Knowledge And Decisions

TOTALITARIANISM

It is not simply the origin or basis of political power that defines totalitarianism, nor even the amount of power or its ruthless application. A tyrant is not automatically a totalitarian. It is the political blanketing of the vast range of human activities — from intimate personal relations to philosophical beliefs — that constitutes “totalitarianism.” The founder of fascism and originator of the term “totalitarianism,” Benito Mussolini, summed it up: “All through the state, all for the state, nothing against the state, and nothing outside the state.”⁹ Totalitarianism “recognizes the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State.” Nongovernmental entities, whether formal or informal, had no place. “No individuals or groups, political parties, associations, economic unions, social classes are to exist apart from the state.”¹⁰ It is the exclusion or suppression of autonomous sources of orientation that is the defining characteristic of totalitarianism.

A military dictator may hold power through force of arms and mercilessly kill every political rival, and yet care little how children are raised, or whether the people are religious or not. In the Roman Empire before Christianity became the state religion, religious toleration was widespread,¹¹ as was a certain amount of general toleration, accommodation, and social mobility in a large multiracial, multicultural domain.¹² At this juncture, the Judeo-Christian religions were dealt with harshly precisely because they refused to accommodate other religions, which they denounced as idolatry.¹³ Yet the Roman Empire was an autocracy, and at various times a military dictatorship in which the emperor exercised arbitrary powers of life and death over the masses and the aristocracy alike. It was not totalitarian, however.

Totalitarian governments reach into every nook and cranny of private life, among the masses as well as the elite. Children are indoctrinated with the official ideology, taught to betray even their parents to the state, and as adults live in an atmosphere in which even the most intimate relationships are subject to state scrutiny and carry the threat of mutual betrayal or official retaliation against lovers or family members for the actions of an individual who has displeased the political authorities. History, science, and the arts are all made subject to political direction. Hitler’s “pseudoauthoritative judgments about everything under the sun”¹⁴ were matched by Stalin’s pronouncements that extended to linguistics and his disastrous imposition of Lysenko’s genetic theories on Soviet agriculture, and by Mao’s “sayings” which seemed to cover every aspect of human existence. It is not the source or the ruthlessness of power alone which defines totalitarianism, but the unprecedented scope of the activities subjected to political control.

A concentration camp is the ultimate in totalitarianism, with political decisions determining such routine things as eating and sleeping, as well as personal relations (dehumanization) and death (extermination). Slave plantations in the antebellum South have been analogized to concentration camps,¹⁵ but their paramount nonpolitical objective of economic gain meant that slave owners had to make far more concessions to slaves than concentration camp commanders ever made to their inmates. Concentration camps in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were far less economically efficient than the totalitarian societies of which they were a part,¹⁶ but they were maintained despite this, for political purposes. Slave plantations were profit-making enterprises,¹⁷ inherently limited by that fact in how far they could go in oppressing or destroying the sources of their wealth. Whatever moral equivalence may have existed between the two kinds of institutions, they were neither politically nor economically equivalent.

A unifying ideology is essential in a totalitarian state, if only so that its multitudes of organizations do not work at cross purposes to such an extent as to be self-destructive. In the intentional terms of totalitarian belief or propaganda, power is exercised in the service of the ideology. However, in view of the ease with which Nazi officials became Communist officials after World War II, it is also possible that the ideology is exercised in the service of power. Certainly it is hard to imagine totalitarian state power without a unifying ideological theme, and history presents no examples.