Hannah Arendt: Total Domination

Hannah Arendt was born in Germany and earned her education there as well. During the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, she moved to Paris and then New York. It was there that she met her husband who happened to be a professor of philosophy. Arendt started working on her book, “The Origins to Totalitarianism”, in 1945. By 1951, her book was published. She wrote the book after the defeat of the Nazi movement in Germany and during the growing tension of the Cold War.

In this book, Hannah Arendt goes over the principles of the politics of communist and autocrat governments. She believes that these types of governments use tools such as implantation, or brainwashing, to get the people to believe a certain sets of ideas. These governments would get the people to believe that one race was better than the others by using those brainwashing methods. This is how Arendt thought these totalitarian governments got all of their power, and once they had that power, anything done wrong against a certain race of people would be accepted, and in some cases advocated. Such was the case in Nazi Germany in its prosecution against the Jews.

I believe that the thought of one race being superior to another is extremely backwards and crazy, no matter what race we are talking about. Everybody is different in one way or another, and to persecute somebody because they do not look the same as you do or have the same culture as you do is absurd and ignorant.