Editing Totalitarianism (section)

===Early usages===
====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.<ref name="saz"/>

[[File:Palazzo Braschi Fascist Poster, 1934.png|thumb|Facade of the [[Palazzo Braschi]] (Rome, 1934) with ''[[Il Duce]]'' [[Benito Mussolini]]'s face. As the leader of [[Fascist Italy (1922–1943)]], Mussolini and his ideologues used the term 'totalitarian' to characterize his government.]]
In 1923, in the early reign of Mussolini's government (1922–1943), the anti-fascist academic [[Giovanni Amendola]] was the first Italian public intellectual to define and describe Totalitarianism as a ''régime of government'' wherein the supreme leader personally exercises total power (political, military, economic, social) as ''Il Duce'' of The State. That [[Italian fascism]] is a political system with an ideological, utopian [[worldview]] unlike the [[Realpolitik|realistic politics]] of the personal dictatorship of a man who holds power for the sake of holding power.<ref name="regime">{{cite book |last=Pipes |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Pipes |year=1995 |title=Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime |location=New York |publisher=Vintage Books, Random House |isbn=0394502426 |page=[https://archive.org/details/russiaunderbolsh00rich/page/243 243] |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/russiaunderbolsh00rich/page/243}}</ref> 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 defence 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 (government, social, economic, political) and the practical goals (economic, geopolitical, social) of the new [[Fascist Italy (1922–1943)]], which was the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals."<ref>{{cite book |last=Payne |first=Stanley G. |author-link=Stanley G. Payne |date=1980 |title=Fascism: Comparison and Definition |publisher=University of Washington Press |page=73 |isbn=978-0299080600}}</ref> 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.<ref name="doctrine"/> That to achieve the Fascist [[utopia]] in the imperial future, Italian totalitarianism must politicise human existence into subservience to the state, which Mussolini summarised with the epigram: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."<ref name="regime"/><ref>{{cite book |last=Conquest |first=Robert |author-link=Robert Conquest |date=1990 |title=The Great Terror: A Reassessment |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=249 |isbn=0195071328}}</ref>

Hannah Arendt, in her book ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]'', contended that Mussolini's dictatorship was not a totalitarian regime until 1938.{{sfn|Arendt|1958|pp=256-257}} Arguing that one of the key characteristics of a totalitarian movement was its ability to garner [[mass mobilization]], Arendt wrote: <blockquote>"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.... [E]ven 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]]."{{sfn|Arendt|1958|pp=308–309}}</blockquote>
For example, [[Victor Emmanuel III]] still reigned as a [[figurehead]] and helped play a role in the [[Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy|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]] (1922–1939) and [[Pope Pius XII]] (1939–1958).
[[File:Una patria, un estado, un caudillo.jpg|thumb|A 1937 propaganda image featuring [[Francisco Franco]] and his motto ''Una patria! Un estado! Un caudillo!'' resembling the Nazi motto ''Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer''. During the [[Spanish Civil War]], Franco proclaimed that his [[Francoist Spain|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."<ref name="franco"/> 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.<ref name="trav2"/>

[[José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones]], the leader of the historic Spanish [[reactionary]] party called the [[CEDA|Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right]] (CEDA),<ref>{{cite book|last=Mann|first=Michael|author-link=Michael Mann (sociologist)|year=2004|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eTE7ytbtp_cC|title=Fascists|location=New York|publisher=Cambridge University Press|page=331|isbn=978-0521831314|access-date=2017-10-26|archive-date=2020-08-19|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200819062157/https://books.google.com/books?id=eTE7ytbtp_cC|url-status=live}}</ref> 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 [[Cortes Generales|parliament]] submits or we will eliminate it."<ref>{{cite book |last=Preston |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Preston |date=2007 |title=The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge |edition=3rd |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |page=64 |isbn=978-0393329872}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book|last=Salvadó|first=Francisco J. Romero|year=2013|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i5e7wRi-HGcC&pg=PA149|title=Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil War|publisher=Scarecrow Press|page=149|isbn=978-0810880092|access-date=2019-04-27|archive-date=2020-08-19|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200819120937/https://books.google.com/books?id=i5e7wRi-HGcC&pg=PA149|url-status=live}}</ref>

General Franco began using the term 'totalitarian' towards his regime during the [[Spanish Civil War]] (1936–1939). On 1 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."<ref name="franco">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RdWLDwAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-78672-300-0 | title=Franco: Anatomy of a Dictator | date=18 December 2017 | publisher=Bloomsbury }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=14RJCAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-0-19-028148-9 | title=Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War | date=20 March 1997 | publisher=Oxford University Press }}</ref>

[[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 "by beating Greece, they were beating what their flag stood for."<ref>https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/11/2/article-p315_8.xml</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lClpAwAAQBAJ | title=Popular Autocracy in Greece, 1936-1941: A Political Biography of General Ioannis Metaxas | isbn=978-1-134-72926-5 | last1=Vatikiotis | first1=P. J. | date=23 April 2014 | publisher=Routledge }}</ref>

[[Ion Antonescu]], the [[Axis of World War II|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.<ref>https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/pdf-drupal/en/report/english/1.5-the-holocaust-in-romania.pdf</ref><ref>https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Romania/twelve.pdf</ref>

