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The Return of Totalitarianism Ideology, Terror, and Total Control Žarko Paić The Return of Totalitarianism Žarko Paić The Return of Totalitarianism Ideology, Terror, and Total Control Žarko Paić University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia ISBN 978-3-031-18941-8 ISBN 978-3-031-18942-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18942-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P reface The book attempted to talk of totalitarianism after the end of the nation- state has been lost in the global order of ideology—the total sovereignty of the state apparatus with control of the society. Instead of that modern condition, we are faced with the return of totalitarianism in the postmodern assemblage of new overlapping tendencies like right-wing populism, fascism and neo-fascism Islamic fundamentalism, and current Putin’s autocracy with brutality in the war against Ukraine. Ideology as mass-media propaganda, terror as a policy of the state of exception, and total control of the lives of citizens carried by the secret police determine totalitarianism not only as the phenomenon of modernity but as a threat of rebuilding rule in a new form in the era of post- imperial global capitalism. This book shows that totalitarianism cannot be only a political-ideological problem but rather a problem of the relation- ship between the technosphere, political power, and the narcissistic culture of the spectacle. I owe my thanks to close friends and researchers in social sciences and humanities who encouraged me to develop this assemblage of conceptual tools devoted to an insight into post-totalitarian policy which tries to occupy almost entire daily life in the contemporary world. Finally, I want to thank Amy Invernizzi, my executive editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her care and prompt decision to publish this book. Zagreb, Croatia Žarko Paić August 2022 v c ontents 1 Introduction 1 2 Totalitarianism Without Subject: The End of the Total State and the “Ideology” of the Corporatism 9 2.1 Introduction 9 2.2 What Should Be Done with Totalitarianism Today? Destroyed “Societies” and Their Relationships 13 2.3 Ideology Without Politics? The Permanent Terror 21 2.4 Corporation and State: Bio-cybernetic Power 30 2.5 Conclusion 32 References 37 3 The Mystery of the New Beginning: Hannah Arendt and the Political in Modern Times 39 3.1 The New Between Tradition and Utopia 39 3.2 History as Contingency 49 3.3 The Event and Openness of the World 59 References 65 4 Metapolitics and Evil: Heidegger’s “Spiritual Nazism” 67 4.1 Introduction: New Evidence and Facts 67 4.2 State, Leadership, and Geopolitics: Seminars 1933/1934 77 4.3 Anti-Semitism and Metaphysics: Black Notebooks 91 4.4 Concluding Reflections: Event and Politics 95 References 100 vii viii CoNTENTS 5 The Triumph of Political Religions: Identity Politics and the Twilight of Culture 105 5.1 Introduction 105 5.2 Voegelin’s Notion of History: From Gnosticism to Political Religions of Modernity 117 5.3 Political Islam as a New Totalitarianism? 127 5.4 Conclusion 139 References 141 6 Ideology, Terror, Control: Does Totalitarianism Have a Prospect for the Future? 145 6.1 Introduction: Propaganda Beyond Manipulation 145 6.2 Ideology as an “Industry of Consciousness”: Kracauer’s Contribution to the Criticism of Nazism 156 6.3 Terror, Terrorism, Camps: The State of Exception and Its Victims 170 6.4 The Age of Total Control: Secret Police and Technosphere 183 6.5 Conclusion 191 References 194 7 Power, Mass, and Brutality: Putin’s War Machine 197 7.1 The New Geopolitical Leviathan 197 7.2 Autocracy 200 7.3 Historical Revisionism 201 7.4 Totalitarian Rule 202 7.5 Imperialist Policy 204 7.6 Terror and Colonization 207 References 217 8 Conclusion 219 Reference 222 Index 223 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Totalitarianism—why do we signify that term as something uncanny? Is there something controversial in this word that emerges again in our time, almost leading in the philosophical discourse of the political and politics, but also in the everyday jargon that justifies political decisions in criticizing its content? The terms are now depleted of their historically established being. Their use in the language of philosophy, political science, and, ulti- mately, irreducible life becomes increasingly impossible with the task of reconciling the idea and reality. But in the concept of totalitarianism, something seems prevalent today. Nobody is going to be more proudly defending legitimacy and necessity, even transformed fascists, Nazis, and Stalinist communists. Anyone would guess, just like Hitler in the Weimar Republic, to fulfil all the norms and ideals of democracy, thinking only of the perversion of its idea in modern times. If the mass determines what truth and justice are, appears the sacrifice of freedom as such a “democracy” in the universal meaning of the right to self-determination, exis- tence, and life. What has been demagogically contained in the programmes of Hitler’s NSDAP and Stalin’s SKP(b) in the global world history had the normative, descriptive, and analytical value of the only ideal in the public domain of thought. This is, of course, democracy as a “national and work- er’s thing” for the sake of the new total state. Although totalitarianism in political