Totalitarianism

Review: The Lawless Roads

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Cover image of "The Lawless Roads" by Graham Greene

The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504054263) 2018 (first published in 1939).

Summary: Greene’s journey through Mexico to the states of Chiapas and Tabasco where Catholicism was most severely repressed.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists. However, I would not pick him as a travel writer. I have to admit to not looking closely when I purchased The Lawless Roads, only discovering after beginning to read the book, that it was a non-fiction account of Greene’s journey from north to south in Mexico during 1938. His publisher asked him to investigate the anti-Catholic purges in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco.

These began in the 1920’s under Plutarco Elías Calles, President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928 and de facto leader of the country from 1929-1934. Being a Catholic, the publisher thought Greene would have a special connection to the people. As a travel account, it is a dreary read, reflecting the dysfunctional and dangerous character of Mexico in this period. However, the account served as backgroud of perhaps his most acclaimed novel, The Power and the Glory.

He begins at Laredo, then crosses over into northern Mexico, where he succeeds in interviewing General Cedillo, leader of a rebel state. As it turns out, Cedillo is aging and President Cardenas will soon replace him. He then makes his way to Mexico City, describing the life of the city, attending Mass, and meeting the exiled Bishop of Chiapas, “considered “one of the most dangerous and astute of the Mexican bishops.” That visit hardened his determination to reach Las Casas. Then, he travels to Veracruz, on the coast.

From here the journey grows more perilous. He books passage on the Ruiz Cano, little more than a barge, in unbearable heat, with constant rolling motion, and cramped quarters with no sex divisions. Then, he takes another barge from Frontera to Villahermosa, capitol of Tabasco, meets up with a Scottish adventurer, and spends a Sunday with no Mass, comforting himself in a godless state by reading Trollope. Then on to Salto in a small plane, from which he hoped to get a flight to Las Casas. Instead, he settles for a mule trip to Yajalon, with a sketchy guide, from which he hopes to catch a plane. Before departing, he learns of covert mass baptisms by itinerant priests in Yajalon

Finally, when no plane turns up, he embarks on another mule trip across the mountains to Las Casas, braving Arctic chills, changes in elevation, and passing cemeteries of slain Catholics, before finally reaching his destination in time for Holy Week. Masses occur in private homes, hidden services on Good Friday, a visit to the site of miraculous healings on Easter. All the while evidence of the suppression of faith is all about.

By this time, Greene himself is deathly sick with dysentery and we wonder if he will make it back. He does and in an epilogue recounts the journey home. Mass in Chelsea is “curiously fictitious.” He writes:

“[N]o peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees. It would have seemed shocking, like the Agony itself. We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.”

Greene’s narrative has little plot, only a destination. Apart from the gritty faith of the people, led by courageous priests, there is little to inspire. Crass tourism, corrupt government, risky transport, and endless heat and mosquitoes are recurring themes. Perhaps the most suspenseful part of the account is our uncertainty that Greene will survive. At best, it is an unvarnished account of the aftermath of totalitarian rule.

So this is a tough read. It offers good background for The Power and the Glory. It describes the venality that descends on a nation under totalitarian rule. And it recounts the instances of courage of faith-led resistance. If you are a Greene fan and these reasons are important to you, it is a worthwhile read. Otherwise, you may just find it a slog.

Review: The Road to Serfdom

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The Road to Serfdom (Fiftieth Anniversary edition), F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 (originally published in 1944, link is to the 2007 Definitive Edition).

Summary: An argument that collectivist, planned economies lead to the erosion of individual liberties, the rule of law, and result in the rise of totalitarian governments.

It is probably not insignificant that F. A. Hayek, an economist who grew up and was educated in Austria, emigrated to England in 1938 and wrote this work during World War Two. He later moved to the United States. This book, less a work on economics than political philosophy, is an argument for the classic (not contemporary) liberal ideal that emphasized the rights and initiative of the individual, a limited role for government, a relatively unrestrained marketplace, and the rule of law. His basic argument is that the shift he was seeing from this liberal ideal to socialist, planned economies in England reflected the same course that he witnessed in the rise of National Socialism in Nazi Germany and Communism in the Stalinist Russia.

He argues that planned economies can never plan for all the variables of the marketplace, that those who buy and sell goods and services can more nimbly respond to. Planning undercuts the initiative of the individual and leads to increasingly authoritarian forms of government, required to enforce the efforts needed toward economic plans. Instead of seeking equality in liberty, the collectivist system achieves equality through restraint and servitude. These increasing coercive efforts result in the arbitrary use of authority rather than the rule of law. Paradoxically, even the poor are less free under such a system.

