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Totalitarianism: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Totalitarianism
The word totalitarian was first used in the early 1920s to describe the Italian Fascist regime, yet it would eventually become the defining label for the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. In 1923, the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a regime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power. This definition was quickly co-opted by the Fascists themselves, with the theoretician Giovanni Gentile ascribing politically positive meanings to the ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defense of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. Mussolini summarized the goal of his regime with the epigram: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. The concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after which it became accepted, at least until 1941, to present Stalin and Hitler as twin dictators and call Nazism brown Bolshevism and Stalinism red Fascism. The label totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of the 5th of October 1938 before the House of Commons, in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to a Communist or a Nazi tyranny. The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reich invaded the USSR, and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as valiant freedom-loving ally in the war. Among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film Mission to Moscow in 1943, based on the 1941 book of the same name. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British historian E. H. Carr said that the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable in the decolonising countries of Eurasia. That revolutionary Marxism-Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialization from 1929 to 1941 and the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945 that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only the blind and incurable ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay Why I Write in 1946, the socialist George Orwell said, the Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use the mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
Common questions
Who first defined the term totalitarianism in 1923?
The anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a regime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power. This definition was quickly co-opted by the Fascists themselves, with the theoretician Giovanni Gentile ascribing politically positive meanings to the ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defense of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy.
When did Winston Churchill use the word totalitarian in a speech to the House of Commons?
The label totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of the 5th of October 1938 before the House of Commons, in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency.
What years did Benito Mussolini lead Fascist Italy as a totalitarian state?
As the Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943 the representative Totalitarian State. The term totalitarian became used by the Fascists themselves, and the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defense of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy.
Why did the concept of totalitarianism become abandoned in 1941?
The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reich invaded the USSR, and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as valiant freedom-loving ally in the war. Among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film Mission to Moscow in 1943, based on the 1941 book of the same name.
Which historians argued that the Soviet Union was not a totalitarian state?
Historians like Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. The historian Robert Service in his biography of Stalin wrote that this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes.
For influential philosopher Karl Popper, the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of Modernism, which Popper said originated in humanist philosophy. In the Republic proposed by Plato in Ancient Greece, in Hegel's conception of the State as a polity of peoples, and in the political economy of Karl Marx in the 19th century, Popper traced the roots of the modern totalitarian state. Yet historians and philosophers of those periods dispute the historiographic accuracy of Popper's 20th-century interpretation and delineation of the historical origins of totalitarianism, because, for example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato did not invent the modern State. Wild, John in 1964 wrote that Popper is committing a serious historical error in attributing the organic theory of the State to Plato, and accusing him of all the fallacies of post-Hegelian and Marxist historicism. Popper's approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation and as an ahistorical attempt to present totalitarianism and liberalism not as products of historical development, but as eternal and timeless categories of humankind itself. There were similar ideocratic attempts in traditions of the Counter-Enlightenment to trace totalitarianism back to the times preceding the 20th century. Eric Voegelin saw totalitarianism as the journey's end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology, an epilogue of the process of secularization which began with the Reformation and led to a world deprived of any religiosity. Jacob Talmon thought totalitarianism to be a merger of left-wing radical democracy from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre and François-Noël Babeuf and right-wing irrationalism from Johann Gottlieb Fichte as traditions opposed to empirical liberalism. The German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno viewed totalitarianism as an ineluctable destiny of modernity rooted in the origins of the Western civilization and as the ultimate end of the evolution of the Enlightenment from emancipatory reason to instrumental rationality. Enzo Traverso believes that the idea of total state, or totalitarian state as it would be called later, came from the concept of total war which was used to describe World War I by its contemporaries. The war shaped the imagination of an entire generation by rationalizing nihilism and methodical destruction of the enemy, introducing a new warrior ethos in which the old ideals of heroism and chivalry merged with modern technology and a process of brutalization of politics and such examples of continentally planned industrial killing as the Armenian genocide. Total