Editing Totalitarianism (section)

==Definitions==
===Contemporary background===
[[File:Kim Il Sung Portrait.png|thumb|upright|[[Kim Il Sung]] was the founder and leader (from 1948 to 1994) of [[North Korea]], a state which was created and functioned with the assistance of the [[Soviet Union]] after [[World War II]] and by the early 1970s had become a totalitarian regime.<ref name="Suh 2012 p. 149">{{cite book | last=Suh | first=J.J. | title=Origins of North Korea's Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development | publisher=Lexington Books | year=2012 | isbn=978-0-7391-7659-7 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7dmysjj13QwC&pg=PA149 | access-date=2023-02-05 | page=149}}</ref>]]
Modern political science catalogues three régimes of government: (i) the democratic, (ii) the authoritarian, and (iii) the totalitarian.<ref name="LinzLinz2000">{{cite book | author1 = Linz, Juan José | date = 2000 | title = Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes | publisher =Lynne Rienner Publisher | pages = 143| isbn = 978-1-55587-890-0 | oclc = 1172052725 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=8cYk_ABfMJIC&pg=PA143}}</ref><ref name="Michie2014">{{cite book | editor = Jonathan Michie | date = 3 February 2014 | title = Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences | publisher = Routledge | page = 95 | isbn = 978-1-135-93226-8 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=ip_IAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA95}}</ref> Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: [[political repression]] of all opposition (individual and collective); a [[cult of personality]] about The Leader; official [[economic interventionism]] (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official [[mass surveillance]]-policing of public places; and [[state terrorism]].<ref name="reflections2"/> In the essay "Democide in Totalitarian States" (1994) the American political scientist [[Rudolph Rummel]], while acknowledging that there is "much confusion about what is meant by ''totalitarian''" up to denial that totalitarian systems have ever existed, defined a totalitarian state as "one with a system of government that is unlimited, [either] [[Political constitution|constitutionally]] or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a Church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic [[secret ballot|secret]] and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships." According to Rummel, such governments act as "agencies of totalitarianism" itself, that is, "the ideology of absolute power", which installs "mortacracy" in states controlled by it. Rummel cited [[Marxism–Leninism]] and [[communism]] in the [[Soviet Union]] under [[Joseph Stalin]], [[History of the People's Republic of China (1949–1976)|China]] under [[Mao Zedong]] and in [[East Germany]], [[Nazism]] in [[Nazi Germany|Germany]] under [[Adolf Hitler]] and [[fascism]] in other states, [[state socialism]] ([[Burmese way to socialism]]) in [[History of Burma (1962–1988)|Burma]] under [[Ne Win|U Ne Win]] and [[Islamic fundamentalism]] ([[Islamism]]) in [[Iran]] as examples of totalitarianism.<ref name="Rummel 1994b">{{cite book|last=Rummel|first=Rudolph|year=1994|chapter=Democide in Totalitarian States: Mortacracies and Megamurderers |editor-last1=Charny|editor-first1=Israel W.|editor-last2=Horowitz|editor-first2=Irving Louis|title=The Widening Circle of Genocide|pages=3–40|edition=1st|publisher=[[Routledge]]|doi=10.4324/9781351294089-2|isbn=9781351294089}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Tago|first1=Atsushi|last2=Wayman|first2=Frank|date=January 2010|title=Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949–87|journal=Journal of Peace Research|location=Thousand Oaks, CA|publisher=Sage Publications|volume=47|issue=1|pages=3–13|doi=10.1177/0022343309342944|issn=0022-3433|jstor=25654524|s2cid=145155872}}</ref> However, not all scholars believe these regimes and ideologies exemplify totalitarianism: some of those who support of the concept of totalitarianism exclude Burma,<ref>{{cite book|author1=William Ebenstein|quote=The second category includes one-party states in Asia and Africa such as Burma, Iraq, and Zaire - which are not totalitarian but allow only one political party.|page=182|isbn=9780060418618|title=American Democracy in World Perspective|date=1980 |publisher=[[Harper (publisher)|Harper & Row]]}}</ref> Iran<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gZMTDGajvu0C | title=Iran's Struggle for Economic Independence: Reform and Counter-Reform in the Post-Revolutionary Era | isbn=978-1-136-73557-8 | last1=Pesaran | first1=Evaleila | date=25 April 2011 | publisher=Taylor & Francis }}</ref> and even [[Fascist Italy]]<ref name="italy"/> from this category, while historians who state that the concept can not adequately describe [[Stalinism]] nor [[Nazism]] criticize the concept of totalitarianism in general (see below).

