The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses
not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; not
citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs,
like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries.
p.308
Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for
one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization.
Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they
lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined,
limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal
with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a
combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on
common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional
organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country
and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically
indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and
of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited
their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all
other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention.
The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of
people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted
the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda,
and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements
not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as
a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never
been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute
opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in
death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.
They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural,
social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and
therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming
only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties;
it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be
equally hostile to all parties.
The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end
of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of European
nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that
the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that
each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party.
On the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and
indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled
country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules
which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic
illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically
indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and constituted
no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life
of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public
opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government
had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent
and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions
and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian
movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary government,
they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in
convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious
and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby
undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which
also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.
It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and
abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devilish
cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part
of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all
citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function
organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups
or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class system,
the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states,
certainly was "one of the most dramatic events in recent German history"
and as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratification
in Russia's immense rural population (this "great flaccid body destitute
of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling
action") was to the Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky
government. Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers
implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with
the end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown
of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while
events in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolutionary
changes in Asia may take. Practically speaking, it will make little
difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or
Bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend
to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics.
p.311-2