movements—fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism in the twentieth century—do not confront directly democracy as such, but primarily © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1 Switzerland AG 2022 Ž. Paić, The Return of Totalitarianism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18942-5_1 2 Ž. PAIĆ liberalism as the ideology of freedom, the market, and individual rights, it should be common to say that totalitarianism and democracy stand in contradiction. But it might be not a problem in a comparative approach. It could be also used by the most valuable researchers of totalitarianism (historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers) to open the possibilities of insight into the complex reality of the evolution of evil order and warn of the odds of their rebuilding in the world we inhabited in. It is much harder to explain how it is possible for all these roles to put into practice three fundamental notions in modern history: ideology, terror, and total control. In this book, in eight chapters: 1) I seek to show how the concept of totalitarianism cannot be analyti- cally developed today as it is commonly done previously in social sciences and humanities. The reason is that totalitarianism has not completely disappeared from the historical scene in 1945 after the defeat of fascism and Nazism and in 1989 after the fall of commu- nism in the world. Its ability to rejuvenate, but not the actual situa- tion, is found in today’s right-wing populist movements, neo-fascism as an ideology, and an increase in xenophobia and hatred towards an immigrant population but also in Putin’s neo-imperial brutal war in Ukraine with aspiration for a new geopolitical Leviathan in the global and planetary divided world. 2) The concept and the notion of totalitarianism as a singular event in the twentieth century is opened by beginning with his philosophical and political analysis of contradictions and ways of transformation into the contemporary era of the end of the sovereignty of the nation-state. 3) The theory of history and contingency of the political and political action of Hannah Arendt has been peculiarly considered in her clas- sical theory of totalitarianism as a unique and singular political order in the entire history of the West. 4) I am considering Heidegger’s “spiritual Nazism” after the release of the Black Notebooks in which his latent expression leads to the anti- Semitism but also criticism of the metaphysical framework of modernity in which ideologies and politics (liberalism, Bolshevism, and Nazism) are the last proof of the end of the modern era and prepa- rations for the “second/other beginning” of history (andere Anfang). 1 INTRODUCTION 3 5) This chapter deals with the possibilities of applying the analytical paradigm of political religions in an attempt to understand Islamic fundamentalism as a threat to the global world order. 6) In this chapter, I intend to research the role of ideology as propaganda, terror, and concentration camps in the totalitarian notion of the end of history and on the way of articulation of total controls in the era of technosphere with a new function of the secret police. 7) War is neither a means nor a purpose for the enthronement of the absolute power of a nation-state such as Russia in the twenty-first century, but a contingent performance of politics through the power of a new ideology, terror, and total control of what is left of civil society. Instead of a modern nation-state with a policy of sovereignty and its postmodern re-articulation in the culture of Russians as an ethnic- nationalist collective identity, the logic of power, mass, and brutality of Putin’s war machine denotes the production of a geopolitical state of exception on a global level. The essential difference between Stalin and Putin, the totalitarian Leader of the USSR and the autocratic tyrant of contemporary Russia, stems from the fact that this postmodern terror is based on the spectacular-d emocratic logic of visualizing events with the help of artificial intelligence and new interactive media. 8) Without synthesis of ideology, terror, camp, and total control over what is left of the sovereignty of the state and the autonomy of society, totalitarianism has no conceptual credibility or justification in complex networks of reality, and precisely because its content is for- mally expanded, and the forms are realistically transformed into something indefinite as the corporate society/state of control, it is only possible to establish a constant new analogy with the past. Almost all determinations of totalitarianism point to the radical politici- zation of life in the reign of science and technology. However, what appears to be decisive certainly lies in the idea that human nature no longer determines any eternal archetype of good and divine mercy of redemption. With the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, we are entering the space of inhumane and its fundamental categories, such as computing, planning, and construction. Horrible crimes against all groups of people, social classes, and individuals have not been done without the mass support of the “people”. It seems that the time has come for the deconstruction of the under- standing of propaganda as manipulation starting from the analysis of ideology as terror, concentration and labor camps, and total state control