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totalitarianism
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{{Short description|Extreme form of authoritarianism}}{{Distinguish|Compulsory cartel#Types of compulsory cartels{{!}}Economic totalitarianism}}{{Multiple image| total_width = 350| image1 = JStalin Secretary general CCCP 1942.jpg| image2 = Adolf Hitler cropped 2.jpg- the content below is remote from Wikipedia
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| Joseph Stalin (left), List of leaders of the Soviet Union>leader of the Soviet Union | , and Adolf Hitler (right), Führer>leader of the Nazi Germany | —considered prototypical dictators of totalitarian regimes, of the Left–right political spectrum>left and right respectively}}Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and controls the public sphere and the private sphere of society. In the field of political science, totalitarianism is the extreme form of authoritarianism, wherein all socio-political power is held by a dictator, who also controls the national politics and the peoples of the nation with continual propaganda campaigns that are broadcast by state-controlled and by friendly private mass communications media.BOOK, Robert, Conquest, Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, 1999, 0393048187, 73–74, Norton, The totalitarian government uses ideology to control most aspects of human life, such as the political economy of the country, the system of education, the arts, the sciences, and the private-life morality of the citizens. In the exercise of socio-political power, the difference between a totalitarian régime of government and an authoritarian régime of government is one of degree; whereas totalitarianism features a charismatic dictator and a fixed worldview, authoritarianism only features a dictator who holds power for the sake of holding power, and is supported, either jointly or individually, by a military junta and by the socio-economic elites who are the ruling class of the country.BOOK, Cinpoes, Radu, 2010, Nationalism and Identity in Romania: A History of Extreme Politics from the Birth of the State to EU Accession, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney, Bloomsbury, 70, 978-1848851665, DefinitionsContemporary backgroundModern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian.BOOK, Linz, Juan José, 2000, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Lynne Rienner Publisher, 143, 978-1-55587-890-0, 1172052725,books.google.com/books?id=8cYk_ABfMJIC&pg=PA143, BOOK, Jonathan Michie, 3 February 2014, Reader’s Guide to the Social Sciences, Routledge, 95, 978-1-135-93226-8,books.google.com/books?id=ip_IAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA95, Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism. In the essay “Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers” (1994) the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel said that:File:Kim Il Sung Portrait.png|thumb|Totalitarian dictator: The politician Kim Il Sung was the founding-father and leader (r. 1948–1994) of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, a (Communism|communist]] totalitarian state based on the USSR.BOOK, Suh, J.J., Origins of North Korea’s Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development, Lexington Books, 2012, 978-0-7391-7659-7,books.google.com/books?id=7dmysjj13QwC&pg=PA149, 2023-02-05, 149, )There is much confusion about what is meant by totalitarian in the literature, including the denial that such [political] systems even exist. I define a totalitarian state as one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic secret and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was thus totalitarian, as was Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s Germany, and U Ne Win’s Burma.Totalitarianism is, then, a political ideology for which a totalitarian government is the agency for realizing its ends. Thus, totalitarianism characterizes such ideologies as state socialism (as in Burma), Marxism–Leninism as in former East Germany, and Nazism. Even revolutionary Muslim Iran, since the overthrow of the Shah in 1978–79 has been totalitarian—here totalitarianism was married to Muslim fundamentalism. In short, totalitarianism is the ideology of absolute power. State socialism, Communism, Nazism, fascism, and Muslim fundamentalism have been some of its recent raiments. Totalitarian governments have been its agency. The state, with its international legal sovereignty and independence, has been its base. As will be pointed out, mortacracy is the result.BOOK, Rummel, Rudolph, 1994, Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers, Charny, Israel W., Horowitz, Irving Louis, The Widening Circle of Genocide, 3–40, 1st, Routledge, 10.4324/9781351294089-2, 9781351294089, JOURNAL, Tago, Atsushi, Wayman, Frank, January 2010, Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949–87, Journal of Peace Research, Thousand Oaks, California, SAGE Publications, 47, 1, 3–13, 10.1177/0022343309342944, 0022-3433, 25654524, 145155872,