war became total state, and after the war, it was used as a pejorative by the Italian anti-fascists of the 1920s and later by the Italian Fascists themselves. American historian William Rubinstein wrote that the Age of Totalitarianism included nearly all the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by the Jewish Holocaust, but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world, other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of World War I, without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in the minds of unknown agitators and crackpots. In the 1920s Germany, during the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt integrated Gentile's Fascist philosophy of united national purpose to the supreme-leader ideology of the Führerprinzip. Since the Cold War, the so-called traditional, or totalitarian, historians have argued that Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, was the first politician to establish a totalitarian state; such description of Lenin is opposed by the so-called revisionist historians of Communism and the Soviet Union as well as by a broad range of authors including Hannah Arendt. As the Duce leading the Italian people to the future, Benito Mussolini said that his dictatorial régime of government made Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943 the representative Totalitarian State. Likewise, in The Concept of the Political in 1927, the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term der Totalstaat to identify, describe, and establish the legitimacy of a German totalitarian state led by a supreme leader. Later Joseph Goebbels would call a totalitarian state the goal of the Nazi Party, although the concept became downplayed in Nazi discourse. After the Second World War from 1937 to 1945, U.S. political discourse included the concepts and the terms totalitarian, totalitarianism, and totalitarian model. In the post-war U.S. of the 1950s, to politically discredit the anti-fascism of the Second World War as misguided foreign policy and at the same time direct anti-fascists against Communism, McCarthyite politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat to Western civilization, and so facilitated the creation of the American national security state to execute the anti-communist Cold War from 1945 to 1989 that was fought by client-state proxies of the US and the USSR. While the concept of totalitarianism became dominant in Anglo-American political discourse after World War II, it remained neglected in continental Europe except for West Germany. In such countries as Italy and France, where the Communist parties played a hegemonic role in the anti-fascist resistance, the pioneering works of the theory of totalitarianism by such authors as Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich were often ignored or not even translated. The political theory of totalitarianism in these countries was promoted by Congress for Cultural Freedom supported by the CIA.
The Traditionalist And Revisionist Wars
The Western historiography of the USSR and of the Soviet period of Russian history is in two schools of research and interpretation: the traditionalist school of historiography and the revisionist school of historiography. The traditionalists and neo-traditionalists, or anti-revisionists, are also known as totalitarian school or totalitarian approach and Cold War historians, for relying on concepts and interpretations rooted in the early years of the Cold War and even in the sphere Russian White émigrés of the 1920s. Traditionalist-school historians characterize themselves as objective reporters of the claimed totalitarianism allegedly inherent to Marxism, to Communism, and to the political nature of Communist states, such as the USSR, while the Cold War revisionists criticized the politically liberal and anti-communist bias they perceived in the predominance of the traditionalists and describe their approach as emotional and oversimplifying. Revisionist-school historians criticise the traditionalist school's concentration upon the police-state aspects of Cold War history which they say leads it to anti-communist interpretation of history biased towards a right-wing interpretation of the documentary facts. The revisionists also oppose the equation of Nazism and Communism and Stalinism and stress such their ideological differences as the humanist and egalitarian origins of Communist ideology. In the 1960s, revisionists studying the Cold War and the Communist movement in the U.S. criticized the dominant ideas that American Communists were an actual threat to the United States and that the Cold War was the fault of Stalin's territorial and political ambitions and that Soviet expansionism and its alleged strife to conquer the world forced the U.S. to turn from isolationism to a global containment policy. The difference between these two historiographic directions is not only political, but also as methodological: the traditionalists focus on politics, ideology and personalities of the Bolshevik and Communist leaders, putting the latter in the center of history while largely ignoring social processes, and traditionalists present history from above, directed by the leaders, while the revisionists put emphasis on history from below and social history of the Soviet regime, and they describe the traditionalists as right-wing romantics. In their turn, the traditionalists defend their approach and methodology, dismiss focus on social history and accuse their opponents of Marxism and of rationalizing the actions of the Bolsheviks and failing to recognize the primary role of one man leading a movement, Vladimir Lenin or Adolf Hitler. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, revisionist approaches became largely accepted in academic circles, and the term revisionism migrated to characterize a group of social historians focusing on the working class and the upheavals of the Stalin years. At the same time, traditionalist historians retained popularity and influence outside academic circles, especially in politics and public spheres of the United States, where they supported harder policies towards the USSR. For example, Zbigniew Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, while Richard Pipes, a prominent historian of totalitarian school, headed the CIA group Team B. After 1991, their views have found popularity not only in the West, but also in the former USSR. Since the 1980s, there has been a debate over the nature of the October Revolution between the traditionalists and the revisionists as well as a debate about the nature of the government of Vladimir Lenin. Traditionalist scholars believe that the government