Editing Totalitarianism (section)

===Cold War===
[[File:Hannah Arendt 1933.jpg|thumb|upright|Anti-totalitarian: Hannah Arendt thwarted the ''totalitarian model'' Kremlinologists who sought to co-opt the thesis of ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'' (1951) as American anti–Communist propaganda that claimed that every [[Warsaw Pact|Communist state]] was of the totalitarian model.]]

In ''[[The Origins of Totalitarianism]]'' (1951), the political scientist [[Hannah Arendt]] said that, in their times in the early 20th century, corporate [[Nazism]] and [[Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|soviet Communism]] were new forms of totalitarian government, not updated versions of the old [[Tyrant|tyrannies]] of a military or a corporate dictatorship. That the human emotional comfort of ''political certainty'' is the source of the mass appeal of revolutionary totalitarian régimes, because the totalitarian [[worldview]] gives psychologically comforting and definitive answers about the complex socio-political mysteries of the past, of the present, and of the future; thus did Nazism propose that all history is the history of [[ethnic conflict]], of the survival of the fittest race; and Marxism–Leninism proposes that all history is the history of [[class conflict]], of the survival of the fittest social class. That upon the believers' acceptance of the ''universal applicability'' of totalitarian ideology, the Nazi revolutionary and the Communist revolutionary then possess the simplistic moral certainty with which to justify all other actions by the State, either by an appeal to [[historicism]] (Law of History) or by an [[appeal to nature]], as expedient actions necessary to establishing an authoritarian state apparatus.<ref>{{cite book |last=Villa |first=Dana Richard |date=2000 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=2–3 |isbn=0521645719}}</ref>

;True belief
In ''[[The True Believer|The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements]]'' (1951), [[Eric Hoffer]] said that political mass movements, such as [[Italian Fascism]] (1922–1943), German [[Nazism]] (1933–1945), and Russian [[Stalinism]] (1929–1953), featured the common political praxis of negatively comparing their totalitarian society as [[Cultural imperialism|culturally superior]] to the [[Decadence|morally decadent]] societies of the democratic countries of Western Europe. That such [[mass psychology]] indicates that participating in and then joining a political mass movement offers people the prospect of a glorious future, that such membership in a community of political belief is an emotional refuge for people with few accomplishments in their real lives, in both the [[public sphere]] and in the [[private sphere]]. In the event, the true believer is assimilated into a collective body of true believers who are mentally protected with "fact-proof screens from reality" drawn from the official texts of the totalitarian ideology.<ref>{{cite book |last=Hoffer |first=Eric |author-link=Eric Hoffer |date=2002 |title=[[The True Believer|The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements]] |publisher=Harper Perennial Modern Classics |pages=61, 163 |isbn=0060505915}}</ref>

;Collaborationism
In "European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?" (2018) the historian Paul Hanebrink said that Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933 frightened Christians into anti-communism, because for European Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, the new postwar '[[culture war]]' crystallized as a struggle against Communism. Throughout the [[Interwar period|European interwar period]] (1918–1939), right-wing totalitarian régimes indoctrinated Christians to demonize the Communist régime in Russia as the apotheosis of [[Dialectical materialism|secular materialism]] and [as] a militarized threat to worldwide Christian social and moral order".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Hanebrink |first=Paul |date=July 2018 |title=European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf? |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=53 |issue=3 |page=624 |doi=10.1177/0022009417704894|s2cid=158028188 }}</ref> That throughout Europe, the Christians who became anti-communist totalitarians perceived Communism and communist régimes of government as an existential threat to the moral order of their respective societies; and [[Collaborationism|collaborated]] with Fascists and Nazis in the idealistic hope that anti-communism would restore the societies of Europe to their root Christian culture.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Hanebrink |first=Paul |date=July 2018 |title=European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf? |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=53 |issue=3 |pages=622–643 |doi=10.1177/0022009417704894|s2cid=158028188 }}</ref>