Historical backgroundFrom the right-wing perspective, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism, which the philosopher Karl Popper said originated from humanist philosophy; from the republic (res publica) proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece (12th c. BC – 600 AD), from G.F.W. Hegel’s conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and from the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th centuryBOOK, Popper, Karl,books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Gombrich, E. H., 2013, Princeton University Press, 978-0691158136, 17 August 2021, 11 January 2022,web.archive.org/web/20220111091824/https://books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies, live, —yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute the historiographic accuracy of Popper’s 20-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State.Wild, John (1964). Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 23. “Popper is committing a serious historical error in attributing the organic theory of the State to Plato, and accusing him of all the fallacies of post–Hegelian and Marxist historicism — the theory that history is controlled by the inexorable laws governing the behaviour of superindividual social entities of which human beings and their free choices are merely subordinate manifestations.“Levinson, Ronald B. (1970). In Defense of Plato. New York: Russell and Russell. p. 20. “In spite of the high rating, one must accord his [Popper’s] initial intention of fairness, his hatred for the enemies of the ‘open society’, his zeal to destroy whatever seems, to him, destructive of the welfare of mankind, has led him into the extensive use of what may be called terminological counter-propaganda. . . . With a few exceptions in Popper’s favour, however, it is noticeable that [book] reviewers possessed of special competence in particular fields – and here Lindsay is again to be included – have objected to Popper’s conclusions in those very fields. . . . Social scientists and social philosophers have deplored his radical denial of historical causation, together with his espousal of Hayek’s systematic distrust of larger programs of social reform; historical students of philosophy have protested his [Popper’s] violent, polemical handling of Plato, Aristotle, and, particularly, Hegel; ethicists have found contradictions in the ethical theory (’critical dualism’) upon which his [anti-Modernist] polemic is largely based.“In the early 20th century, Giovanni Gentile proposed Italian Fascism as a political ideology with a philosophy that is “totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.“BOOK, Gentile, Giovanni, Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini, Benito, Benito Mussolini, 1932, La dottrina del fascismo, The Doctrine of Fascism, The Doctrine of Fascism, In 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile’s Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Fuhrerprinzip. In the mid 20th-century, the German academics Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer traced the origin of totalitarianism to the Age of Reason (17th c. – 18th c.), especially to the anthropocentrist proposition that: “Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history”, which excludes the intervention of supernatural beings to earthly politics of government.BOOK, Horkheimer, Max, Max Horkheimer,books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno, Theodor W., Theodor W. Adorno, Noeri, Gunzelin, 2002, Stanford University Press, 978-0804736336, en, 2021-08-17, 2022-01-10,web.archive.org/web/20220110122043/https://books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment, live, In the essay “The ‘Dark Forces’, the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History” (1987), by J.F. Hough,JOURNAL, Hough, Jerry F., The “Dark Forces,” the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History, The Russian Review, 1987, 46, 4, 397–403, 10.2307/130293, 130293,www.jstor.org/stable/130293, 0036-0341, and in the book The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution (2019), by Alexander Riley,BOOK,books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PA9, The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, Alexander, Riley, Alfred Kentigern, Siewers, June 18, 2019, Rowman & Littlefield, 9781793605344, Google Books, April 17, 2022, April 17, 2022,web.archive.org/web/20220417002550/https://books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjShc7Ht5n3AhXhkGoFHa8jCS0Q6AF6BAgGEAM#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false, live, the historians said that the Russian Marxist revolutionary Lenin was the first politician to establish a sovereign state of the totalitarian model.BOOK,books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PA98, Totalitarianisms: The Closed Society and Its Friends. A History of Crossed Languages, Juan Francisco, Fuentes, April 29, 2019, Ed. Universidad de Cantabria, 