Scientology and the Nazis: blood brothers?

From: Bob Minton
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 17:23:07 GMT


My very first post to ARS followed a picket of the Boston
Org in September 1995 and I remember the scientologists I
met and talked with at that picket seemed so normal:
articulate, well -- dressed, educated and prosperous
looking. After what I had read about scientology up to
that time, I think I was naively expecting little green
men and women with horns or something. As I have matured
as a critic, I have often times asked myself what kind of
a system breeds the evil that is so prevalent in
scientology that is carried out by such "normal" people.

"A Report on the Banality of Evil" was the subtitle of
Hannah Arendt's 1963 book called "Eichmann in Jerusalem"
where she wrote about the trial of one of the most
notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolph Eichmann, who was
kidnapped in 1960 by Israeli intelligence in Argentina and
spirited to Israel to stand trial. One of her observations
about Eichmann was on the mark, about how such "normal"
people could commit such evil deeds:

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were
like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor
sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and
terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal
institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this
normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities
put together, for it implied -- as had been said at
Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their
counsels -- that this new type of criminal commits his
crimes under circumstances that make it well -- nigh
impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing
wrong."

Hitler had managed to shield a German society of eighty
million people from reality and factuality by the same
self -- deception, lies, and stupidity that were still
ingrained in Eichmann's mentality at the time of his trial
eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when
most of the specific content of its lies had been
forgotten. These lies changed from year to year, and they
frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were
not necessarily the same for the various branches of the
Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice
of self -- deception had become so common it was a moral
prerequisite for survival in Nazi Germany. It's what
"normal" people did to survive.

So, I asked myself how did this totalitarian regime of
Hitler cause the eighty million people of Germany to
abandon the most basic function of human judgment -- that
human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even
when all they have to guide them is their own judgment,
even when it happens to be completely at odds with what
they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all those
around them. Watch "The Wave" that Keith Henson talked
about here within the last month and then try to answer
that question. It is after all what Hannah Arendt
described as one of the central moral questions of all
time.

Well, how does this link to scientology and the use of a
swastika on a picket sign. Be patient, we'll get there. So
there I am reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and along comes
Laura Fuller who wrote a college thesis entitled
"Scientology and Totalitarianism" which is on the web at
Operation Clambake -- http://www.xenu.net/archive/thesis/
and, I believe on Arnie Lerma's page somewhere. Ms Fuller
used Hannah Arendt's writings, particularly "Origins of
Totalitarianism" as a basis for comparing scientology to
the Totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler. It was a
very interesting and thought provoking read and one I
recommend to anyone who cares to understand another side
of the issues involved in the controversy on ARS
surrounding comparisons of scientology and the
totalitarianism practiced by the Nazis. So I had to go OT
(by reading Origins of Totalitarianism), in order to more
deeply understand the totalitarian leanings of scientology.

Soon after reading "Scientology and Totalitarianism" and
"Origins of Totalitarianism," the Columbine High School
tragedy happened and I watched on MSNBC a discussion on
hate and bigotry in America. One of the notable
participants was from The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los
Angeles. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in
November 1977 and today, together with its world renowned
Museum of Tolerance, it is a 400,000 member strong
international center for Holocaust remembrance, the
defense of human rights and the Jewish people. With
offices throughout the world, the Wiesenthal Center
carries on the continuing fight against bigotry and anti
-- Semitism and pursues an active agenda of related
contemporary issues. Today, the Center devotes 80% of its
research manpower to monitor on -- line hate groups. The
participant from the Wiesenthal Center mentioned a project
they were involved with called "Digital Hate 2000" which
is part of their ongoing commitment to monitor and combat
the changing face of hate.

The Wiesenthal Center chose a swastika to use on their web
site and on the CD cover of their interactive report
"Digital Hate 2000." They did not choose this symbol
lightly; it was not chosen to offend Jewish people, nor
was it chosen to remember Holocaust victims. It was chosen
because the swastika is the ultimate symbol of hatred and
has been adopted by hate groups throughout the world.

Therefore, I believe the swastika to be a most appropriate
symbol to associate with the "church" of scientology. It
is certainly the most hateful, most bigoted and most
intolerant group that I have ever directly encountered.

And, It was only after serious study I decided to use a
swastika on my picket signs. I've used several types of
swastikas, always including the word scientology on all
four parts of the swastika. Few, if any here, have ever
bothered to look at the designs and therefore criticize
out of emotion rather than knowledge. But that is often
times the nature of ARS. So, yes I will continue to use a
swastika when I picket scientology and if anyone would
like to look at the signs I will use in Clearwater, I
posted them to alt.binaries.scientology on September 1 and
again today under the subject: My Clearwater Picket Sign
-- Side One and Side Two. On the Side One sign is the
swastika, the same swastika used by the Wiesenthal Center,
except I have removed one hate symbol from the center of
the swastika and replaced it with another symbol of hatred
and bigotry -- the scientology cross. I find this symbol
to be a powerful and meaningful expression of my feelings
about the hate group known as scientology. I will carry my
sign proudly. But, I have some good news for Clearwater
protestors -- I will not be there on December 3rd and 5th
due to other commitments and maybe not the 4th.

