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Characteristics of modern Totalitarianism (not just fascism)
Last edited Sun Jun 10, 2012, 05:31 PM - Edit history (6)
A conventional way of describing totalitarianism is to present a list of characteristics common to Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Soviet Bolshevism. (Other regimes may also be included—notably, Chinese Communism under the rule of Mao, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), and Pol Pot's "Democratic Cambodia."
But how capacious should that portmanteau be? In Totalitarianism, published in 1954, Carl Friedrich itemized five elements, which, in a subsequent collaboration with Zbigniew Brzezinski, he increased to six. Yet, before that, Arthur M. Hill concocted fifteen points that Norman Davies, in Europe: A History (1997), expanded to seventeen. Recurrently mentioned features of totalitarianism include the following:
It should be noted that there is widespread disagreement among commentators about whether Italian Fascism is properly classified as a totalitarian system. Hannah Arendt and George Kennan thought otherwise. Mussolini's regime, on such accounts, is best comprehended as an extreme form of dictatorship or, according to Juan Linz, a species of "authoritarianism." Though preeminent, it shared power with other collective actors such as the monarchy, the military, and the Catholic Church in a way that was utterly alien to National Socialism and Bolshevism. Official anti-Semitism was less intense and less vigorously policed. And Mussolini was domestically ousted in a way that indicates a far more precarious grip on power than either Hitler or Stalin evinced.
But how capacious should that portmanteau be? In Totalitarianism, published in 1954, Carl Friedrich itemized five elements, which, in a subsequent collaboration with Zbigniew Brzezinski, he increased to six. Yet, before that, Arthur M. Hill concocted fifteen points that Norman Davies, in Europe: A History (1997), expanded to seventeen. Recurrently mentioned features of totalitarianism include the following:
• A revolutionary, exclusive, and apocalyptical ideology that announces the destruction of the old order—corrupt and compromised—and the birth of a radically new, purified, and muscular age. Antiliberal, anticonservative, and antipluralist, totalitarian ideology creates myths, catechisms, cults, festivities, and rituals designed to commemorate the destiny of the elect.
• A cellular, fluid, and hydralike political party structure that, particularly before the conquest of state power, devolves authority to local militants. As it gains recruits and fellow believers, the party takes on a mass character with a charismatic leader at its head claiming omniscience and infallibility, and demanding the unconditional personal devotion of the people.
• A regime in which offices are deliberately duplicated and personnel are continually shuffled, so as to ensure chronic collegial rivalry and dependence on the adjudication of the one true leader. To the extent that legal instruments function at all, they do so as a legitimizing sham rather than a real brake on the untrammeled use of executive power. Indeed, the very notion of "the executive" is redundant since it presupposes a separation of powers anathema to a totalitarian regime.
• Economic-bureaucratic collectivism (capitalist or state socialist) intended to orchestrate productive forces to the regime's predatory, autarchic, and militaristic goals.
• Monopolistic control of the mass media, "professional" organizations, and public art, and with it the formulation of a cliché-ridden language whose formulaic utterances are designed to impede ambivalence, nuance, and complexity.
• A culture of martial solidarity in which violence and danger (of the trenches, the street fight, etc.) are ritually celebrated in party uniforms, metaphors ("storm troopers," "labor brigades"
• The pursuit and elimination not simply of active oppositionists but, and more distinctively, "objective enemies" or "enemies of the people"—that is, categories of people deemed guilty of wickedness in virtue of some ascribed quality such as race or descent. Crimes against the state need not have actually been committed by the person accused of them. Hence the "hereditary principle" in North Korea where punishment is extended to three generations (the original miscreants, their children, and their grandchildren). Under totalitarianism, it is what people are, more than what they do that marks them for punishment. As Stéphane Courtois observes, "the techniques of segregation and exclusion employed in a 'class-based' totalitarianism closely resemble the techniques of 'race-based' totalitarianism" (p. 16). Soviet and Chinese Marxism may have claimed to represent humanity as a whole, but only a humanity divested first of millions—classes, categories—who were beyond the pale of Marxist doctrine. Its universalism was thus always, like National Socialism, an exclusive affair.
• Continual mobilization of the whole population through war, ceaseless campaigns, "struggles," or purges. Moreover, and notwithstanding ideological obeisance to ineluctable laws of history and race, totalitarian domination insists on febrile activity. The mercurial will of the leader and the people as a whole must constantly be exercised to produce miracles, combat backsliding, and accelerate the direction of the world toward its cataclysmic culmination.
• The pervasive use of terror to isolate, intimidate, and regiment all whom the regime deems menacing. Charged with this task are the secret police rather than the army, which typically possesses significantly fewer powers and less status than it does under a nontotalitarian dictatorship or "authoritarian" regime.
• The laboratory of totalitarian domination is the concentration camp. The experiment it conducts aims to discover the conditions under which human subjects become fully docile and pliable. In addition, a slave labor system exists side by side with a racial and/or class-oriented policy of genocide. In Nazi Germany, Jews were the principal objective enemy—over six million were murdered—but there were others such as Slavs and Gypsies. In the Soviet Union, key targets of annihilation or mass deportation were Cossacks (from 1920), kulaks (especially between 1930–1932), Crimean Tartars (1943), Chechens, and Ingush (both in 1944). The Great Purge of 1937–1938 is estimated to have killed close to 690,000 people, but this is dwarfed by the systematically induced famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933, thought to have killed around six million. Pol Pot's Cambodian Communist Party had a similar penchant for mass extermination, as did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao: the Chairman boasted that 700,000 perished in the 1950–1952 campaign against "counterrevolutionaries." The CCP targeted landlords and intellectuals, and through a policy of accelerated modernization created the famine of the Great Leap Forward that claimed around 30 million victims.