;Degree of control
In exercising the power of government upon society, the application of an official [[dominant ideology]] differentiates the [[worldview]] of the totalitarian régime from the worldview of the authoritarian régime, which is "only concerned with political power, and, as long as [government power] is not contested, [the authoritarian government] gives society a certain degree of liberty."<ref name="Cinpoes"/> Having no ideology to propagate, the politically secular authoritarian government "does not attempt to change the world and human nature",<ref name="Cinpoes"/> whereas the "totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens",<ref name="regime"/> by way of an official "totalist ideology, a [political] party reinforced by a [[secret police]], and [[Monopoly|monopolistic control]] of industrial [[mass society]]."<ref name="Cinpoes"/>

===Historical background===
For influential philosopher [[Karl Popper]], the social phenomenon of political totalitarianism is a product of [[Modernism]], which Popper said originated in [[Humanism|humanist philosophy]]; in the ''[[Republic (Plato)|Republic]]'' (''res publica'') proposed by [[Plato]] in [[Ancient Greece]], in [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]]'s conception of [[State (polity)|the State]] as a polity of peoples, and in the [[political economy]] of [[Karl Marx]] in the 19th century<ref>{{cite book|last=Popper|first=Karl|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies|title=The Open Society and Its Enemies|editor-last=Gombrich|editor-first=E. H.|year=2013|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0691158136|access-date=17 August 2021|archive-date=11 January 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220111091824/https://books.google.com/books?id=EaKc0RRqlvYC&q=The+Open+society+and+its+enemies|url-status=live}}</ref>—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 [[Sovereignty|modern State]];<ref>Wild, John (1964). ''Plato's Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 23. "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 — the theory that history is controlled by the inexorable laws governing the behaviour of superindividual social entities of which human beings and their free choices are merely subordinate manifestations."</ref> his approach has been described as a radical denial of historical causation<ref>Levinson, Ronald B. (1970). ''In Defense of Plato''. New York: Russell and Russell. p. 20. "In spite of the high rating, one must accord his [Popper's] initial intention of fairness, his hatred for the enemies of the 'open society', his zeal to destroy whatever seems, to him, destructive of the welfare of mankind, has led him into the extensive use of what may be called ''terminological counter-propaganda''. [...] With a few exceptions in Popper's favour, however, it is noticeable that [book] reviewers possessed of special competence in particular fields – and here Lindsay is again to be included – have objected to Popper's conclusions in those very fields. [...] Social scientists and social philosophers have deplored his radical denial of historical causation, together with his espousal of Hayek's systematic distrust of larger programs of social reform; historical students of philosophy have protested his [Popper's] violent, polemical handling of Plato, Aristotle, and, particularly, Hegel; ethicists have found contradictions in the ethical theory ('critical dualism') upon which his [anti-Modernist] polemic is largely based."</ref> 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.<ref name="trav">[[Enzo Traverso]], Despina Lalaki. [https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3644-against-totalitarianism-a-conversation-with-enzo-traverso Against "Totalitarianism": A Conversation with Enzo Traverso]</ref> 