Now, back to Hannah Arendt. For those not familiar with
Arendt, she was a historian and political philosopher,
born in Hanover, Germany. Of Jewish ancestry, she received
her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg (1929) and fled
Hitler's Germany for France (1933) and the United States
(1940), where she was naturalized in 1951. Her reputation
as a scholar and writer was firmly established with the
publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
which linked Nazism and Communism to 19th -- century
imperialism and anti -- Semitism. Internationally
recognized as the best -- known American political
theorist of her generation, she was both a prominent
member of America's literary and academic elite and a
revered mentor. Her teaching career included stints at
Princeton (1953, 1959), Berkeley, the University of
Chicago (1963 -- 7), Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell
Universities, and the New School for Social Research (1967
-- 75).

Again, I urge you to read Laura Fuller's thesis which
quotes Hannah Arendt extensively and provides far more
intelligent analysis than I could do myself. Given that I
am not known for my intellectual prowess, I too will quote
extensively from "Origins of Totalitarianism" but leave
the commentary to the readers as it may relate to
scientology. At the end of this message, I will tell you
where on a scale of 1 -- 100 I think scientology is in
achieving their goals which include amongst many others a
society where no one but scientologists have any civil
rights and where 2.5 percent of the population should be
done away with, quietly and without sorrow.

Excerpts from Origins of Totaliarianism by Hannah Arendt:

The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its
first glimpse of a totalitarian movement through its front
organizations. The sympathizers, who are to all
appearances still innocuous fellow -- citizens in a
nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single --
minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their
fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their
propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the
whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements
which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be
normal political reactions or opinions.

The fellow -- traveler organizations surround the
totalitarian movements with a mist of normality and
respectability that fools the membership about the true
character of the outside world as much as it does the
outside world about the true character of the movement.
The front organization functions both ways: as the facade
of the totalitarian movement to the nontotalitarian world,
and as the facade of this world to the inner hierarchy of
the movement.

A definite advantage of this structure is that it blunts
the impact of one of the basic totalitarian tenets -- that
the world is divided into two gigantic hostile camps, one
of which is the movement, and that the movement can and
must fight the whole world -- a claim which prepares the
way for the indiscriminate aggressiveness of totalitarian
regimes in power.

Through a carefully graduated hierarchy of militancy in
which each rank is the higher level's image of the
nontotalitarian world because it is less militant and its
members less totally organized, the shock of the
terrifying and monstrous totalitarian dichotomy is
vitiated and never full realized; this type of
organization prevents its members' ever being directly
confronted with the outside world, whose hostility remains
for them a mere ideological assumption. They are so well
protected against the reality of the nontotalitarian world
that they constantly underestimate the tremendous risks of
totalitarian politics.

Pg 367

This total responsibility for everything done by the
movement and this total identification with every one of
its functionaries have the very practical consequence that
nobody ever experiences a situation in which he has to be
responsible for his own actions or can explain the reasons
for them. Since the Leader has monopolized the right and
possibility of explanation, he appears to the outside
world as the only person who knows what he is doing,

Pg 375

The totalitarian movements have been called "secret
societies established in broad daylight."" Indeed, little
as we know of the sociological structure and the more
recent history of secret societies, the structure of the
movements, unprecedented if compared with parties and
factions, reminds one of nothing so much as of certain
outstanding traits of secret societies.91 Secret societies
also form hierarchies according to degrees of
"initiation," regulate the life of their members according
to a secret and fictitious assumption which makes
everything look as though it were something else, adopt a
strategy of consistent lying to deceive the non --
initiated external masses, demand unquestioning obedience
from their members who are held together by allegiance to
a frequently unknown and always mysterious leader, who
himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a
small group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the
half -- initiated who form a "buffer area" against the
hostile profane world.92 With secret societies, the
totalitarian movements also share the dichotomous division
of the world between "sworn blood brothers" and an
indistinct inarticulate mass of sworn enemies."

Pg 376

These similarities are not, of course, accidental; they
cannot simply be explained by the fact that both Hitler
and Stalin had been members of modern secret societies
before they became totalitarian leaders -- Hitler in the
secret service of the Reichswehr and Stalin in the
conspiracy section of the Bolshevik party. They are to
some extent the natural outcome of the conspiracy fiction
of totalitarianism whose organizations supposedly have
been founded to counteract secret societies -- the secret
society of the Jews or the conspiratory society of the
Trotskyites. What is remarkable in the totalitarian
organizations is rather that they could adopt so many
organizational devices of secret societies without ever
trying to keep their own goal a secret. That the Nazis
wanted to conquer the world, deport "racially alien"
peoples and exterminate those of "inferior biological
heritage," that the Bolsheviks work for the world
revolution, was never a secret; these aims, on the
contrary, were always part of their propaganda. In other
words, the totalitarian movements imitate all the
paraphernalia of the secret societies but empty them of
the only thing that could excuse, or was supposed to
excuse, their methods -- the necessity to safeguard a
secret.