9788481028898, Google Books, April 17, 2022, April 17, 2022,web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjso5nU0pn3AhUXVzABHborA044ChDoAXoECAkQAw#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false, live, BOOK,books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT85, Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective, Lennard, Gerson, September 1, 2013, Hoover Press, 9780817979331, Google Books, April 17, 2022, April 17, 2022,web.archive.org/web/20220417002551/https://books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT85&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjShc7Ht5n3AhXhkGoFHa8jCS0Q6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false, live, BOOK,books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT13, Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 2: The Early Soviet Period 1917–1929, Richard, Gregor, 1974, University of Toronto Press, 9781487590116, Google Books, April 17, 2022, April 17, 2022,web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT13&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjso5nU0pn3AhUXVzABHborA044ChDoAXoECAgQAw#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false, live, As the Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini (r. 1922–1943) said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy (1922–1943) the representative Totalitarian State: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.“JOURNAL, Delzell, Charles F., Remembering Mussolini,www.jstor.org/stable/40257305, The Wilson Quarterly, 12, 2, Spring 1988, 127, Wilson Quarterly, Washington, D.C., 40257305, 2022-04-24, 2022-05-13,web.archive.org/web/20220513050107/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305, live, Retrieved April 8, 2022 Likewise, in The Concept of the Political (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish the legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader.BOOK, Carl, Schmitt, Carl Schmitt, 1927, Der Begriff des Politischen, The Concept of the Political, 0226738868, 1996, University of Chicago Press, Rutgers University Press, 22, de, American historian William Rubinstein wrote that:The ‘Age of Totalitarianism’ included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by the Jewish Holocaust, but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world, other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I, without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in the minds of unknown agitators and crackpots.BOOK, Rubinstein, W.D., {{google books, y, nMMAk4VwLLwC, |title=Genocide: a history |publisher=Pearson Education |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-582-50601-5 |page=7}}After the Second World War (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) and the terms totalitarian, totalitarianism, and totalitarian model. In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy, McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat to Western civilisation, and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by client-state proxies of the US and the USSR.BOOK, Siegel, Achim, 1998, The Totalitarian Paradigm After the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment, hardback, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 200, 978-9042005525, Concepts of totalitarianism became most widespread at the height of the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, especially since the Korean War, they were condensed into a far-reaching, even hegemonic, ideology, by which the political elites of the Western world tried to explain and even to justify the Cold War constellation., BOOK, Guilhot, Nicholas, 2005, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order, hardcover, New York City, Columbia University Press, 33, 978-0231131247, The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as ‘lies’ and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism., BOOK, Reisch, George A., 2005, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic, Cambridge University Press, 153–154, 978-0521546898, BOOK, Brook, Defty, 2007, 2. Launching the New Propaganda Policy, 1948. 3. Building a Concerted Counter-offensive: Co-operation with other powers. 4. Close and Continuous Liaison: British and American co-operation, 1950–51. 5. A Global Propaganda Offensive: Churchill and the revival of political warfare, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department, 1st paperback, London, Routledge, 978-0714683614, BOOK, Caute, David, 2010,books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95, Politics and the Novel during the Cold War, Transaction Publishers, 95–99, 978-1412831369, 2020-11-22, 2021-04-14,web.archive.org/web/20210414175538/https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95, live,Historiography
