Lessons from Hannah Arendt
Her prescient words from decades ago serve as the template for What Is Now Occurring in the Tyranny of the United States and the Genocide in Gaza.
To celebrate summer 2025, I am offering a paid support special. Until Labor Day, all paid support is 50% off forever. You can sign up for paid support or upgrade your current free subscription below. All paid support goes toward my teenage daughter’s future higher education.
Her book had intimidated me for years. After TACO's 2016 election, I knew I could no longer afford to let myself remain intimidated.
Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is not a beach read. Instead it is a vital and necessary one that every U.S. citizen and students of world history should now consume.
The German philosopher and political historian Arendt was a Holocaust survivor who witnessed and experienced firsthand anti-Semitism and Nazism. She saw her early teacher the philosopher Martin Heidegger fall under Hitler’s Nazi spell.
Before arriving to the United States, and becoming a U.S. citizen in 1951, she was a refugee and stateless. This was not mere theory. It was the greatest learning methodology—experience.
In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt's words serve as an especially prescient template today. The Arendt documentary Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt shared the following from Origins of Totalitarianism:
The quiet sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The explosion of the first World War touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. Its civil wars were not only bloodier and crueler than all their predecessors, they were followed by migrations of groups who were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.
Once they had left their homeland, they remained homeless. Once they had left their state, they became stateless. And once they had been deprived of their human rights, they were rightless. They became the scum of the earth, superfluous.
So the insane mass manufacture of corpses in Nazi time was preceded by the historical preparation of living corpses of refugees.
. . . .
Denationalization and xenophobia became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics. Those who were defined by their persecutors as scum of the earth—Jews, Trotskyists and the like—were treated as such wherever they went. Those unwanted by oppressive governments became the unwanted of Europe. In time, the official SS newspaper explicitly stated that if the world is not yet convinced that the Jews are the scum of the earth, it will soon be convinced when these beggars without citizenship, without money and passports, cross over their borders.
Before they seize power and establish their world according to their doctrine, totalitarian movements conjure up a false ideological and consistent world, which is more in needs of the human mind than reality itself.
What the masses refuse to recognize is the random nature of reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere laws and eliminate coincidences and spontaneity by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence, which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda and ideology thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency. Logic is its core.
. . . .
The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and deceptive concept of reality—idealism, that is, unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world rather than just a lust for power.
Years after she advocated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and the self-determination of Europe's Jewish community after World War I and World War II, Arendt found herself with new critical thoughts about Zionism. Once the state of Israel was established and recognized by the U.N. she applied her philosophical heuristic to analyze and criticize the Israeli government’s policies and actions. She had wanted a pluralistic country strengthened with Jewish and Palestinian cooperation and respect. Instead she saw tribalism.
Instead she saw nationalism and the marginalization of the Palestinians: the same behaviors she had scrutinized and excoriated in Nazi Germany. Until her death in 1975, Arendt remained a critical thinker, and it was that critical thinking that led to her controversial thesis of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem and the blowback that followed from her own Jewish and academic communities.
What became lost in that loud backlash was what Arendt her claim that lays within the root of what she termed the “banality of evil”: the inability to or cessation of critical thinking.
The U.S. has become a fascist and MAGA-Nazi totalitarian state because 77 million Trump voters and 86 million non-voters did not have the ability to think or suspended their ability to think. The United States in 2025 is here because of thoughtlessness.
Now we live in a nation where migrants and Latine U.S. citizens are being openly kidnapped, denied due process and whisked to concentration camps in the United States and in foreign countries. These camps ignore their universal and Constitutional human rights and human dignity. Already several people imprisoned in those camps have died.
We now live in a nation where women and people who can become pregnant have lost their Constitutional right to abortion health care. A federal abortion care ban loom. That would make it illegal in states where abortion care remains legal.
We now live in a state where the Congressional “murder bill,” as
calls it, may become federal law. The “murder bill” is founded on white supremacy, eugenics, capitalism and patriarchy.And we now live in a world where genocide in Gaza openly occurs with little international intervention to stop it. With the exception of Ireland, itself a nation once colonized that experienced genocide, no Western country has recognized the Gaza genocide, worked to cease enabling it and made any effort to end it.
My first graduate women's and gender studies professor told my Feminist Theories class said the world finally made sense when she discovered the work of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Arendt also makes our current and past social and political realities make sense.
I hope you nourish your ability to think and read The Origins of Totalitarianism and watch Vita Activa. I also hope you share this post. The only way put of the United States’ authoritarian nightmare and the Gaza Genocide is through it. Our ability to think will strengthen us and work in ending both.