What is ideology terrorism?

Hannah Arendt, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Hannah Arendt answers

The phrase combines two things I spent decades trying to hold apart analytically, precisely because their combination names something genuinely new in the history of government. Ideology, taken alone, is not yet dangerous in the totalitarian sense. Racism is merely an irresponsible opinion so long as it restricts itself to praising one group and hating another; it becomes an ideology only when it pretends to explain the whole course of history as secretly maneuvered by the despised group.1

The same move transforms socialism from a program of social reform into an ideology when it claims that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win, that a classless society must follow, and that the state will wither away.2 What all ideologies share, at the moment they become ideologies properly speaking, is this: they are systems of explanation that claim to account for everything, past and future, without any further concurrence with actual experience.3

Terror, taken alone, is as old as tyranny. What is new is the combination, and the combination produces something neither element could produce on its own. Terror in the totalitarian form is not a means of intimidating opponents; it is the realization of a law of movement — the law of Nature (race struggle) or the law of History (class war) — racing freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.4

Guilt and innocence become senseless categories before this terror, because the murdered did nothing against the system and the murderers do not really murder but execute a sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.5 What binds the two together is the arrogant emancipation from reality that ideology requires. Because ideological thinking is independent of existing reality, it treats all factuality as fabricated — if the facts do not fit the ideological claim, the facts must be changed.6

Terror is then needed precisely to enforce this consistency: to make the world conform to the ideological premise, and to dominate human beings to the point where they lose, with their spontaneity, the specifically human unpredictability of thought and action.7 The self-coercive force of logical deduction inside the ideology and the compulsion of total terror outside it correspond to each other and need each other.8

Together they destroy two things simultaneously: contact with other human beings, and contact with reality itself. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or convinced Communist, but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.9 Neither Stalin nor Hitler added a single new thought to racism or socialism respectively.10

What they discovered was how to translate a general explanatory outlook into a singular principle ruling over all activities — how to make the ideology deadly serious by harnessing terror to it as its executive arm. The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into a process of nature or history and can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law; the ideology prepares each individual equally well for either role.11

That two-sided preparation — the readiness to kill or to be killed on the same ideological grounds — is what distinguishes totalitarian ideology-terror from ordinary political violence and from ordinary political propaganda. It is not a tool for achieving a goal that lies beyond it; it is the movement itself, and the movement has no end that is the welfare of any actual human being.12

Sources

  1. racism or anti-Semitism is not an ideology, but merely an irresponsible opinion, as long as it restricts itself to praising Aryans and hating Jews; it becomes an ideology only when it pretends to explain the whole course of history as being secretly maneuvered by the Jews
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 416–417
  2. Socialism—or communism—becomes an ideology only when it pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away.
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 417–418
  3. ideologies are systems of explanation of life and world that claim to explain everything, past and future, without further concurrence with actual experience.
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 416–417
  4. Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 505–506
  5. Guilt and innocence become senseless notions; 'guilty' is he who stands in the way of the natural or historical process... the murdered because they did nothing against the system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 505–506
  6. Insofar as ideological thinking is independent of existing reality, it looks upon all factuality as fabricated, and therefore no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 417–418
  7. Terror is needed in order to make the world consistent and keep it that way; to dominate human beings to the point where they lose, with their spontaneity, the specifically human unpredictability of thought and action.
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 417–418
  8. The compulsion of total terror on one side... and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other... correspond to each other and need each other in order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving.
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 516–517
  9. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 516–517
  10. Neither Stalin nor Hitler added a single new thought, respectively, to socialism or racism; yet only in their hands did these ideologies become deadly serious.
    On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding, pp. 417–418
  11. The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into and caught in the process of nature or history for the sake of accelerating its movement; as such, they can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law.
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 510
  12. Terror as the execution of a law of movement whose ultimate goal is not the welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of mankind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the 'parts' for the sake of the 'whole.'
    The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 505–506