Review of "Chronicles of Totalitarianism 2021"

By Elisabeth Audrerie in Politique magazine

Ariane Bilheran, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology, specializes in the study of manipulation, power deviations, perversion, paranoia, harassment and totalitarianism, and has published numerous works in her field of expertise.

Currently living in Colombia, she was one of the first to point out, in March 2020, at the beginning of the lockdown linked to the emergence of the famous Covid, that from the point of view of political philosophy, we were facing a totalitarian drift and, from the psychopathological point of view, a paranoiac delusion.

Like a war reporter, to use the expression of her preface writer Slobodan Despot, she has published numerous chronicles, given several conferences, intervened as an expert in different symposiums, juries, organizations, to dissect and analyze the forces at play, and give us the keys to understanding and resisting what was an incomprehensible tidal wave for rational minds attached to freedom and truth.

Some of these chronicles and interventions are grouped together in this work and, like a logbook, they enlighten us and remind us, from different angles, of the mechanisms at work leading to millions of people finding themselves under the yoke of paradoxical injunctions, harassed or transformed into petty informers and police chiefs, to the leitmotif of an ideology whose end justified all means.

The political and psychological angle of perversion and paranoia

The word totalitarian is frightening and leads to denial, because it refers to periods of history or other geographical locations that make us hide the present, or at least blur the keys to reading it. However, all the foundations of totalitarianism that have been analyzed and deciphered in particular by Hannah Arendt, abundantly cited in these chronicles, its effects, its implementation, are easily and frighteningly applicable in this matter.

Ariane Bilheran is not afraid of words and has never stopped warning against the tragic consequences for humanity that such methods taken to the extreme could cause. Corruption of language, distortion of reality, scapegoating, destruction of family ties, permanent agitation of fear, use of paradoxical language, dehumanization, strategy of divisions, interference in daily life, harassment, tracking, conflicts of loyalty, censorship, ostracism from social life, are all elements that populations have had to face and against which they have been, for the vast majority, incapable of resisting, so sudden and violent was the traumatic shock and the mechanisms of collective paranoia implemented with terrifying speed.

This book is not a treatise and does not claim to cover the whole issue. However, it has the immense merit of acting as a memorial and of analyzing from a political and psychological angle the perversion and paranoia that are often the corollaries of the exercise of power and how they can be embodied so easily in peoples who, if they have lost all emotional, intellectual and transcendental depth, all quest for truth, are quite incapable of resisting them, or even contribute to their contagion.