HCJ -Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a branch of phenomenology. Hannah Ardent disagreed strongly in totalitarianism and said "The Holocaust was normal". She disagreed with views taken from Nietzsche and from his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra saying there are no supermen, and that we are just doing our daily jobs as humans.

Like it seems with almost all European intellectuals of the 1920s, Hannah Ardent had been either a secret member of the Communist Party or a sympathiser (Leninism and the Popular Front). In the 1930s and the 1940s there was the time of Communist Heroics with the Battle of Stalingrad and Aaron Copeland. Trotsky was cited out and became a Martyr and a brilliant example of this situation in early Russia was George Orwell's book "Animal Farm" which symbolised the battle for power between Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky.

The 1950s saw the cold war and the anti-communism - "The God that Failed" as well as the idea of the creation of the berlin Wall in the late 50s. The 1960s gave birth to the Cold War and anti-communist aspects. It also saw the new left in America, owed more to Nietzsche's belief of individualism and individualistic personal liberation than socialism.

Back to Ardent and her belief that the Holocaust was normal in the links to totalitarianism. There were a believed three stages of the Holocaust. Stage 1 of the Holocaust was that slave people were sub-human and they were burnt in burning. Stage 2 was to deport the, and rid the nation of people not worthy of national or religious rights to exist in the country and Stage 3 was to line them up and shoot them all.

The main phenomena of totalitarianism is that you are told what to believe.

The Freudian metaphor is that the Holocaust is too horrific to deal with so either suppress the memory or displace it.

Naziism is normal - everyone is a nazi -everyone was complicit and therefore holocausts are normal.

The mid 20th century and the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and in 1956 was the year of Khruschev's secret speech - http://www.historyguide.org/europe/khrush_speech.html

There was the re-evaluation of marxism with the new Left which was formed and enhanced by Ralph Miliband and the institute for the Worker's Control.

Ardent had been a fan of the Trotsky era, of Leon Trotsky and of Trotskyism.

"collaboration is death" -Neo-kantianism of the moral law and the categorical imperative.

Phenomenology itself is the idea of "Why is there something and not nothing?"