The question is who ultimately occupies the role of planners. Hayek offers a telling critique of the idea of the “common good,” which often remains undefined. And often, this happens to be the worst among us, those who are not constrained by moral restraints or concerns about truth. Perhaps the most chilling chapter in this work is the one titled, “The End of Truth,” reminding one of the “Post-truth era” in which we live. Authoritarian rulers develop their own myths to justify their rise to power and rule. Instead, all the channels used to spread knowledge are pressed into service to “strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority” (p. 175).

Hayek does allow a role for government in a capitalist economy, not in restricting trade but in regulating methods of legal production, sanitary and safe practices, the protection of environmental resources, and preventing fraud. He also allows a basic level of economic and health security as a concern of government.

It strikes me that Hayek’s fears of planned economies have not been realized in the socialist countries of Europe. My own sense is that what has occurred instead is an enlarged role of government to protect us from recessions, economic cycles, the consequences of shifts in the marketplace, and even personal misfortunes. This diminishment of the individual and dependency does leave us vulnerable to Hayek’s feared authoritarianism and the eclipse of the rule of law.

What troubles me in Hayek’s liberal ideal of individual liberty is that such systems are often blind to the inequities baked into the system, protecting individual liberty for only some who are citizens. Furthermore, these systemic inequities leave capitalist economies vulnerable to being supplanted by more planned economies that offer a vision of equality for the disadvantaged.

Nevertheless, Hayek’s critique of “planning,” of the rise of coercion, of the justification of means to achieve ends, the rise of authority and the suspension of rule of law, and the jettisoning of truth are all important to consider in our day. Hayek’s concern in looking at Nazi Germany was the recognition that it could happen in socialist England. While I suspect that there are more variant roads to totalitarian, Hayek’s recognition of the important elements of liberal democracy are worth attending to, as is the recognition that should we neglect these elements, it can happen here as well.

Review: Live Not By Lies

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Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher. New York: Sentinal, 2020.

Summary: Drawing on interviews with Christians in the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Dreher warns of a rise of a similar, though “soft” totalitarianism in the U.S., and outlines what Christians must do to live in the truth.

In The Benedict Option (review), Rod Dreher outlines how he believes Christians, having lost the culture war, must live. Live Not By Lies offers an even grimmer future, the rise of a “soft” progressive totalitarianism functioning by rhetorical and social control, utilizing the capacities already in existence for digital surveillance.

He draws on interactions with survivors of Communism in the Czech Republic and the former Soviet Union. His title comes from a statement by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in what would be his final message to the Soviet Union. Dreher writes:

What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm–or at least not to oppose–to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.

Dreher and his eastern bloc interlocutors recognize the same troubling trends around the suppression of truth, the attractions of progressiveness to the discontented, the loss of faith in institutions, and a combination of destructiveness and transgressiveness. He points to the safety and cancel cultures of universities that foreclose open discussion of ideas.

The second part of his work addresses how Christians ought prepare for the rise of progressive totalitarianism. He argues for the importance of cultural memory, particularly the memory of totalitarian regimes. He believes that the family and networks of small groups are critical to resistance. He believes that the church is the critical bedrock of resistance, although it is also important to stand in solidarity with others who resist. It was heartening to not see him reprise the strategic withdrawal into monastic-type communities of The Benedict Option but rather listen and draw upon the testimony of those who resisted in the urban centers of Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union

Perhaps his greatest challenge to Christians is to accept the possibility of suffering as testimony to the truth–not sought, but not avoided. Talking with those who suffered, he stresses both the challenge to suffer without bitterness, and the gift of suffering.

I think the two most important lessons of this book are that “it can happen here” and that Christians are woefully unprepared as yet. What troubled me in reading this was that Dreher’s apprehension of threats from the far left seems to have blinded him to threats from the far right. In warning exclusively of a progressive, Communist-leaning totalitarianism, I found him more or less silent about the danger of a fascist totalitarianism. In the “survival of the extremes” character of our parties, it seems increasingly that they are moving toward one of these two polarities. The culture war no longer is Christians versus the secular culture but rather these two polarities against each other, each using parts of the Christian community to gain political leverage.

