THE TERM totalitarian was first used in Italy, where Fascist Party thinkers suggested that the total nation should be devoted to the same political goal. That principle lay behind the effort common in all of the totalitarian regimes to dominate youth organizations, the educational establishment, news and entertainment media, labor unions, and other organizations to institute party control. Although some such measures reflected the leftist concept of state socialism, the resultant regimes were authoritarian and ruthlessly suppressed individual liberty and ideological deviation from the official line.

Totalitarianism is the form of dictatorship that emphasizes total control of the lives of the people it abuses. It is one of the ironies of history that the very technological progress of the past 140 years, since Samuel F.B. Morse ...