426
DANIEL
BELL
sophy), the end of the "categorical logic of language" which unites
words and the world. Reality is now set afloat, to be grotesque or
absurd, a self-contained "game" in which the function of the rules
is
to disguise, not to bound, events. One finds this not only among the
Nazis, but in the most variegated areas of life where the purpose is
to avoid the direct confrontation with ugly experience. In his description
of the "Cosa Nostra," Joseph Valachi remarked on the witness stand:
"Genovese told me that Bender had disappeared ." "Did you take that
to mean that Bender had been killed?" asked Senator McClellan.
Valachi nodded and said, " It meant in our language that he had
ordered his death."
But a disguise is not enough. Ordinary men have to feel some
sense of higher purpose to engage in such conscience-provoking acts,
and the function of the slogans and catch-phrases, such as "the battle of
destiny" (which Eichmann called "winged words") was to submerge
the sense of individual responsibility in some cosmic enterprise. "What
stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was
simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose,
unique ('a great task that occurs once in two thousand years'), which
must therefore be difficult to bear."
It
is the same device that Bert
Brecht used explicitly in
Die Massnahme,
which he wrote shortly after
becoming a Communist in 1930 ("What vileness would you not commit
to root out the vile. . .. Sink down in the slime/Embrace the butcher
/But change the world....") to justify the murder of weak-kneed
comrades.
The point of all this-the heart of the argument-is that ordinary
men, men like Eichmann, can easily become part of a system which will
wipe out entire populations as superfluous, not in the manner of the
Mongol hordes ( there, at least, a primitive utilitarianism was at work)
but as a projection of unconscious impulses onto secular ideologies.
Lacking any restraint, "everything is possible" to men in the pursuit of
an Idea.
At stake is the meaning of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not
just the pulverization of private life, the destruction of society by the
State, so to speak-this is never wholly possible, and soon breaks down
-but the creation of an ideology-"Race" or "History" speaking through
the Fuehrer or the Party-which serves as the rule of higher law.
Old-fashioned despotism was the arbitrary will of a single man with
no legitimation beyond superior force or tradition. The strength of
totalitarian movements consists in creating a legitimation which over–
rides not only ordinary morality about lying, cheating, stealing but
