PARTISAN REVIEW
regime becomes more secured, and accordingly concentration camps
are expanded as political opposition decreases.
4
Totalitarian de–
mands do not seem to be satisfied by political success in establishing
a one-party state, and it seems as though political opposition were by
no means the cause of terror but rather a barrier to its full develop–
ment. This seems absurd only if we apply to modern totalitarian
movements those standards of utility which they themselves expressly
reject as obsolete, sentimental, and bourgeois.
If
on the contrary we ·take totalitarian aspirations seriously and
refuse to be misled by the common-sense assertion that they are
utopian and unrealizable, it develops that the society of the dying
established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is
possible to dominate man entirely. Those who aspire to total domina–
tion must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere existence of
individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most
private forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may
seem. Pavlov's dog, the human specimen
reduc~d
,to the most ele–
mentary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liqui–
dated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in
exactly the same way, is the model "citizen" of a totalitarian state;
and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the
camps.
The uselessness of the camps, their cynically admitted antiutility,
is only apparent. In reality they are more essential to the preservation
of the regime's power than any of its other institutions. \Vithout
concentration camps, without the undefined fear they inspire and the
very well-defined training they offer in totalitarian domination, which
has nowhere else been fully tested with all of its most radical possi–
bilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire its nuclear troops with
fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in complete apathy. The
dominating and the dominated would only too quickly sink back
into the "old bourgeois routine"; after early "excesses," they would
succumb to everyday life with its human laws; in short, they would
develop in the direction which all observers counseled by common
swse were so prone to predict. The tragic fallacy of all these proph–
ecies originating in a world that was still safe, was to suppose that
there was such a thing as one human nature established for all time,
to identify this human nature with history and thus declare that the
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