Totalitarianism
In the early 1920s Mussolini was amongst the first fascists to refer approvingly to the newlyemerging Italian Fascist state as 'totalitarian'. During the late 1950s and the early 1960s -particularly in a Cold War fixated America - a theory centred on totalitarianism became thedominant academic narrative on both fascism and communism.This was in good part due to its use in legitimising certain anti-communist conservative politicalaims of the Cold War (by associating communism with the universally hated Nazism) and anassociated solid support in the western popular media which fastened on to this easy tounderstand model and repeated it ad nausium. The correct interpretation of its nazi pastbecame a potent ideological weapon in the propaganda war, with historians on both sidesembroiled in a heavily charged political debate as to whether Nazism was either an expressionof big business (and therefore chiefly a capitalist and liberal phenomenon), or a variety of'totalitarian' regime still expressed in East German 'communism'.This historical revisionism was to return in another guise in 1986 with the so calledhistorikerstreit ('historians battle') Sparked off by the text of a lecture to be given by Ernst Nolte
Even the routine use of terror becomes legitimised in the rigorous execution of apparentlyobjective laws. For all the apparent openness and democracy of this liberal market-based system, individualshave very little control over decisions which affect their vital interests becoming 'sublimatedslaves' under an insidious form of 'totalitarian' control. the conditions necessary to produce thesethree factors developed in Europe, with World War I providing the catalyst necessary to activatetheir full potential both in the defeated nations and those states impoverished by the costs ofwar. As a result they were wide open to a varietyof utopian and dystopian appeals. it seems to me that the depiction of nazism as a 'totalitarian system' are best avoided,not simply because of the inescapable political colouring attached to the label'totalitarian', but because of the weighty conceptual problems which the term poses. - examples of which include Sparta, the Empire of Diocletian andCalvin's Geneva.
Common topics in this essay:
World War,
Friedrich Brzezinski,
Eros Civilization,
Soviet Gulags,
Cold War,
Dictatorship Autocracy,
Marxist Neumann,
Deitrich Bracher,
Soviet Union,
Interpretations Fascism,
carl friedrich,
totalitarian theory,
nineteenth century,
atomisation individualisation,
friedrich zbigniew,
carl friedrich zbigniew,
cambridge mass,
totalitarian dictatorship autocracy,
beneath surface,
movements regimes,
liberal democracy,
cats grey,
friedrich zbigniew brzezinski,
mainstream totalitarian theory,
level abstraction cats,
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Acceptance Essays