Where Dreher gets it right is that both of these extremes are built on the lie of ultimate allegiance that no Christian can accept, with a whole host of other lies paving the way to believing this big lie. I believe he is right in recognizing how we may be seduced by lies from one extreme or the other. What I wish he had addressed is how we might be people who turn neither to the Left nor the Right but who are shaped by the narrative of the Gospel of the Kingdom. But in a culture where lying is endemic, the call to not capitulate to the lies and the community that sustains a people of truth is no insignificant thing. A Czech emigre friend told the author that writing this book was a waste of time because, “People will have to live through it first to understand….Any time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or acquaintances, I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense.” I hope he is wrong.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Origins of Totalitarianism

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the origins of totalitarianism

The Origins of  Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968.

Summary: A work tracing the rise of totalitarian governments in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to their origins in racism and class warfare, reactions to imperialism, and the mechanics that distinguish totalitarian states from other kinds of states.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is on my “Ten Books I Want to Read Before I Die” list. After over a month of reading, I can check this book off the list, but I can’t dismiss it from my thoughts. It is long, the prose is demanding, and the ideas are critically important to our times. I certainly will not do the book justice in a blog-length review. But I hope I can give you a sense of what it is about and why I think the book is worth the effort.

The book is written in three parts. Many focus on the third, “Totalitarianism” and neglect the first two, on “Antisemitism” and Imperialism.” The first part describe the rise of race thinking, particularly in the context of the nation-state, and how the Jews, as stateless persons were particularly vulnerable to racist attacks. This was epitomized in the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French Army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, of Jewish descent, was wrongly accused of treason and convicted, arousing latent fears about Jews in France, indeed fears about the motives of Jews in other European countries.

Imperialism arose, in Arendt’s analysis as economic expansion came up against national limits. Arendt writes:

“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.” 

In turn, a form of continental imperialism arose, as an alternative to the existing parties characterized as “pan-Slav” or “pan-German.” This played into ideologies that led to decline of the parliamentary nation states, institutionalizing either anti-Semitism, or anti-bourgeois sentiment (even after the bourgeoisie in Russia was eliminated).

The third part describes the methodology of totalitarian movements eventuating in totalitarian states. Such movements substitute masses for classes, kept in subjection by an inner ring of secret police using methods of terror to keep people in line, using camps and gulags to destroy real and projected enemies. Propaganda plays a critical role in creating an alternate reality that followers of the totalitarian leader prefer to truth, particularly in engendering fear of an “other” who threatens the state. Arendt writes,

“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.” 

Arendt’s book concludes, in its revised edition, with a chapter discussing how loneliness and isolation of individuals serve as pre-conditions for totalitarianism.

The one thing I missed in her analysis was a discussion of how the disruption of World War I and global economic depression contributed to the conditions giving rise to Stalinism and Nazism. It seems to me that these conditions offered fertile ground for the use of racist and classist attacks, widespread dissatisfaction with the existing nation-state (which she does touch on), and the appeal of a strong leader.

This book has gone through a resurgence of interest in light of current political developments in the US. The language of tyranny and totalitarianism has been thrown around, but in reality we are a long way from Arendt’s description of governments that dominate every aspect of a person’s life through government-sponsored terror, secret police, and concentration camps (apart from the temporary interning of undocumented refugees and their children).

Nevertheless, there are concerning trends that Arendt observes in these totalitarian societies that are present in American society:

  • Nationalist organizations affirming one’s racial identity while portraying other “races” as a threat to the nation’s greatness.
  • Deep dissatisfaction with established political parties and systems.
  • The blurring of distinctions between fact and fiction, of truth and falsehood to uphold particular narratives of reality and the questioning of motives of any who challenge those narratives.
  • The increasing isolation and loneliness of growing numbers of people, confined to echo chambers of virtual communities, instead of being surrounded by robust local communities.
  • A growing focus on national political leadership, and particularly on finding strong figures who “get things done” as the critical element to a thriving national life, as opposed to local forms of government, voluntary associations, and private enterprise.

None of these of themselves eventuate in the totalitarian state of which Arendt writes. But these conditions could be exploited by leaders unafraid of using methods of totalitarian control to transform a democratic republic to a government that dominates every aspect of the human existence of its citizens.

I suspect the people of Czarist Russia and of early 1930’s Germany believed that a totalitarian state “couldn’t happen here.” Perhaps that assumption is the most dangerous of all. Arendt’s massive work traces how it did, and could. It persuaded me that it can happen here, and of the vital work each of us need to embrace in bridging rather than accentuating our divides, in protecting the institutions that help us separate fact from fiction, in renewing our neighborhoods and local communities, and in exercising deliberate care in those we elect to positions of power and trust.