sense – they share as they build families and engage with others in their community; second he attacks the reason – and reasoning – people use to navigate the world through the stories told by friends and leaders as they share personal belief, personal experience, family
history, world history, and theoretical research and thinking. The effect is confusion and disorientation – making the person no longer human, non-human, as s/he is reduced to being solely a member or the animal-species.
An attack on men’s minds and bodies was, of course, a primary purpose of the concentration camps. Intellectually, the camps and throwing people into camps simply because of their religion, disability, or sexual orientation made no sense. It still makes no sense today. As we previously noted, Gopnik pointed out: you don’t need to kill someone to silence them. Yet, as people tried to make sense of the nonsense – or tried to negotiate with the Nazis to mitigate the numbers of people being killed – they were forced to confront the fragility of their reason and the laws produced by such. Reason itself could be challenged, laws could be ignored, and collective groups built around a common belief system could be overpowered. And none could make sense of it or why it was happening.
Physically, the camps were designed to destroy bodies. Torture itself – though used – was not the end game. Torture is engaged when one wants to extract something: labor, information, etc. But, as most know, there is a limit to torture: if torture results in death, nothing more can be extracted. Thus, again, in the camps, terror in all its expression was nothing more than a tool to kill the ‘juridical’ part of the person, to silence opposition and choice, to eliminate reason and reasoning, to destroy what would be any sense of human dignity that, if it were to be allowed to exist, would raise the again the possibility of challenge. Brutality was, in other words,
designed to eliminate the human element and thereby reduce man to nothing more than a member of the non-thinking animal species.
What the totalitarian achieves by this is the de-humanization of the individual. What defines man as a species is his ability not just to exist, but to creatively express him- or herself. Creativity, whether expressed through a reasoned proposition or through a life lived creatively and fully is what gives men and women their unique identity and thus unique position in a common world. In Arendt’s vernacular, it is ‘natality,’ birth itself, that introduces a yet undefined new opportunity. Birth is the ultimate creative act, which announces a new arrival and hence adds a “new” dimension to worldly existence. It is, by its very nature, the opposite of a pre-defined, pre-constrained world view that suppresses individuality through a preconceived worldview that demands conformity to the ‘iron band’ imposed by the one ‘Man of Gigantic Dimension,’ familiar to us all as the party apparatchik, the non-human, non-thinking being who is but the animalistic expression of his species, an animal devoid of human-ness.
Seen in this way, it is possible to understand that a person arrives into this world already possessing human dignity. It is not something that should be questioned. A creative, thinking
The totalitarian mind, harboring contempt for reality and facts, constructs new structural arguments on the basis of supersense, on logical imaginings that exist beyond reason and which are accepted on the basis of trust.
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