Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows" (Orwell, 1984, 69) Following the end of World War II, when the world discovered the Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe, their exposure brought the revelation that the Nazis had mercilessly slaughtered millions upon millions of innocents. This tragedy transformed human history, for never before had such a civilized society produced horrors of such scope and calculated ruthlessness. In response to the Holocaust, a school of philosophy emerged through the writings of George Steiner, Primo Levi, Jean Am‚ry, Hannah Arendt, and others that focused on the analysis of the horrors and excesses of Nazi Germany. Post-Holocaust thought, coupled with the atrocities committed by the Stalinist state in Russia, led to the classification of such governments as totalitarian. Included in this philosophy is a work by Hannah Arendt, entitled The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which Arendt analyzes the workings and philosophy behind such systems of government. One central aspect of Arendt's work concerns her analysis of a three stage process by which a totalitarian government destroys its citizens in order to maintain its absolut