goal of defending the nation successfully, in totalitarian regimes
this is permanent, what Hannah Arendt describes as ‘permanent
impermanence’.^4
She argues that totalitarian leaders were driven by ‘perpetual
motion mania’ to keep everything around them in a process of con-
stant change and uncertainty to secure and enhance their power. In
this way the leader could guarantee uncritical acceptance of his poli-
cies and the sacrifices he demanded from his people, particularly
in terms of their lost individual rights – their right to free speech, to
information, freedom of the press, freedom of movement, and their
freedom from arbitrary arrest.
To achieve this, two types of ultimate goal were used as the justi-
fication for mass mobilisation. The first, the achievement of certain
ideal goals, like social equality or rapid industrialisation, was used
to justify the worsening economic and social conditions. The leader
argued that if there were to be jobs for all, free education and health
care, and improvements in living standards, sacrifices had to be
made – present consumption had to be cut to invest in the future.
With everyone working to achieve such noble ideals, uncritical
acceptance of the leader ’s policies was virtually guaranteed.
But probably the most popular pretext was national defence. This
could take two forms: against the external and the internal aggres-
sor. The external aggressor in turn could be defensive or expan-
sionist. In either case it was frequently fictitious. The nation, it was
argued, faced a serious threat to its survival from a foreign power,
although this could change with the most bewildering about-turns,
as occurred in 1939 when Soviet Russia signed the non-aggression
pact with Nazi Germany.
However, this one example illustrates equally well the expansion-
ist ambitions that lie behind such pretexts, in that the 1939 pact also
divided Poland between the two totalitarian regimes. The justifica-
tion here was the supposed international plot to weaken the nation
by creating internal pressures that would ultimately lead to its break-
up. The only effective remedy, it was argued, was an expansionist
policy.
For example, the Nazi Government in Germany in the 1930s fre-
quently used the Treaty of Versailles as evidence of an international
conspiracy to contain Germany, when the rapidly rising German
population needed more, not less, territory in which to expand. This
was the policy of ‘Lebensraum’, which provided the pretext for mass
mobilisation and the series of diplomatic and military initiativesProcessing the Ideas 89HTW12 7/26/01 9:04 PM Page 89