Politics of historical interpretationThe historiography of the USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history is in two schools of research and interpretation: (i) the traditionalist school of historiography and (ii) the revisionist school of historiography. Traditionalist-school historians characterise themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism inherent to Marxism, to Communism, and to the political nature of Communist states, such as the USSR. Moreover, traditionalist historians criticise the politically liberal bias they perceive in the predominance of revisionist historians in academic publishing, and claim that revisionist-school historians also over-populate the faculties of colleges, universities, and think tanks. Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school’s concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history, and so produce anti-communist history biased towards a right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts,BOOK, Haynes, John Earl, John Earl Haynes, Klehr, Harvey, Harvey Klehr, 2003, Revising History, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage, San Francisco, Encounter, 11–57, 1893554724, thus, the revisionist school dismiss traditionalist historians as the being the politically reactionary faculty of the HUAC school of scholarship about the Communist Party USA.New semanticsIn 1980, in a book review of How the Soviet Union is Governed (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that “the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of the USSR].” In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (2019), by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the USSR after Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from “the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]” as anti-Communist propaganda.BOOK, Saladdin, Ahmed, 2019, Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura, Albany, SUNY Press, 7, 978-1438472935, In the essay, “Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word” (2010), the historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because “The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. . . . Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech [word] totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? [Totalitarianism] is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old ‘theory’ from the 1950s.“JOURNAL, Connelly, John, 2010, Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 11, 4, 819–835, 10.1353/kri.2010.0001, 143510612, In Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (2022), the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way said that nascent revolutionary régimes usually became totalitarian régimes if not destroyed with a military invasion. Such a revolutionary régime begins as a social revolution independent of the existing social structures of the state (not political succession, election to office, or a military coup d’état) and produces a dictatorship with three functional characteristics: (i) a cohesive ruling class comprising the military and the political élites, (ii) a strong and loyal coercive apparatus of police and military forces to suppress dissent, and (iii) the destruction of rival political parties, organisations, and independent centres of socio-political power. Moreover, the unitary functioning of the characteristics of totalitarianism allow a totalitarian government to perdure against economic crises (internal and external), large-scale failures of policy, mass social-discontent, and political pressure from other countries.BOOK, Steven, Levitsky, Way, Lucan, 13 September 2022, Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism, Princeton University Press, 978-0691169521, Some totalitarian one-party states were established through coups orchestrated by military officers loyal to a vanguard party that advanced socialist revolution, such as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1962),BOOK, Rummel, R.J., Widening circle of genocide, 1994, Transaction Publishers, Charney, Israel W., 5, Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers., Syrian Arab Republic (1963),Sources:
PoliticsEarly usages
Cold WarFile:Hannah Arendt 1933.jpg|thumb|Anti-totalitarian: Hannah Arendt thwarted the totalitarian model Kremlinologists who sought to co-opt the thesis of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as American anti–Communist propaganda that claimed that every Communist state was of the totalitarian model.]]In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of a military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers’ acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism (Law of History) or by an appeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus.BOOK, Villa, Dana Richard, 2000, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, Cambridge University Press, 2–3, 0521645719,