Pg 378

What inspired them with the unwavering loyalty of members
of secret societies was not so much the secret as the
dichotomy between Us and an others. This could be kept
intact by imitating the secret societies' organizational
structure and emptying it of its rational purpose of
safeguarding a secret. Nor did it matter if a conspiracy
ideology was the origin of this development, as in the
case of the Nazis, or a parasitic growth of the
conspiratory sector of a revolutionary party, as in the
case of the Bolsheviks. The claim inherent in totalitarian
organization is that everything outside the movement is
"dying," a claim which is drastically realized under the
murderous conditions of totalitarian rule, but which even
in the prepower stage appears plausible to the masses who
escape from disintegration and disorientation into the
fictitious home of the movement.

So long as the movement exists, its peculiar form of
organization makes sure that at least the elite formations
can no longer conceive of a life outside the closely knit
band of men who, even if they are condemned, still feel
superior to the rest of the uninitiated world.

Pg 381

The machine that generates, organizes, and spreads the
monstrous falsehoods of totalitarian movements depends
again upon the position of the Leader. To the propaganda
assertion that all happenings are scientifically
predictable according to the laws of nature or economics,
totalitarian organization adds the position of one man who
has monopolized this knowledge and whose principal quality
is that he "was always right and will always be right."
106 To a member of a totalitarian movement this knowledge
has nothing to do with truth and this being right nothing
to do with the objective truthfulness of the Leader's
statements which cannot be disproved by facts, but only by
future success or failure. The Leader is always right in
his actions and since these are planned for centuries to
come, the ultimate test of what he does has been removed
beyond the experience of his contemporaries.107

Pg 383

The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state
may be sure is that the more visible government agencies
are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of
the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will
ultimately turn out to be. ---- This is a bone for Veritas
---- :)

Pg 403

The complete absence of successful or unsuccessful palace
revolutions is one of the most remarkable characteristics
of totalitarian dictatorships.

Pg 406

The evidence of Hitler's as well as Stalin's dictatorship
points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized
individuals provides not only the mass basis for
totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top
of the whole structure.

Pg 407

The famous "Right is what is good for the German people"
was meant only for mass propaganda; Nazis were told that
"Right is what is good for the movement,", and these two
interests did by no means always coincide. The Nazis did
not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the
world belonged, but that they should be led by a master
race, as should all other nations, and that this race was
only on the point of being born.611 Not the Germans were
the dawn of the master race, but the SS.69 The "Germanic
world empire," as Himmler said, or the "Aryan' world
empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in any event
still centuries off. 10 For the "movement" it was more
important to demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate
a race by annihilating other "races" than to win a war
with limited aims. What strikes the outside observer as a
"piece of prodigious insanity" is nothing but the
consequence of the absolute primacy of the movement not
only over the state, but also over the nation, the people
and the positions of power held by the rulers themselves.
The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule,
with their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power
in the hands of a single man, were never tried out before,
is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough to discard
all limited and local interests -- economic, national,
human, military -- in favor of a purely fictitious reality
in some indefinite distant future.

Pg 412

One of the important differences between a totalitarian
movement and a totalitarian state is that the totalitarian
dictator can and must practice the totalitarian art of
lying more consistently and on a larger scale than the
leader of a movement. This is partly the automatic
consequence of swelling the ranks of fellow -- travelers,
and is partly due to the fact that unpleasant statements
by a statesman are not as easily revoked as those of a
demagogic party leader

Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried
out only under the conditions of totalitarian rule, where
the fictitious quality of everyday reality makes
propaganda largely superfluous

The more conspicuous the power of totalitarianism the more
secret become its true goals. To know the ultimate aims of
Hitler's rule in Germany, it was much wiser to rely on his
propaganda speeches and Mein Kampf than on the oratory of
the Chancellor of the Third Reich; just as it would have
been wiser to distrust Stalin's words about "socialism in
one country," invented for the passing purpose of seizing
power after Lenin's death, and to take more seriously his
repeated hostility to democratic countries.

Pg 413

Evidence that totalitarian governments aspire to conquer
the globe and bring all countries on earth under their
domination can be found repeatedly in Nazi and Bolshevik
literature. Yet these ideological programs, inherited from
pretotalitarian movements (from the supranationalist
antisemitic parties and the Pan -- German dreams of empire
in the case of the Nazis, from the international concept
of revolutionary socialism in the case of the Bolsheviks)
are not decisive. What is decisive is that totalitarian
regimes really conduct their foreign policy on the
consistent assumption that they will eventually achieve
this ultimate goal, and never lose sight of it no matter
how distant it may appear or how seriously its "ideal"
demands may conflict with the necessities of the moment.
They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign,
but, on the contrary, every country as their potential
territory. Rise to power, the fact that in one country the
fictitious world of the movement has become a tangible
reality, creates a relationship to other nations which is
similar to the situation of the totalitarian party under
nontotalitarian rule: the tangible reality of the fiction,
backed by internationally recognized state power, can be
exported the same way contempt for parliament could be
imported into a nontotalitarian parliament. In this
respect, the prewar "solution" of the Jewish question was
the outstanding export commodity of Nazi Germany:
expulsion of Jews carried an important portion of Nazism
into other countries; by forcing Jews to leave the Reich
passportless and penniless, the legend of the Wandering
Jew was realized, and by forcing the Jews into
uncompromising hostility against them, the Nazis had
created the pretext for taking a passionate interest in
all nations' domestic policies.77

Pg 415

The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they
play power politics in an especially ruthless way, but
that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and
unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their
Realpolitik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept
of reality. Supreme disregard for immediate consequences
rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of
national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for
utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of
self -- interest; "idealism," i.e., their unwavering faith
in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for
power -- these have all introduced into international
politics a new and more disturbing factor than mere
aggressiveness would have been able to do.

