diane,
your wrote,
> there is, i think, a point where this compression effect produces a
> collective coherence, i'm not sure there is ever anything ambiguous about
> totalitarianism.
not all collective action is rebellion against oppression. there are
various kinds of other processes, mainly religious ones, in which
collectivities emerge. even in cases of rebellion (whether or not the
oppressor is totalitarian in that special sense that Arendt intended) there
is a diversity in the unity that usually plays itself out if (and after) the
rebellion succeeds. That is the ambiguity I was referring to . . .
> how? what new meanings emerged from the Bolshevik revolution? or the
> ultimately failed resistance in Hungary? Romania? China? the crueler truth
> is that these actions, while collective, seem to fall short of producing
> any change.
to say that the Bolshevik and the chinese revolutions (i assume you mean
the revolution that ended in 1949, not the one that ended in 1910). didn't
produce any change is incomprehensible to me, probably to the Russians and
the chinese as well. But in any event, I was referring to the events that
formed the basis of what might be called the root metaphor: say the storming
of the Winter Palace or the Potemkin in the Bolshevik case, the Long March
in the chinese. William Hinton, a quaker farmer who went to China in 1948
to teach the use of mechanized agricultural machinery, provided a great,
first-hand description of both the "spirit" of the Long March and how it
provided the basis for everything that came under the central symbol of the
early Chinese revolution, FANSHEN, which is also the title of the book he
wrote about it. One only needs to look at the USA itself to see how such
historical events (e.g, Washington's Winter at Valley Forge) get
transformed into a framework of ideals, a vocabulary of style, a grammar of
motives . . .
As to revolutions and rebellions that don't succeed, perhaps that failure
becomes a symbol fueling continued resistance -- certainly Hungary (1956)
was this. And I'm curious as to why you only mention struggles against
"communist" regimes, what about Chile, Guatemala, . . . . ?
Paul H. Dillon
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