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-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Also worth looking at the concept of inverted totalitarianism, by Sheldon Wolin.

Sweeping atrocities under the rug is also very common, then trying to project one's own failure to speak out against them as some kind of moral failing of those who do.

> Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. In the West, these specialists are called "intellectuals" and, with marginal exceptions, they fulfill their task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, in this practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history.

-- Noam Chomsky

Just the fact that this discussion was barely penalized, is bursting with accusations of "hysteria" (that also has tradition) and "racism" and "flamebait", while these for example were very harshly penalized, speaks volumes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318279

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315905

I think grotesque is a good word for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsoImQfVsO4&t=33m27s

> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

This is exactly the tactic, and the pattern in hundreds of HN discussions: make accusations one doesn't need to prove, and the accused cannot disprove. "You just say this because you hate X", or "you don't say this because you think it's true, and despite it possibly offending someone, no... this is flamebait, my inability to address your argument on its merits is actually your intention". But of course it's verboten to be offended by any of that.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

But it can't happen here, regardless of where "here" is. And when it does happen, it can't be discussed or resisted, especially when "here" became everywhere.

> We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again.

and

> What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away.

> Is that what we're gonna tell them?

> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.

-- both by Eben Moglen in "Freedom of thought requires free media"

It's long, but is extremely nuanced and shows that the issue is far more complex than just "the solution to offensive speech is more speech".

One key takeaway is in the middle:

> [Free speech is] a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive. There’s a countertradition, however. It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation. A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members. Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”

> In other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing,” the philosopher Jason Stanley and the linguist David Beaver argue in their forthcoming book, “The Politics of Language.”

But most of all the article shows that the history of free speech in the US is not simple at all -- and that our current view of it is very different from the period of 1949-1987 when broadcasters were subject to the "fairness doctrine", which I think most people today aren't even aware of.

The final chapter of her book, "Origins of Totalitarianism," was added in later editions, and it is called "Ideology and Terror." Beyond criticism and explanation, I think it is a rare model with predictive power. The challenge with that book is that unless you are specifically interested in the history of antisemitism, the first 1/3 of the book is about it, and her general theory of totalitarian movements will get lost. I recommend reading the chapters of big theory books in reverse order, as the last thing the author wrote tends to be the thing they have thought the most about and is the most refined idea. (chapter is at: http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...)

Regarding her views about violence, I suspect there may only be two true levers of political power, and these are force, and deception. Where one seems absent, the other is necessarily at work, and where one is renounced the other is tacitly advocated. When they start to form a synergistic feedback loop, you get totalitarian movements.

Glad to see Arendt here, hers is an important perspective.

I have presented at more than one Blackhat conference and since then I have seen the hacker scene reduced to nothing but a farm team for surveillance companies, domestic spy agencies, and totalitarian movements in academia because they think merely being against-bad is sufficient to be good. Hacking was always about individual competence as a check on technological dominion and absolute political power. Today, it's something you do to get noticed by people who rent you out for dog and pony shows to sell surveillance technologies. Security is no longer about protecting innovation and enabling a perimeter for safe creativity and exploration, it is about inserting a governance layer over the competent and other technologists, to ensure their subordination to a layer of interchangeable compromised sycophants.

The movement to change these things has nothing to do with the content of "blackhat/whitehat." It is only about whether the people militating for the change have the power to cow others into submission. It is a test of whether the we will submit to the histrionic bullying by people in this movement. This is the same mechanism as the myth of Kim Jong Il hitting 11 consecutive holes in one, which was patently ridiculous, but designed to identify people who still have enough individual identity to recognize and resist the dominating absurdity of the movement behind it, who can't help but out themselves, so that they may be targeted by the movement for liquidation. What's worse, is people like this researcher aren't insane, they are calculated and cynical. This entire playbook is described by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Ideology and Terror," which was appended to her book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism."

If this makes me the first to stop clapping, so be it. The stakes are high enough that bearing the risk of being honest is a greater service to others than anything else I will likely achieve.

Good riddance.

It really is a big question, but this bit by Hannah Arendt in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (a book I highly recommend, it's as timely as ever sadly) really struck me.. it's on page 667 in the German version, this is my crappy translation:

> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central are the purely animal like reactions, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.

So I would say at least part of the answer might be: taking away the ability to act instead of just react, and the the ability to start a logical chain of thinking from new premises (which is also something she mentions, though of course in contrast with totalitarianism, which forces a certain flow of logic based on some premises set in stone; she's not writing about what it means to be human).

The closest to this that the review comes is

> One sentiment repeated with variations throughout the book is “The timing was good” (for the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, when Stalin seemed to have taken the place of Hitler).

In context I think the idea is that some people like Arendt may have engaged in sincere journalism and philosophy, which the culture and/or the CIA may then have deployed as part of the Cold War, not that Arendt (at least) was thinking "what could I write that would make me famous and influential right now?".