Totalitarian modelIn the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism, totalitarian, and totalitarian model, presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in the foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology, the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the politburo crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with the USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country.BOOK, Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Friedrich, Carl, Carl Joachim Friedrich, 1956, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Harvard University Press, 978-0674332607, As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:
Criticism of the totalitarian modelFile:Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1977.jpg|thumb|upright|Anti-totalitarian: the American political scientist Zbigniew BrzezinskiZbigniew BrzezinskiAs traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that the totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper.Brzezinski & Friedrich 1956, p.22. Revisionist historians noted the historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into the nomenklatura, the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of the USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy.BOOK, Laqueur, Walter, Walter Laqueur, 1987, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, New York, Scribner’s, 186–189, 233–234, 978-0684189031, The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state.BOOK, Kershaw, Ian, Ian Kershaw, 2000, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London; New York, Arnold; Oxford University Press, 25, 978-0340760284, 43419425, That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State. Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and the Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of collective leadership. The American historian Walter Laqueur agreed that Bracher’s totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski.BOOK, Laqueur, Walter, Walter Laqueur, 1987, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, New York, Scribner’s, 241, 978-0684189031, {{multiple image| total_width = 350| image1 = Hafez al-Assad official portrait.jpg| image2 = Al-Assad 2022 (cropped).jpeg | Syria) has been ruled by the generational dictatorships of Hafez al-Assad (r. 1971–2000) and his son Bashar al-Assad (r. 2000 – ) since the late Cold War of the 1970s.KHAMIS, B. GOLD, VAUGHN | TITLE=THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PROPAGANDA STUDIES | YEAR=2013 | EDITOR-LAST=AUERBACH, CASTRONOVO | LOCATION=198 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10016 | CHAPTER=22. PROPAGANDA IN EGYPT AND SYRIA’S “CYBERWARS”: CONTEXTS, ACTORS, TOOLS, AND TACTICS, WEDEEN >FIRST=LISA | PUBLISHER=UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS | ISBN=978-0-226-33337-3 | PAGES= | DOI=10.7208/CHICAGO/978022345536.001.0001 | TITLE=CREATING CONSENT IN BA’THIST SYRIA: WOMEN AND WELFARE IN A TOTALITARIAN STATE | YEAR=2016 | PAGES=, }}In Democracy and Totalitarianism (1968) the political scientist Raymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:
Post–Cold WarFile:Ambassador Nura Abba Rimi & President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea (cropped).jpg|thumb|upright|President Isaias Afwerki has ruled (Eritrea]] as a totalitarian dictator since the country’s independence in 1993.JOURNAL, Saad, Asma, 21 February 2018,mjps.ssmu.ca/2018/02/21/eritreas-silent-totalitarianism/, Eritrea’s Silent Totalitarianism, McGill Journal of Political Studies, 21, 7 August 2020, 7 October 2018,web.archive.org/web/20181007040952/https://mjps.ssmu.ca/2018/02/21/eritreas-silent-totalitarianism/, live, )File:AQMI Flag asymmetric.svg|thumb|Flag of the Islamic State, which is a self-proclaimed caliphate that demands the religious, political, and military obedience of Muslims worldwide ]]Laure Neumayer posited that “despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War.“BOOK, Neumayer, Laure, Laure Neumayer, 2018, The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War, Routledge, 9781351141741, In the 1990s, François Furet made a comparative analysisJOURNAL, Schönpflug, Daniel, 2007, Histoires croisées: François Furet, Ernst Nolte and a Comparative History of Totalitarian Movements, European History Quarterly, 37, 2, 265–290, 10.1177/0265691407075595, 143074271, and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism.MAGAZINE, Singer, Daniel, Daniel Singer (journalist), 17 April 1995, The Sound and the Furet,www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer, dead, The Nation,web.archive.org/web/20080317075608/https://www.thenation.com/doc/19950417/singer, 17 March 2008, 7 August 2020, Furet, borrowing from Hannah Arendt, describes Bolsheviks and Nazis as totalitarian twins, conflicting yet united., MAGAZINE, Singer, Daniel, Daniel Singer (journalist), 2 November 1999,www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/, Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir, The Nation, 7 August 2020, ... the totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Russia is undeniable., 26 July 2019,web.archive.org/web/20190726020527/https://www.thenation.com/article/exploiting-tragedy-or-le-rouge-en-noir/, live, WEB,www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html, Nazi Fascism and the Modern