Hannah Arendt, Nidhi Eoseewong, and the Spectre of Totalitarianism in Thailand

Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her expansive analysis of the development and spread of totalitarianism in Europe in 1951, in the aftermath of the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism, the Holocaust, and the violent destruction of life, community, and nation left both in the wake of World War II and amidst Stalinism. Her analysis rooted firmly in Europe, she commented in the preface that, "Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and selfinterest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards or other centuries." Over sixty years later, noted Thai historian Nidhi Eoseewong picked up Arendt's work to write two articles about the forms of creeping totalitarianism emergent in Thailand in the long aftermath of the 19 September 2006 coup. 2 While the points of difference between interwar Europe and present-day Thailand are as multiple as the points of resonance, the shape of totalitarianism itself is very similar. By threading his analysis of changes in Thai society over the last ten years through a reading of the chapters on the mass and dictatorship in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Nidhi provides a broad context and framework for understanding present-day developments in Thailand, which mitigate against the very isolation he and Arendt argue is a key feature of totalitarianism. In what follows, I offer an account of the current crisis in Thai politics informed by Nidhi's essays. The translation of the two short essays, "Totalitarian Dictatorship," and "The Great Mass of the People," originally published on Prachatai, an independent Thai news and commentary site, follow my account

Psychoanalysis · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology · Turkey's Politics and Society