Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system in which people have nearly no independent social or civil rights. They are completely dominated by a powerfully encompassing government. Totalitarianism uses fear and force, as well as strict norms and conventions developed by an ideological apparatus and explicit propaganda, as forms of power to dominate society, so that all political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural beliefs, preferences, and activities are decided by the state. In a totalitarian state, democracy does not exist. Totalitarian ideas oppose democracy and are cynical about its intentions.

Totalitarianism is seen as a movement particular to the 20th century, when its political structure was developed; the term totalitarianism was first applied to the regime of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Totalitarianism is conceptually tied to the fascist and the socialist regimes of Nazism and communism in Germany and the Soviet Union, respectively. They are philosophically similar in that both claim to be universal, to offer a secular substitute for religion, and that their new moral order can save the nation from corruption. Most important, they overpower the existing state order and destroy the customs and traditions of a nation. The term has been applied to other regimes, including national socialist regimes in Argentina, the dictatorship in Chile, and to Franco's Spain, as well as to Mao's China and the regime in North Korea. However, none of these achieved the same force as in the classic totalitarian regimes, which perhaps only applies to the latter. In many respects totalitarianism as a social-scientific concept only really applies to Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. The term takes on an explanatory as well as a descriptive status for many writers in the 1950s and 1960s.

The ideology of the Nazi regime was created by Adolf Hitler, who stressed mandatory individual subordination to the state and strict obedience to its totalitarian leadership. He believed that Germans—so-called Aryans—were the superior “race,” and that members of other races, including Slavs but most especially those of Jewish descent, were inferior to the extent that Germany had an obligation to commit genocide against the Jewish population as well as Gypsies and other “undesirables.” He believed in the need to spread this ideology to other nations, thus invoking conflict and war with neighboring countries.

Communism in the Soviet Union was inspired by the works of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. Marx argued that contradictions in capitalism would lead to its downfall through a workers' revolution. Marx thought that greed, competition, and fear would be eliminated by creating a society of cooperation with shared goods and services. He believed that under a communist regime the people would be empowered to produce an excess of goods that could be shared among all. Private property, social class divisions, and unequal distributions of wealth and power would not exist.

Totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism, despotism, tyranny, and dictatorships because it permits only a single political party. It is more ideological. According to Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz and Alfred Wayne Penn, we can see in totalitarian regimes what they call an ideocracy, a term that encompasses all political systems that seek to legitimize themselves by an all-inclusive utopian ideology. A totalitarian state attempts to impose its ideology through its proclamation of supreme values. It uses it spiritual and secular power to persuade the people and to dominate the largest sector of the state.

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