Pg 417

Power, as conceived by totalitarianism, lies exclusively
in the force produced through organization. Just as Stalin
saw every institution, independent of its actual function,
only as a "transmission belt connecting the party with the
people"12 and honestly believed that the most precious
treasures of the Soviet Union were not the riches of its
soil or the productive capacity of its huge manpower, but
the "cadres" of the party83 (i.e., the police), so Hitler,
as early as 1929, saw the "great thing" of the movement in
the fact that sixty thousand men "have outwardly become
almost a unit, that actually these members are uniform not
only in ideas, but that even the facial expression is
almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this
fanatical enthusiasm and you will discover . . . how a
hundred thousand men in a movement become a single type.""

Pg 418

In totalitarian regimes provocation, once only the
specialty of the secret agent, becomes a method of dealing
with his neighbor which everybody, willingly or
unwillingly, is forced to follow. Everyone, in a way, is
the agent provocateur of everyone else; for obviously
everybody will call himself an agent provocateur if ever
an ordinary friendly exchange of "dangerous thoughts" (or
what in the meantime have become dangerous thoughts)
should come to the attention of the authorities.
Collaboration of the population in denouncing political
opponents and volunteer service as stool pigeons are
certainly not unprecedented, but in totalitarian countries
they are so well organized that the work of specialists is
almost superfluous. In a system of ubiquitous spying,
where everybody may be a police agent and each individual
feels himself under constant surveillance; under
circumstances, moreover, where careers are extremely
insecure and where the most spectacular ascents and falls
have become everyday occurrences, every word becomes
equivocal and subject to retrospective "interpretation."

Pg 431

The truth of the matter is that totalitarian leaders,
though they are convinced that they must follow
consistently the fiction and the rules of the fictitious
world which were laid down during their struggle for
power, discover only gradually the full implications of
this fictitious world and its rules. Their faith in human
omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done
through organization, carries them into experiments which
human imaginations may have outlined but human activity
certainly never realized. Their hideous discoveries in the
realm of the possible are inspired by an ideological
scientificality which has proved to be less controlled by
reason and less willing to recognize. factuality than the
wildest fantasies of prescientific and prephilosophical
speculation.

The totalitarian conspiracy against the nontotalitarian
world, on the other hand, its claim to world domination,
remains as open and unguarded under conditions of
totalitarian rule as in the totalitarian movements. It is
practically impressed upon the co -- ordinated population
of "sympathizers" in the form of a supposed conspiracy of
the whole world against their own country.

Pg 436

Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite
plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of
humanity were just one individual, is possible only if
each and every person can be reduced to a neverchanging
identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of
reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. The
problem is to fabricate something that does not exist,
namely, a kind of human species resembling other animal
species whose only "freedom" would consist in "preserving
the species."'* -- '5 Totalitarian domination attempts to
achieve this goal both through ideological indoctrination
of the elite formations and through absolute terror in the
camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formations
are ruthlessly used become, as it were, the practical
application of the ideological indoctrination -- the
testing ground in which the latter must prove itself --
while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is
sup posed to furnish the "theoretical" verification of the
ideology.

The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and
degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly
experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled
conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human
behavior and of transforming the human personality into a
mere thing, into something that even animals are not; for
Pavlov's dog, which, as we know, was trained to eat not
when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a perverted
animal.

Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished,
because spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated
insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but
with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It
is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment
is at all possible, and therefore they are not only "la
societe la plus totalitaire encore rialisee" (David
Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total domination
in general. Just as the stability of the totalitarian
regime depends on the isolation of the fictitious world of
the movement from the outside world, so the experiment of
total domination in the concentration camps depends on
sealing off the latter against the world of all others,
the world of the living in general, even against the
outside world of a country under totalitarian rule. This
isolation explains the peculiar unreality and lack of
credibility that characterize all reports from the
concentration camps and constitute one of the main
difficulties for the true understanding of totalitarian
domination, which stands or falls with the existence of
these concentration and extermination camps; for, unlikely
as it may sound, these camps are the true central
institution of totalitarian organizational power.

Pg 438

There are numerous reports by survivors.1211 The more
authentic they are, the less they attempt to coiiimunicate
things that evade human understanding and human experience
-- sufferings, that is, that transform men into
"uncomplaining animals." 121 None of these reports
inspires those passions of outrage and sympathy through
which men have always been mobilized for justice. On the
contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration
camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has
resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself
is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own
truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for
reality -- 128

This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality
of their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have
always known: that men determined to commit crimes will
find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most
improbable scale. Not only because this renders all
punishments provided by the legal system inadequate and
absurd; but because the very immensity of the crimes
guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence
with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than
the victims who tell the truth. The Nazis did not even
consider it necessary to keep this discovery to
themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his
book in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must
be enormous -- which did not prevent people from believing
him as, similarly, the Nazis' proclamations, repeated ad
nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated like bedbugs
(i.e., with poison gas), prevented anybody from not
believing them.