of Vladimir Lenin was a totalitarian dictatorship but revisionist scholars do not. The core argument of the traditionalists was based on their belief that the Revolution was a violent act which was carried out from above by a small group of intellectuals with brute force. Such traditionalist historians as Richard Pipes claimed that Soviet Russia of 1917-1924 was as totalitarian as the Soviet Union under Stalin was, and they also claim that Stalinist totalitarianism was a mere continuation of Lenin's policies because Stalinism was prefigured by Lenin's ideology, that Lenin was the inventor of totalitarianism, and that further totalitarian regimes just implemented the policies already invented. For example, Pipes compared Lenin to Hitler and stated that The Stalinist and Nazi holocausts stemmed from Lenin's Red Terror and had much greater decorum than the latter. The revisionists, on the contrary, stressed the genuinely popular nature of the 1917 Revolution, and tended to see a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism. A revisionist historian Ronald Suny cites Hannah Arendt who distinguished Lenin's terror of the Russian Civil War, a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, from totalitarian terror aimed not at specific enemies but at fulfilling ideological goals, solving the problem of inequality and poverty, an instrument to rule masses who are perfectly obedient. It was also noted that Stalin became an uncontested dictator after a period of authoritarian pluralism, while the one-party dictatorship and mass violence were interpreted not as a result of Lenin's totalitarian blueprint, but rather of reactions yet justified by the ideology to current events and external factors, including wartime conditions and the struggle for survival. Some historians highlighted the initial attempts of the Bolsheviks to form a coalition government. Martin Malia noted that the debates on history were politically significant: if the traditionalists were right, Communism must be abolished, but if they were not, it could be reformed. Understanding of relationship of Lenin and Stalin as a continuity of the totalitarian regime was consensual for a major period. The first revisionists of the 1960s, social historians, also believed it to be a continuity, but as a continuity of policies of modernization, not as a continuity of totalitarianism. Starting from the end of the 1960s, availability of new Soviet materials allowed to dispute the continuity for such historians as Moshe Lewin and break the consensus. According to Evan Mawdsley, the revisionist school had been dominant from the 1970s, and achieved some success in challenging the traditionalists.
The Death Of The Model
The death of Stalin in 1953 voided the simplistic totalitarian model of the police-state USSR as the epitome of the totalitarian state. Starting from the 1970s, the revisionist historians, described as those who insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong and focused not on typology of power, but social history, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick began challenging the totalitarian paradigm. Without denying the state violence by the regime, these scholars argued that the Stalinist system could not and did not rule only through coercion and terror, and pointed to support within the population for many of Stalin's policies and argued that the party and state were often responsive to people's desires and values. More to it, they examined the substantial differences of Stalinist and Nazi violence that inevitably put into question the attempt to gather Stalin's and Hitler's regimes into a single category which was presented by the concept of totalitarianism. In 1999 the sociologists Randall Collins and David Waller grouped the concept of totalitarianism among the theories that were completely wrong. In Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared in 2008, Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer critically examined the concept of totalitarianism and made a very detailed comparison of similarities and substantial differences between Hitler and Stalin and made conclusion in agreement with the point of Collins and Waller. Some historians who did not align themselves with the revisionist school later openly stated that Stalinist system cannot be regarded as totalitarian. For example, the historian Robert Service in his biography of Stalin wrote that this was not a totalitarian dictatorship as conventionally defined because Stalin lacked the capacity, even at the height of his power, to secure automatic universal compliance with his wishes. Eric Hobsbawm wrote that although Stalin indeed wanted to achieve total control of the population, he did not establish an actual totalitarian system, what, as he said, throws considerable doubt on the usefulness of the term. According to Fitzpatrick, totalitarian-model scholarship - the USSR as a top-down entity, a monolithic party grounded on ideology and ruling by terror over a passive society - was in effect a mirror image of the Soviet self-representation, but with the moral signs reversed. A fact common to the revisionist-school interpretations of the reign of Stalin from 1927 to 1953 was that the USSR was a country with weak social institutions, and that state terrorism against Soviet citizens indicated the political illegitimacy of Stalin's government. To critics of totalitarian model state terror was a mark of a weak regime, and J. Arch Getty wrote of a technically weak and politically divided party whose organizational relationships seem more primitive than totalitarian, commenting the Smolensk Archive, and so, the criticism of accepted model began with labelling Stalinism as inefficient totalitarianism, where the dictator had to rely on shock methods to counter the resistance of local autonomies and administrations and political factionalism within the apparatus. The citizens of the USSR were not devoid of personal agency or of material resources for living, nor were Soviet citizens psychologically atomized by the totalist ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet political system was chaotic, that institutions often escaped the control of the center, and that Stalin's leadership consisted, to a considerable extent, in responding, on an ad hoc basis, to political crises as they arose, and many purges and forced collectivizations were local or even popular initiatives which Stalin and his henchmen could not control, while the people collectively resisted by such methods as refusing to work efficiently and migrating by the millions. That the legitimacy of Stalin's régime of government relied upon the popular support of