Terror Regimes

The essence of a terror regime lies in summary justice. Under summary justice, the innocent as well as the guilty are victims; in terror regimes, the deaths of innocent victims, chosen on the basis of characteristics that no change in behavior can alter, occur on a large scale. Terror regimes are important to the study of power because according to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, rather than being the epitome of power as naked violence, a terror regime constitutes the form of government in which power is totally absent, destroyed by violence and replaced by a terror system concealed behind a state façade of seemingly normal structures and processes.

Arendt's principal focus was on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, both of which she classified as totalitarian regimes. She identified the onset of totalitarianism as occurring in Germany in 1938 and in the USSR in 1930. She considered Mussolini's Italy to have been a totalitarian dictatorship because the government ruled through the state, rather than through a parallel system of party organization, and because innocents were not deliberately targeted as victims; guilt and innocence had meaning. At the center of totalitarian regimes are terror systems with concentration camps and labor camps run by the secret police. The state has ostensible, not real power; characterized by lawlessness, it is shapelessly organized through multiple offices duplicating functions and even “fake departments,” which conceal the operations of the terror system. In the Soviet Union, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) ran the system of terror; in Germany it was run by the by the Schutzstaffel (SS).

Because of the concealment inherent to terror regimes, they are clearly identified only after their fall. Cambodia under Pol Pot reveals a picture similar to that of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. During the “zero years” from April of 1975 until January of 1979, hundreds of thousands of people met their deaths. In proportion to national population, even the lowest of the estimates, which range from 400,000 to 1.671 million, is in line with those for Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Similarly, the state was a façade: apart from the Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea of January 1976, the Khmer Rouge issued neither laws nor decrees. Government was carried out behind the state, Pol Pot himself soon dropping out of the public eye to operate under complete concealment. At the crux of the regime was Tuol Sleng, the main center for interrogation, torture, and execution in Phnom Penh and the nucleus of Norkabal, the secret police system. Other such centers were to be found at regional, district, and commune levels. The records at Tuol Sleng showed that of the 14,499 people held there between April of 1975 and the end of 1978, only four survived. Outside of Phnom Penh, victims met their deaths in mass executions carried out away from the general population.