Totalitarianism of Arendt and the Case of Albania

Abstract

The philosophy of Hannah Arendt in her work "The origins of totalitarianism" (1949), where she analyzes totalitarianism during and after World War II, reveals his three basic characteristics: violence, terror and ideology. All three of these elements were present, even quite evident in Albania during the communist period 1945 - 1990. Listed among the countries of the socialist camp east, under the strong influence of communist ideology, Stalinist dictatorship in Albania has been the most brutal than any other country in the east. With nearly 3 million inhabitants, the statistics show a high percentage of imprisonment, deportation, executions, reprisals against the population, especially against political opponents that did not fit with their ideology. The public and political dimension of the Albanian citizen was shocked too, under the communist. The regime truncated even the private dimension; terror and violence reached out to families. The Albanians were not free, not only within the society, but they were feeling unsure even inside their own families. Albanians were denied physical freedom and are not less but more than 25 thousand prisoners, nearly 80 thousand other political interned in work camps, with some 6 thousands people killed without trial, without mentioning the rest where hundreds of other victims traumatized, maimed or terrorized by psychological violence. Another part of the Albanian society, that was not isolated, was also feeling the same insecure and lonely, despite being formally part of the society, and felt threatened at any moment by possible punishments. Don’t all these facts above give us the right to call the 45 - year-old system in Albania a totalitarian system? The paper is an approach and analysis of these three elements in the specific conditions of Albania during the communist regime.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s1p415