Totalitarianism. David D. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ range of totalitarianism

Although the totalitarianism category emerged in response to a particular era of political experiment, the era of the two world wars in Europe, it has also been applied more widely to a variety of political regimes, movements, aspirations, and visions – and even to non-political phenomena. The spectrum of uses has raised questions about the chronological, geographical, and topical range of the phenomena that might appropriately be considered totalitarian.

      Although World War II brought about the end of the Italian and German regimes, the communist experiment continued in the Soviet Union; indeed, the Soviet Union emerged a major victor from World War II, its prestige and power much enhanced. The later 1940s saw the expansion of communism to the Soviet satellite states of east central Europe, as well as, not coincidentally, the advent of the Cold War. Despite a modicum of liberalization in the Soviet bloc after Stalin’s death in 1953, totalitarianism continued to be applied to the whole Soviet system until it came crashing down from 1989 to 1991.

      Meanwhile, in China the communists, led by Mao Zedong,³ took power in 1949 and, despite fits and starts, the ensuing regime followed a direction widely labeled totalitarian until Mao’s death in 1976. Thereafter, his successors pulled back from what seemed the totalitarian excesses of the Mao era. But though the Chinese system became less overtly totalitarian, it entailed significant continuities from the Mao period and certainly no embrace of multiparty democracy. Meanwhile, other communist regimes emerged in, most notably, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and Vietnam, all with features widely considered totalitarian. Each developed its own particular trajectory, however, and, as in China after Mao, the totalitarian thrust seemed to dissipate in some of them.

Just as totalitarianism might have seemed to be petering out in the communist world, Islamic extremism moved to center stage, first in 1979 with the revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran. That regime has been labeled totalitarian, and the term has also been used to characterize other Islamist movements and regimes, most notably the self-described Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), established in 2013. Indeed, it may characterize the whole radical political ideology that some label “Islamism” to distinguish it from Islam the religion.

      Moreover, some observers see a return to totalitarianism with the recent evolution of China under Xi Jinping, or even in Russia under Vladimir Putin. And if we add phenomena like the potential abuses of new technologies, to be considered under the topical range below, it is clear that, at least as a question worth raising, totalitarianism remains current.

      The question of chronological range also points to the centuries before the term was applied. Some students of modern totalitarianism have found parallels and even continuities with premodern religious millenarian movements. Others have found the origins of at least the leftist brand of totalitarianism in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. Is use of the concept to characterize earlier phenomena inherently anachronistic? Reasonable observers will continue to differ, but totalitarianism has generally been considered a specifically modern phenomenon, presupposing at least indirect experience with secular liberalism and parliamentary democracy and requiring modern technologies for mobilization and indoctrination.

      Precisely as modern, moreover, totalitarianism has generally been considered a specifically secular phenomenon. But that would appear to rule out earlier millenarianism, and it might seem to call into question any association of Islamic political extremism with totalitarianism. However, even those who deem such extremism totalitarian disagree over the nature of the relationship between the modern extreme and Islamic tradition. The extreme may be specifically modern and even secular, whatever the claim of a link to religious tradition.

In terms of geographical range, there have long been questions about the applicability of totalitarianism to movements or regimes beyond the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany during the era of the two world wars. This includes several in Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Poland and Romania. Whereas most specialists do not consider Franco’s Spain totalitarian, the label is routinely applied to it by journalists and the general public. But the same question comes up concerning others outside Europe, such as Imperial Japan and Kemalist Turkey. We have seen that totalitarianism was part of political discussion in both countries during the 1930s, but whether it applies to the actual practice of those regimes is much less clear.

      However we draw the lines, it is undeniable that the geographical range of totalitarianism has extended across the globe. In the wake of the Russian Revolution and the foundation of the Russian-dominated Third or Communist International (Comintern) in 1919, other communist parties in Europe and beyond were founded under the Comintern umbrella. Among them was the Chinese Communist Party, launched in 1921. In adopting the communist label, they distinguished themselves from the socialist parties of the earlier Second International and committed to following the communist model under the tutelage of Russia (which became the Soviet Union in 1922). Entailing centralized discipline and control, the communist direction was arguably totalitarian precisely as the mainstream socialist direction was not.

      Totalitarianism has also been used to characterize tendencies even in liberal democracies. Critics on both the Left and the Right have sometimes claimed to discern a disturbing totalitarian potential inherent in secular modernity itself. The Left points to the modern reliance on instrumental reason and the use of knowledge for power and domination. Critiques from the libertarian Right often ran parallel as they lamented the seemingly relentless expansion of the modern state, assuming ever more powers and responsibilities, arguably at the expense of individual freedom.

      From either direction, that totalitarian potential might be considerably enhanced by new methods of government surveillance through social media and the internet, or of societal manipulation through genetic profiling and engineering. But is the totalitarianism category, which was, and to some extent remains, intertwined with the era of fascism and Stalinism, sufficiently flexible to illuminate such contemporary phenomena or, with all its baggage by this point, is it more likely to throw us off?

We must keep in mind, to be sure, that our key categories inevitably evolve or even “grow” with historical experience, as the trajectory of other key concepts in political theory, such as revolution, freedom, and sovereignty, make clear. Studying more recent instances might add to what we mean or understand by totalitarianism. But though the range is not delimited in some predetermined way, such concepts may get diluted, losing analytical power, as they are stretched to encompass ever more cases. So how much can the totalitarianism category grow with new experience?

      Quite apart from the question of flexibility, a tendency toward careless usage, resulting from overfamiliarity, has threatened to make the category flabby. Even in scholarly discourse, totalitarianism is often used in a largely unexamined way, and in general discussion, usage sometimes veers from dilution to over-the-top sci fi fantasy.

      In a television documentary on Evelyn Cameron, a pioneering English-born photographer who settled in remote eastern Montana in the late 1890s, a British photography expert refers to her “almost totalitarian feel for the image.”⁴ Filmmakers, especially, have sometimes been accused of seeking total control in order to manipulate the audience. But totalitarian? Such casual usage surely waters down the category unduly.

      More plausible is Anna Burns’s use of the category in a recent novel to characterize the tense, oppressive, tightly controlled environment on the local level during the recent sectarian struggles in Northern Ireland.⁵ All aspects of life had become intensely politicized, with no escape. But though her narrator memorably conveys the sense of stifling oppressiveness, Burns too is stretching the category because there is no totalitarian intention or system but simply the atmosphere that has resulted from the sectarian struggle itself.

Masha Gessen, a highly regarded American journalist with a Soviet background, uses “totalitarianism” more conventionally to characterize a full-scale political regime in the subtitle of her recent book The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. СКАЧАТЬ