Editing Totalitarianism (section)

====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>
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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}}