the Soviet citizenry as much as Stalin relied upon state terrorism for their support. That by politically purging Soviet society of anti-Soviet people Stalin created employment and upward social mobility for the post-War generation of working class citizens for whom such socio-economic progress was unavailable before the Russian Revolution. That the people who benefited from Stalin's social engineering became Stalinists loyal to the USSR; thus, the Revolution had fulfilled her promise to those Stalinist citizens and they supported Stalin because of the state terrorism. The revisionists also conducted new comparative studies of the Third Reich and the USSR, but stressed substantial differences between them. Thus, fascisms lasted much shorter, but experienced cumulative radicalization until their collapse, while Stalinism arose in stabilized and pacified country and fell apart due to an internal crisis after a post-totalitarian period. Fascism maintained traditional elites, while Stalinism was a result of revolution and radical social transformation. Their ideologies were antipodal. Totalitarian model likened charismatic authorities of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but they were different. Hitler and Mussolini were popular figures of providential men who needed an almost physical contact with the followers and exemplified the totalitarian New Man with their bodies and behavior, while Stalin's cult is described as afar, purely artificial and much more distant, and Stalin never merged with the people, always staying hidden from his followers. Mass state violence was also different: Soviet violence was primarily internal, while that of the Nazis primarily external. The former was an ineffective and irrational means of a rational goal, modernization, while Nazis sought extremely irrational goals with rational industrial means. The efficiency of Soviet forced labor camps was measured by the authorities by practical results, like building train tracks, which would eventually lay a basis of modernity, while Nazism mobilized industry for extermination, and the efficiency of extermination camps was measured by the number of deaths. Thus, the revisionists have argued, both regimes committed inhumane mass violence, but their internal logic was fundamentally different. In the case of East Germany, Eli Rubin posited that East Germany was not a totalitarian state but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.
The Weak Dictator Thesis
Enzo Traverso and Andrew Vincent point out that the totalitarian approach or the theoretical concept of totalitarianism, which presented the idea of a monolithic party, no separation between state and society, and total mobilization of the atomized masses and total control over the state, society and economy, is not applicable not only to the USSR, but also to Nazi Germany and Fascist states as well, since it also did not present a monolithic structure exercising total control over society, but on the contrary, that Nazi bureaucracy was highly chaotic, anomic and disorganized and disunited, and that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator and laissez-faire leader, as said by such historians as Hans Mommsen and Ian Kershaw. This description of Nazi Germany was first introduced in 1942 by Franz Leopold Neumann in the work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, where he provocatively presented Hitlerism a Behemoth, a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy, and later entered historiography of Nazism. In the 1970s, the German historians of functionalist school presented Nazism as a polycratic system grounded on different centers of power - the Nazi party, the army, the economic elites, and the state bureaucracy. To such historians, totalitarian monolithic state and party were just a facade, similarly to Fitzpatrick's assessment of Stalinism. Historians like Mommsen and Ian Kershaw were critical of concepts of totalitarianism and focused on lack of bureaucratic coherence in the Nazi system and on its immanent tendency towards self-destruction. Michael Mann wrote that these descriptions doubted theories of totalitarianism, since anything less like the rigid top-down bureaucracy of totalitarian theory is hard to imagine, but that Stalinism and Nazism belong together, and that it is only a question of finding the right family name. According to Mann, totalitarian theorists depicted an unreal level of coherence for any state. Modern states are a long way short of Hegelian or Weberian rational bureaucracy and they rarely act as singular, coherent actors. Normally regimes are factionalized; in an unpredictable world they stumble along with many foul-ups. Second, we should remember Weber's essential point about bureaucracy: it kept politics out of administration. Political and moral values were settled outside of bureaucratic administration, which then limited itself to finding efficient means of implementing those values. Contrary to totalitarian theory, the twentieth-century states most capable of such formally rational bureaucracy were not the dictatorships but the democracies. The concept of totalitarianism appeared in the debates among German historians and public intellectuals known as Historikerstreit, in which one of the parties defended the idea of exceptionalism of Nazism, while their conservative opponents believed that the Third Reich may be explained through comparison with the USSR. At the same time, such conservative historians as Karl-Dietrich Bracher and Klaus Hildebrand rejected the notion of Nazism as a branch of generic fascism, on the grounds that the uniqueness of Nazism lay in the person and ideology of Hitler and that Nazism was defined primarily by Hitler's personality and personal beliefs rather than by any external factors. Stanley Payne wrote that indeed, both Mussolini and Hitler failed to achieve full totalitarianism, and of Mussolini it was said that his regime was not totalitarian, excluding merely fascist Italy from totalitarian regimes, started by Hannah Arendt who also thought that Nazism became totalitarian only in 1938-1942, is a not unpopular but contested position in contemporary historiography. So Payne concludes that only a socialist or Communist system can achieve full totalitarianism, since total control requires total institutional revolution that can only be effected by state socialism. According to Payne, both Lenin and Stalin were totalitarian. Payne writes that it is easy to argue either that many different kinds of regimes are totalitarian or conversely that none were perfectly total, yet, he writes that the concept totalitarianism is both valid and useful if defined in the