The only “country” the world had to offer the stateless, Arendt write, was the internment camp. “The moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.” It became clear, Arendt writes, that you only had human rights if you belonged to a state - the League of Nations could not help you.

“The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in the sphere of international relationships, was being abolished.” See for yourself if any of Arendt’s warnings sound familiar: 1 - It begins with a refugee crisis…Īmong the ‘ origins’ of ‘ totalitarianism’, Arendt argues, is the fact that human rights became unenforceable when people without a state - usually persecuted minorities - became rightless: forced to leave their own state, no other community was willing to guarantee them any rights whatsoever.Īrendt traces the first cracks of a free state to the failure to help refugees: Here are some of the scariest parts of the book, that are basically a warning to future societies that racism can destroy a free state.

Most articles have focused on the totalitarianism - the book’s eerily familiar description of demagoguery, propaganda and eventually, dictatorship - but not the origins - the trends, or early stages, that evolved into the darkest moments of human history.

Arendt totalitarianism sparknotes