It should be noted that there is widespread disagreement among commentators about whether Italian Fascism is properly classified as a totalitarian system. Hannah Arendt and George Kennan thought otherwise. Mussolini's regime, on such accounts, is best comprehended as an extreme form of dictatorship or, according to Juan Linz, a species of "authoritarianism." Though preeminent, it shared power with other collective actors such as the monarchy, the military, and the Catholic Church in a way that was utterly alien to National Socialism and Bolshevism. Official anti-Semitism was less intense and less vigorously policed. And Mussolini was domestically ousted in a way that indicates a far more precarious grip on power than either Hitler or Stalin evinced.
This is from a Free online encyclopedia. I know nothing about jrank.org one way or another, but was looking for a good summary of the work of Friedrich and Brzezinski and Arthur M. Hill and particularly Norman Davies (whose treatement of this in EUROPE I highly recommend). For the record, the chapter in EUROPE about this is sublime and vastly better than genral treatment above. Look it up. Wonderful stuff.
Though longer than most excerpts I believe this is fair use as intended by the free encyclopedia, provided it is cited as they request:
Totalitarianism - Totalitarian Characteristics
http://science.jrank.org/pages/11471/Totalitarianism-Totalitarian-Characteristics.html
Speaking for myself, now (Cthulu2016)...
I wish there was a word with the emotional punch of "fascism" to describe what is going in in America, because this is not fascism. It is very evil, but not facism. It has fascist trappings, as will any capitalist authoritarian leaning political movement. And it has totalitarian trappings, as will any authoritariam movement from anywhere on the left-right spectrum. But what we see today is not the teaparty over-throwing the old order, but rather astro-turf activism being used as a predicate for a selective form of corporate anarchism.
In saying, "this is not fascism" it is bound to be read as saying, "this is not that bad," which is incorrect. Like I said, the word "fascism" carries a unique emotional load and is this over-used, along with "treason" and "communist."
What we see today is more like the Industrial revolution in Britain (and most other places) which was, in its effects, not categorically less poisonous and indifferent to human dignity or valuation of human life as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia or the Taliban, but without the trappings of a revolutionary movement. Capitalist anarchy with no effective systemic protection of the interests of average people. Never underestimate what happened to ordinary people during the industrial revolution. There is a reason there were worker's revolts in almost every European nation in 1848, and continually onward until the modern welfare state took up enough slack to ease the pressure. (The Communist Manifesto was written about the revolutions of 1848.)
Before Democratic-socialist inspired reform the life of an urban working person was not so different from the life of an American slave or Nazi Concentration camp detainee. The slave had a peculiar legal non-person status, and the Nazi slave laborer would eventually be executed, but the daily life was the same. Ceaseless cruel toil under inhuman and life-threatening conditions with no possibility of improvement or escape. The relative horror of utterly horriffic things distracts from the fact that they are all horrible. Unacceptable. Destroying of human lives and human dignity. A bakery worker in New York in 1910 had the same day-to-day life as a contemporary Chinese slave-laborer. (They were required to sleep atop the mountains of dough so that their body heat would cause the dough to rise... a Matrix-esque total use of the worker as abstract bio-mechanism.) But Slavery and the Holocaust are very loaded terms, while "wage-slave" lacks the same punch. In the same way, "Kleptocratic Capitalist Anarchism" lacks the punch of Fasicsm. Or, for that matter, Communism.
But linguistic impact aside, evil people are making war on the bulk of humanity for money, and the casualties will be in the billions. It is a very evil thing, but a thing that deserves it's own emotionally charged labels.
I wish there was a word with the emotional punch of "fascism" to describe what is going in in America, because this is not fascism. It is very evil, but not facism. It has fascist trappings, as will any capitalist authoritarian leaning political movement. And it has totalitarian trappings, as will any authoritariam movement from anywhere on the left-right spectrum. But what we see today is not the teaparty over-throwing the old order, but rather astro-turf activism being used as a predicate for a selective form of corporate anarchism.
In saying, "this is not fascism" it is bound to be read as saying, "this is not that bad," which is incorrect. Like I said, the word "fascism" carries a unique emotional load and is this over-used, along with "treason" and "communist."
What we see today is more like the Industrial revolution in Britain (and most other places) which was, in its effects, not categorically less poisonous and indifferent to human dignity or valuation of human life as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia or the Taliban, but without the trappings of a revolutionary movement. Capitalist anarchy with no effective systemic protection of the interests of average people. Never underestimate what happened to ordinary people during the industrial revolution. There is a reason there were worker's revolts in almost every European nation in 1848, and continually onward until the modern welfare state took up enough slack to ease the pressure. (The Communist Manifesto was written about the revolutions of 1848.)
Before Democratic-socialist inspired reform the life of an urban working person was not so different from the life of an American slave or Nazi Concentration camp detainee. The slave had a peculiar legal non-person status, and the Nazi slave laborer would eventually be executed, but the daily life was the same. Ceaseless cruel toil under inhuman and life-threatening conditions with no possibility of improvement or escape. The relative horror of utterly horriffic things distracts from the fact that they are all horrible. Unacceptable. Destroying of human lives and human dignity. A bakery worker in New York in 1910 had the same day-to-day life as a contemporary Chinese slave-laborer. (They were required to sleep atop the mountains of dough so that their body heat would cause the dough to rise... a Matrix-esque total use of the worker as abstract bio-mechanism.) But Slavery and the Holocaust are very loaded terms, while "wage-slave" lacks the same punch. In the same way, "Kleptocratic Capitalist Anarchism" lacks the punch of Fasicsm. Or, for that matter, Communism.
But linguistic impact aside, evil people are making war on the bulk of humanity for money, and the casualties will be in the billions. It is a very evil thing, but a thing that deserves it's own emotionally charged labels.
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