====Totalitarian model====
In the U.S. geopolitics of the late 1950s, the Cold War concepts and the terms ''totalitarianism'', ''totalitarian'', and ''totalitarian model'', presented in ''Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy'' (1956), by Carl Joachim Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, became common usages in the foreign-policy discourse of the U.S. Subsequently established, the ''totalitarian model'' became the analytic and interpretational paradigm for [[Kremlinology]], the academic study of the monolithic police-state USSR. The Kremlinologists analyses of the internal politics (policy and personality) of the [[politburo]] crafting policy (national and foreign) yielded [[strategic intelligence]] for dealing with the USSR. Moreover, the U.S. also used the totalitarian model when dealing with fascist totalitarian régimes, such as that of a [[banana republic]] country.<ref name="Brzezinski & Friedrich 1956">{{cite book |last1=Brzezinski |first1=Zbigniew |author-link1=Zbigniew Brzezinski |last2=Friedrich |first2=Carl |author-link2=Carl Joachim Friedrich |date=1956 |title=Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy |publisher=Harvard University Press |page= |isbn=978-0674332607}}</ref> As anti–Communist political scientists, Friedrich and Brzezinski described and defined totalitarianism with the monolithic totalitarian model of six interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:

# Elaborate guiding ideology.
# [[One-party state]]
# [[State terrorism]]
# Monopoly control of weapons
# Monopoly control of the [[Mass media|mass communications media]]
# Centrally directed and controlled [[planned economy]]<ref>Brzezinski & Friedrich, 1956, p.22.</ref>

====Criticism and evolution of the totalitarian model====
[[File:Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1977.jpg|thumb|upright|The American political scientist [[Zbigniew Brzezinski]] popularised 'combating left-wing totalitarianism' in U.S. foreign policy<ref name="Connelly 2010"/> and served as National Security Advisor to the United States President [[Jimmy Carter]].<ref name="suny"/>]]
As traditionalist historians, Friedrich and Brzezinski said that the totalitarian régimes of government in the USSR (1917), Fascist Italy (1922–1943), and Nazi Germany (1933–1945) originated from the political discontent caused by the socio-economic aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), which rendered impotent the government of [[Weimar Germany]] (1918–1933) to resist, counter, and quell left-wing and right-wing revolutions of totalitarian temper.<ref>Brzezinski & Friedrich 1956, p. 22.</ref> Revisionist historians noted the historiographic limitations of the totalitarian-model interpretation of Soviet and Russian history, because Friedrich and Brzezinski did not take account of the actual functioning of the Soviet social system, neither as a political entity (the USSR) nor as a social entity (Soviet civil society), which could be understood in terms of socialist class struggle among the professional élites (political, academic, artistic, scientific, military) seeking upward mobility into the ''[[nomenklatura]]'', the ruling class of the USSR. That the political economics of the politburo allowed measured executive power to regional authorities for them to implement policy was interpreted by revisionist historians as evidence that a totalitarian régime adapts the political economy to include new economic demands from civil society; whereas traditionalist historians interpreted the politico-economic collapse of the USSR to prove that the totalitarian régime of economics failed because the politburo did not adapt the political economy to include actual popular participation in the Soviet economy.<ref>{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |pages=186–189, 233–234 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref>

The historian of Nazi Germany, [[Karl Dietrich Bracher]] said that the ''totalitarian typology'' developed by Friedrich and Brzezinski was an inflexible model, for not including the ''revolutionary dynamics'' of bellicose people committed to realising the violent revolution required to establish totalitarianism in a sovereign state.<ref name="Kershaw, Ian page 25">{{cite book |last=Kershaw |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Kershaw |date=2000 |title=The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation |location=London; New York |publisher=Arnold; Oxford University Press |page=25 |isbn=978-0340760284 |oclc=43419425}}</ref> That the essence of totalitarianism is total control to remake every aspect of civil society using a universal ideology—which is interpreted by an authoritarian leader—to create a collective national identity by merging civil society into the State.<ref name="Kershaw, Ian page 25"/> Given that the supreme leaders of the Communist, the Fascist, and the Nazi total states did possess government administrators, Bracher said that a totalitarian government did not necessarily require an actual supreme leader, and could function by way of [[collective leadership]]. The American historian [[Walter Laqueur]] agreed that Bracher's totalitarian typology more accurately described the functional reality of the politburo than did the totalitarian typology proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski.<ref>{{cite book |last=Laqueur |first=Walter |author-link=Walter Laqueur |date=1987 |title=The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present |location=New York |publisher=Scribner's |page=241 |isbn=978-0684189031}}</ref>

