign and domestic policy around racism; they called it the New Order. He states how
Within this New Order, the Nordic peoples-the Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes-received preferential treatment, for they were racially related to the master race, the Germans. The French, and ‘inferior’ Latin people, occupied a middle position… He painted for his intimate circle the fantastic vision of a cast eastern colonial empire where Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be enslaved and forced to die out… (977).
Arendt agrees with this notion when she
The concept of obedience is an important aspect in a totalitarian regime. Without obedience a government will not be able to exercise total control of its people. In this regard, people do agree that totalitarian governments did strive for complete obedience from its people; the only disagreement is on how much real control they actually had on its society. For early examiners, like Arendt, they thought that regimes such as Nazi Germany exercise complete obedience of its people. She thought that the favored German population gladly contributed to the horrendous acts that their government inflicted on the less desirable. Her reasoning for this phenomenon is that “This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known: that men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale” (120). However, as …show more content…
When analyzing the rhetoric of the Nazis party we find it filled with racism and anti-Semitism. In this regard, both Arendt and McKay are in agreement. McKay points out that Germany’s totalitarian government fashion their foreign and domestic policy around racism; they called it the New Order. He states how
Within this New Order, the Nordic peoples-the Dutch, Norwegians, and Danes-received preferential treatment, for they were racially related to the master race, the Germans. The French, and ‘inferior’ Latin people, occupied a middle position… He painted for his intimate circle the fantastic vision of a cast eastern colonial empire where Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians would be enslaved and forced to die out… (977).
Arendt agrees with this notion when she