Pan-Slav anti-Western aestheticism helped prepare Europe’s ground for totalitarianism

Evidence

To the Pan-Slav who always insisted on die so much more “interesting” conditions in Russia against the shallow boredom of civilized countries, it looked as though the Divine had found an intimate immanence in the soul of the unhappy Russian people, matched nowhere else on earth. In an unending stream of literary variations the Pan-Slavs opposed the profundity and violence of Russia to the superficial banality of the West, which did not know suffering or the meaning of sacrifice, and behind whose sterile civilized surface were hidden frivolity and triteness. The totalitarian movements still owed much of their appeal to this vague and embittered antiWestern mood that was especially in vogue in pre-Hitler Germany and Austria, but had seized the general European intelligentsia of the twenties as well. Up to the moment of actual seizure of power, they could use this passion for the profound and rich “irrational,” and during the crucial years when the exiled Russian intelligentsia exerted a not negligible influence upon the spiritual mood of an entirely disturbed Europe, this purely literary attitude proved to be a strong emotional factor in preparing the ground for totalitarianism. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 626

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The ‘profundity of the East vs. banality of the West’ discourse is a prototype of the cultural essentialism the Islamophobia field examines in Orientalism.
• QUESTION: How directly does Arendt trace this ‘anti-Western mood’ into the intellectual preconditions for fascism? Want to compare with Said on Orientalism’s own genealogy.

Related

• Bureaucratic chaos and anti-Western irrationalism emotionally prepared Europe for totalitarianism (similarity 0.86)
• Pan-Slavism fused xenophobia with a claim to universal salvation (similarity 0.79)
• Pan-Germanism punished non-members with contempt while Pan-Slavism assumed every Slav had the soul regardless (similarity 0.78)