“[A] tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis
With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, I believe that he is quite wrong about this since the Communist regimes of the late 20th century demonstrated that they could provide all the power of these omnipotent moral busybodies without any of their sincerity. I would argue that all totalitarian regimes exercise power in ways that are extremely similar to his hypothetical omnipotent moral busybodies and they only approval they seek is the continued exercise of power. Still, if we look at the strategies these oppressive rulers engage in to subjugate their citizens, I think Lewis has made an intriguing point There is no more effective totalitarian state than the one where the dictates of the security apparatus has been internalized by its citizens. In short, all totalitarian regimes find a way to turn the consciences of their citizens against themselves, while studiously avoiding having a conscience of their own.
You might be wondering, why the hell is Erin thinking about totalitarian regimes and how they oppress their people? I blame it on this little shelf above me. A guy can only spend so much time surfing the Internet. There on the shelf was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of those books that you are supposed to read (can we call it one those Books? Or at least, one of those Novels?) and truthfully, one that I had been meaning to read for a long time. And when I finished it, I saw that Lewis quote and it produced an internal dialogue that was long and complicated enough to warrant the time and effort needed to turn it into a blog post (and a good long one at that).
Since Kundera's novel was the proximate cause for this line of thought, let's start with the Communist police state (for the record, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Tom Stoppard have all written eloquently on this subject and I'm drawing from all of them). The Communist police state in action strongly resembles the more busybodies that Lewis talked about. The primary tactic applied to the population as whole is to create a culture of the surveilled, which is to say that the security apparatus is dedicated to creating institutions that give the average person the impression that they are constantly being watched. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discusses how Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon works in society. In the Panopticon (first envisioned as an ideal form of prison design by Bentham), the prisoners can all be seen by a security area at the center, but the center is opaque, so they never know when they are being observed. Since most people act in their own best interest, simple game theory calculations show that the most reasonable choice is to act as though they were always being watched (a perversion of Pascal's wager perhaps). Foucault feared the way that Western society had manifested this idea, but the Communist states took this idea and made it quite literal in applying it to their societies as a whole.
In the smaller states, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia every high profile dissident and everyone suspected of possibly being a dissident was convinced that they were being bugged and surveilled and informed on (history has shown that they were mostly right). Just in case anyone thought they could escape from the surveillance net, the regimes made examples of certain people, often they weren't particularly vocal or particularly dissident, in order to silence everyone else. This obviously has an (intentional) effect on the “normal” citizen as well (two birds, one large expensive stone). Kundera's Tereza talks about this feeling in very personal terms, comparing her experiences in Prague to her girlhood under the baleful eye of a once beautiful mother who survived the loss of her beauty by becoming old and grotesque openly and without shame and by stripping her daughter of her own right to feel shame. Tereza internalized this as an intense need for privacy and was thus constantly terrorized living in the post Prague Spring era. Kundera says that, for Tereza at least, a concentration camp is the total absence of privacy, in which case the ultimate goal of the security apparatus is to turn all of society into a concentration camp.
The overall effect of the Communist methods of subjugation (perfected over time beginning as early as 1917 under Lenin as Solzhenitsyn points out, lest anyone be tempted to blame this solely on Stalin's influence) is the same as that of a state of moral busybodies. We will get to the Nazis in a moment, but a key distinction between the Communists and the Nazis is only how they turned their citizen's consciences against themselves; both regimes made it a point of policy to do so. The Nazis had a generally a stable sense of what it was correct to believe, while Communists (both good and bad) never had any idea of what it was acceptable to believe. Maybe the Nazis would have gone this way as well, but Communism was riven from its very beginnings by disagreements and factions and a steady series of purges. Being a good Communist in 1933 was not the same as being a good Communist in 1938. This may confuse those who believe that Communists were acting rationally as a result of their ideology. Marx certainly didn't write anything new between 1933 and 1938. But Solzhenitsyn points out that these great waves of purges had a particularly chilling effect on society because the terror of the police state is most effective when no one has any idea why they were arrested. Solzhenitsyn points out that the KGB was adept at simply inventing reasons for you to be arrested and then convincing you during the interrogation that you are in fact guilty, turning their own consciences against them, usually by assuring them that if they go along with what the authorities want, they or their families will be spared. The key to understanding the success of all totalitarian regimes is understanding the extent to which the state makes a bargain with their citizens to trade their silence for their safety. The Communist regime was brutally effective at creating an atmosphere of fear and stifling a sense of community because they had no compunction about lying to, arresting, and generally bullying everyone, from the lowest citizen to the highest officials. The offered trade for safety was always false, but most people are helplessly innocent in the face of state power and they just refuse to believe that a government official would lie to them so blatantly. Note that the Communist regime is not acting in accordance with any particular ideology when it acts this way. Communism has its own set of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies and so a Communist regime will resort to Communist discourse to justify its actions, but underneath the rhetoric, we find an iron fist and an iron will to power. Words did not mean anything and they could be played with at will in the pursuit of silencing dissent, destroying a citizenry's sense of privacy (and therefore community), and generally creating an atmosphere of fear that made it possible to rule effectively.
