Totalitarianism

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
It doesn't stop at the water's edge:

Politics

link=:category:
Key players
Theory
Practice
Philosophies
Other concepts
Country sections

Flag of the United States.svg
Flag of the United Kingdom.svg


Totalitarianism is a rhetorical term deployed to indicate "really repressive tyranny." By implication, some tyrannies or authoritarian regimes are more repressive than others and therefore merit a special designation. The obvious problem is that there is no obvious line to be drawn between them. Dictatorships use the same instruments of repression: secret police surveillance, torture, and propaganda. Which liberties they repress depend on their ideologies. At best there are differences in the intensity of repression. Totalitarians are notably intolerant of all who disagree with them.

The term totalitarian was coined during the Cold War to designate regimes deemed most threatening: most communist regimes and the extinct fascist regime in Germany. Other fascist regimes like Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal, Chile under Pinochet, as well as a raft of other pro-Western tyrannies were given a pass as "merely" authoritarian. Thanks for that?

Consistent with the Cold War construction of the term is the following: authoritarianism reflects a political ethos valuing the authority of the state over the individual freedoms of its citizens. A totalitarian state usually requires a defining ideology with which to justify its appropriation of the levers of power: extreme nationalism was the driving force behind Nazism; Marxism in the case of the Soviet Union; and a puritanical form of Islam in the case of a theocracy such as Iran. China offers an interesting example of a totalitarian regime that has abandoned the practical ramifications of its ideology, whilst retaining the power structures thus derived. Ba'ath regimes in Syria and Iraq have also been termed totalitarian.

Such states are characterised by the extent of their subversion of the rule of law, with the police and judiciary acting as direct instruments of control and providing no meaningful check or balance upon the ruling elite. Media outlets are subordinated to faithful promotion of the defining ideology and, as the state matures, this tends to be reinforced with coordinated programmes of indoctrination within the education system. Dissent is often brutally repressed and extra-judicial are common. Other common features include the fostering of a cult of personality around the head of state and rampant corruption due to the arbitrary enforcement of laws and statutes.

Contents

[edit] Examples

[edit] Rightist

[edit] Leftist

[edit] Otherist

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. The only Soviet puppet who's title as "totalitarian" is debatable was Hungary under János Kádár with his "Goulash Communism" (Communism-lite), though this was still at the very least authoritarian and anti-democatic.
  2. Joseph Sassoon. Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support