precise and literal sense of a state system that attempts to exercise direct control over all significant aspects of all major national institutions. Further debates from 1980 to 1990 saw Walter Laqueur dismiss the arguments of revisionists as reappraisals of Stalin and Stalinism and compared them with German revisionist historians of Nazism, particularly Ernst Nolte, whom he did not distinguish from functionalist historians of Nazism, and called their analysis Marxist, for which Stalin was not promising material. As Laqueur wrote, the historians who disagreed with the revisionists still had very strong feelings towards Stalinism and found concepts such as modernization inadequate tools for explaining Soviet history, unlike the concept of totalitarianism. Citing Mikhail Gorbachev using the term totalitarianism, Laqueur wrote that the efforts of the revisionists to abolish the totalitarian model had become difficult. Laure Neumayer posited that despite the disputes over its heuristic value and its normative assumptions, the concept of totalitarianism made a vigorous return to the political and academic fields at the end of the Cold War. In 1978, the term was revived in Western Europe: such historians as François Furet produced revisionist critical re-evaluations of the French Revolution which, according to them, led to the emergence of totalitarianism, while in Italy, anti-anti-Fascist historians, notably Renzo De Felice and after him Emilio Gentile, challenged the myth produced by the hegemonic role of the Communists in the Italian resistance, stated that the choice between Fascism and Communism was equal for Italy, and implied that the latter could be even worse, what led to the resurgence of the concept of totalitarianism as a new dimension of studies of Fascism, while the ones who doubted their theories were swept away with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991. The revival of the concept which started in the 1970s in Europe took some time to re-appear in English-language literature, as the revisionists achieved hegemony in the academy, while the totalitarians retained control over public discourse. The European debates were transferred to English-language historiography by Martin Malia. In 1995, Furet made a comparative analysis and used the term totalitarian twins to link Nazism and Stalinism. Pipes and Malia continued depicting ideological developments as the grounds of communism, and thus, totalitarianism, drawing a line from utopianism and the French Revolution, which Pipes compared to a virus, to Lenin, and to describe the nature of totalitarianism, they used the concept of ideocracy. Furet and Ernst Nolte, a historian praised by Furet, also identified anti-Fascism as Communist totalitarianism. Nolte presented a conflict between totalitarianisms as European Civil War, stating that it was begun by Bolshevism and produced Nazism, an inverted Bolshevism, thus assessing the latter as only a response to the threat of Bolshevism and the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa as both a retaliation and a preventive measure against Bolshevism. Another major work belonging to the same period was The Black Book of Communism in 1997, the editor of which, Stephane Courtois, stressed structural homology of totalitarian systems embodied in identity of class genocide of Communism and race genocide of Nazism, and concluded that Communism was more murderous than Nazism, or any other ideology from counting and summing the number of victims that can be attributed to Communist states and thus communism in general, what triggered an emotional debate in France on whether Communism should be treated as a single unified phenomena and whether a blanket condemnation of Communism as an ideology makes sense. While Nolte and the historians supporting him were not victorious in the Historikerstreit, but his influence on Furet and the historians outside Germany legitimized his ideas, and they returned to Germany in other forms, what thus led to the resurgence of the concept in Germany. The concept entered historiography in Eastern Europe, in former countries of the Eastern Bloc, describing not only Stalinism, but the whole Communist project in general along with the Double genocide theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization which summarized Nazi and Stalinist violence into a single metanarrative and became an influential framework of interpretation. Furet's totalitarian interpretation of the French Revolution, directed against the classic Marxist or Jacobin interpretation, triggered debates with such historians as Michel Vovelle, who led new studies on it. As Eric Hobsbawm concluded in 2007, the Furet Revolution was now over. In regards to Furet's ideas on the 20th century, Hobsbawm wrote that Nazism and Stalinism were functionally and not ideologically derived. Furet, as a distinguished historian of ideas, knows that they belonged to different if structurally convergent taxonomic families. Contrary to conception of anti-Fascism as a mask of Stalinism, Hobsbawm attributed the alliance between liberalism and communism, which had enabled capitalism to overcome its crisis, and wrote that Furet's work reads like a belated product of the Cold War era. Historians Enzo Traverso and Arno J. Mayer and the author Domenico Losurdo accepted Nolte's concept of the European Civil War, although set its beginning to 1914 and differently interpreted it, not in terms of struggle between two totalitarianisms. Michael Parenti in 1997 and James Petras in 1999 have suggested that the totalitarianism concept has been politically employed and used for anti-communist purposes. Parenti has also analysed how left anti-communists attacked the Soviet Union during the Cold War. For Petras, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom to attack Stalinist anti-totalitarianism. According to some scholars and authors, such as Domenico Losurdo calling Joseph Stalin totalitarian instead of authoritarian has been asserted to be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Western self-interest, just as surely as the counterclaim that allegedly debunking the totalitarian concept may be a high-sounding but specious excuse for Russian self-interest. For Losurdo, totalitarianism is a polysemic concept with origins in Christian theology and applying it to the political sphere requires an operation of abstract schematism which makes use of isolated elements of historical reality to place fascist regimes and the Soviet Union in the dock together, serving the anti-communism of Cold War-era intellectuals rather than reflecting intellectual research. After 1990s, criticisms of totalitarianism as a historical