To modernize this a bit, Ta-nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were both developing and expressing their ideas for a long time (decades, I think) in relative obscurity. Then they suddenly became best-sellers in the 2010s, I imagine to a great extent because of cultural and political developments outside of themselves and their work. Both are presumably profiting quite a bit from their success, but I doubt either primarily thought tactically or consciously opportunistically about that.

Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism":

> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being "good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi scheme for terror.

Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins of Totalitarianism," (http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...)

Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was, you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of magnitude less data.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism

I'm not completely well-versed in Heidegger, but is it possible that he did not hold his Nazi beliefs so close to his heart that true love (corny, I know) could not usurp those feelings? I would not suggest that a man such as Heidegger would not be forthcoming in his beliefs, but I do think it's possible that him (and others throughout history) adopted political beliefs partially out of convenience. Sometimes, it's difficult to tell the lengths to which someone holds their convictions.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

That's not permitted though. This is the framework that is permitted, and within which we can discuss the difference between "be yourself" and "just do what you want" in articles of appropriate word count as suggested by the editor:

> [Hobbes] foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

We have this "open world sandbox", moot and harmless, utterly devoid of deep meaning, because it's all printed on stickers without any lasting adhesive, that can and will be removed without any trace or consequence. We may not have noticed this, but our brain did.

Most "thought" expressed in the 21st century stems from rationalizing around that elephant on the couch, that's what I think. When I come across a turtle on its back in a desert, I don't know quite know what to do, I never seem to be able to help and it's really stressing me out, but I know what I will NEVER do, I will never say "oh, I guess that's just what the turtle does, that's just how it walks, it's not dying, that's how it lives".

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

A war of aggression going hand in hand with "Total Information Awareness" (anyone remember that?), going along with that is crazy and suicidal.

I guess people at Jonestown also talked a lot about the crazy things going on in the world, just not about the crazy they were part of.

So, that's how that works. Just like the instant downvoting without reply works. It's like asking "what is cancer?" and when the reply is "it can come in various forms, for example that lump you have there, that's also cancer", then suddenly we don't really want to know what cancer is anymore, and are no longer accountable for basically shutting people up. As long as the status quo agrees, no justifications are required.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Timely as ever.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

When people get into re-education camps and are never heard from again.. well, Hannah Arendt again:

> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

And ALL that is required on behalf of the population is to look the other way, to just deny the people who get disappeared is to have blood on one's hands. The excuses people made in the last century are on record, and the excuses we hear today are no better.

It's one thing to feel helpless or be scared, it's one thing to want to, but to not know how -- but to simply look away, and to pat oneself on the back for it! There are a bunch of circles in hell, then there's few hundred circles for nobody, which Dante mistakenly thought to lead nowhere, and then there's a final circle for that.

This is people talking to me about grammar who don't even know what a letter is. Read "Origins of Totalitarianism". Read Sebastian Haffner. Everybody is so interested in the subject, so knowledgeable about it, and so against Nazis.

The proof is in the pudding. You cannot disprove my with your straw men and having no clue about the nature of Nazism and related diseases, you can strike yourself from my phone book is all.

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

> The adoption of European astronomy, facilitated by the failure of indigenous astronomy to make progress, was accompanied by a sinocentric reinterpretation that declared the imported ideas Chinese in origin:

> > European astronomy was so much judged worth consideration that numerous Chinese authors developed the idea that the Chinese of antiquity had anticipated most of the novelties presented by the missionaries as European discoveries, for example, the rotundity of the Earth and the "heavenly spherical star carrier model." Making skillful use of philology, these authors cleverly reinterpreted the greatest technical and literary works of Chinese antiquity. From this sprang a new science wholly dedicated to the demonstration of the Chinese origin of astronomy and more generally of all European science and technology.

https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-...

https://www.philstar.com/world/2019/09/10/1950642/chinese-sc...

> A group of Chinese scholars claim that all European languages, including English, are actually Mandarin dialects.

> Speaking at the first China International Frontier Education Summit in Beijing, the World Civilization Research Association also argued that Europe had no history before the 15th century

from "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt:

> Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.

I can't say much about world history, but I've been reading some books to get a better understanding of American politics:

- "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires": Interesting analysis on the rise and fall of conquering civilizations. Tons of parallels between dead empires and the US empire.

- "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Nations are built on cities, and America's cities are very poorly built. What are we doing wrong, what could we do better?

- "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War": Very dense, lots of data. Suggests that our current political turmoil is due to our economy and society expecting unrealistic growth, and a disconnect between reality and the expectation of citizens.

- The Origins of Totalitarianism: "Slippery slope" gets thrown around a lot w.r.t. suspicious legislation. This book provides context on past societies that slipped, and where we stand on that slope.

- "Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization": Optimistic look at the future of globalism.

- "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed": An analysis of the cascade failure that took out almost all the great bronze-age civilizations around the Mediterranean region in 1177BC.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - I haven't read this, but this is the #1 book that pops up in conversations.