There is a great temptation to explain away the
intrinsically incredible by means of liberal
rationalizations.

Pg 439

The first essential step on the road to total domination
is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on
the one hand, by putting certain categories of people
outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same
time, through the instrument of denationalization, the
nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it
was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp
outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its
inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a
definite crime entails a predictable penalty. Thus
criminals, who for other reasons are an essential element
in concentration -- camp society, are ordinarily sent to a
camp only on completion of their prison sentence. Under
all circumstances totalitarian domination sees to it that
the categories gathered in the camps -- Jews, carriers of
diseases, representatives of dying classes have already
lost their capacity for both normal or criminal action.
Propagandistically this means that the "protective
custody" is handled as a "preventive police measure," that
is, a measure that deprives people of the ability to act.

Pg 447

The aim of an arbitrary system is to destroy the civil
rights of the whole population, who ultimately become just
as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and
homeless. The destruction of a man's rights, the killing
of the juridical person in him, is a prerequisite for
dominating him entirely. And this applies not only to
special categories such as criminals, political opponents,
Jews, homosexuals, on whom the early experiments were
made, but to every inhabitant of a totalitarian state.

The next decisive step in the preparation of living
corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is
done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time
in history, impossible: "How many people here still
believe that a protest has even historic importance? This
skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great
accomplishment. They have Corrupted all human solidarity.
Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses
are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when
death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give
death a meaning, to act beyond one's own death. In order
to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning.
There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in
absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter
what happens." 152

Pg 451

The camps and the murder of political adversaries are only
part of organized oblivion that not only embraces carriers
of public opinion such as the spoken and the written word,
but extends even to the families and friends of the
victim. Grief and remembrance are forbidden. ….The
concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous
(making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is
dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a
fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's
own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him
and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on
the fact that he had never really existed.

This attack on the moral person might still have been
opposed by man's conscience which tells him that it is
better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of
murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible
triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off
from the individualist escape and in making the decisions
of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When
a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus
murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children,
for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death;
when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his
own family -- how is he to decide? The alternative is no
longer between good and evil, but between murder and
murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek
mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of
her three children should be killed? 154

Through the creation of conditions under which conscience
ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly
impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all
men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to
the victims and thus made really total. The SS implicated
concentration camp inmates, criminals, politicals, Jews --
in their crimes by making them responsible for a large
part of the administration, thus confronting them with the
hopeless dilemma whether to send their friends to their
death, or to help murder other men who happened to be
strangers, and forcing them, in any event, to behave like
murderers.", -- , The point is not only that hatred is
diverted from those who are guilty (the capos were more
hated than the SS), but that the distinguishing line
between persecutor and persecuted, between the murderer
and his victim, is constantly blurred.151

Pg. 452

Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that
still prevents men from being made into living corpses is
the differentiation of the individual, his unique
identity. In a sterile form such individuality can be
preserved through a persistent stoicism, and it is certain
that many men under totalitarian rule have taken and are
each day still taking refuge in this absolute isolation of
a personality without rights or conscience. There is no
doubt that this part of the human person, precisely
because it depends so essentially on nature and on forces
that cannot be controlled by the will, is the hardest to
destroy (and when destroyed is most easily repaired).157

Pg 453

After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the
juridical person, The destruction of the individuality is
almost always successful. Conceivably some laws of mass
psychology may be found to explain why millions of human
beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into
the gas chambers, although these laws would explain
nothing else but the destruction of individuality. It is
more significant that t1fose individually condemned to
death very seldom attempted to take one of their
executioners with them, that there were scarcely any
serious revolts, and that even in the moment of liberation
there were very few spontaneous massacres of SS men.

For to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity,
man's power to begin something new out of his own
resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis
of reactions to environment and events.161 Nothing then
remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which
all behave like the dog in Pavlov's experiments, which all
react with perfect reliability even when going to their
own death, and which do nothing but react. This is the
real triumph of the system: "The triumph of the SS demands
that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the
noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon
himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity.
And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of
sheer sadism, that the SS men desire his defeat. They know
that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim
before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the
best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission.
Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human
beings going like dummies to their death. The man who sees
this says to himself: 'For them to be thus reduced, what
power must be concealed in the hands of the masters,' and
he turns away, full of bitterness but defeated." 1112

Pg 455

Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and
fulfillment of functions are entirely superfluous to
totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives not towards
despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men
are superfluous. Total power can be achieved and
safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of
marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity.
Precisely because man's resources are so great, he can be
fully dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the
animal -- species man.

Therefore character is a threat and even the most unjust
legal rules are an obstacle; but individuality, anything
indeed that distinguishes one man from another, is
intolerable. As long as all men have not been made equally
superfluous -- and this has been accomplished only in
concentration camps -- the ideal of totalitarian
domination has not been achieved. Totalitarian states
strive constantly, though never with complete success, to
establish the superfluity of man -- by the arbitrary
selection of various groups for concentration camps, by
constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass
liquidations. Common sense protests desperately that the
masses are submissive and that all this gigantic apparatus
of terror is therefore superfluous; if they were capable
of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply:
The apparatus seems superfluous to you only because it
serves to make men superfluous.