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| footer            = Dynasty of totalitarians: [[Ba'athist Syria]] was ruled by the generational dictatorships of [[Hafez al-Assad]] (r. 1971–2000) and his son [[Bashar al-Assad]] (r. 2000 – 2024) between the late Cold War in the 1970s<ref>{{Cite book |last=Khamis, B. Gold, Vaughn |first=Sahar, Paul, Katherine |title=The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-19-976441-9 |editor-last=Auerbach, Castronovo |editor-first=Jonathan, Russ |location=198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 |pages=422 |chapter=22. Propaganda in Egypt and Syria's "Cyberwars": Contexts, Actors, Tools, and Tactics}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Wedeen |first=Lisa |title=Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2015 |isbn=978-0-226-33337-3 |location=Chicago |pages= |chapter= |doi=10.7208/chicago/978022345536.001.0001|doi-broken-date=1 November 2024 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Meininghaus |first=Esther |title=Creating Consent in Ba'thist Syria: Women and Welfare in a Totalitarian State |publisher=I. B. Tauris |year=2016 |isbn=978-1-78453-115-7 |pages= |chapter=}}</ref> until 2024.<ref name="fall">{{cite news |title=Syrian rebels topple President Assad, prime minister calls for free elections |url=https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/syria-rebels-celebrate-captured-homs-set-sights-damascus-2024-12-07/ |access-date=8 December 2024 |publisher=Reuters |date=8 December 2024}}</ref>
}}

In ''[[Democracy and Totalitarianism]]'' (1968) the political scientist [[Raymond Aron]] said that for a régime of government to be considered totalitarian it can be described and defined with the totalitarian model of five interlocking, mutually supporting characteristics:

# A one-party state where the ruling party has a monopoly on all political activity.
# A state ideology upheld by the ruling party that is given official status as the only authority.
# A state monopoly on information; control of the mass communications media to broadcast the official truth.
# A state-controlled economy featuring major economic entities under state control.
# An ideological police-state terror; criminalisation of political, economic, and professional activities.<ref>{{cite book |last=Aron |first=Raymond |author-link=Raymond Aron |date=1968 |title=[[Democracy and Totalitarianism]] |publisher=Littlehampton Book Services |page=195 |isbn=978-0297002529}}</ref>

In 1980, in a book review of ''How the Soviet Union is Governed'' (1979), by J.F. Hough and Merle Fainsod, William Zimmerman said that "the Soviet Union has changed substantially. Our knowledge of the Soviet Union has changed, as well. We all know that the traditional paradigm [of the totalitarian model] no longer satisfies [our ignorance], despite several efforts, primarily in the early 1960s (the directed society, totalitarianism without police terrorism, the system of conscription) to articulate an acceptable variant [of Communist totalitarianism]. We have come to realize that models which were, in effect, offshoots of totalitarian models do not provide good approximations of post–Stalinist reality [of the USSR]."<ref name="Zimmerman 1980"/> In a book review of ''Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura'' (2019), by [[Ahmed Saladdin]], [[Michael Scott Christofferson]] said that Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the USSR after [[Stalinism|Stalin]] was her attempt to [[intellect]]ually distance her work from "the Cold War misuse of the concept [of the origins of totalitarianism]" as anti-Communist propaganda.<ref name="Saladdin 2019">{{cite book |last=Saladdin |first=Ahmed |date=2019 |title=Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura |location=Albany |publisher=SUNY Press |page=7 |isbn=978-1438472935}}</ref>{{cn|date=March 2025|reason=The text cites the book review not the book, but current note only references the book}}