Totalitarian State, Grobman, Gary M., 1990, Remember.org, 7 August 2020, The government of Nazi Germany was a fascist, totalitarian state., 2 April 2015,www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html," title="web.archive.org/web/20150402073405www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html,">web.archive.org/web/20150402073405www.remember.org/guide/Facts.root.nazi.html, live, Eric Hobsbawm criticised Furet for his temptation to stress the existence of a common ground between two systems with different ideological roots.BOOK, Hobsbawm, Eric, Eric Hobsbawm, 2012, Revolutionaries, History and Illusion, Abacus, 978-0349120560, In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, Žižek wrote that “[t]he liberating effect” of General Augusto Pinochet’s arrest “was exceptional”, as “the fear of Pinochet dissipated, the spell was broken, the taboo subjects of torture and disappearances became the daily grist of the news media; the people no longer just whispered, but openly spoke about prosecuting him in Chile itself.“BOOK, Žižek, Slavoj, Slavoj Žižek, 2002, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion, London and New York, Verso, 169, 9781859844250, Saladdin Ahmed cited Hannah Arendt as stating that “the Soviet Union can no longer be called totalitarian in the strict sense of the term after Stalin’s death”, writing that “this was the case in General August Pinochet’s Chile, yet it would be absurd to exempt it from the class of totalitarian regimes for that reason alone.” Saladdin posited that while Chile under Pinochet had no “official ideology”, there was one man who ruled Chile from “behind the scenes”, “none other than Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism and the most influential teacher of the Chicago Boys, was Pinochet’s adviser.” In this sense, Saladdin criticised the totalitarian concept because it was only being applied to “opposing ideologies” and it was not being applied to liberalism.In the early 2010s, Richard Shorten, Vladimir Tismăneanu, and Aviezer Tucker posited that totalitarian ideologies can take different forms in different political systems but all of them focus on utopianism, scientism, or political violence. They posit that Nazism and Stalinism both emphasised the role of specialisation in modern societies and they also saw polymathy as a thing of the past, and they also stated that their claims were supported by statistics and science, which led them to impose strict ethical regulations on culture, use psychological violence, and persecute entire groups.BOOK, Shorten, Richard, 2012, Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present, Palgrave, 978-0230252073, BOOK, Tismăneanu, Vladimir, 2012, The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, University of California Press, 978-0520954175, BOOK, Tucker, Aviezer, 2015, The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework, Cambridge University Press, 978-1316393055, Their arguments have been criticised by other scholars due to their partiality and anachronism. Juan Francisco Fuentes treats totalitarianism as an “invented tradition” and he believes that the notion of “modern despotism” is a “reverse anachronism”; for Fuentes, “the anachronistic use of totalitarian/totalitarianism involves the will to reshape the past in the image and likeness of the present.“JOURNAL, Fuentes, Juan Francisco, 2015, How Words Reshape the Past: The ‘Old, Old Story of Totalitarianism, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 16, 2–3, 282–297, 10.1080/21567689.2015.1084928, 155157905, Other studies try to link modern technological changes to totalitarianism. According to Shoshana Zuboff, the economic pressures of modern surveillance capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action.BOOK, Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs, 2019, 978-1610395694, New York, 1049577294, Toby Ord believed that George Orwell’s fears of totalitarianism constituted a notable early precursor to modern notions of anthropogenic existential risk, the concept that a future catastrophe could permanently destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life due in part to technological changes, creating a permanent technological dystopia. Ord said that Orwell’s writings show that his concern was genuine rather than just a throwaway part of the fictional plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 1949, Orwell wrote that “[a] ruling class which could guard against (four previously enumerated sources of risk) would remain in power permanently.“BOOK, Ord, Toby, 2020, Future Risks, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Bloomsbury Publishing, 978-1526600196, That same year, Bertrand Russell wrote that “modern techniques have made possible a new intensity of governmental control, and this possibility has been exploited very fully in totalitarian states.