Authoritarianism, Isolation, and Community
It’s been a busy week and I’ve been remiss in attending to these installments. Protest in support of Ukraine continues to flourish, which has kept me on the streets and behind the camera. This is an opening thought in longer series about the importance of building resistance communities in the face of authoritarian political and corporate structures, in light of the imminence and actualities of war.
I’m just learning that I need to resize photos a certain way for Substack, so please bear with me.
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The Atlantic ran a short essay by Anne Applebaum, adapted from her thoughts on Hannah Arendt in a new edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. This is as good a place as any to begin.
I would add two issues to her argument. First, while it is true to modern autocracies don't necessarily hew to a Marxist-Leninist view of world domination, they do engage in a kind of modified, technocratic colonialism that empowers local authoritarianism. Just look at Xi's Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, Putin and Xi both endorse and pursue the promotion of nationalist authoritarianism in other countries, including in the United States. The point is to build societies around structures of surveillance and control, the particularities of ideology being secondary (as opposed to primary, in the Marxist-Leninist view of things.) to authority itself. Second, multinational corporations and even individuals — the ultra-rich — are often practically states unto themselves, and carry on media practices (take Fox News, for a glaring example, but also the social media ecosystem) that further authoritarian practices precisely because, in the context of such a society, we see a profitable feedback loop grow out of market domination. How to counter this? It begins, in my view, in dissident, creative, and other communities that challenge structural isolation, and do so on a huge, fairly diverse, and often messy scale, which can add up to democracy in action. This has been happening, in fact, and I still view the first wave of women's marches as the stepping off of people being more broadly committed to taking pro-democracy action to the streets. Critics and would-be scholars of activism who bemoaned its shortcomings miss the point, which is that it is the inculturation of dissident mentalities in contemporary society that matter, and that this process takes time. We are seeing the fruits of it in environmental movements, in racial and economic justice movements, and also in popular opposition to Putin's war on Ukraine.Democratic societies are a very new thing, in historical terms. The Russian Revolution, which exploded out of the context of WWI in 1917, dragged on until Lenin’s consolidation of what became the Soviet state in 1923. The dissolution of the USSR came on December 25, 1991, a scant 31 years ago. Putin’s authoritarian state in a hybrid of historically powerful despotic influences and modern kleptocratic capitalism — topics for another discussion, to put it mildly. It is heartening to see popular resistance as well as the extraordinarily of world governments to his war on Ukraine.
"Most modern autocracies do not have a “foreign policy openly directed toward world domination,” or at least not yet. Propaganda has also changed. The modern Russian leadership feels no need to constantly promote its own achievements around the world, for example; it is often satisfied with belittling and undermining the achievements of others.
And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda—just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other … Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”(1)
(https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/03/arendt-origins-of-totalitarianism-ukraine/627081/ )