Thinking, Totalitarianism, and Tribunals: The Notion of Responsibility in Repressive Regimes

Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on totalitarian regimes. For her, such a political development becomes possible particularly because people abrogate their faculty of thinking. Totalitarianism, in turn, breeds conformity, engenders an ethics of alienation. Moreover, language, too, loses its hermeneutical ability to conjure up other possible, alternative, imaginative scenarios, as the regime clamps down on the use of words and phrases, creating a rhetorically univocal echo chamber from which it becomes increasingly more difficult to escape. The observations of Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist, corroborates Arendt’s reflections, underscoring her perennial relevance on this matter.