There were similar "ideocratic"<ref name="trav2"/> attempts in traditions of the [[Counter-Enlightenment]]<ref name="dos"/> 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]] which 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;<ref name="trav2">{{cite journal | url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/26650707 | jstor=26650707 | title=Totalitarianism Between History and Theory | last1=Traverso | first1=Enzo |author-link1=Enzo Traverso|journal=History and Theory | date=2017 | volume=56 | issue=4 | pages=97–118 | doi=10.1111/hith.12040 }}</ref> 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 an ultimate end of the evolution of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] from emancipatory reason to instrumental rationality,<ref name="trav"/> and as a product of [[Anthropocentrism|anthropocentrist]] proposition that: "Man has become the master of the world, a master unbound by any links to Nature, society, and history", which excludes the intervention of [[Supernatural|supernatural beings]] to earthly politics of government.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Horkheimer |first1=Max |author-link=Max Horkheimer |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment |title=Dialectic of Enlightenment |last2=Adorno |first2=Theodor W. |author2-link=Theodor W. Adorno |last3=Noeri |first3=Gunzelin |date=2002 |publisher=[[Stanford University Press]] |isbn=978-0804736336 |language=en |access-date=2021-08-17 |archive-date=2022-01-10 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220110122043/https://books.google.com/books?id=l-75zLjGlZQC&q=the+dialectic+of+enlightenment |url-status=live }}</ref>

[[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 [[Lost Generation|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 resistance movement|Italian anti-fascists]] of the 1920s and later by the Italian Fascists themselves.<ref name="trav2"/>

American historian [[William Rubinstein]] wrote that:<blockquote>The 'Age of Totalitarianism' included nearly all the infamous examples of [[genocide]] in modern history, headed by the Jewish [[Holocaust]], but also comprising [[Mass killings under communist regimes|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, [[Revolutions of 1917-1923|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.<ref>{{cite book |last=Rubinstein |first=W.D. |url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=nMMAk4VwLLwC}} |title=Genocide: a history |publisher=Pearson Education |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-582-50601-5 |page=7}}</ref></blockquote>

In the 20th century, [[Giovanni Gentile]] classified [[Italian Fascism]] as a political ideology with a philosophy that is "totalitarian, and [that] the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unity inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people"; Gentile expressed his ideas in "[[The Doctrine of Fascism]]" (1932), an essay he co-authored with [[Benito Mussolini]].<ref name="doctrine">{{cite book |last1=Gentile |first1=Giovanni |author-link1=Giovanni Gentile |last2=Mussolini |first2=Benito |author-link2=Benito Mussolini |date=1932 |title=La dottrina del fascismo |trans-title=The Doctrine of Fascism |title-link=The Doctrine of Fascism}}</ref> In 1920s Germany, during the [[Weimar Republic]] (1918–1933), 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 'traditionalist', or 'totalitarian', historians (see below) argued<ref name="mawdsley"/><ref name="suny"/> that [[Vladimir Lenin]], one of the leaders of the 1917 [[October Revolution]] in Russia, was the first politician to establish a totalitarian state;<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Hough |first1=Jerry F. |title=The "Dark Forces," the Totalitarian Model, and Soviet History |journal=The Russian Review |date=1987 |volume=46 |issue=4 |pages=397–403 |doi=10.2307/130293 |jstor=130293 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/130293 |issn=0036-0341}}</ref><ref name="riley">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9|title=The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution|first1=Alexander|last1=Riley|first2=Alfred Kentigern|last2=Siewers|date=June 18, 2019|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=9781793605344 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002550/https://books.google.com/books?id=CNeaDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA9|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PA98|title=Totalitarianisms: The Closed Society and Its Friends. A History of Crossed Languages|first=Juan Francisco|last=Fuentes|date=April 29, 2019|publisher=Ed. Universidad de Cantabria|isbn=9788481028898 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=-eaWDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA98|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT85|title=Lenin and the Twentieth Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective|first=Lennard|last=Gerson|date=September 1, 2013|publisher=Hoover Press|isbn=9780817979331 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002551/https://books.google.com/books?id=pHUzDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT85&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjShc7Ht5n3AhXhkGoFHa8jCS0Q6AF6BAgHEAM#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&pg=PT13|title=Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Volume 2: The Early Soviet Period 1917–1929|first=Richard|last=Gregor|date=1974|publisher=University of Toronto Press|isbn=9781487590116 |via=Google Books|access-date=April 17, 2022|archive-date=April 17, 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220417002552/https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQ5DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT13&dq=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&gbmsitb=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjso5nU0pn3AhUXVzABHborA044ChDoAXoECAgQAw#v=onepage&q=%22first+totalitarian%22+%22lenin%22&f=false|url-status=live}}</ref> such description of Lenin is opposed by the so-called 'revisionist' historians of Communism and the Soviet Union<ref name="mawdsley"/> as well as by a broad range of authors including [[Hannah Arendt]].<ref name="lenin1">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5UQX1l4KmUYC | isbn=978-0-415-19278-1 | title=The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics | date=2006 | publisher=Taylor & Francis }}</ref><ref name="suny"/> 