concept and a tool of analysis continued; however, while these critics called for expulsion of the concept from academic field, they stated that its legitimate outside it. Hans Mommsen criticized it as a descriptive concept, not a theory with little or no explanatory power. But he wrote that the totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself, and that it is legitimate in non-scholarly usage. Enzo Traverso in his essay Totalitarianism Between History and Theory in 2017 dismisses the term as both useless and irreplaceable for political science and academic history and cites Franz Leopold Neumann who called it a Weberian ideal type, an abstraction that does not exist in reality as opposed to concrete totality of history, and believes it to be a term of abuse in Western political science and propaganda, he writes about its legitimacy for storing traumatic collective experience of the 20th century state violence. Thus, if the concept of totalitarianism continues to be criticized for its ambiguities, weaknesses, and abuses, it probably will not be abandoned. Beyond being a Western banner, it stores the memory of a century that experienced Auschwitz and Kolyma, the death camps of Nazism, the Stalinist Gulags, and Pol Pot's killing fields. There lies its legitimacy, which does not need any academic recognition. In the essay Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word in 2010, the historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or, for that matter, any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech word totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? Totalitarianism is a useful word, and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old theory from the 1950s.
The Self-Description Of Autocracies
The term totalitarian was used by leaders and senior officials of right-wing and far-right dictatorships and autocracies established during the interwar period and World War II to describe their regimes, most notably by Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy. While in the triade of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the latter it became an official self-description, in the second it was also used but to a less extent, and in the first it was not used it all, this pattern of self-description was reversed by later theories of totalitarianism which regarded the USSR as an epitome of totalitarianism, projected this understanding on Nazi Germany and to a less extent on Fascist Italy. Thus, the meaning of the term used in self-descriptions of the Fascists and the one used after World War II were different. As the leader of Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943, Mussolini and his ideologues used the term totalitarian to characterize his government. In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government, the anti-fascist academic Giovanni Amendola was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a regime of government wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power. That Italian fascism is a political system with an ideological, utopian worldview unlike the realistic politics of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power. The term totalitarian became used by the Fascists themselves: later, the theoretician of Italian Fascism Giovanni Gentile ascribed politically positive meanings to the ideological terms totalitarianism and totalitarian in defense of Duce Mussolini's legal, illegal, and legalistic social engineering of Italy. As ideologues, the intellectual Gentile and the politician Mussolini used the term totalitario to identify and describe the ideological nature of the societal structures and the practical goals of the new Fascist Italy, which was the total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals. In proposing the totalitarian society of Italian Fascism, Gentile defined and described a civil society wherein totalitarian ideology subservience to the state determined the public sphere and the private sphere of the lives of the Italian people. That to achieve the Fascist utopia in the imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicize human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarized with the epigram: Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938. Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner mass mobilization, Arendt wrote: While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations. Even Mussolini, who was so fond of the term totalitarian state, did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule. For example, Victor Emmanuel III still reigned as a figurehead and helped play a role in the dismissal of Mussolini in 1943. Also, the Catholic Church was allowed to independently exercise its religious authority in Vatican City per the 1929 Lateran Treaty, under the leadership of Pope Pius XI from 1922 to 1939 and Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958. During the Spanish Civil War, Franco proclaimed that his Spanish State would be modelled after other countries of totalitarian regime, these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. As the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they began using the concept of totalitarian state propagated by Mussolini and Schmitt to characterize their regime. Joseph Goebbels stated in his 1933 speech: Our party has always aspired to the totalitarian state. The goal of the revolution National Socialist has to be a totalitarian state that penetrates into all spheres of public life. However, the concept of totalitarianism was downplayed among the Nazis who preferred the term Volksstaat people's state or racial state to describe their regime. José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones, the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right, declared his intention to give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity and went on to say: Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it. General Francisco Franco was determined not to have competing right-wing parties in Spain and CEDA was dissolved in April 1937. Later, Gil-Robles went into exile. General Franco began using the term totalitarian towards his regime during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. On the 1st of October 1936, he announced his intention to organize Spain within a broad totalitarian concept of unity and continuity, and practical realization of this intention began with the forced unification of all parties of the Nationalist zone into FET y de las JONS, the sole ruling party of the new regime. After that, he and his ideologues stressed the missionary and totalitarian nature of the new state that was