In 1940, the foreign minister of the [[Empire of Japan]] [[Matsuoka Yosuke]] expressed in an interview the ideological assumptions prevailing within the [[Statism in Shōwa Japan|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."<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-FgMS9xpeV4C | title=Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–2004 | isbn=978-1-139-45558-9 | last1=Freyer | first1=Tony A. | date=9 October 2006 | publisher=Cambridge University Press }}</ref> 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".<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=k7q6BwAAQBAJ | title=The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II | isbn=978-0-19-960582-8 | last1=Overy | first1=R. J. | date=2015 | publisher=Oxford University Press }}</ref>

==== Criticism and analysis ====
[[File:Leon Trotsky, 1930s.jpg|thumb|left|upright|[[Leon Trotsky]] formulated a concept of totalitarianism in his analysis of the USSR in the 1930s.]]
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.<ref name="trav2"/>

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<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DAxVjDG4p_0C | title=Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses | isbn=978-1-4128-3165-9 | last1=Wrong | first1=Dennis Hume | publisher=Transaction Publishers }}</ref> to do so, thus producing perhaps most famous example of such usage of the term by a left-wing anti-Stalinist dissident.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RF3LFMID9k8C | title=The Lost Debate: German Socialist Intellectuals and Totalitarianism | isbn=978-0-252-06796-9 | last1=Jones | first1=William David | date=1999 | publisher=University of Illinois Press }}</ref> 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 familiarised 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]]'' (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 the one 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;<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3o2fAwAAQBAJ | title=Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy | isbn=978-90-04-26953-8 | last1=Twiss | first1=Thomas M. | date=8 May 2014 | publisher=BRILL }}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Kc1oAAAAMAAJ | title=The Trotsky Reappraisal | isbn=978-0-7486-0317-6 | last1=Brotherstone | first1=Terry | last2=Dukes | first2=Paul | date=1992 }}</ref>
[[File:Carriers of the New Black Plague.jpg|thumb|1938 satirical illustration "Carriers of the New Black Plague" by [[William Cotton (artist)|William Cotton]]; the caption mentions "Totalitarian Eclipse" threatening democracy.]]
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.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Nemoianu |first=Virgil |date=December 1982 |title=Review of ''End and Beginnings'' |journal=Modern Language Notes |volume=97 |issue=5 |pages=1235–1238}}</ref> The label ''totalitarian'' was twice affixed to Nazi Germany during [[Winston Churchill]]'s speech of 5 October 1938 before the [[House of Commons of the United Kingdom|House of Commons]], in opposition to the [[Munich Agreement]], by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the [[Sudetenland]].<ref>{{cite speech |last=Churchill |first=Winston |author-link=Winston Churchill |title=The Munich Agreement |date=5 October 1938 |location=[[House of Commons of the United Kingdom]] |publisher=International Churchill Society |url=http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-munich-agreement |access-date=7 August 2020 |language=English |quote=We in this country, as in other Liberal and democratic countries, have a perfect right to exalt the principle of self-determination, but it comes ill out of the mouths of those in totalitarian states who deny even the smallest element of toleration to every section and creed within their bounds. Many of those countries, in fear of the rise of the Nazi power, ... loathed the idea of having this arbitrary rule of the totalitarian system thrust upon them, and hoped that a stand would be made. |archive-date=26 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200626193227/https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-munich-agreement/ |url-status=live }}</ref> Churchill was then a [[backbencher]] MP representing the [[Epping (UK Parliament constituency)|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."<ref>{{cite speech |last=Churchill |first=Winston |author-link=Winston Churchill |title=Broadcast to the United States and to London |date=16 October 1938 |publisher=International Churchill Society |url=http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace |access-date=7 August 2020 |archive-date=25 September 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200925195010/https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1930-1938-the-wilderness/the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jmeBDwAAQBAJ | title=The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right | isbn=978-1-78873-046-4 | last1=Traverso | first1=Enzo | date=29 January 2019 | publisher=Verso Books }}</ref><ref name="trav"/> The concept was abandoned in 1941, as the Third Reich [[Operation Barbarossa|invaded the USSR]], and the latter became depicted in Western propaganda as "valiant freedom-loving" ally in the war;<ref name="dos">{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MeKzEAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-6669-3090-0 | title=Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union | date=20 March 2023 | publisher=Rowman & Littlefield }}</ref> among the major productions of pro-Stalinist Western propaganda was the film ''[[Mission to Moscow]]'' (1943), based on the 1941 book of the same name.<ref name="suny"/>

In the aftermath of the Second World War (1939–1945), in the lecture series (1945) and book (1946) titled ''The Soviet Impact on the Western World'', the British historian [[E. H. Carr]] said that "the trend away from [[individualism]] and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable" in the [[Decolonization|decolonising]] countries of [[Eurasia]]. That [[proletarian revolution|revolutionary]] Marxism–Leninism was the most successful type of totalitarianism, as proved by the USSR's [[Industrialization in the Soviet Union|rapid industrialisation]] (1929–1941) and the [[Great Patriotic War]] (1941–1945) 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.<ref>{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |page=131 |isbn=0684189038}}</ref>

Politically matured by having fought and been wounded and survived the Spanish Civil War, in the essay "[[Why I Write]]" (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."<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Orwell |first=George |author-link=George Orwell |date=1946 |title=Why I Write |url=http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part47 |magazine=[[Gangrel (magazine)|Gangrel]] |access-date=7 August 2020 |archive-date=25 July 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200725130413/http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part47 |url-status=live }}</ref>