The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects
the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an
overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men
are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in
which punishment is meted out without connection with
crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit,
and where work is performed without product, is a place
where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, within
the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could
be more sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin,
it is logical that they should be killed by poison gas; if
they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to
contaminate the population; if they have "slave -- like
souls" (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to
re -- educate them. Seen through the eyes of the ideology,
the trouble with the camps is almost that they make too
much sense, that the execution of the doctrine is too
consistent.

While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and
cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes
sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense,
they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense
which the ideologies actually always meant when they
pretended to have found the key to history or the solution
to the riddles of the universe. Over and above the
senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the
ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition.
Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary
opinions only as long as they are not believed in
seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken
literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in
which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows
comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise

Pg 457

is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in
their first premise but in the very logicality with which
they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms,
their simple -- minded trust in the salvation value of
stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying
factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian
contempt for reality and factuality.

Common sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless
against this ideological supersense, since totalitarian
regimes establish a functioning world of no -- sense. The
ideological contempt for factuality still contained the
proud assumption of human mastery over the world; it is,
after all, contempt for reality which makes possible
changing the world, the erection of the human artifice.
What destroys the element of pride in the totalitarian
contempt for reality (and thereby distinguishes it
radically from revolutionary theories and attitudes) is
the supersense which gives the contempt for reality its
cogency, logicality, and consistency. What makes a truly
totalitarian device out of the Bolshevik claim that the
present Russian system is superior to all others is the
fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the
logically impeccable conclusion that without this system
people never could have built such a wonderful thing as,
let us say, a subway; from this, he again draws the
logical conclusion that anyone who knows of the existence
of the Paris subway is a suspect because he may cause
people to doubt that one can do things only in the
Bolshevik way. This leads to the final conclusion that in
order to remain a loyal Bolshevik, you have to destroy the
Paris subway. Nothing matters but consistency.

The aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from
lust for power, and if it feverishly seeks to expand, it
does so neither for expansions sake nor for profit, but
only for ideological reasons: to make the world
consistent, to prove that its respective supersense has
been right.

It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the
sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for
totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly
call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies
the recognition of my fellow -- men or our fellow --
nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders
of a common world. No ideology which aims at the
explanation of all historical events of the past and at
mapping out the course of all events of the future can
bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that
men are creative, that they can bring forward something so
new that nobody ever foresaw it.

What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the
transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing
transmutation of society, but the transformation of human
nature itself. The concentration camps are the
laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and
their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of
their inmates and those who run them according to strictly
"scientific" standards; it is the concern of all men.

Pg 458

Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is
possible seems to have proved only that everything can be
destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove that everything
is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without
knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither
punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible
it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil
which could no longer be understood and explained by the
evil motives of self -- interest, greed, covetousness,
resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which
therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure,
friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the
death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer
"human" in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest
species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity
in human sinfulness.

It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that
we cannot conceive of a "radical evil," and this is true
both for Christian theology, which conceded even to the
Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the
only philosopher who, in the word he coined for it, at
least must have suspected the existence of this evil even
though he immediately rationalized it in the concept of a
"perverted ill will" that could be explained by
comprehensible motives. Therefore, we actually have
nothing to fall back on in order to understand a
phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its
overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we
know. There is only one thing that seems to be
discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in
connection with a system in which all men have become
equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system
believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of
all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the
more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves
are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born.
The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion
is that today, with populations and homelessness
everywhere on the increase, masses of people are
continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think
of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social, and
economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with
totalitarian instruments devised for making men
superfluous. The implied temptation is well understood by
the utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most
countries are too desperate to retain much fear of death.
The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their
factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest
solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically
superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are as
much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions
may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the
form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it
seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or
economic misery in a manner worthy of man.

Pg 459

To abolish the fences of laws between men -- as tyranny
does -- means to take away man's liberties and destroy
freedom as a living political reality; for the space
between men as it is hedgcd in by laws, is the living
space of freedom. Total terror uses this old instrument of
tyranny but destroys at the same time also the lawless,
fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion which tyranny
leaves behind. This desert, to be sure, is no longer a
living space of freedom, but it still provides some room
for the fear -- guided movements and suspicion -- ridden
actions of its inhabitants,

By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys
the space between them; compared to the condition within
its iron band, even the desert of tyranny, insofar as it
is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of
freedom. Totalitarian government does not just curtail
liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at
least to our limited knowledge, succeed in eradicating the
love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the
one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply
the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.

Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government,
exists neither for nor against men. It is supposed to
provide the forces of nature or history with an
incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This
movement, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in
the long run be hindered; eventually its force will always
prove more powerful than the most powerful forces
engendered by the actions and the will of men. But it can
be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the
freedom of man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot
deny, for this freedom -- irrelevant and arbitrary as they
may deem it -- is identical with the fact that men are
being born and that therefore each of them is a new
beginning, begins, in a sense, the world anew. From the
totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and
die can be only regarded as an annoying interference with
higher forces. Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant
of natural or historical movement has to eliminate from
the process not only freedom in any specific sense, but
the very source of freedom which is given with the fact of
the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new
beginning. In the iron band of terror, which destroys the
plurality of men and makes out of many the One who
unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of the
course of history or nature, a device has been found not
only to liberate the historical and natural forces, but to
accelerate them to a speed they never would reach if left
to themselves. Practically speaking, this means that
terror executes on the spot the death sentences which
Nature is supposed to have pronounced on races or
individuals who are "unfit to live," or History on "dying
classes," without waiting for the slower and less
efficient processes of nature or history themselves.