under construction as in other countries of totalitarian regime, these being Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and totalitarianism was described as an essentially Spanish way of government. In December 1942, as World War II progressed, Franco stopped using the term, and it received a negative connotation as Franco called for a struggle with Bolshevist totalitarianism. Ioannis Metaxas, the leader of the 4th of August Regime in Greece which took some inspiration from Fascism, wrote in his diary that he established an anti-communist, anti-parliamentary state, a totalitarian state, a state based on agriculture and labour, and therefore anti-plutocratic. After the Italian and German invasions of Greece, he wrote that by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for. Although Metaxas did not create the governing single party, he believed that the whole of the Greek people, the nation, constituted if any, such a political party, excluding of course the Communists and reactionary old political parties or factions. Ion Antonescu, the Axis-aligned dictator of the Kingdom of Romania during World War II, described his regime as ethnocratic, ethnic Christian and as the national-totalitarian regime, the regime of national and social restoration, devoted to the ideology of extreme Romanian nationalism, springing from the Romanian heritage. It enacted antisemitic and racial legislation and was active in perpetrating the Holocaust; however, in 1941, Antonescu dissolved the ruling party, the Iron Guard, denounced its terrorist methods, and continued his rule without the single-party system. The regime also spared half of the Jews during its existence. In 1940, the foreign minister of the Empire of Japan Matsuoka Yosuke expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within the Shōwa statist government of Japan: In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt. Fascism will develop in Japan through the people's will. It will come out of love for the Emperor. A document produced by the government's cabinet planning board pointed out that since the founding of our country, Japan has had an unparalleled totalitarianism. An ideal totalitarianism is manifest in our national polity. Germany's totalitarianism has existed for only eight years, but Japanese totalitarianism has shone through 3,000 years of ageless tradition.
The Left-Wing Critique
In the interwar period totalitarianism emerged as a term used in criticism and analysis of dictatorships of the time. In this critical period, the term began to be used to describe fascism and later became a ground of comparison of fascist states and the Soviet Union, but was not understood as an element of a single liberal-totalitarian dychotomy and as something opposite to liberal democracy. In the 1930s, left-wing critics of Stalinism began applying the term to the Soviet state and use it to compare it to fascist states. Leon Trotsky was one of the first to do so, thus producing perhaps most famous example of such usage of the term by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident. It seems that the first to use the term towards the USSR was the writer and left-wing activist Victor Serge, who did it shortly before his arrest in the USSR in a letter published in France. The same year, Trotsky compared fascist and Soviet bureaucracies, describing both as parasitic, and later stated that in the last period the Soviet bureaucracy has familiarized itself with many traits of victorious fascism, first of all by getting rid of the control of the party and establishing the cult of the leader. In The Revolution Betrayed in 1936, Trotsky began using the term totalitarian to analyse the USSR and compare it with Fascism, attributing to totalitarianism, rooted in the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history, such features as concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, the abolition of popular control over the leadership, the use of extreme repression, and the elimination of contending loci of power. Later he included the suppression of all freedom to criticize; the subjection of the accused to the military; examining magistrates, a prosecutor and judge in one; a monolithic press whose howlings terrorize the accused and hypnotize public opinion. Trotsky wrote that the USSR had become totalitarian in character several years before this word arrived from Germany. However, his concept was much less defined than those of the Cold War theorists, and he would have disagreed with their core points: that central control and direction of the entire economy was applicable to fascism, and would have rejected their tendency to depict totalitarian societies as politically monolithic and inherently static, as well as their anti-communist perspective and their description of Lenin as a totalitarian dictator. Scholars even argued that for him it was a pejorative, not a sociologal concept based on equating Fascism and socialism, like it was for Cold War theorists. One of the first people to use the term totalitarianism in the English language was Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label totalitarian was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during Winston Churchill's speech of the 5th of October 1938 before the House of Commons, in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was then a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks later, Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to a Communist or a Nazi tyranny. The concept gained legitimacy in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after which it became accepted, at least until 1941, to present Stalin and Hitler as twin dictators and call Nazism brown Bolshevism and Stalinism red Fascism. The same year, scholars of various disciplines held the first international symposium on totalitarianism in Philadelphia. The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reich invaded the USSR, and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as valiant freedom-loving ally in the war. Among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film Mission to Moscow in 1943, based on the 1941 book of the same name. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the British historian E. H. Carr said that the trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable in the decolonising countries of Eurasia. That revolutionary Marxism-Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's rapid industrialization from 1929 to 1941 and the Great Patriotic War from 1941 to 1945 that defeated Nazi Germany. That, despite those achievements in social engineering and warfare, in dealing with the countries of the Communist bloc only the blind and incurable ideologue could ignore the Communist régimes' trend towards police-state totalitarianism in their societies. Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay Why I Write in 1946, the socialist George Orwell said, the Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. That future totalitarian régimes would spy upon their societies and use the mass communications media to perpetuate their dictatorships, that If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