As I mentioned earlier, the Nazis chose a slightly different tack. Instead of creating a blanket of fear through uncertainty, they enabled their regime and its goals by highlighting certainty in the calculations of personal safety. Much has been made of the silence of ordinary citizens concerning the Holocaust in Germany, both by Germans themselves in their intense introspective debates about the meaning of the Holocaust (or Shoah or Auschwitz or whatever you want to call it) and by outside observers (hence, Hitler's Willing Executioners). “But I didn't know!” is the classic cry of those who seek to justify themselves and this cry has been completely worked over in the course of the intense and long lasting debate about German history, showing how little power that phrase had in clearing anyone of guilt. It also doesn't give the Nazis enough credit for their adept manipulation of the conscience's of the average person. The Nazis co-opted their citizenry from the outset by offering a clear cut boundary. Pastor Niemoeller's classic quote lays it out: “First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew . . .” This was the bargain between the Nazis and the majority of its citizens: if you were not a Jew, then you have nothing to fear from us. If you don't help Jews or have anything to do with them, we will leave you alone and for this you will be grateful. You didn't have to agree with the Nazis beating Jews up, and you didn't have to do it yourself. All you had to do was not to look at it. From that point on, the Nazis own you, even if you don't take part in the beatings or the killings or the expropriation of property (though they did take your children and tried to make sure they took part – that's a much more effective compromise of someone's conscience after all). The Nazis have you on their side because the act of turning your back was immoral and people knew it. After all, no government that goes around beating people for one reason has any compunction about changing that reason to include you. But if the price for not getting beaten at the moment was not condemning the beating of this other guy, that is a price that most people will pay. But it creates a complicated calculus of guilt, which is undoubtedly intentional. If you didn't beat a Jew, and you didn't kill one, and you never saw the smoke from a crematorium, what reason did you have to be considered guilty was the public cry of many, but deep down, they knew that reason and the regime knew it too. The regime had purchased what it wanted from them, had used your own conscience against them by preying on this natural insecurity. Niemoeller finishes the thought of course (then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything). In other words, the Nazis also created an atmosphere of fear, removed any sense of privacy and community, and used the conscience of their citizens against themselves.
The Nazis co-opted their citizens by guaranteeing their safety and so silencing their consciences. The Communists arrested random samples of people periodically so that everyone assumed they were being spied on and could be arrested for doing something that was counterrevolutionary and since no one knew exactly what that meant, everyone's conscience became a weapon in the hands of state security. Both methods of totalitarian rule divided the people, kept them apart from themselves and never gave them the safety. You could argue that the difference in methodologies was a result in the difference in their ideologies and the end goals of the regimes, but that ignores a great big variable, which is that Communist countries perfected their tactics over the course of seventy years and the Nazi regime only lasted twelve, which is to say, the Nazis might have ended up in the same place, given enough time in power. My point is that despite these slight differences, the same effects were aimed for and achieved. Obviously the surface rhetorical and discursive strategies diverged, but in the end both regimes, and I think all totalitarian regimes, do the same things to their citizens and for the same reason, regardless of the surface rhetoric and ideological appearances. The purpose of a totalitarian regime is to exercise power in a particular way and it is always necessary to oppress their citizens to do so. Their justifications for this oppression differ (within limits) but all act to instill fear in their citizens, remove a sense of privacy at a societal level, and offer a fake bargain between safety and acquiescence which compromises the conscience of their citizens. In other words, Lewis was wrong to think that a completely oppressive society required moral busybodies who were convinced they were acting for their citizen's own good. He was right however, in sensing that a state that used the people's own good as it's justification could reach the highest heights of oppressive tyranny. There were good Communists who were true believers, and they had their uses, but true believers lack the flexibility of those who wish to remain in power, which is why the Communists had to purge them on regular basis, silencing those who would remind them of Marx's purpose, as if that were the point! Communist China is doing a wonderful job of living out this contradiction: Communism is as much a method of maintaining power as it is an ideology. Since the 1980s China has not let Marx or Mao get in the way of accruing economic strength.
C.S. Lewis is hardly alone in making the mistake of believing in the sincerity of the rhetoric of oppressive regimes rather than recognizing them as a means to an end, but nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. All totalitarian regimes fundamentally act to the same ends: terrorizing and silencing their populace by finding a way to use the conscience of the populace against itself. While true believers exist and though they help to provide the ideological and rhetorical cloak that enables totalitarian regimes, totalitarianism is fundamentally devoid of ideology. The surface rhetoric changes from regime to regime because the realities of power differ from place to place, but you will always find with such regimes that ideology is a cloak applied to the iron fist of power. Some (clueless) leaders may even believe some of the stuff they are spouting, though I have my doubts about that. Is Qaddafi really so insane that he sincerely believes the claptrap he spouts? I don't think so. Whatever the cloak, the underlying imperative of a totalitarian regime is to get and retain a certain type of power. Ideology provides a discursive reservoir for the rhetoric intended for public consumption. It's also a handy weapon against any of their citizens who make the mistake of actually believing any of it.