Pg 466

In a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have
become One Man, where all action aims at the acceleration
of the movement of nature or history, where every single
act is the execution of a death sentence which Nature or
History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions
where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the
movement in constant motion, no principle of action
separate from its essence would be needed at all. Yet as
long as totalitarian rule has not conquered the earth and
with the iron band of terror made each single man a part
of one mankind, terror in its double function as essence
of government and principle, not of action, but of motion,
cannot be fully realized. Just as lawfulness in
constitutional government is insufficient to inspire and
guide men's actions, so terror in totalitarian government
is not sufficient to inspire and guide human behavior.

While under present conditions totalitarian domination
still shares with other forms of government the need for a
guide for the behavior of its citizens in public affairs,
it does not need and could not even use a principle of
action strictly speaking, since it will eliminate
precisely the capacity of man to act. Under conditions of
total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an
advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its
victims without reference to individual actions or
thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective
necessity of the natural or historical process. Under
totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread
than ever before; but fear has lost its practical
usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to
avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy
or support of the regime; for total terror not only
selects its victims according to objective standards; it
chooses its executioners with as complete a disregard as
possible for the candidate's conviction and sympathies.

Pg 467

On the other hand, all ideologies contain totalitarian
elements, but these are fully developed only by
totalitarian movements, and this creates the deceptive
impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian
in character. The truth is, rather, that the real nature
of all ideologies was revealed only in the role that the
ideology plays in the apparatus of totalitarian
domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three
specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to
all ideological thinking.

First, in their claim to total explanation, ideologies
have the tendency to explain not what is, but what
becomes, what is born and passes away. They are in all
cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that
is, with history in the customary sense of the word.
Ideologies are always oriented toward history, even when,
as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed from the
premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain
historical matters and reduce them to matters of nature.
The claim to total explanation promises to explain all
historical happenings, the total explanation of the past,
the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable
prediction of the future. Secondly, in this capacity
ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience
from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a
question of something that has just come to pass. Hence
ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality
that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a
"truer" reality concealed behind all perceptible

Pg 470

things, dominating them from this place of concealment and
requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of
it. The sixth sense is provided by precisely the ideology,
that particular ideological indoctrination which is taught
by the educational institutions, established exclusively
for this purpose, to train the "political soldiers" in the
Ordensburgen of the Nazis or the schools of the Comintern
and the Cominform. The propaganda of the totalitarian
movement also serves to emancipate thought from experience
and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning
into every public, tangible event and to suspect a secret
intent behind every public political act. Once the
movements have come to power, they proceed to change
reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The
concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and
this produces a mentality in which reality -- real enmity
or real friendship -- is no longer experienced and
understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed
to signify something else.

Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform
reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from
experience through certain methods of demonstration.
Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely
logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically
accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that
is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in
the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically
or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent
process of argumentation which, because it thinks in terms
of a process, is supposed to be able to comprehend the
movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical
processes. Comprehension is achieved by the mind's
imitating, either logically or dialectically, the laws of
"scientifically" established movements with which through
the process of imitation it becomes integrated.
Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical
deduction, corresponds to the two aforementioned elements
of the ideologies -- the element of movement and of
emancipation from reality and experience -- first, because
its thought movement does not spring from experience but
is self -- generated, and, secondly, because it transforms
the one and only point that is taken and accepted from
experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving
from then on the subsequent argumentation process
completely untouched from any further experience. Once it
has established its premise, its point of departure,
experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking,
nor can it be taught by reality.

The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform
their respective ideologies into weapons with which each
of their subjects could force himself into step with the
terror movement was deceptively simple and inconspicuous:
they took them dead seriously, took pride the one in his
supreme gift for "ice cold reasoning" (Hitler) and the
other in the "mercilessness of his dialectics," and
proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes
of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked
preposterously "primitive" and absurd: a "dying class"
consisted of people condemned to death; races that are
"unfit to live" were to be exterminated.

Pg 471

The question we raised at the start of these
considerations and to which we now return is what kind of
basic experience in the living -- together of men
permeates a form of government whose essence is terror and
whose principle of action is the logicality of ideological
thinking. That such a combination was never used before in
the varied forms of political domination is obvious.
Still, the basic experience on which it rests must be
human and known to men, insofar as even this most
"original" of all political bodies has been devised by,
and is somehow answering the needs of, men.

It has frequently been observed that terror can rule
absolutely only over men who are isolated against each
other and that, therefore, one of the primary concerns of
all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation
about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it
certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its
result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian;
its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes
from men acting together, "acting in concert" (Burke);
isolated men are powerless by definition.

Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability
to act at all, have always been characteristic of
tyrannies. Political contacts between men are severed in
tyrannical government and the human capacities for action
and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men
are broken and not all human capacities destroyed. The
whole sphere of private life with the capacities for
experience, fabrication and thought are left intact. We
know that the iron band of total terror leaves no space
for such private life and that the self -- coercion of
totalitarian logic destroys man's capacity for experience
and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action.

What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called
loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isolation
and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated -- that
is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is
nobody who will act with me -- without being lonely; and I
can be lonely -- that is in a situation in which I as a
person feel myself deserted by all human companionship --
without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse into
which men are driven when the political sphere of their
lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common
concern, is destroyed. Yet isolation, though destructive
of power and the capacity for action, not only leaves
intact but is required for all so -- called productive
activities of men.

Pg 474

While isolation concerns only the political realm of life,
loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian
government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist
without destroying the public realm of life, that is,
without destroying, by isolating men, their political
capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of
government is new in that it is not content with this
isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases
itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging
to the world at all, which is among the most radical and
desperate experiences of man.

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of
totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality,
the preparation of its executioners and victims, is
closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness
which have been the curse of modern masses since the
beginning of the industrial revolution and have become
acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last
century and the break -- down of political institutions
and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted
means to have no place in the world, recognized and
guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to
belong to the world at all. Uprootedness can be the
preliminary condition for Superfluousness, just as
isolation can (but must not) be the preliminary condition
for loneliness. Taken in itself, without consideration of
its recent historical causes and its new role in politics,
loneliness is at the same time contrary to the basic
requirements of the human condition and one of the
fundamental experiences of every human life.

Pg 475

What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's
own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed
in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy
company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust
in himself as the partner of his thoughts' and that
elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to
make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for
thought and experience are lost at the same time.

The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither
the self nor the other nor the world in order to function
safely and which is as independent of experience as it is
of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose
premise is the self -- evident. The elementary rules of
cogent evidence, the truism that two and two equals four
cannot be perverted even under the conditions of absolute
loneliness. It is the only reliable "truth" human beings
can fall back upon once they have lost the mutual
guarantee, the common sense, men need in order to
experience and live and know their way in a common world.
But this "truth" is empty or rather no truth at all,
because it does not reveal anything. (To define
consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to
deny the existence of truth.) Under the conditions of
loneliness, therefore, the self -- evident is no longer
just a means of the intellect and begins to be productive,
to develop its own lines of "thought." That thought
processes characterized by strict self -- evident
logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have
some connection with loneliness was once noticed by Luther
(whose experiences in the phenomena of solitude and
loneliness probably were second to no one's and who once
dared to say that "there must be a God because man needs
one being whom he can trust") in a little -- known remark
on the Bible text "it is not good that man should be
alone": A lonely man, says Luther, "always deduces one
thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst
114 The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far
from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists
indeed in this "thinking everything to the worst," in this
deducing process which always arrives at the worst
possible conclusions.

Pg 477

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non
-- totalitarian worId is the fact that loneliness, once a
borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal
social conditions like old age, has become an everyday
experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The
merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and
organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from
this reality. The "ice -- cold reasoning" and the "mighty
tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise"
appears like a last support in a world where nobody is
reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner
coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of
contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity
outside all relationships with others. It fits him into
the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and
totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone
except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement.
By destroying all space between men and pressing men
against each other, even the productive potentialities of
isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the
logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he
will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first
premise from which the whole process is being started,
even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed
into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated. If
this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems
as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in
motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all
parts of the inhabited earth.

The conditions under which we exist today in the field of
politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand
storms. Their danger is not that they might establish a
permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny,
bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and
the impotence from which fear springs are antipolitical
principles and throw men into a situation contrary to
political action, so loneliness and the logical --
ideological deducing the worst that comes from it
represent an antisocial situation and harbor a principle
destructive for all human living together. Nevertheless,
organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than
the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by
the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its
danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know
it -- a world which everywhere seems to have come to an
end -- before a new beginning rising from this end has had
time to assert itself.

Apart from such considerations -- which as predictions are
of little avail and less consolation -- there remains the
fact that the crisis of our time and its central
experience have brought forth an entirely new form of
government which as a potentiality and an ever -- present
danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on,
just as other forms of government which came about at
different historical moments and rested on different
fundamental experiences have stayed with mankind
regardless of temporary defeatsmonarchies, and republics,
tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism.

But there remains also the truth that every end in history
necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is
the promise, the only "message" which the end can ever
produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event,
is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is
identical with man's freedom. Initium ut esset homo
crealus est -- "that a beginning be made man was created"
said Augustine.r, This beginning is guaranteed by each new
birth; it is indeed every man.

Pg 478

So where is scientology on that imaginary scale of 1 --
100 that I mentioned earlier. I'd say under 5. So why
worry? Because, I think they are pushing hard for
mainstream acceptance and in the process hiding their true
motives by purging the writings of Hubbard to conceal
their true goals.

I want scientology to stay under 5 on my imaginary scale.
It will be hard to stop them if they were to rise above
10. And to those on ARS who say that the wolf will always
come to the door wearing the same disguise, I say go read
some history.

Bob Minton