“JOURNAL, Clarke, R., 1988, Information Technology and Dataveillance, Communications of the ACM, 31, 5, 498–512, 10.1145/42411.42413, 6826824, free, In 2016, The Economist described China’s developed Social Credit System under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping’s administration, to screen and rank its citizens based on their personal behavior, as totalitarian.NEWS,www.economist.com/briefing/2016/12/17/china-invents-the-digital-totalitarian-state, China invents the digital totalitarian state, The Economist, 17 December 2017, 14 September 2018, 14 September 2018,web.archive.org/web/20180914200819/https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/12/17/china-invents-the-digital-totalitarian-state, live, Opponents of China’s ranking system say that it is intrusive and it is just another tool which a one-party state can use to control the population. Supporters say that it will transform China into a more civilised and law-abiding society.NEWS, Leigh, Karen, Lee, Dandan, 2 December 2018, China’s Radical Plan to Judge Each Citizen’s Behavior,www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-radical-plan-to-judge-each-citizens-behavior/2018/12/02/0a281258-f69b-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html,web.archive.org/web/20190102090447/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/chinas-radical-plan-to-judge-each-citizens-behavior/2018/12/02/0a281258-f69b-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html, dead, 2 January 2019, The Washington Post, 23 January 2020, Shoshana Zuboff considers it instrumentarian rather than totalitarian.JOURNAL, Lucas, Rob, January–February 2020, The Surveillance Business,newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business, New Left Review, 121, 23 March 2020, 21 June 2020,web.archive.org/web/20200621022016/https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business, live, Other emerging technologies that could empower future totalitarian regimes include brain-reading, contact tracing, and various applications of artificial intelligence.JOURNAL, Brennan-Marquez, K., 2012, A Modest Defence of Mind Reading,yjolt.org/modest-defense-mind-reading, Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 15, 214, 2020-08-10,web.archive.org/web/20200810195039/https://yjolt.org/modest-defense-mind-reading, live, NEWS, Pickett, K., 16 April 2020, Totalitarianism: Congressman calls method to track coronavirus cases an invasion of privacy,www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/totalitarianism-congressman-calls-method-to-track-coronavirus-cases-an-invasion-of-privacy, Washington Examiner, 23 April 2020, 22 April 2020,web.archive.org/web/20200422082819/https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/totalitarianism-congressman-calls-method-to-track-coronavirus-cases-an-invasion-of-privacy, live, BOOK, Helbing, Dirk, Frey, Bruno S., Gigerenzer, Gerd, Hafen, Ernst, Hagner, Michael, Hofstetter, Yvonne, van den Hoven, Jeroen, Zicari, Roberto V., Zwitter, Andrej, Towards Digital Enlightenment, Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?, 2019, 73–98, 10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_7, 978-3-319-90868-7, 46925747,pure.rug.nl/ws/files/111453647/Helbing2019_Chapter_WillDemocracySurviveBigDataAnd.pdf, live,web.archive.org/web/20220526083948/https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/111453647/Helbing2019_Chapter_WillDemocracySurviveBigDataAnd.pdf, 2022-05-26, (also published in BOOK, Helbing, D., Frey, B. S., Gigerenzer, G., etal, 2019, Will democracy survive big data and artificial intelligence?, Towards Digital Enlightenment: Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution, Springer, Cham., 73–98, 978-3319908694, )JOURNAL, Turchin, Alexey, Denkenberger, David, 19208453, Classification of global catastrophic risks connected with artificial intelligence, AI & Society, 3 May 2018, 35, 1, 147–163, 10.1007/s00146-018-0845-5,philarchive.org/rec/TURCOG-2, Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that there is a possible trade-off, namely that some existential risks might be mitigated by the establishment of a powerful and permanent world government, and in turn the establishment of such a government could enhance the existential risks which are associated with the rule of a permanent dictatorship.JOURNAL, Bostrom, Nick, Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority, Global Policy, February 2013, 4, 1, 15–31, 10.1111/1758-5899.12002, North Korea is the only country in East Asia to survive totalitarianism after the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and handed over to his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un in 2011, as of today in the 21st century.Religious totalitarianismIslamicFile:Flag of the Taliban.svg|thumb|Flag of the Taliban ]]The Taliban is a totalitarian Sunni Islamist militant group and political movement in Afghanistan that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet–Afghan War and the end of the Cold War. It governed most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and returned to power in 2021, controlling the entirety of Afghanistan. Features of its totalitarian governance include the imposition of Pashtunwali culture of the majority Pashtun ethnic group as religious law, the exclusion of minorities and non-Taliban members from the government, and extensive violations of women’s rights.*JOURNAL, Sakhi, Nilofar, The Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan and Security Paradox, Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, December 2022, 9, 3, 383–401, 10.1177/23477970221130882, 253945821, Afghanistan is now controlled by a militant group that operates out of a totalitarian ideology.,
