Totalitarianism

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 first used electromagnetic energy to send messages over the telegraph, also made possible a degree of social and political control unimagined by the despots of ancient Greece and Rome.

Totalitarianism is to be seen through the historical experiences of Nazi Germany and Soviet (communist) Russia. This is because, of all the countries considered totalitarian, these two have had the greatest impact on history and had the earliest technologies for such cradle-to-grave despotism.

The main engine that drove these 20th-century despotisms was a highly centralized political party. In Germany, it was the National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP), or Nazi Party. It was the Bolshevik Party, later referred to as communist, that took control of Soviet Russia, or the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler joined the Nazi Party in September 1919, where, he later recalled, he soon became board member number 7. As Joachim C. Fest noted in Hitler, “his growing reputation as a speaker solidified his position within the party.” From the beginning, Hitler showed the talent for centralization that would later take the party to its Machtergreifung, its seizure of power in Germany. Fest said, “his ‘talent for combination' seized upon the most disparate elements and fitted them together into compact formulas.” In November 28, Hitler and his Nazi Party attempted a coup in Munich in the Beer Hall Putsch. The putsch failed and Hitler was arrested and served time in Landsberg Prison. On January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, however, and moved quickly to consolidate his power. On March 23, a law giving Hitler the legislative right to rule by decree was overwhelmingly voted in by the German parliament, or Reichstag. William L. Shirer observed in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “the one party totalitarian State had been achieved with scarcely a ripple of opposition or defiance.” With the ability to rule by decree, executive fiat, Hitler was now the effective ruler of the German people.

The German Nazi Party had taken over in a period of great turbulence, when street battles with the German communists were frequent and bloody. By appealing to the national desire for order, Hitler became chancellor. The centralized control of his party, and the willingness to use his storm troopers, the SA of Ernst Roehm, had bulldozed all opposition.

It was during similar chaos in Russia following the abdication of Tzar Nicholas II in February (new calendar March) 1917, that Vladimir Lenin was able to strike with his Bolsheviks.

...