As the ''[[Duce]]'' leading the Italian people to the future, [[Benito Mussolini]] said that his dictatorial régime of government made [[Fascist Italy]] (1922–1943) the representative ''Totalitarian State'': "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."<ref>{{cite journal |last=Delzell |first=Charles F. |title=Remembering Mussolini |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305 |journal=The Wilson Quarterly |volume=12 |number=2 |date=Spring 1988 |page=127 |publisher=Wilson Quarterly |location=Washington, D.C. |jstor=40257305 |access-date=2022-04-24 |archive-date=2022-05-13 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220513050107/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257305 |url-status=live }} Retrieved April 8, 2022</ref> Likewise, in ''[[The Concept of the Political]]'' (1927), the Nazi jurist Schmitt used the term ''der Totalstaat'' (the Total State) to identify, describe, and establish the [[Legitimacy (political)|legitimacy]] of a German totalitarian state led by a [[Führer|supreme leader]];<ref>{{cite book |first=Carl |last=Schmitt |author-link=Carl Schmitt |date=1927 |title=Der Begriff des Politischen |trans-title=The Concept of the Political|isbn=0226738868 |edition=1996 |editor=University of Chicago Press |publisher=Rutgers University Press |page=22 |language=de}}</ref> later [[Joseph Goebbels]] would call a totalitarian state the goal of the Nazi Party,<ref name="franco"/> although the concept became downplayed in Nazi discourse.<ref name="trav2"/>

After the [[Second World War]] (1937–1945), U.S. political discourse (domestic and foreign) included the concepts (ideologic and political) 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, [[McCarthyism|McCarthyite]] politicians claimed that Left-wing totalitarianism was an existential threat to [[Western culture|Western civilisation]], and so facilitated the creation of the American [[national security state]] to execute the [[anti-communist]] Cold War (1945–1989) that was fought by [[client state|client-state]] proxies of the US and the USSR.<ref name="siegel">{{cite book|last=Siegel|first=Achim|year=1998|title=The Totalitarian Paradigm After the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment|edition=hardback|location=Amsterdam|publisher=Rodopi|page=200|isbn=978-9042005525|quote=Concepts of totalitarianism became most widespread at the height of the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, especially since the Korean War, they were condensed into a far-reaching, even hegemonic, ideology, by which the political elites of the Western world tried to explain and even to justify the Cold War constellation.}}</ref><ref name="guilhot">{{cite book|last=Guilhot|first=Nicholas|year=2005|title=The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order|edition=hardcover|location=New York City|publisher=Columbia University Press|page=33|isbn=978-0231131247|quote=The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.}}</ref><ref name="reisch">{{cite book |last=Reisch |first=George A. |date=2005 |title=How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=153–154 |isbn=978-0521546898}}</ref><ref name="defty">{{cite book|first=Brook|last=Defty|year=2007|chapter=2. Launching the New Propaganda Policy, 1948. 3. Building a Concerted Counter-offensive: Co-operation with other powers. 4. Close and Continuous Liaison: British and American co-operation, 1950–51. 5. A Global Propaganda Offensive: Churchill and the revival of political warfare|title=Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–1953: The Information Research Department|edition=1st paperback|location=London|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0714683614}}</ref><ref name="caute">{{cite book |last=Caute |first=David |year=2010 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |title=Politics and the Novel during the Cold War |publisher=Transaction Publishers |pages=95–99 |isbn=978-1412831369 |access-date=2020-11-22 |archive-date=2021-04-14 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210414175538/https://books.google.com/books?id=ttmCWwuxX8cC&pg=PA95 |url-status=live }}</ref>

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 [[Resistance during World War II|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]].<ref name="trav2"/>