Christian{{See also|National Catholicism}}File:RETRATO DEL GRAL. FRANCISCO FRANCO BAHAMONDE (adjusted levels).jpg|thumb|250x250px|Portrait of Francisco FrancoFrancisco FrancoFrancoist Spain (1936–1975), under the dictator Francisco Franco, has been characterized as a totalitarian state until at least the 1950s by scholars. Franco was portrayed as a fervent Catholic and a staunch defender of Catholicism, the declared state religion.BOOK, Viñas, Ãngel,dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=511206, En el combate por la historia: la República, la guerra civil, el franquismo, 2012, Pasado y Presente, 978-8493914394, es, 2020-09-15, 2020-10-05,web.archive.org/web/20201005174834/https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=511206, live, Civil marriages that had taken place in the Republic were declared null and void unless they had been validated by the Church, along with divorces. Divorce, contraception and abortions were forbidden.WEB, Franco edicts,search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif, dead,search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif," title="web.archive.org/web/20080626065607search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif,">web.archive.org/web/20080626065607search.boe.es/datos/imagenes/BOE/1954/198/A04862.tif, 26 June 2008, 16 December 2005, According to historian Stanley G. Payne, Franco had more day-to-day power than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin possessed at the respective heights of their power. Payne noted that Hitler and Stalin at least maintained rubber-stamp parliaments, while Franco dispensed with even that formality in the early years of his rule. According to Payne, the lack of even a rubber-stamp parliament made Franco’s government “the most purely arbitrary in the world.“BOOK, Payne, Stanley G., The Franco Regime, 1936–1975, 1987, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 978-0-299-11070-3, 323 f–324,books.google.com/books?id=mgDWLYcTYIAC&pg=PA323, However, from 1959 to 1974 the “Spanish Miracle” took place under the leadership of technocrats, many of whom were members of Opus Dei and a new generation of politicians that replaced the old Falangist guard.Jensen, Geoffrey. “Franco: Soldier, Commander, Dictator”. Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005. p. 110-111. Reforms were implemented in the 1950s and Spain abandoned autarky, reassigning economic authority from the isolationist Falangist movement.WEB,www.forbes.com/sites/timreuter/2014/05/19/before-chinas-transformation-there-was-the-spanish-miracle/#f5da6133b3e1, Before China’s Transformation, There Was The ‘Spanish Miracle’, Forbes Magazine, 22 August 2017, 19 May 2014, Tim, Reuter, 24 December 2019,web.archive.org/web/20191224061157/https://www.forbes.com/sites/timreuter/2014/05/19/before-chinas-transformation-there-was-the-spanish-miracle/#f5da6133b3e1, live, This led to massive economic growth that lasted until the mid-1970s, known as the “Spanish miracle”. This is comparable to De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, where Francoist Spain changed from being openly totalitarian to an authoritarian dictatorship with a certain degree of economic freedom.Payne (2000), p. 645The city of Geneva under John Calvin’s leadership has also been characterised as totalitarian by scholars.BOOK, Bernholz, P., Totalitarianism, Terrorism and Supreme Values: History and Theory, Springer International Publishing, Studies in Public Choice, 2017, 978-3-319-56907-9,books.google.com/books?id=dyYmDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA33, 2023-02-28, 33, BOOK, Congleton, R.D., Grofman, B.N., Voigt, S., The Oxford Handbook of Public Choice, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, Oxford Handbooks, 2018, 978-0-19-046974-0,books.google.com/books?id=wLh9DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA860, 2023-02-28, 860, BOOK, Maier, H., Schäfer, M., Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume II: Concepts for the Comparison Of Dictatorships, Taylor & Francis, Totalitarianism Movements and Political Religions, 2007, 978-1-134-06346-8,books.google.com/books?id=L4d8AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA264, 2023-02-28, 264,Revisionist school of Soviet-period history
See also
References{{reflist}}Notes{{notelist}}Further reading{{div col}}
External links{{Wiktionary|totalitarianism}}
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