The Cold War Model
In The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, the political scientist Hannah Arendt said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate Nazism and soviet Communism were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old tyrannies of a military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of political certainty is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian worldview gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future. Thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of ethnic conflict, of the survival of the fittest race; and Marxism-Leninism proposes that all history is the history of class conflict, of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the universal applicability of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to historicism Law of History or by an appeal to nature, as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus. True belief In The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements in 1951, Eric Hoffer said that political mass movements, such as Italian Fascism from 1922 to 1943, German Nazism from 1933 to 1945, and Russian Stalinism from 1929 to 1953, featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as culturally superior to the morally decadent societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such mass psychology indicates that participating in and then joining a political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the public sphere and the private sphere. In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with fact-proof screens from reality drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology. In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms totalitarianism, totalitarian, and totalitarian model, presented in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy in 1956, by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in the foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the totalitarian model became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for Kremlinology, the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics policy and personality of the politburo crafting policy national and foreign yielded strategic intelligence for dealing with the USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a banana republic country. As anti-Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: Elaborate guiding ideology. One-party state State terrorism Monopoly control of weapons Monopoly control of the mass communications media Centrally directed and controlled planned economy. As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that the totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR from 1917, Fascist Italy from 1922 to 1943, and Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War from 1914 to 1918, which rendered impotent the government of Weimar Germany from 1918 to 1933 to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper. Revisionist historians noted the historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity the USSR nor as a social entity Soviet civil society, which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites political, academic, artistic, scientific, military seeking upward mobility into the nomenklatura, the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of the USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy. The historian of Nazi Germany, Karl Dietrich Bracher said that the totalitarian typology developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the revolutionary dynamics of bellicose people committed to realising the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state. That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State. Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and the Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of collective leadership. The American historian Walter Laqueur agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski. In Democracy and Totalitarianism in 1968 the political scientist Raymond Aron said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics: A one-party state where the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity. A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority. A state monopoly on information; control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth. A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control. An ideological police-state terror; criminalization of political, economic, and professional activities. In 1980, in a book review of How the Soviet Union is Governed in 1979, by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm of the totalitarian model no longer satisfies our ignorance, despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription to articulate an acceptable variant of Communist totalitarianism. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post-Stalinist reality of the USSR. In a book review of Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura in 2019, by Ahmed Saladdin, Michael Scott Christofferson said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after Stalin was her attempt to intellectually distance her work from the Cold War misuse of the concept of the origins of totalitarianism as anti-Communist propaganda. During the Russo-American Cold War from 1945 to 1989, the academic field of Kremlinology analysing politburo policy politics produced historical and policy analyses dominated by the totalitarian model of the USSR as a police state controlled by the absolute power of the supreme leader Stalin, who heads a monolithic, centralized hierarchy of government. The study of the internal politics of the politburo crafting policy at the Kremlin produced two schools of historiographic interpretation of Cold War history: traditionalist Kremlinology and revisionist Kremlinology. Traditionalist Kremlinologists worked with and for the totalitarian model and produced interpretations of Kremlin politics and policies that supported the police-state version of Communist Russia. The revisionist Kremlinologists presented alternative interpretations of Kremlin politics and reported the effects.